from jumping by an invisible voice that said, You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be okay.
Whose voice was that? God’s? My guardian angel’s? The ghost of Dick Boylan? My future self? You can take your pick.
What I do know is that I turned around, got back in the car, and drove south for a couple of days until I showed up unexpectedly at a party in New York City, where, at a certain moment of rarefaction, I found myself alone in a dark bedroom with this girl, Deedie. I told her about the journey I’d been on.
Having lost her own mother two years before, and her father at the age of eighteen, Deedie Finney had been on a journey of her own. The summer before, she’d gotten herself halfway up Mount Rainer, ice ax in hand, before she realized she was climbing the wrong mountain. Or to be more specific, that the mountain she had to climb was not an actual mountain but something having to do with her heart.
We were married three days after my thirtieth birthday, honeymooned in Alaska, moved up to Maine, where I took on the Colby job. That same fall my first collection of short stories was published, Remind Me to Murder You Later.
I cannot explain how Deirdre got through to me when so many other women had not. All I can say is that I loved her more deeply than anyone I had ever known.
But I did not open my heart to her entirely, and the thing that had remained unspoken for so long stayed unsaid, even with the love of my life.
If you are wondering how anyone with such a profound and ongoing sense of herself as trans could have failed to share this information with the woman she loves, I can only say that I had hoped then what I had hoped my whole life: that an overpowering sense of love would make me into someone else, someone better.
This might seem sad to some of you, but it also strikes me as fundamentally human. Surely the hope of being transformed by love isn’t some curious delusion unique to transgender people. If you’ve never hoped that love would turn you into someone better, then I don’t know what to tell you. We probably have different ideas about love.
Incredibly, the wish I had carried in my heart since I had sat alone inside Robotron 9000 had at last been granted, or so it then seemed. In the summer, my wife and I had long wonderful days together, and in winter, we had long wonderful nights. She made slow-cooker chili and Thai food. We drank Jameson Irish whiskey and went cross-country skiing. We ran naked through the snow and jumped into hot tubs fired by wood-burning stoves. I graded papers, and she rode horses. For Christmas she gave me a union suit—a bright red onesie with a trapdoor. As I wore this, I read the short stories of Italo Calvino while sitting in a rocking chair.
It was pretty great.
Now and again, in the middle of the night, I would open my eyes and stare at the ceiling, and the softest of voices would whisper, You are still not you, and in reply I would whisper back, Shut the fuck up. At that same moment, against the floor, I heard Alex’s tail thump softly.
Did he know that I was awake? Of course he did. Alex kept one eye peeled at all times, on the off chance that, as I slept, something might come for me.
* * *
Back in high school, my friend Zero and I hadn’t dated many girls, partly because of the depth and intimacy of our friendship with each other. All our other relationships seemed shallow compared with the baroque private world we built, a world that revolved around the music of Frank Zappa, the stories of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the delights of Panama Red. I’ll always be grateful that I had a friendship as intense as the one I had with Zero when I was a teenager. But I also know that that friendship didn’t leave much room for any kind of intimacy with anyone else.
One night, as I sat in Zero’s high school bedroom, we listened to a band called Gong, a kind of Himalayan trance orchestra. Zero and I loved that crazy music. Sometimes our joy at hearing the music start was so great that we could not wait for the song to finish before we