A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You Read online

  Jess would like to walk into Dr. Laurence’s office, go into a deep sleep, and walk out with his true body. He has known and seen this body in his dreams, behind half-closed lids, in quick glances at the mirror (with a few beers and a sock in his shorts), and he knows that it is not the body he will have. He’s seen the phalloplasties on a couple of transsexual guys, both the plumped-up clitoris version and the hot-dog version with the silicone implant balls, and neither makes him happy. Inside of himself he is Magic Johnson, the world’s greatest point guard. When he flips through Dr. Laurence’s photo album, it’s clear that he’ll be more like Anthony Epps of the Continental Basketball Association’s Sioux Falls team. Jess lights one of his mother’s Kools. In high school, when he played basketball on the girls’ team, a distant cousin of Chamique Holdsclaw said to him, “It’s true you all can’t dunk, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play.”

  It would please Jane to know that it was Jess’s smile and not her shopping good manners that got Marcella Gray at reception to fiddle with the appointment book. Right after they pick the most realistic penis, somewhere between the little and the deluxe, Dr. Laurence says, “It looks like we’re good to go for the day after tomorrow.” He puts his hand on Jess’s shoulder. “You did great with your top surgery, this is going to go fine. A year from now, six months from now, you’re going to be a happy young man.” Dr. Laurence believes in this work. He believes in going to El Salvador to fix clubfeet, cleft palates, and botched amputations, and he believes that it’s his job on this earth to give people a chance to live life as it should be lived, whole and able and knowing they have been touched by God’s mercy. Dr. Laurence believes that when someone like Jess is in the womb, there is a last, unaccountable blast of the opposite sex hormone and the child is born one sex on the outside and the true one on the inside.

  Jess and Jane walk back to their apartment; the clinic has a row of condos, upscale and fully equipped and three blocks from the surgical center. Men and women come and go, with companions or nurses or large doses of Percocet, doubled over with pain in March and out of the chrysalis in May or June.

  “A little sunbathing?” Jane says. Everyone looks better with a tan, and it will be a while before Jess can lie on their sundeck again.

  Just two years ago, they lay naked in their backyard, sunblock on their nipples and white asses, reading and drinking club soda. Now they turn away from each other to strip down to their underwear. Jess goes into the kitchen for two bottles of lime seltzer, and Jane sees the dark hair on his golden arms, his neat round biceps, the tight line of muscle at the back of his arms, and the two thin ridges of scar tissue on his chest. She nagged him to massage the scars four times a day with vitamin E oil and a mix from her dermatologist, and now they have almost disappeared. Jane watches this handsome boy-girl beside her put down the bottles and stretch out on the chaise.

  “Don’t burn,” she says.

  “Oh, all right,” Jess says. “I was going to, but now I won’t.”

  Jane watches her, watches him, until Jess falls asleep, a lock of black hair falling forward. Jane pushes it back and cries in the bathroom for an hour. She leaves Jess a note, suggesting that they get in some entertainment while they can and go out for Chinese and a movie. They have gone out for Chinese and a movie once a week for almost fifteen years, even when Jessie would only eat rice and chicken fingers. When Jessie was at Michigan, that was what they missed the most. Jessie sent an occasional note home, written on a stained and crumpled Chinese takeout menu. When Jane opened the envelope, the smell of General Tso’s Chicken came up at her.

  When she hoped that Jessie might just be a lesbian, when Jessie also thought that might be it, her hair short and spiky in front, carved into little faux sideburns, long and awkward in back, Jane took them on vacation to Northampton, Massachusetts, the Lesbian Paradise. Jane found out that Jessie’s appalling haircut had an appalling name: the mullet. Surely Nathalie Barney and Barbara Stanwyck and Greta Garbo, all lesbians of the kind Jane would be happy for Jessie to be, would not have been seen in mullet haircuts and overalls. Jessie was so happy her mouth hung open. If she took her eyes off this unexpected, extravagant gift, it might disappear. She squeezed her mother’s arm and then dropped it, reluctant to show just how much this parade of everyday lesbian life meant to her, more than any other trip or present. She worried that her mother might think that all the other presents and the trips to Disney World had been wrong or unnecessary, and they had not. But it was true that this trip was the only time Jessie did not feel like a complete impostor.

  Jane was just happy to see her daughter happy again. She could live with this, easily, especially with Jessie bouncing beside her, smiling right up to her thrice-pierced, beautifully shaped ears. There were unfortunate outfits, of course, and more of those haircuts on women who should have known better, and although some women were admirably, astonishingly fit in bicycle shorts and tank tops, more were too heavy for their frames, cello hips trying a John Wayne walk, big breasts swinging under washed-out T-shirts. Hopeless, Jane thought, but not bad. Jessie ate like a hungry boy, for fuel, for muscle and bone and growth, and as she worked through a double chocolate chip cone from Herrell’s, her ears turned bright red. Jane started to turn around, to see what it was, but Jessie hissed, “Don’t look,” and despite Jane’s hostile maternal impulse to demonstrate that it was her job to monitor public manners, not Jessie’s, she sat still for another ten seconds and then strolled over to the wastebasket and dumped her half-eaten cone, pretending, if anyone cared, that she couldn’t eat another bite. What had turned Jessie’s ears scarlet? A man or a woman, beautiful as Apollo is beautiful, and in the cropped silver hair, loose jeans, layers of Missoni sweaters, and brown polished boots there was no clue at all and Jane thought, Goddammit, go home, we’re looking at lesbians here.

  Jane liked Northampton. The Panda Garden Chinese Restaurant, elegant gold earrings shaped like ginkgo leaves, and the beautiful blunt hands of the saleswoman unfolding Italian sheets, snapping thick ivory linen down the length of a pine table, charmed her, and she still visits every couple of years on her own long after Jess has come to prefer Seattle and Vancouver.

  Jane walks to the mall. They need toilet paper. Jane needs emery boards. She has to get vitamins and Tropicana Original orange juice (testosterone has not changed Jess’s lifelong hatred of orange pulp and of green vegetables) and high-protein powder for shakes and maybe some books on tape until Jess has the energy to read.

  Jane strolls through the entire mall, buying funny socks and aloe vera gel and Anthony Hopkins reading The Silence of the Lambs, and winds up at the Rite Aid, the least glamorous stop on a not very glamorous list. She recognizes the man at the end of the aisle. Not part of Dr. Laurence’s staff, she would have noticed those hazel eyes. Someone she knows from home? Did she decorate a house for him? An office? Cheekbones like a Cherokee and flat waves of slick dark hair like a high-style black man from the forties.

  “I’m Cole Ramsey,” he says, and Jane smells bay rum aftershave. “I think I saw you at the medical center? Down the street?” He is not really asking, he is Southern. And he keeps talking. “Forgive me for being so forward.”

  Jane has goosebumps and her chest hurts, and it has been so long since she’s had these symptoms that for a moment she thinks she’s getting the flu. She introduces herself and drops the package of emery boards, which Cole Ramsey picks up and holds on to.

  “May I walk along with you?”

  “Through the Rite Aid? Be my guest.”

  By the time they’ve finished shopping and bought a Pooh Corners mobile from the Disney Store for Cole’s brand-new nephew, Jane knows that he is an endocrinologist who sometimes consults with Dr. Laurence and has his own regular-people practice on the other side of Santa Barbara. Cole likes to talk. He talks about malls and why he enjoys them (“Of course, I also like kudzu, so there you go”) and Dr. Laurence (“A good man and a good surgeon—a rare combination, not that I should bad-mo
uth the profession, but most doctors are half-people and most surgeons are not even that”) and the poetry of Richard Howard (“He’s so decorous but so willing to disturb”), and he tries to talk Jane into dinner.

  “My son’s having surgery day after tomorrow. Tonight’s his last chance for Chinese food.” That’s enough information, Jane thinks.

  “Of course. Just a drink, then? Or a post-shopping cappuccino?”

  Jane calls home, and Jess, still drowsy from the sun and anxiety, says, “Fine. Go. Whoop it up.”

  Jane says, “I’ll be home no later than seven, and we can go out for dinner and catch the nine-thirty movie.”

  “Whatever, Mom,” Jess says. “It’ll be fine. I’m going back to sleep.”

  Jane falls on her bed, after the sixteen-ounce Bloody Mary with Cole Ramsey and the beer with Jess and their all-appetizer dinner and malted milk balls at the movie, and she thinks of Cole and exhales happily. His soft, light voice. The focused, flattering attention. The self-deprecating jokes. Jane has not had a close gay male friend since Anthony died in ’88, and Cole is charming and such a pleasure to look at.

  In the morning Jane and Jess kick around until it’s time for him to check into the hospital. They play gin and walk to the bookstore and waste time, and eventually they pack and watch an afternoon rerun of Friends. They act more like pilots before a big mission than like patients. At the hospital Jess is hungry and nervous and unwilling to let Jane sit with him any longer.

  “Love you, Mom,” he says.

  “Love you, too, honey,” Jane says, and thinks, Oh, my brave girl.

  Jane sees Cole in the hospital lobby, patting the cheek of a fat blond nurse. When he sees Jane, he gives the nurse a squeeze on the shoulder and she hugs him, her wide body hiding him from view. Cole hurries to catch up with Jane.

  “You must have just left your son. May I walk along with you?”

  They walk through the parking lot, into the wet grass and waving palms and blooming Jacarandas of the small, unexpectedly tropical city park.

  “This is nice,” he says. “A little bit of Paradise we didn’t know about.” He makes it sound as if he and Jane have been exploring municipal parks together for years.

  “You have a good relationship with the nurses,” Jane says.

  “Patients and nurses are about everyone that counts in a hospital.”

  “I bet that one’s in love with you,” Jane says. She’s teasing; she and Anthony used to talk about women who fell in love with him with a particularly gratifying mix of compassion and malice.

  “Oh, I’m over fifty, no one falls in love with me anymore.” Cole sits down on a bench and pulls gently on Jane’s hand.

  “Don’t be silly. Men have it easy until they’re seventy. And look at Cary Grant, he looked fabulous until he died.” And he was gay too, she thinks.

  “Well, I’m not Cary Grant, I’m afraid, just a skinny doc from South Carolina. Not that I wasn’t a fan. Particularly Bringing Up Baby.”

  “Well, yes,” Jane says. “One of the best movies ever made.” They talk through the movie from beginning to end, and he applauds her imitation of Katharine Hepburn, and when they get to the scene with the crazy dog and poor Cary Grant in Hepburn’s peignoir, they laugh out loud.

  Cole looks at his watch and sighs. “This has been just lovely, but I do have to run.”

  Jane looks at him. “Of course. Someone waiting at home?” It would be nice to be friends with a gay couple. She could invite them over for dinner, for pizza at least, while Jess is in the hospital, or maybe while he’s recuperating and getting bored.

  Cole looks down at his hands.

  “I’m in mid-divorce. I promised my soon-to-be ex-wife that we could do a last furniture divvy tonight. We’ve been trying to stay out of the lawyer’s office as much as possible, but that does mean that we spend far too much time talking to each other. Comes under the heading of no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.”

  “What good deed?” Jane is trying to figure out whether he means “wife” in the sense of “woman I am married to,” or “wife” in the sense of “man in my life who played a kind of wifely role.”

  “Oh, you know. I don’t want to bore you. The good deed of ending twelve years of unhappy marriage with an amicable divorce. After God answered my prayers and sent her the kind of man she should have married in the first place.”

  Straight? Jane thinks.

  Cole holds Jane’s hands in his. They are the same size.

  “I am sorry to have to run, and even sorrier that this kind of dreary talk should ruin our little moment. I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t have to,” Jane says. “It’s a safe couple of blocks.”

  “It will be a pleasure,” he says. “And it will be my last pleasure for a few hours.” He smiles. “Except when I insist that my wife take back some of the horrible furniture we got from her mother, the Terror of Tallahassee. I used to hope our house would just go up in flames and we could start again.”

  Actual wife, Jane thinks.

  At the doorstep Cole says, “I have to tell the truth. I saw you before our serendipitous meeting in the Rite Aid. You were daydreaming in the cafeteria. You looked so far away and so lovely. I wanted to be wherever you were.” He brings her hand to his mouth, kisses it right above the wrist, and goes.

  In bed Jane holds her wrist gently and hopes very hard that Jess will be all right. She does not believe in God, but she believes in Dr. Laurence, and she believes that people who are loved and cared for have a better chance in life than people who are not.

  Cole rings the doorbell at midnight.

  “Forgive me. You must have been sleeping. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I do. I was thinking about your energy, your mix of acceptance and strength, and I felt in need of it.”

  He talks nonstop, flattery and Southern folk sayings, snatches of Auden and Yeats, a joke about sharks and lawyers whose punch line he mangles, and finally Jane pours him a glass of wine and wraps his hand around it.

  “You must think I’m demented,” he says.

  “No, just worn out. Actually, I thought you were gay.”

  Cole smiles. “Oh, my. I wouldn’t mind being, except that that would require having sex with men.” He looks right at Jane. “That is not my preference.”

  “I’m embarrassed. I don’t know why I thought that. Your manners are so good, I guess.”

  Cole pats her hand. He doesn’t look surprised or offended. “Crazy Creole mother. Jumped-up Irish father. I was terrible at team sports. Just barely American, in fact.”

  Jane pours herself a glass of wine and yawns. Cole loosens his tie.

  “Spending all my time at Dr. Laurence’s clinic, I could have been wondering if you were, you know, genetically male.” Jane smiles.

  Cole laughs. “Mmm,” he says. “If I were not my mother’s son, if I have a few more glasses of wine, if you allow that robe to slip open another inch or two, then I might say, Oh, dear Jane, it would be my great pleasure to satisfy your curiosity.”

  There is a long silence. Cole touches the side of her face with two fingers, from her brow to her chin, and Jane leans forward and kisses his temples and then his cheek.

  “I’m so out of practice,” she says.

  Cole kisses her neck, and the goosebumps return.

  “No,” he whispers. “There’s no practicing for this.”

  They kiss on Jane’s couch until dawn, unbuttoned and unsure, hot, restless, and dreamy. In between, Cole says that his back is not great. Jane tells him, as she has not told anyone, that her doctor thinks she’ll need a hip replacement by the time she’s sixty.

  “The erotic life of the middle-aged,” he says. “Let’s soldier on.”

  Cole undresses Jane a little more, and at every moment of skin revealed he kisses her and thanks her. He sits behind her, biting her very gently down the spine until she cries out. Jane turns to face him, now in just her underpants, and sees that he has taken off only his
shoes. She puts both hands on his belt buckle. Cole lifts them off firmly and kisses them.

  “Let me go on touching you,” he says. “For a little longer.” And he holds her hands over her head and kisses the undersides of her breasts and the untanned shadows beneath them.

  His beeper goes off.

  Jane puts her robe back on. “The vibrating ones seem more discreet.”

  She feels clotted and cold, and to stave off shame (really, she has known him just a couple of hours; really, is this what she does while her only child lies in a hospital bed?) she is prepared to make him feel terrible, but his hands are trembling and he cannot put his feet into the right shoes.

  “I have to go. Like the Chinese sages, crawling with charity, limp with duty.” His jacket is on, his beeper is in his pocket. “But I am prepared to grovel, for weeks on end, if necessary.” His thick hair sticks up like dreadlocks, and there are wet, lipsticky blotches on his shirt. “I’ll come look for you tomorrow in the hospital, if I may.” He stands there, slightly bent, expecting a blow, as if this is the right, inevitable moment in their relationship for Jane to backhand him.