Thinking of him now, I feel more than ever the rightness of the great repudiation of masculinity that so many of us in academe consider the supreme contribution of the humanities in our time. Masculinity in its old, feral, malevolent guise, that is; unadapted masculinity worthy of nothing more than its own inevitable extinction. I can almost see a furry tail waving between the split skirts of Bruno’s coat as he walks out of the room…
He turned to me from the door:
‘Where’d you get the black eye from, Lawrence? Did someone put up a fight?’
‘I slipped on ice,’ I muttered in reply to the first part of his question. The second part I didn’t understand.
As it happened, Bruno’s words proved unexpectedly helpful. By reminding me of my appearance while I was in the midst of all my other preoccupations, they gave me an idea I might not otherwise have had.
Returning to my office after the meeting, I locked the door behind me and opened the closet. There, hanging on the peg, were Barbara Hellermann’s maroon beret and her dry cleaning.
I took down the beret and put it on my head.
Modest as this gesture was, it filled me with a strange excitement, as though a minor adjustment to some telescopic instrument had abruptly swung a whole new galaxy of possibilities into view.
The hat was a good fit. It felt warm and very comfortable. In the mirror it sat softly on my lank blond hair, looking only a little strange. With my high cheekbones and smooth chin, I reminded myself of some film actress from the forties, the bruise and black eye not altogether ruining the effect. I could pass for a female member of the French Resistance, I thought, heroically holding out after being beaten by her captors.
Or I could pass for a more modern kind of heroine: a battered woman, for instance, summoning up the courage to escape from her abuser.
I went back to the closet for the dry cleaning. Under the wrapper I could see a fawn-colored jerkin-style jacket with a quilted lining, and a brown skirt of heavy, woven yarn.
A powerful, almost gleeful sense of purpose came into me as I folded these into my briefcase along with the maroon beret. I felt that I was finally on the attack.
At home I dialed the shelter. The machine picked up as usual.
This time I left a message.
CHAPTER 10
It had snowed in the night, but now it was raining. The traffic, solid from the Port Authority, sizzled through the slush along the West River, which was all but choked with its own traffic of car-sized, mud-colored chunks of ice.
I was on a Trailways bus bound for Corinth.
I was wearing Barbara’s clothes, along with a polo-neck sweater, and some women’s shoes and wool tights I’d bought to complete the outfit. In my initial excitement at this plan, I had assumed it would be something that I, of all people, should have been able to execute without psychic cost; with even a certain professional enthusiasm. I had told myself that a journey in women’s clothing would be a learning – an empowering – experience; something I might even ask my male students to try as an exercise. I remembered reading that Siberian shamans would sometimes undergo a symbolic transformation into women as a part of their journey into the spirit realm. Perhaps I would come back like them with healing or prophetic visions, or, like Tiresias, with a completed knowledge of what it was to be human.
What I hadn’t counted on was the tremendous resistance of one’s mass of unconscious prejudices – one’s gender-soul, if I can call it that – to this kind of disturbance. Stepping out on to the street in these clothes, I had felt an abrupt, cascading sense of inward collapse; almost a feeling of shame, as if I were wearing this long brown skirt, these chrome-buckled pumps, under duress; as a punishment for some crime I’d committed without knowing it.
As I’d turned on to Avenue A, I had seen Mr Kurwen walking toward me with a black patch over his missing eye. All my remaining strength seemed to go out of me as we approached each other. I wanted very badly not to be recognised by him. Despite my own knowledge that what I was doing was both rational and necessary, I felt unequal to the savage hilarity I knew my transformation would arouse in such a man. His good eye stared hard at me as we came close. I don’t know if he recognised me, but for a moment I felt cornered and utterly defenseless.
At the Port Authority I had gone without thinking into the Men’s Room to pee. A man in a suit, still fastening his fly as he turned from the urinal, had looked at me, startled. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I realised he was looking at a woman in a maroon beret who was apparently about to approach the porcelain stalls, and I beat a hasty retreat to the Women’s Room; mortified, and again strangely humiliated. Here, as I washed my hands at the sink, a white-haired old lady had tut-tutted sympathetically at me in the mirror. ‘Boyfriend?’ she’d murmured, gesturing at my bruises. I hesitated a moment, then nodded. She shook her head with a sigh.
I’d felt even worse after that. Aside from abusing the woman’s sympathy, this little misappropriation of female suffering seemed to deepen the reality of what I was doing. To my general despondency, a new, sharply particular kind of demoralisation was added: I had just stepped into character, I realised. I was a battered woman.
Over the bridge and all along the Palisades the rain kept the traffic at the same funereal adagio. We lumbered off on to the Thruway. Mountains appeared; nothing on them but the endless rolling smoke of winter trees, barely distinguishable from the clouds above them or the gray explosions of rain in between.
The vastness of America, the great volumes of space in which one’s existence has no meaning to anyone or anything, is overpowering at times like this. If you’re alone, you feel your aloneness as an almost physical encumbrance. An acute homesickness seizes you; unballasted, in my case, by any sense of where home might be. To be traveling through the rain, dressed as a woman, with a broken face, from a place where I had almost no human connections left, to one where I had none at all, seemed suddenly pitiful. There was a certain margin of tolerance, I felt; an elastic limit stretching only so far from the warm centers of human society. Step beyond it, and you couldn’t count on being gathered back in. And it wouldn’t necessarily be society that kept you out, but something in yourself; some unassimilable new singularity making you unfit, by your own judgment, for the company of your fellow creatures.
At a rest stop on Route 9 – a senses-jangling temple of commerce set down by what appeared to be primeval forest – I sat with a cup of bile-colored coffee, staring through the rain-streaming glass, thinking I could disappear out of my life without a ripple; could just get up and walk out there into those dripping oaks and pines, and vanish… There was something appealing about the idea; soothing almost. I pictured myself hiding out there somewhere, huddled in a damp cave or pine-bough shelter over a smoking heap of dead leaves…