Amy Bloom - Normal

“So,” Jim says to the man in the chair, “can I tackle those eyebrows?” The man says, reluctantly, that his wife won’t let him pluck. Jim is undaunted. “Well, the wife must have her say. Let’s just give you exquisite eyebrows tonight.” He smooths the lower halves of the man’s thick, straight brows with foundation, sets it with colorless powder, and darkens and arches the upper halves with brown powder. When Jim puts a wig of chestnut waves on the man, he looks different, of course. He also looks radiant. He thanks Jim, tearfully—“I can’t tell you what it means to me to see myself like this, God bless you”—and the next man hops into the makeup chair. Mike sighs and kicks one pointed toe against the wall.

I volunteer to do Mike’s makeup, although I don’t think that I can really master the magic of the Scotch tape strips attached to the concealed headband to raise the eyebrows and lids and recontour everything from the jaw up. “Lucille Ball, Loretta Young,” Jim says airily. “They did this all the time before everyone had face-lifts.” He knows. He did makeup in Hollywood for thirty years, for Joan Collins, Mick Jagger, and a long list of other divas, and when he kept getting bumped from choice assignments “by little blonds with boob jobs who were shtupping the producer,” he turned to an unimaginably grateful, large, and uncomplaining clientele: crossdressers.

Jim quickly does the Scotch tape trick and applies Mike’s false eyelashes, which I am afraid to do. Nine men wait impatiently, trying on auburn and honey-blond wigs, restlessly looking through the jewelry and false eyelashes and corsets for sale. All the goods are sized for larger-than-average women, to minimize the “King Kong in heels” effect that Jim has been warning them all about.

Mike now looks like a denuded drag queen from the neck up, and like a man ready to mow the lawn from the neck down. As we walk down the hall to his room, he tells me about his very supportive wife, about his teenage boys, who don’t know, about his passion for wine making and vintage motorcycles. The worst thing in his life, he says, was Vietnam; his kids are the best thing, especially now that they’re old enough to really talk. For forty-five minutes I lean over him, applying foundation, following his instructions, making my own improvisations. So this is what you have to do to stubble, so this is how you diminish the shelf of bone over the eye. I have tried for a subtle, natural look, and when I step back I see what a mistake I’ve made. With his edges softened, he looks wan and vulnerable, feminized but now lifeless. I put on more eye shadow, more lip liner. I apply more blush and work it in carefully, then dust a little shimmering powder over it all. Mike looks in the mirror and laughs. Now he looks like Mimi.

“I’d kiss you if it wouldn’t mess my lipstick,” he says cheerfully, and disappears into the bathroom to get into his pantyhose, his padded bra, and the fierce corset. His wife, stout, handsome, and tired, comes into the room. We introduce ourselves, and she settles down on the edge of the bed with a self-preserving amusement, holding her purse in her lap. I explain that he’s dressing.

“Oh,” she says, “well, that’ll take a while. He really gets into it.” She unpacks her overnight case and looks at me closely.

“I helped with his makeup,” I say. “Jim was really busy.”

“Oh, yeah, I can imagine. I used to help him with it, but — it just took so much time. I said, ‘If this is what you want to do, you better get good at it.’ ”

Mike comes out as Mimi, his biceps and deltoids gleaming above and below black latex straps, the muscles contrasting with the now small waist. He grins and strikes a pose. He sees his wife and freezes in the doorway, no longer friendly, blunt Mike, not yet wild party-girl Heidi, but a Heidi-in-waiting, hoping that his wife will give him permission to become.

His wife purses her lips. “That’s new, huh?”

“Yeah, but if you don’t like it, I brought the other one.” He points to a more conservative black sheath hanging on the closet door, with cap sleeves and a modest hemline.

She shrugs, massively. “Wear what you want. You ready to go?”

We all walk out together, and I see his wife hail a couple of friends, other wives from the MAGGIE circuit.

The pageant begins with one of the emcees, an older crossdresser, performing Rusty Warren’s “Knockers Up,” a song from the era of “blue” records: Redd Foxx, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams. Hard-faced and lithe, the emcee lip-syncs Warren’s biggest hit, from fifty years ago, and although there is some applause, no one looks very pleased, and the other emcees, Lor and Mary Akers, cut the song off pretty quickly.

Lor and Mary are the new generation for MAGGIE. Lor is a female-to-male transsexual, and Mary, his wife, has been with him since they were a lesbian couple. They are both short and stocky and tirelessly kind, and they both make it a point to check in with me to see if I have met the people I wish to meet. All weekend I see them thanking people, comforting people, sorting out the usual conference problems. The only other “FTM” at Fall Harvest is self-identified — and self-identified only. A petite Cyndi Lauper look-alike, in an ivory pantsuit and rainbow-dyed hair, she claims to be a shaman, a healer, and formerly a man, in her previous life. After she hands me her business card, Mary Akers catches my eye and shakes her head good-naturedly. Mimi pulls the card out of my hand. “Nuts,” he says.

The talent portion of the pageant, like the evening wear, ranges from the excruciating (plump, sweet Lor lip-synching, two-stepping, and giddyapping to a loping, sexy cowboy tune) to the pleasant (a dark, strong-featured black crossdresser belts out a gospel tune, and the mere fact that it is actually sung, not lip-synched, and sung well, brings down the house) to the complicated. The complicated performance is Stella’s.

Stella, a transsexual, is a warm, giggling blond with a great figure and a flirtatious head toss. Someone tells me she was a successful professional athlete and had her surgery a year ago. On the good side of thirty, fit and energetic, Stella dances and lip-synchs to “Le Jazz Hot,” a dopey number from the movie Victor/Victoria , in which the point is, of course, that a beautiful woman is impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Stella cuts to the chase. Her adequate lip-synching is background to the real performance, which is simply her body. She strips down, a bit awkwardly, from a tux to a spangly Folies Bergère outfit that clings to her small perky breasts and her bare round ass. Stella shimmies and loosens her hair, which has been hidden under a fedora. Her sexy, very female body is revealed and shaken and shown to every crossdresser in the room. I think she’s not much of a dancer, really — there is a certain stiffness in the hips which is very un-jazz — but Jim Bridges and all the other judges (friends of the community, vendors, and therapists) go wild. Stella bows, looking deeply, deeply pleased with herself.

My pal Jeanette, another crossdresser I met the first evening, is next in the show, and I wish he weren’t. In his everyday androgynous wear (bandanna, jeans, clogs, and tight T-shirt) he looks like George Peppard in his late-forties prime. In drag he looks awkward, and I blame his girlfriend, Marianne. Jeanette tells me that Marianne sought him out; bisexual and dominating, she loves having a man to dress up in women’s clothing. If she’s so happy, I think, why doesn’t she dress him right? He’s in a strange seventies sort of wig, a rayon jersey Liz Claiborne dress, dark hose, and makeup that distorts his features, although I cannot imagine what kind of makeup would not be wrong. If he were a woman, someone would have said to him by now— he’s about fifty—“You have strong features, make the most of them.” He should have a Diana Vreeland or Gertrude Stein look, powerful and emphatic, with no attempt to take the edge off, because the edge is the glory of those strong masculine faces. What I think, and what impels me to shut up about makeup and clothing when we talk and he asks for suggestions, is that he makes a very handsome man and a plain, awkward woman. Jeanette, smart, appealing, and sensitive, seems to me to have no place in this show, between Stella and the elderly gentleman in tails and leotard, who shows great legs and does an old-fashioned magic act. Jeanette reads from Dorothy Parker’s short stories and poetry, and the audience is puzzled, very much as they would be at Miss USA or Miss World. When they say “talent,” they don’t mean reading.