Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

There was no other way, was there?

Of course there was. At that point Dad wouldn’t have stopped me from hanging out in the neighborhood. He didn’t care. It was all me; I couldn’t make it work. Not psychologically. It was too much of a break. After I left Shabazz it was as if my whole life was outside the neighborhood. That car ride to Roland Park was like my oxygen line. I was like some fragile plant that can survive only at one elevation. Who was there to tell me that it would take me twenty years to find the name for my unhappiness? That I had had everything I needed, and failed to recognize it, and thrown it away? It was a matter of starting from scratch.

But there’s a thousand ways of starting from scratch. Is that what you’re saying? That this all was a form of rebel—

I’m not saying anything. I’m posing a question. An obvious question. Was it me, or was it him? Did my father, effectively, make Martin Lipkin into Martin Wilkinson? Can your white father make you a black man? Or could I have been anybody?

I check the time signature on the recorder: one hour and fifty-three minutes. Is that all? A day, a week?

This is making you uncomfortable, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

Oh, come on, Kelly. Your knee’s jiggling.

He flicks on the emergency lights and slows the car, easing us off to the side, over the bassoon tones of the rumble strip and into the scabby grass. Across the drainage ditch a fallow cornfield stretches to a hazy, soapy horizon. To our left, the highway divider is an impenetrable thatch of overgrown oaks: the westbound traffic audible but not visible. The Northeast Corridor and its abandoned outdoors.

Let me tell you something that happened when I first got to Bangkok, he says. Silpa’s office was staffed by trannies. All different stages. It’s common there. Some of them do a little work-for-surgery arrangement. And I was a little freaked out by them. I mean, anyone would be, if you’re used to the ordinary, heterosexual world. So Silpa introduced me to Suki. His private secretary. You’ll meet her — she’s the best. She took me into an examining room and took everything off. Look at me, she said. Really look . Take all the time you want. It’s okay. It’s just hair and skin. It won’t bite you.

And?

Well? I looked. I checked her out. I couldn’t tell; she seemed one hundred percent. Her face — her breasts — down below — the whole package. I would never have known. It was complete. She was Silpa’s best advertisement.

So what’s your point?

You know what she said to me? I don’t ever think about being a man. As far as I’m concerned, I never was one. I looked her in the face, and I just had to accept it. I had to buy it! So this is what I’m saying: what do I have to show you, Kelly?

To convince me it’s real? I believe it’s real. How could I not?

To believe it was always real. I’m not talking about etiology. I’m not talking about cause . We can speculate about the circumstances all we want — later. Right now I’m just talking about the fact of the phenomenon. I was a black boy in a white boy’s body. I was a black man in a white man’s body. Can you accept that, Kelly? Can you really believe it’s possible, when it comes down to it? I need to know. Before we go any further, I need to know.

I believe you.

No, see that’s not the same. You believe it because I’m saying it. I’m not asking you to accept the words. I’m asking you to accept the thing itself. The possibility that—

Yeah, I get it. You don’t have to repeat yourself.

Which means it could happen to anybody. It could be latent in anybody. It could be latent in you.

What would be the chances of that?

You think it’s some kind of genetic freak that so many kids go to liberal-arts colleges, you know, Bennington, Santa Cruz, and come out as lesbians, and then a few years later they’re getting the hormone shots and beginning to transition? You think environment and suggestion has no effect at all ? Either it’s a fad, a style thing, which is bullshit, or it’s present in a much higher percentage of the population than we realize. Given the technology, the resources, the access, a change in social approval, it could be ten percent. Seriously. There’s research. And if one, why not the other? You have to turn the whole logic around. Not who are you now , but who would you most like to be? What is the ultimate form of you? You follow me?

I close my eyes.

Martin, I say, what you’re really asking me to say is, you’re not a freak. You’re not a monster. You are, authentically, who you say you are. You are, one hundred percent, the black man Martin Wilkinson, the man I met at Mondawmin Mall, what was it, six weeks ago? You are that man. No one else. No matter what the explanation happens to be, in the end. Is that what you want me to say?

His eyes are shining.

Yeah, he says. I guess that’s it.

Then the answer is yes. See? I don’t even have to think about it. If you hadn’t introduced yourself I would never have known. Isn’t that enough? You could have gone on living your life. You chose.

I did. I put my faith in you.

And so what do I have to do, then, to demonstrate that I was worth it?

When I know for sure, he says, I’ll tell you.

—

We drive for ten more minutes in silence, and turn off the interstate onto Route 193, the suburban strip outside the old city, passing three intersections, each interchangeable with the last: Wendy’s, Best Buy, Starbucks, Walmart, Target, HomeGoods, Bed Bath & Beyond. Since moving to Baltimore I haven’t once needed to go to a mall, or any store larger than a supermarket, though in Cambridge, with a household of three, we were forever searching out some bargain outside the city on a gray February Sunday, placating Meimei with food-court egg rolls and new DVDs. In a little more than a year I’ve forgotten how to drive these four-lane roads, with cars stacked up in the dedicated turn lanes, the traffic signals signaling seven different movements at once. It’s as disorienting as a pinball machine. I used to be the expert, the director, the choreographer of our American existence. And now, it seems to me, having stopped growing — shrinking, in fact, as I get older — I need nothing from this America. No economy-sized pallets of paper towels. No Little Mermaid bathing suits. I have failed to burgeon.

I look over at Martin, the very essence of calm behind the wheel, eyes on every mirror, checking his watch. Which of us is the visitor, I want to know, which of us has given up his claim? Instead, I clear my throat and ask: how long are you going to be?

Are you on a schedule? I thought you had all afternoon.

Just for my information.

Maybe an hour and a half. These legislative lunches never run too long.

And what is it you’re legislating?

Import-export stuff. Tax exemptions. Inspection issues at the port. I come down here every six months. All part of the job.

We’ll have to talk more about that. The job. I still don’t really grasp it.

Is it relevant? I mean, for this? For the story?

Maybe indirectly.

I’m an open book, he says. For you. For now. Ask away.

During my dissertation-writing years, in my late twenties, I traveled so often between Beijing and Taipei and Tokyo and Cambridge that I coined my own term for jet lag: the gray hour . Three in the afternoon, the day after you’ve arrived, when the last of the morning’s adrenaline has leached away, and, in the middle of teaching a class, driving on the highway, picking up a child from daycare, the daylight turns into a gluey fog, your eyes loosen in their sockets, and your stomach begins to burn its leftover acids: because it’s three in the morning, of course, according to your circadian clock. Your fuels are spent; your body hardens into clay.