---

 
For two people who genuinely loved one another, Susan and I were pretty expert at tearing into one another. Perhaps that’s the secret to really powerful fighting: the intensity of the fight is directly proportional to what you feel for the person you’re fighting with. It would explain some of the things we said to one another a few days earlier. I should never have mentioned Susan’s abortion, and when I did I hadn’t been trying to hurt her, directly. Well, that's untrue — but I was only striking back. I’d never used it as a weapon against her before, and I was ashamed of myself.

“Hey, I’m really sorry,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Me too.”

“No, I mean really sorry.” I should never have talked about, you know …”

“Well,” she shrugged. “You were right. You were reminding me that I’d made some bad choices, too, which had led to other choices and places I hadn’t expected to find myself in.”

“Yeah, but in my case, you know, it’s completely my fault.”

“It was my fault I got pregnant, Alex.”

“And Jim’s.”

“Whatever. I remember, at the time, it all just felt like a huge, crushing inevitable thing. It all just rolled along, until suddenly, you know, it was the clinic, because what else was I going to do? Tell Mom and Dad?” She stared at the coffee mugs on my kitchen shelves, as though they had some encoded message in the Starbucks pattern. “Is that what’s it’s been like for you? Just this huge, unstoppable thing?”

“Not exactly. You know, I have this rule, about telling you about things before I do them, and I mostly keep it, you know?” I shook my head. “Except when I don’t. So I told you I was thinking about playing blackjack, but then you didn’t like it, and I did it anyway. And that was the point at which I broke the rule. And it all kind of went downhill from there.”

“You think?”

“I know. And you want to know the really fucked up part?” I opened the refrigerator to retrieve some ingredients for dinner. “The reason I didn’t listen to your advice is I didn’t tell you the main reason I was going to play blackjack.”

“What was the main reason?” Susan said. “Money?“

I laughed. “I thought I had a shot at hooking up with Alice Kim. Ha.”

“Why would you have been afraid to tell me that?”

“I don’t know. I was always afraid to tell you about people I was interested in.”

“In case I didn’t like them?”

“I guess in case I flunked out with them. If you didn’t know, you couldn’t laugh at me.”

“I don’t think I’d have laughed at you.“ Susan seemed mildly offended. “But I might have asked you to consider why you thought you had a shot with Alice.”

“You would have?”

“Wait. Back up a minute.” It seemed like she was still catching up on the conversation. “You started this blackjack thing for a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“She was coming on to you in order to get you on to this team? Alice?”

“Well, not exactly coming on to me …” I put a bunch of herbs on the chopping board to begin some prep. “You want to stay for dinner?”

“Sure. Thanks. Um, Alice. You didn’t think that was kind of strange?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Well, was she interested in you before?”

“I didn’t know her too well before.”

“It just seems, I don’t know …”

“Well, you know, we’ve actually become pretty good friends, so the whole thing is kind of ironic, really.”

“If you use the word ironic in the sense Alanis Morissette uses it again I will stab you through the heart with this parsley,” Susan said, holding a bunch aloft.

“It’s like raaaaaaaaiiiiiiiin, on your wedding day.” I sang, and Susan lunged at me, laughing.

 

~o~O~o~

 

I finished rolling out the pasta. Oddly enough it was the one activity I had done that day that made the scar near my hairline hurt slightly. I had no idea why that was. I put it through the machine and had some good loops of fettuccine in about ten minutes, while Susan was chopping the garlic. The sauce was one of my favorite recipes, just parboiled broccoli, anchovies, fresh parsley, toasted breadcrumbs, garlic and oil. The anchovies dissolve with the oil and garlic, and are offset by the sweetness of the broccoli, and it’s a great mix of textures. It needs good fresh broccoli and freshly-made pasta to work well, but milling my own pasta has always seemed like a morally righteous thing to do, so it’s a recipe I come back to often. Since I messed up some of the really big things in my life, I take solace in little achievements.

We’d probably made too much food for just the two of us, but it was going to be good. I had been eating so poorly the past few days that my mouth was watering just thinking about it.

Susan finished the chopping and laid two settings at the table. She was rummaging in the kitchen drawer for the corkscrew, as I was sautéing the garlic, when we heard Pete come through the front door.

Pete. I had forgotten, completely forgotten, that I was going to have some explaining to do with him. I wasn’t really ready to do it right at that moment.

Susan looked at me. I looked back. I said nothing. She busied herself trying to open the tempranillo.

I heard his footsteps approaching the kitchen. I placed my head forward against the range hood of our kitchen, the steam from the boiling water for the pasta brushing over my face. With my eyes half-closed I tried to think of something to say that I hadn’t already said to Susan, or Alice, and came up with nothing. When I opened my eyes and turned to face him I could see Pete was still just standing there, staring at me.

“Hey,” he finally said, softly.

“Hey yourself,” I said.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” and then he turned to Susan. “Or you. Hi Susan.”

“Would you like some wine?” Susan said, in an attempt at deflection.

“Actually,” I said, “there’s a ton of food here, if you want some. No meat though. If that’s important, I mean. Anchovies. But a lot of pasta. It’s good. You’ll like it.” I was babbling.

“You okay?” Pete said, still with that quiet, soft tone he used when he was unsure of me.

“I’m fine.” I waved at my head. “Nothing you wouldn’t find in a Mary Shelley novel. Pretty good, considering.”

Susan set the bottle on the table. “Hey, Alex,” she said. “I can … you know — leave you guys to it, if you want.”

“Don’t do that,” Pete said. “Yeah, I’d love dinner, if there’s enough.”

“There’s enough,” I said. I strained the pasta and put it into a large bowl, glad to have something to do. “But it will be ready in like two minutes, so go wash up if you want some.”

Pete left, and I dumped the broccoli, and parsley in the pasta, then stirred in the hot oil, anchovy and garlic mixture, which sizzled and crackled. Finally I added the toasted breadcrumbs to the tossed mixture. It was one of my favorite things to cook, so easy and yet so fresh and tasty. I carried it across to the table and sat down across from Susan, who had just sat down after setting another place.

“I take it,” she said, “that you didn’t tell Pete you were having any surgery.”

“No, she didn’t,” Pete said, as he re-entered the room. “She’s full of surprises like that.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I spooned some pasta onto his plate, and poured him some wine. “Let me make it up to you.”

Pete reached across the table and brushed his hand across my upper cheek, pushing my bangs back. It felt like an intimate gesture, with Susan watching on.

“You look good, kid,” he said, inspecting one of the yellow bruises that still lurked near my hairline. “You look maybe like you played a match with the Bruins, but you look pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I said quietly.

“But you should have told me.” He turned to Susan. “She tell you?”

“Nope.”

“Then I don’t feel so bad, being left out.”

He raised his glass. “To Alex's recovery, and the future, and good fortune, and whatever the hell that means.”

 

~o~O~o~

 

It was 9pm, and Susan announced it was time for her to leave. Maybe it was the sheer nervous exhaustion of sitting with Pete and me, and wondering which one of us was actually going to begin speaking directly about the elephant in the room, which was what my facial surgery said about my sexual identity. I was certainly worn out. Pete was trying to be upbeat, but there was still undeniably some kind of odd tension in the room while we sat and ate, and I didn’t blame Susan when she finally decided to make her excuses. I gave her a hug at the door, the kind of deep, real hug you can give your sister out of gratitude without seeming excessive. You can only do that with family. She held my hand before we parted, and smiled. “Be careful, Alex.”

Maybe it was the wine, but I didn’t really know what she was talking about. I was pretty sure I’d made all the mistakes it was possible to make in life, already.

Back in the kitchen, I noticed Pete had cleared the table and stacked the dishwasher. “You up for another drink?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, imagining we were going to crack the second bottle of white wine in the refrigerator. Instead, Pete led me to the front door and down the steps. For some reason I was oddly happy to be led. I was glad he hadn’t exploded at me, yet, the way Susan had, about my face. I had been expecting it, but he genuinely seemed to be okay with what had happened.

We went to our regular haunt. Cameron was on bar again, and gave me a nod and a smile as we walked in. We immediately made our way to the back, but that late there were no booths. So I stood, a little awkwardly, while Pete went to the bar to bring us both back some drinks. Someone behind the bar had put on some Throwing Muses. It wasn’t unusual — local band, local bar, there were bound to be some fans — but it wasn’t the most upbeat sound I could think of.

When Pete came back he immediately proposed a toast. “To change,” he said.

“Nothing stays the same forever.” I said, clinking our glasses.

“Nothing stays the same for ten minutes in this town,” Pete said. “You know this place is going to be renovated?”

“What? They're going to try painting it for a change?”

“Cameron just told me, they’re “updating it“. Renovations next month.”

I looked around. What were they going to renovate? “So we’ll have to find somewhere else to drink?”

Pete took a deep swig from his beer. “That or give up drinking. I just hope they don’t go all ultra Irish on me. I’m not listening to the Pogues here as well as every other fucking place in Boston.”

“Then you should have gone to college in Madison, Pete,” I said, smiling.

I’m not sure what happened at that point. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Irish music, but he was suddenly serious. “Goddamn, Alex.”

“What?” I was mystified.

“What did we discuss, what, last year? Two years ago?”

“What?” Seriously, we had discussed a lot of things last year.

“I want you to know –” he said, suddenly more serious than I’d ever seen him, ever. He had his arm on my shoulder, like he was about to pull me toward him. “– I totally support you. I will always be here for you. But you told me, last year, that you didn’t want to be a chick. And here you are,” he gestured with his hands. “What am I supposed to make of this?”

“That I’m a terrible liar?” It was a lame attempt at a joke.

“Seriously, Alexandra.” He held his hand up to prevent me interrupting. “Yeah, I’ve seen your driver’s license. You left it on the coffee table two months ago with a credit card application.”

“Uh.” I wanted to say more, but the bar seemed a lot noisier than usual. Maybe I wasn’t used to the wine and beer, after a week or so in hospital and then recuperating.

“You just have to be straight with me.” Pete said.

“I will.”

“Good. I was worried you were gonna melt down on me. I can’t have that. I need you, Alex.”

Pete needed me? Wow. What did that mean?

I had never felt 'needed' before. It was a new experience, and my reverse-idiot-savant brain wasn't very good at processing it.

A table had opened up nearby. I watched the girl who had been there with her boyfriend vacate it. She had a cute face, big hips, black thick strappy sandals with a 2 inch heel, and long hair tied up behind her head in a loose, messy bun. Apart from the hips, and the fact that I was wearing sneakers, I could probably pull that look off. Maybe my hair wasn't long enough yet. I slid into the seat she had vacated. Pete went to get some more beers.

We talked a lot that night, over the noise of the crowd, U2, Soundgarden, Sebadoh and a bunch of other mainstream forgettable 90s bands. We talked about what I had done, what I was doing with Arun, what I was going to do about my parents, about Pete’s fucked up relationships with several women (Debra was not in his good books any more), and then Pete talked about his work for a while. A rival company had just patented an algorithm for pattern recognition of crowds that was very similar to work Pete's business had been doing. “We were like, only a week from finalizing our new patent application,“ he said, making a gesture with his fingers. “This close.“

“You can write something new, right?“

“Well, of course. It’s just frustrating. And the guys at Command Dynamics are seriously pissed.“ He signed deeply. “It will take us at least six months to re-work our stuff enough not to infringe their patent. Seriously, their stuff was exactly what we were working on.“

I was touched. Pete had spent the evening trying to make me feel better, but he'd been pretty miserable the whole time. I made more sympathetic and encouraging noises, and bought him another drink.

I tried telling some bad jokes to take his mind off things: “A screwdriver walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'Hey, we have a drink named after you!'. The screwdriver responds, “You have a drink named Jeff?'“

After that lame attempt Pete decided he need more booze, and we moved onto drinking whisky (Pete) and margaritas (me). This is a bad idea at Grendels, which is pretty much a beer dive, but we were already drunk so our discrimination was impaired.

By the time they came to clear the bar, we were both toasted. We stumbled home in the warm night air, walking at least a mile and a half. The air was still warm, and the moon was bright, and it was a beautiful night to be out. At one point Pete put his arm around me. I wasn’t sure if it was to steady himself, or me, but I didn’t object.

On the walk, Pete wanted to talk about what I had told him about my reasons for having the surgery. “Pattern recognition, huh?”

“Apparently,” I said.

“You know that’s my thing, right?”

“Duh. What were we just talking about back at the bar? You don’t do face recognition though, do you?”

“We do all kinds of pattern recognition. But no, you’re right, we don’t specifically do facial recognition algorithms,” Pete said. “But you should have mentioned it. Maybe I could have helped.”

“How could you have helped?”

“I don’t know, I’m just saying.” He tried to shrug while keeping his arm around me, which was funny.

“Well, the advice we got was that it was plastic surgery time.”

“I’m just reinforcing an idea with you here, Alex.” Pete said. “Which is: you get in trouble, you have a problem, you come to me. Are we clear on that?”

“We’re clear on that,” I said. “So long as it runs both ways.”

Once inside our apartment, we both stumbled to the bathroom. “Uh,” Pete said, letting me go first in what seemed like a gracious manner at the time. I did, then selfishly took the time to clean my teeth as well before letting Pete have the room to pee. I staggered to my room to collapse. I managed to get my jeans off, but left my bra and panties on underneath my t-shirt. I think I was asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

Some time later I was aware that Pete had joined me in my bed. He’d brushed his teeth, which I took as a plus. There was a little part of me – a big part of me – that wondered what the fuck he was doing in my bed. But that part of me was tired, and drunk, and Pete seemed to be tired and drunk too, and he had his arm around my waist, but nowhere compromising. I went back to sleep, sound asleep.

 

~o~O~o~

 

Waking up next to someone you love, when you haven’t made love with them, is even harder than waking up next to someone you don’t love when you have had sex the night before.

I woke before Pete. He still had his arm around my waist, with his hand on my fake breast outside my bra. I lay still, not wanting to disturb him until I had some kind of plan for how I was going to deal with the aftermath of what I was sure had been a very bad decision by both of us. Pete was my closest friend. I had no doubt about that. Alice was becoming a good friend, but I had known Pete longer, and while I wasn’t completely sure I could trust Alice to watch my back if I needed to, I completely trusted Pete to do so. He’d done it many times before.

Did we have sex? I couldn’t remember. I mean, I think I would have remembered. Surely, I thought, I would have felt something. Like, I don’t know, I’d have been sore? Or something?

Even if we had not had sex, we had slept together. As in slept. But still. It was a level of intimacy we’d never had before. I was torn. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy that Pete was apparently interested in me. Although I wasn’t sure he was interested, exactly. Usually Pete went for women who were more, um, endowed than me.

Part of me sort of hoped he was interested. The past few years had been lonely. Any kind of physical affection was welcome. But another part of me wasn’t happy about it at all. I hadn’t yet come to grips with whether or not I was actually attracted to guys.

I might be, I thought. Maybe?

The bigger problem was that I didn’t want to use Pete as the experiment to find out. What if it didn’t work out? What if I ended up being the one rejecting him? Could I even do that?

Besides, what was he actually attracted to? Was he actually attracted? Was he just drunk? Here he was, with a handful of silicone and lace. I knew, from comments Pete had made before I’d had any of this gender trouble in a serious way, that the kinds of girls Pete liked weren’t the kind that relied on silicone. He hated, or professed to hate, artificiality. Of course, I’d become aware in recent months that like most men Pete had no idea how much makeup and styling went into the kind of looks he thought were ‘natural’, but it didn’t change his stated feelings. A girl with fake breasts was definitely not where Pete’s interests lay.

Out of the corner of my eye, without moving my head, I could see the clock radio beside the bed, which read 8.25. I tried to turn over. Pete stirred. He removed his arm from around me and flopped it to his side.

“Pete,” I said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to be late.”

“Fuck off.” He buried his head into the pillow.

“You’re going to be late.”

“Who are you and what did you do to my head?”

This is going to sound demented, but if there was anything that ever made me decide I was in love with Pete, it was that.

I decided to get up, and extricated myself from the bed without stealing all the bedclothes. As soon as I stood up I regretted the margaritas from the night before. I went to put some coffee on, then ducked into the shower while it was brewing. Maybe I could entice him out of bed with the aroma of the coffee.

I washed my hair again, since it was full of smoke from the bar the night before. My hair was still not as long as it had been before I'd had the first cut at Alice's prompting, but it was below my chin now, almost to my shoulders. Long enough to tie back when I needed to.

When I came back to my bedroom, with a towel wrapped around me, Pete was gone. I dressed quickly, in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and pulled my still wet hair back to my shoulders, and went to knock on the door to his room, to see whether he was okay, but he wasn’t there, either. He’d obviously got out of bed and just left the apartment.

So much for the morning after. I put some music on, drank the coffee, and sat in the kitchen in a deep funk.

 

~o~O~o~

 

I needed to get out of the house, so I phoned Alice, and to my surprise she picked up. “Come over,“ she said. “I have a plan.“

I put on a simple sundress and some sandals and drove over, wondering what her plan would involve. I should have known better. Alice's 'plan' was to go to the beach, and as she opened her apartment door to let me in she thrust a beach towel, a one-piece costume, and a tote bag at me. It took me a few seconds to put it all together in my head.

“Alice, I can’t go to the beach.“

“Why not?“

“I’ll look ridiculous in a swimming costume.“ I gestured toward my torso with my hands. “Have you forgotten that a lot of me is padding?“

“You'll be okay,“ she said, unconvincingly.

I gestured to my face. “What about all this?“

She held up a big sunhat. “This, and glasses, are going to hide almost everything. Come on. We don’t actually have to swim. But it will be fun. I need to get out of town.“

Alice tried for several minutes to coerce me into the costume, and eventually I gave in. It was a beautiful July day, and perfect beach weather, and it had been so long since I'd even thought about the beach, or swimming, I was mildly excited at the prospect.

I did the requisite tucking thing that I won’t go into too much detail about here, and since I was so thin I didn't actually look too terrible — my hipbones actually stuck out some and my waist was tiny. But there was no disguising the fact that I had no breasts. If I put the chicken filets in, they showed above the neckline of the costume.

“Satisfied?“ I said to Alice. I was cranky.

“Okay, you win.“

“I think I lose, actually, whichever way you look at it.“

“Sorry.“

“Yeah, well, do you have a plan B?“

“I packed us a lunch. Let's just go sit on the sand anyway.“

I put the sundress back on, and Alice kept to her halter and denim shorts. We drove all the way out to Crane Beach. The first part of the journey was in silence but Alice put The Magnetic Fields' Get Lost on the CD player, and the sun was on my skin as we drove and it was impossible to stay in a bad mood the whole way there. I had heard a lot of The Magnetic Fields at WHRB, but Stephin Merrit’s music had always seemed a little close to show tunes for my tastes, and they'd never stuck with me. I was punk rock and angst, not melody and wit. Maybe my tastes were changing along with my gender, but I found, while listening, that I loved the music. The songs were all about love and crying and the moon, but they were melodic and poppy in an unexpected way — genius pop, actually — and I had never heard The Magnetic Fields that way before, but suddenly I was in love with the music. There was one very sad song, delivered in a deadpan by Stephin Merrit, which caught me. I made Alice play it three times even though I knew it suggested painfully obvious things about me. It’s All The Umbrellas in London, and it’s not my favorite Magnetic Fields song these days but it’s up there in the pantheon.

I drive around
I walk around in circles
'Cause I've got no sense of direction
I guess I've got no sense at all

I listened to the song, and we drove, and neither of us said anything for a while. I was still tossing around my feelings about Pete, but I wasn't cross with Alice any more.

After we had settled on the beach for a while I worked up the courage to say much about what was really on my mind.

“Alice, have you ever slept with someone and then regretted it?“

“I think you're asking the wrong question, Alex. How many times have I slept with someone and not regretted it?“

“Really?“

“Not quite. But, you know, delight has been … a scarce commodity.“ She dipped her sunglasses for a moment to look at me. “So. Who?“

“Pete. Who else?“

“You're very attractive, Alex. I can imagine many who else's. But Pete … Huh.“

“Huh?“

“Well, sleeping with a housemate isn’t unprecedented.“

“No.“

“You guys have been friends for a long time.“

“Ever since I first got to Boston. He's like my closest guy friend.“

“Huh.“

Alice was irritating me again. Surely there was more to say than 'huh'?

“So you think I did the wrong thing?“

“That depends. What happened?“

I outlined the story of the previous night, and Pete leaving without saying anything in the morning, and Alice patted the sand next to her and said “So tell me something new about men.“

“Yeah.“

“But you guys didn't have actual sex?“

“I did not have sexual relations with that man,“ I said. Clinton had made his infamous disclaimer a few months earlier, but had yet to appear before the Grand Jury. “Nor, so far as I can remember, did I perform any Lewinsky-like maneuvers.“

“So your problem is …“

“I think maybe I made a mistake, Alice. And I feel like a fraud. Or something.“

“A fraud.“

“You know, what am I doing?“ I gestured toward my body. “This started out as one thing, now it’s something completely different.“

“Yes, well, we went through that a few weeks ago.“

I thought that was a little insensitive.

“The thing is, I really like Pete,“ I said. “Really. I get him. I think — I used to think — he gets me. I don’t know. But also, and here's the thing, I worry that if I get involved with him that I'm going to distract him or fuck his life up. And he has some really exciting stuff going on right now, professionally.“

“You mean his business?“

“Yeah. He's really onto something with this pattern recognition thing he's got going.“

“I think you should think of yourself,“ Alice said. “Business is, you know, business. What does your heart say?“

“My heart is an unreliable muscle,“ I said. “I'm better at using my brain. Although I don’t seem to have used it too well lately.“

“We've been through this before, right?“

“Yeah. My heart hurts more this time though.“

“Of course.“

Talking about this with Alice was really beginning to seem like hard work. “Yeah. Anyway, I really want him to succeed. I know he will. They've got a cool business.“

“I don’t know, Alex. From what I know, I don’t think that's ever going to take off,“ Alice said. “I certainly wouldn't invest in it.“

“Really?“ I knew Alice was pretty knowledgeable about A.I. I didn't know whether she knew much about the specifics of Pete's product.

“Really. And you should take care of yourself.“ She said. “If he cares about you, he’ll let you know.“

“So why did he just leave?“

“Men are like that.“

“Really? I mean, I don’t know. It just seems, uh, insensitive, you know? And Pete's not usually like that. I'm like that. Anyway, really, I care about him, and it hurts, but I really don’t want to distract him with melodrama. He has enough going on. And his other girlfriends all do that, the melodrama thing.“

“His other girlfriends.“ She smiled. “Listen to you.“

It wasn't until later that night that I found myself thinking Alice's response to my comments about Pete's business had been odd. As far as I knew she and Pete barely knew one another, and I didn't think I'd said very much about the detail of his work. I didn't actually know much about the detail, anyway. Alice was the kind of person who, usually, would refrain from saying anything negative about another person, unless seriously provoked. I admired her for that. So speaking out about Pete and effectively dismissing his professional achievements was very strange.

I wondered whether I had said something else to upset her, and perhaps this was her way of striking back.

 

~o~O~o~

 

Pete was on my mind for more reasons than Alice's comments. It had been a long time – since high school – since anyone had held me in their arms. I had enjoyed it. I seemed to enjoy the memory of it even more than the actual event, but that was probably because when it had been happening I had been drunk. Or it was some mammalian thing. I recalled reading somewhere that mammals release some kind of pleasurable hormone in their brain when they’re being touched by other mammals they trust. I am a child of random scientific facts that add up to little, but they distract me enough to avoid asking the big question often, and that keeps me going.

In spite of my mammalian instincts, I started weighing up my life. John Ostermeyer had suggested to me, when I was at a low ebb in high school, that it sometimes helped to write up a list of the good and the bad in your life, because you could always find a few good things to put on the credit side of the ledger, and no matter how bad life looked, those good things were usually things you couldn’t let go of. I remember, years earlier, watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan with John and his Mom one evening over at their house on their old Laserdisc player, and there’s a scene in it in which Woody (or whatever his character’s name was, I forget) made up a list that included Cezanne’s still-lifes and Louis Armstrong and a girl he had loved, played by a young Mariel Hemingway. Contrived or not, the idea of that list had stuck with me.

So I made up a list:

The good: the taste of fresh white peaches, and the texture of soft-shell crab. Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, Van Gogh’s 1889 self portrait (the one with the brushes), Picasso’s work in the 1930s, those demented paintings by Francis Bacon. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach, and Nabokov. Poetry by Auden, Rimbaud, and almost everything by William Blake. Doolittle by Pixies, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, Shostakovich’s Symphony No.4, Mahler’s Seventh, Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins. Groundhog Day, Band of Outsiders, Badlands, Blade Runner. Pete, Susan.

The bad: Pol Pot, Stalin, Kissinger, Nixon. Hitler, obviously. Throw in various Borgias. Licorice. Almost everything Willem de Kooning ever painted. Things produced by The Franklin Mint. Any movie with Sharon Stone in it, plus Highlander, Hudson Hawk, and Billy Madison. The existence of AIDS.

I realized there weren’t any people I actually hated. I could come up with a short list of people I didn’t like much, but they weren’t a counterweight to Susan and Pete. On balance, the world was full of wonderful things.

 

~o~O~o~

 

I discussed my list with Dr. Kidman. He listened to me recite it. I thought he was going to take issue with my aesthetic choices.

“There’s nothing in that list about you.”

“What do you mean? That’s not how it works.”

“Well, try it. What do you like about yourself?”

“Um …” I wasn’t good at answering that one. “Haven’t we been down this path before?”

He smiled. “We have. You didn’t deal with it so well that time.”

I nodded an apology. I was older and maybe not any wiser now, but I knew he wasn’t goading me. “I’m pretty smart, I guess,” I began. “I mean intellectually. I’m pretty stupid when it comes to organizing my life.”

“Go on.”

“On the negative side, I’m not very good at making friends.”

“You think that’s still true, Alex?”

“I guess. I mean, the only real friend I’ve made in the past two years is Alice.”

“She wasn’t on your list.”

“I don’t know whether she qualifies, yet. I like her, and all, but …”

“You hold people to a difficult standard, Alex.”

“Yeah. Should that be one of my negatives? Because, you know, I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible thing.”

“Keep going.”

“On the plus side, I’m healthy. I’m not poor. I had a pretty good education …”

“Yes.”

“On the minus … I don’t like myself all that much.”

“Congratulations.” He said. It wasn’t the response I had been expecting.

“Huh?”

“You’ve been seeing me for a long time now, Alex. And this is the first time you’ve come to that realization.”

“Really?” I thought about it. He was right. The idea had been bubbling around in my head, under the surface, but I’d never verbalized it. Now that I had, it seemed true. More true. “So, um, so what?”

“Well, now we can work on that. The only way to happiness, Alex, is beginning to like yourself.”

“That sounds like a Hallmark Card.”

“It’s true.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Yes, yes it is. Now, when was the last time you remember ever liking yourself?”

I thought back. The last time I could remember really enjoying life, free from the uncomfortable buzz in my head that had always been there, was that summer when Hal and I had been friends, back in 1985. The summer I had been able to say that I didn’t care if someone thought I was a girl. And I remembered I had said to Hal, then: “If I was the one who made a mistake …”

 

~o~O~o~

 

The session with Dr. Kidman had ended well. For the first time, I felt like I understood why Susan had liked him so much. It took a long time to get where we needed to go, but he was a patient man.

We spent a long time discussing what ‘liking myself’ meant, and I did a lot of thinking. I finally tracked down that thought that had been nagging me for years.

I didn’t mind if people thought I was a girl. I did mind if they thought I was a freak. But being a girl … it was actually easier. I enjoyed it more. I worried about my relationships more – I especially worried about my relationship with Pete, and Alice – but I told Dr. Kidman I didn’t have any feelings of inadequacy.

Then I had to backtrack, because I had told a lie. I did have feelings of inadequacy. I told him about the time I had spent on the Common, watching other women in the sunshine. I told him about the time we had gone to Crane Beach, and I had needed to cover myself and stay away from the water. I did feel inadequate, especially next to Susan and Alice. I wanted to feel more … womanly.

There. I had said it. A year of living as a woman, and facial surgery, and I had finally faced the truth. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

“This isn’t going to be peaches and cream,” Dr. Kidman said.

“I know that,” I said. “But somehow I think it’s going to be easier than the past five years have been.”

Dr. Kidman gave me a referral to an endocrinologist, and went to the trouble of phoning to make an appointment on my behalf. I appreciated that, especially since it meant I got a much quicker slot than I would have if I’d called myself. A week later I had a lot of blood taken for tests, and walked away with a prescription for estrogen.

 

~o~O~o~

 

I envied Susan. I wanted the same kind of easy familiarity she had with her friend Chloe. She and Chloe talked almost every day, by phone. Mostly, it seemed, they talked about inconsequential things, and I envied that. Pete and I talked about inconsequential things, too, but not the same kind of inconsequential things. And as I had changed, the nature of our relationship had changed. Now Pete never discussed anything to do with the women he was dating with me.

And Alice and I talked about myriad different subjects. But there were things it just didn’t feel right to talk about with her. Especially things to do with Pete. Or with my future. I had been trying that with her, like that time at Crane Beach, and it wasn’t working. She was too focused, too together. I was too much of a fuckup to be able to begin to explain my problems to her.

Plus there was still a kind of distance between Alice and me. Partly it was that she was very private. I knew she was seeing someone, but she never spoke about him. She hardly ever talked about her childhood. We talked a lot about Harvard, and about the team, and sometimes about clothes or books or people we knew, but rarely about things that were very personal.

So I didn’t have any friends I could talk with anymore about serious personal issues. When I tried it with Alice, there was this information asymmetry problem. Conversations with Pete about relationships or gender or anything sexual didn’t seem to work any more — at least not in the same way. When I tried to discuss serious things with Pete – serious things that required solutions – Pete would always try to find solutions, and often those solutions weren't easy to find.

Chloe and Susan, it seemed, didn’t need to do that. Susan could talk with Chloe about very serious things, and not have the conversation blow up into a huge issue. They could talk about their feelings without having to resolve everything, or indeed anything. The solutions were not as important as the process of talking about the issues. I liked the idea of that. More and more, I thought, I needed someone to talk with.

So I wandered over to Susan’s house. Together, Susan and I were tender and kinder and somehow wiser than either of us could be on our own. I liked that. It seemed to me a kind of validation of the entire idea of family. As a pair, we were stronger. We were better. We were … more.

 

~o~O~o~

 

Pete and I had arranged to meet for drinks after he finished work. His office was over near Bunker Hill, so we settled on the Warren Tavern, which in my student days, if I’d ventured this far, I would have avoided like the plague. All I knew of the area was the rink, where I’d gone once with some friends from college to watch an amateur hockey match, which I’d found boring as hell. Separated from the leafy environment of Harvard by the industrial park and the I-93, Charlestown had always seemed pretty rough and unpleasant. The fact that Dan had been killed there had been one more nail in the coffin of the place for me.

Now, a few years later, the Charlestown neighborhood didn’t seem so bad, apart from the memories of Dan. It still looked dirt poor in most places – solidly working class in a way that only the old east coast cities with their frigid winters can represent, as though they were prospective movie locations for realist depressive films about frustrated dreams. But a lot of places around Charlestown now looked like they’d been renovated. There were planters in a couple of windows, and the streets were lined with newish midsize and compact cars.

I arrived before Pete, and was seated with a view of the street, a rare thing at the Warren. It wasn’t quite dark yet, just going on late dusk, but there wasn’t a lot to look at on the street. I browsed the menu, waiting for Pete. Nobody from Boston really goes to the Warren for the food, it’s more for the convenience and the atmosphere, so the menu was pretty much irrelevant, but I didn’t have anything to read and I had discovered over the preceding months that randomly making eye contact with strange men in a bar was an effective way to invite a pickup line, and I wasn’t really interested in that. As I was wondering what was keeping Pete I glanced out the window a few times. I could see a silver Acura, the same as Arun’s, parked closest to me on Pleasant Street, with two people in it, but I couldn’t see who they were. Almost as though I’d asked, one of them opened the passenger side door, and by the dome light in the interior I could see Arun, with a solid-looking blond man I didn’t know in the passenger seat. The blond man nodded at Arun, and then stepped out of the car. He must have walked in the opposite direction because I didn’t see him walk past the Warren. The dome light went off and I couldn’t see Arun any more either, but then he started the car and drove forward, turning right onto Main Street, I guessed to drive back toward Thompson Square and Cambridge.

I wondered what Arun was doing in Charlestown? It didn’t seem like his kind of neighborhood. Then again, with all the yuppification, maybe it was exactly his kind of area now. I really didn’t know all that much about Arun, and had never bothered to find out.

As I was wondering about the coincidence, Pete came in, apologizing for being late. I swear in the late dusk light coming through the window, shining on his blond hair, he looked like some kind of Norse god. He was wearing a simple black cotton shirt and jeans, and despite being at work all day he somehow still looked fresh and alive. Several of the younger women in the restaurant were checking him out.

“I’m sorry,” He repeated.

“No problem,” I said, smiling. “You look happy.”

“Had a good day,” he said, sitting down. The waitress was over to our table and Pete ordered drinks for both of us.

“Your deal?” I asked.

“Yeah. I think it’s going to come together. We did the term sheet. Now it seems to be about the personnel, and how the relationship will work. I think the financials will take care of themselves.” He was genuinely excited. “I can’t believe I’m not focusing on the money, I really can’t.”

“I can,” I said, smiling. Pete had never been about money, and I had the feeling he probably wasn’t the greatest business guy in the world. He’d surrounded himself with a couple of lawyers and financial advisors to help with all that, and if they did their job properly he wouldn’t have to worry. It seemed like, so far, his lawyers and financial advisors were doing their jobs. “I’m really pleased for you, Pete.”

“Thanks.”

“So what’s next?”

“Well, Vassily and I go down to Virginia to meet with the head guys, do some bonding, you know that. They seem pretty keen to get our team committed.”

“Well, no point buying your stuff if you’re not around to explain it, right?”

“Right. I’m going to be tethered to the business for at least 2 years.”

“Does that mean you have to move to Virginia?”

“Fuck I hope not,” Pete said. “No, there’s no chance of that. They just want us to keep doing what we’re doing, and license the results to them to exploit.”

Pete talked about his business some more, and we ate, and we drank, and at some point – some time in the middle of dessert, I think, when Pete leant back in his chair and laughed at something I’d said — I reflected that this was almost like a date. It was almost like the kind of perfect date I’d have imagined a few years ago I might be taking a girl out on. Only this time I was the girl.

It was on the way home that Pete sprung the surprise on me. “Alex?’ he began, tentatively. I always worried when he asked me questions in that tone, because there was usually a catch attached to whatever was coming next.

“Yes?”

“So, these people from Command Dynamics, they want Vassily and me to meet them in two weeks in DC.”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you would come with me?”

“Me?”

“Yeah.” Pete looked over at me briefly while he was driving, maybe trying to gauge my response. “Vassily is bringing Yana. These guys will have their wives with them. It’s that kind of thing. We’re supposed to be bonding.”

“You want to present me – present us – as a kind of couple?”

“Yeah.” He looked worried. “I mean, if that’s okay. Is that okay?”

I looked out the window. We were driving past the Big Dig. There were huge lights strung over a construction pit, lighting up a giant area next to the road and throwing an alien blue light on the buildings beyond.

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea, Pete?” I said. “I mean, they’ve done a security check on you, right?”

“Yes. I’ve been checked out a few times.”

“And it’s important, right? That you have a good security clearance?”

“Of course. We wouldn’t be able to sell anything if I didn’t.”

For a guy who was so smart he could be super dense. “You don’t think being with a woman who uses a fake name could be an issue?” I said.

“Oh. Right. Yeah.” It seemed like he genuinely hadn’t considered this. “Yeah, I guess that could be a problem.”

We made it back to the apartment. I was pissed. My good mood from dinner had been dashed. What kind of life was I leading?

 

~o~O~o~

 

When I got inside Pete went straight to his room, but I went into the living room to sit for a few moments and collect my thoughts. As soon as I entered I checked the messages on our machine, and was surprised to find one from Sunhee Koh, Dan's sister. I immediately felt guilty for not following up with her after the funeral. She had said then that if I couldn't help her she would take matters into her own hands to seek revenge on whoever had killed Dan. I assumed that it had been Whitwell, but I really didn't have any proof. But I worried about Sunhee as soon as I heard the message. What would she do?

Talia, who was home for once, had overheard me playing the message. She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, peeling a mandarin. “You really think she'd go after people herself?“ she asked. I understood from her tone that she'd heard the message before I played it. It happened frequently in our house — the rule was first one in played the messages, but you only got to delete the ones meant for you.

“I don’t really know her.“ I reflected that she had certainly seemed determined on the day of the funeral. But people are usually very emotional at funerals, and I had no idea how long Sunhee's desire for revenge would continue.

“It wouldn't be such a bad thing if she provided a distraction to these Whitwell people, would it?“

“Talia!“ I was shocked. “Even if I thought that was possible, which I don’t, I wouldn't let a girl like that get into that kind of situation.“

“I'm just saying,“ she said, raising her hands in an 'I surrender' motion. “A distraction would be good, right?“

“Probably,“ I grumbled. “But not like that.“

It wasn't until much later, as I lay in bed that night tossing events around in my head, that I realized that Talia knew about Whitwell. I wondered how she knew about that?

 

~o~O~o~