Empathy (22 page)

This gave her a sense of historical consistency. Now it was time to get dressed.

She knew immediately that she didn't want to hide her penis from the world. Ann had never hidden anything else, no matter how controversial. There was nothing wrong with having a penis. Men had them and now she did too. She wasn't going to let her penis keep her from the rest of humanity. She chose a pair of button-up Levi's and stuffed her penis into her pants where it bulged pretty obviously. Then she put on a t-shirt that showed off her breasts and her muscles and headed toward the F train to Shelley's house to meet her friends for lunch.

By the time Ann finished riding on the F train she had developed a fairly integrated view of her new self. She was a lesbian with a penis. She was not a man with breasts. She was a woman. This was not androgyny, she'd never liked that word. Women had always been whole to Ann, not half of something waiting to be completed.

They sat in Shelley's living room eating lunch. These were her most attentive friends, the ones who knew best how she lived. They sat around joking until Shelley finally asked, “What's that between your legs?”

“That's my penis,” Ann said.

“Oh, so now you have a penis.”

“I got it this morning. I woke up and it was there.”

They didn't think much of Ann's humor usually, so the conversation moved on to other topics. Judith lit a joint. They got high and said funny things, but they did keep coming back to Ann's penis.

“What are you going to do with it?” Shelley asked.

“I don't know.”

“If you really have a penis, why don't you show it to us?” Roberta said. She was always provocative.

Ann remained sitting in her chair but unbuttoned her jeans and pulled her penis out of her panties. She had balls too.

“Is that real?”

Roberta came over and put her face in Ann's crotch. She held Ann's penis in her hands. It just lay there.

“Yup, Ann's got a penis all right.”

“Did you eat anything strange yesterday?” Judith asked.

“Maybe it's from masturbating,” Roberta suggested, but they all knew that couldn't be true.

“Well, Ann, let me know if you need anything, but I have to say I'm glad we're not lovers anymore because I don't think I could handle this.” Judith bit her lip.

“I'm sure you'd do fine,” Ann replied in her usual charming way.

 

Ann put on her flaming electronic lipstick. It smudged accidentally, but she liked the effect. This was preparation for the big event. Ann was ready to have sex. Thanks to her lifelong habit of masturbating before she went to sleep, Ann had sufficiently experimented with erections and come. She'd seen enough men do it and knew how to do it for them, so she had no trouble doing it for herself. Sooner or later she would connect with another person. Now was that time. She wore her t-shirt that said, “Just visiting from another planet.” Judith had given it to her and giggled, nervously.

The Central Park Ramble used to be a bird and wildlife sanctuary. Because it's hidden, and therefore foreboding, gay men use it to have sex, and that's where Ann wanted to be. Before she had a penis, Ann used to imagine sometimes while making love that she and her girlfriend were two gay men. Now that she had this penis, she felt open to different kinds of people and new ideas, too.

She saw a gay man walking through the park in his little gym suit. He had a nice tan like Ann did and a gold earring like she did too. His t-shirt also had writing on it. It said, “All-American Boy.” His ass stuck out like a mating call.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

“Do you want to smoke a joint?” she asked very sweetly.

He looked around suspiciously.

“Don't worry, I'm gay too.”

“OK honey, why not. There's nothing much happening anyway.”

So, they sat down and smoked a couple of joints and laughed and told about the different boyfriends and girlfriends that they had had, and which ones had gone straight and which ones had broken their hearts. Then Ann produced two beers and they drank those and told about the hearts that they had broken. It was hot and pretty in the park.

Ann mustered up all her courage and said.

“I have a cock.”

“You look pretty good for a mid-op,” he said.

His name was Mike.

“No, I'm not transsexual, I'm a lesbian with a penis. I know this is unusual, but would you suck my cock?”

Ann had always wanted to say “suck my cock” because it was one thing a lot of people said to her and she never said to anyone. Once she and her friends made little stickers that said “End Violence in the Lives of Women,” which they stuck up all over the subway. Many mornings when she was riding to work, Ann would see that different people had written over them “suck my cock.” It seemed like an appropriate response given the world in which we all live.

Mike thought this was out of the ordinary, but he prided himself on taking risks. So he decided “what the hell” and went down on her like an expert.

Well, it did feel nice. It didn't feel like floating in hot water, which is what Ann sometimes thought of when a woman made love to her well with her mouth, but it did feel good. She started thinking about other things. She tried to two-gay-men image but it had lost its magic. Then she remembered Jesse. She saw them together in Jesse's apartment. Each in their usual spots.

“You taste just like my wife,” Mike said after she came.

“What?”

Ann's heart was beating. The ocean was crashing in her ears.

“I said, you taste just like my wife, when you come I mean. You don't come sperm, you know, you come women's cum, like pussy.”

“Oh thank God.”

Ann was relieved.

 

Another morning Ann woke up and her fingers were all sticky. It was still dark. First she thought she'd had a wet dream, but when she turned on her reading lamp she saw blood all over her hands. Instinctively she put her fingers in her mouth. It was gooey, full of membrane and salty. It was her period. She guessed it had no other place to come out, so it flowed from under her fingernails. She spent the next three and a half days wearing black plastic gloves.

The feeling of her uterine lining coming out of her hands gave Ann some hope. After living with her penis for nearly a month, she
was beginning to experience it as a loss, not an acquisition. She was grieving for her former self.

One interesting item was that Ann was suddenly in enormous sexual demand. More women than had ever wanted to make love with her wanted her now. But most of them didn't want anyone to know, so she said no.

There was one woman, though, to whom she said yes. Her name was Muriel. Muriel dreamed that she made love to a woman with a penis and it was called “glancing.” So she looked high and low until she found Ann, who she believed had a rare and powerful gift and should be honored.

Ann and Muriel became lovers and Ann learned many new things from this experience. She realized that when you meet a woman, you see the parts of her body that she's going to use to make love to you. You see her mouth and teeth and tongue and fingers. You see her fingers comb her hair, play the piano, wash the dishes, write a letter. You watch her mouth eat and whistle and quiver and scream and kiss. When she makes love to you she brings all of this movement and activity with her into your body.

Ann liked this. With her penis, however, it wasn't the same. She had to keep it private. She also didn't like fucking Muriel very much. She missed the old way. Putting her penis into a woman's body was so confusing. Ann knew it wasn't making love “to” Muriel and it certainly wasn't Muriel making love “to” her. It was more like making love “from” Muriel and that just didn't sit right.

One day Ann told Muriel about Jesse.

“I give her everything within my capacity to give and she gives me everything within her capacity to give - only my capacity is larger than hers.”

In response Muriel took her to the Museum of Modern Art and pointed to a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Ann spent most of the afternoon in front of the large piece, an angry ocean of black penises which rose and crashed, carrying a little box house. The piece was
called “Womanhouse.” She looked at the penises, their little round heads, their black metal trunks, how they moved together to make waves, and she understood something completely new.

 

They got together the next day in a bar. As soon as she walked in Ann felt nauseous. She couldn't eat a thing. The smell of grease from Jesse's chicken dinner came in waves to Ann's side of the table. She kept her nose in the beer to cut the stench.

“You're dividing me against myself, Jesse.”

Jesse offered her some chicken.

“No thanks, I really don't want any. Look, I can't keep making out with you on a couch because that's as far as you're willing to go before this turns into a lesbian relationship. It makes me feel like nothing.”

Ann didn't mention that she had a penis.

“Annie, I can't say I don't love being physical with you because it wouldn't be true.”

“I know.”

“I feel something ferocious when I smell you. I love kissing you. That's why it's got to stop. I didn't realize when I started this that I was going to want it so much.”

“Why is that a problem?”

“Why is that a problem? Why is that a problem?”

Jesse was licking the skin off the bone with her fingers. Slivers of meat stuck out of her long fingernails. She didn't know the answer.

“Jesse, what would happen if someone offered you a woman with a penis?”

Jesse wasn't surprised by this question, because Ann often raised issues from new and interesting perspectives.

“It wouldn't surprise me.”

“Why not?”

“Well, Annie, I've never told you this before, actually it's just a secret between me and my therapist, but I feel as though I do have a
penis. It's a theoretical penis, in my head. I've got a penis in my head and it's all mine.”

“You're right,” Ann said. “You do have a penis in your head because you have been totally mind-fucked. You've got an eight-inch cock between your ears.”

With that she left the restaurant and left Jesse with the bill.

 

Soon Ann decided she wanted her clitoris back and she started to consult with doctors who did transsexual surgery. Since Ann had seen, tasted, and touched many clitorises in her short but full life, she knew that each one had its own unique way and wanted her very own cunt back just the way it had always been. So, she called together every woman who had ever made love to her. There was her French professor from college, her brother's girlfriend, her cousin Clarisse, her best friend from high school, Judith, Claudette, Kate, and Jane and assorted others. They all came to a big party at Shelley's house where they got high and drank beer and ate lasagna and when they all felt fine, Ann put a giant piece of white paper on the wall. By committee, they reconstructed Ann's cunt from memory. Some people had been more attentive than others, but they were all willing to make the effort. After a few hours and a couple of arguments as to the exact color tone and how many wrinkles on the left side, they finished the blueprints. “Pussy prints,” the figure skater from Iowa City called them.

The following Monday Ann went in for surgery reflecting on the time she had spent with her penis. When you're different, you really have to think about things. You have a lot of information about how the mainstream lives, but they don't know much about you. They also don't know that they don't know, which they don't. Ann wanted one thing, to be a whole woman again. She never wanted to be mutilated by being cut off from herself and she knew that would be a hard thing to overcome, but Ann was willing to try.

 

From the
Los Angeles Times,
March 7, 1993
“The Anomie Within:
Empathy
by Sarah Schulman”
by John Weir

 

If personality is just an adjustment to stress, we may all be the result of the crises we survive. The characters in novelist Sarah Schulman's fiction struggle to come to terms with their identity in a contemporary urban landscape that has grown increasingly apocalyptic and implausible. They grasp at love as they watch their friends and lovers die. They strain to understand their lives in the context of global changes and local upheavals. In four previous novels and her current,
Empathy
, Schulman has articulated an ongoing dialogue in which her fictional stand-ins, most often young gay women obsessed with cultural and political concerns, yearn to speak the language of their time, and to learn what actions will suffice in a chaotic world.