The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (15 page)

There was a long pause. “Oh,” said my parents. “How interesting.”

In the day-to-day, we’re pretty much like every other pair of lovers. We’ve negotiated a compromise between his need for a vegetarian household and my love of meat. We rescue each other from potential lateness or overwhelm by doing an extra dog walk or the dry-cleaning pickup. I pack him out the door with lunch when I’m home from touring, and he packs me away for a week with love notes hidden in my dopp kit when I leave again. He always knows how to get where we’re going and I never do; I always know what time it is and he never does. If you asked me to describe our relationship, these are the things I would tell you about. I’d say that we’re good at communication and division of labor, challenged by how to deal with conflict. Excited to be thinking about parenting soon. Both self-employed and very happy about it. These are the sort of things I am getting ready to write on my maple-leaf-emblazoned set of forms, downloaded off the Internet in a state of excitement.

However, it is also true that I once had to give my parents a three-page set of terms and their definitions to help them understand me and my relationships and my life.

The other set of facts about my partnership, soon to be legalized by the Canadian government (knock on wood), is that I was born in New York a baby girl, raised in New England but with Manhattan bagels and sensibilities, and have lived my life being seen as a man much of the time for most of the last ten years. My self-employment is as a touring writer and solo performer, both on issues of gender, sexuality, and culture (which is how I say that I am a queer, Jewish tranny who would like to tell you more about that, but in language that my grandmothers could use at a Hadassah meeting). My parents still refer to me by my old first name and with feminine pronouns, even though I pretty much look like a Nice Jewish Boy, and if you imagine they’d find it embarrassing to use “she” to refer to someone who really looks like a “he” then you have clearly never met my relatives. Last spring, I went to Milwaukee to give a keynote address at a conference and fell in love with a Canadian boy who was born a baby girl in Toronto, who moved to England for a while and then back, and who holds dual citizenship in Canada and the UK, one under his gender-neutral name and one under his unmistakably female one. He was raised just outside of Toronto as a Girl Guide and alto in the Anglican youth choir, but converted to Judaism and is a Nice Jewish Boy now, too, who does policy and curriculum work around queer and trans inclusion in the public schools. For a living. His parents still call him by his gender-ambiguous childhood nickname, but he lives as a man and makes his living in part as what he calls a display-model transsexual.

There does not appear to be a space for most of this on the form.

Here’s the best part—our parents have to write letters to say that, yes, we have been together for two years and, yes, they have met our partner, and yes, it really is a real relationship. I imagine the text:

Dear Canadian Government,

My daughter, who looks like my son and is Sharon on her passport but S. Bear Bergman on his bylines, has evidently fallen hopelessly in love with j wallace, whose documents apparently say that his name is Jessica Charlotte but whom we know as our queer daughter’s gay husband. Yes, we agree that this is very weird, but last night we caught them bickering about who was supposed to have canceled the newspaper delivery, and we all know what that means.

Yours sincerely,
The Bergmans

At first blush, there isn’t a space for a lot of things on these government forms. But as a traveling, tax-paying transperson, perhaps the most valuable lesson I have learned is that in North America, even if there is not a form for you in the general packet, they probably have one for you in the back somewhere. So I am optimistic that somehow, in the grand selection of forms and exemptions and ancillary letters, there is somewhere for me to write in all the details of this relationship, absolutely charmed for all that it may look a little strange. There must be. The Selective Service has a form called the Status Information Letter to exempt young men from the draft if they were born female (the Vice President of the United States, I learned while looking for the form number, is also categorically exempt). Someone at the IRS knows exactly how much of my travel expenses I am entitled to deduct as a self-employed performance artist (not, as you might imagine, a giant employment category), and if you look long enough, you’ll find that you can use form 2106 and then take the total and add it to line twenty-four of the 1040 form with a special code to indicate that you’re exempt from the two percent rule about miscellaneous expenses. The State of New York, if you ask at the DMV, will give you form MV-44, to which you staple an affidavit from a medical professional and proof of your name change, and they’ll change the sex marker on your driver’s license from M to F (or vice versa). Surely, there is a form for me.

And so with this peculiar, bureaucratic optimism I settle in. I write about how he picked me up in a hotel lobby in Wisconsin, and how I bought his parents hardcover books as Christmas presents, and I import into the text file on my computer the pictures we took at Christmas. (There’s me, the big pink cheerful Jewboy, with his entire skinny pale British family in front of the tree. Wearing the paper crown from my first ever Christmas cracker, even.) I sort photos from our trip to Spain and Morocco, looking for the ones that show the most clearly “foreign” scenery with us also in them. I debate about telling the story of how we had a blowout fight on a street corner in Africa, right outside the post office in Fes, and how he almost stalked off and left me on the street corner, but didn’t. On the one hand I don’t want to write our blistering argument into the official governmental narrative of our relationship, but on the other I have rarely felt so in love as I did when I realized that he wasn’t actually
gone
—he’d walked fifty feet away and was standing against a fence, glowering at me. And my heart leapt for the love of him. And, I’ll tell you what: I have never been so glad to see anyone glower at me in my entire life.

All manner of things that contribute to the rich pastiche of love stories must pour through their office. Even being a one-transsexual-and-one-transgender-person couple (kind of like salt and pepper shakers—same, but different), even me with my driver’s license that shows a different middle name than my passport and him with his UK passport that shows a different name than his Canadian one, and all of them with female sex markers. Even with my parents calling me by a different name than his parents use for me, and never mind my grandmothers, or my rabbi, or his, or any of the rest of it. Surely, this must be old news at the Canadian Embassy in Buffalo.

I have what is basically the equivalent of a scrapbook here, not quite up to Martha Stewart standards in that it is digital (and devoid of pressed flowers), but it serves the same function. In the front there’s a narrative letter to explain how all of these testimonials, with all of these pronouns and names, actually reference the same two crazy kids who shacked up together on eight weeks’ acquaintance because the weekend fling they had intended turned out not to be enough. And neither was the June we spent squatting in a friend’s unused guest room, nor the rest of the summer when I swore I wasn’t going to move in with him but couldn’t manage to leave. That Sharon and Bear and j and Jessica and Ishai are all told only two people; two people in love.

From the outside, the questions are about gender and sex. You’re a what, now? Can you get married? Will it be a same-sex marriage (I work hard to refrain from joking that I am hoping for a frequent-and-creative-sex marriage)? How will you get pregnant? What’s the difference between a transsexual and a transgender person, exactly (and you’re not alone, Dad, in finding that complicated)? And from the inside, we’re trying to figure out how to ameliorate the always-late/always-lost gap and schedule our monthly queer Shabbos dinner around my touring schedule and his outdoor activity habit.

(I am the partner of a man who owns seven tents. I, a New York Jew whose previous idea of roughing it was the Holiday Inn, am prepared to live in the same domicile, in perpetuity, with seven tents. Take that, Canadian government.)

Which isn’t to say, “Oh, we’re just like everybody else.” I am so tired of that assimilationist nonsense, and believe me, the cisgender couples I know, queer or straight, don’t have to fight for an hour with a bank officer about if they really are who they say they are, since every piece of picture ID has a slightly different name. The straight people, especially, pretty much do not agonize about how to deal with the fertility clinic or whether it is safer to go through customs together or separately. There are plenty of differences.

But it is to say that love is pretty much like love. You have your song and your anniversary, your love tokens and your secret code words for things, your tender stories and your lustful ones. You spend all damn day trying to buy the first set of holiday gifts for your potential future in-laws. You fight and your fights become part of your love story; you’re enriched by your disagreements and you treasure those too. You save your beloved the middle bite because he likes it best, and he saves you the end bite because you like it best, and what’s more, you start to do this reflexively, even when you’re apart, until one day you find yourself momentarily startled to have saved a bite for someone who is 2,000 miles away. You realize that you used to have two pairs of track pants, one blue and one gray, but that the blue ones are now his pair of your track pants and the gray ones are your pair, and you never even reach for the blue ones anymore, even if they somehow make it back to your closet. Tranny or not, queer or not, binational or not, whatever you’ve got going on, you could put together a scrapbook of love that would convince any Customs and Immigration officer that, however weird it looks, it looks like love.

It Only Takes a Minute, III

Two days after the wedding, I talk to my dad on the phone. He asks me how I refer to Ishai, now that we’re married. I say that I call him my husband. And how, Dad wants to know, does he refer to me? It’s clear in the question that he’s really not imagining me as a “wife,” but doesn’t know any other married words. When I tell my father that Ishai also refers to me as his husband, there is a long pause and then he says, “I’m going to send you an email, with some questions.” I assure him that this will be fine.

A guy on the street is wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned in hot pink with the words “I (heart) Breasts. . .” I turn, and see that the back reads “. . .but I hate breast cancer. Please, do your self-exam.” I laugh and stop him, asking where he got the shirt and explaining that I want one too. He tells me and then says he’s surprised I’d wear it. “Why?” I ask, expecting him to assign it to my being a gay man. “Well,” he replies, “probably people will think you’re a lesbian unless they read the back.”

Four small boys are playing with chalk on a city sidewalk next to a hopscotch pattern. In a fit of whimsy, I hopscotch it as I go by. One of the boys says to the others: “Wow, did you see that? A grownup, and a
guy
grownup. That’s like the weirdest thing
ever
.”

I kiss my boyfriend at the baggage claim in the Pittsburgh airport. He’s the first same-gender masculine person I’ve kissed in public, and I’m shocked at how much more staring there is now than there was when I was one of two dykes kissing. There’s a wildfire of little comments across the concourse, and he says, “Be careful, please.” I know on paper that people react to queer men much differently than they do to dykes, but this is the first time I have to worry about it. It’s a little thrilling.

In a restaurant with my Nana, she hands me her purse before she goes into the restroom. I stand outside, holding it (large and pastel), waiting for her. Another guy is parked similarly, by his mother, and we start joking: “I don’t know about that bag with those shoes,” “Oh, it really brings out the color of your eyes.” We’re camping it up, mincing a little and laughing quite a bit, until I figure it out that I’m being misogynist and he’s being homophobic. I shut up promptly.

Seahorse Papa

On the stoop of the fertility clinic, where we wait at 7:30 a.m. for the daily ultrasound, all of the women are very nice and exchange perplexed expressions only when they think we’re not looking. What are you doing here? is the question their mouths are all full of but won’t spit out. What are
you
—you two boys, you men, you non-uterus-havers, you fertility-unconcerned males—doing here, here together, here without benefit of a woman to explain your presence? The other men stand with their wives looking, in general, only at their female partners or their own hands, but we’re an anomaly. There is no reason for a man to be here at this hour; this is the hour of fertility monitoring, of the motorized chair that lifts its sitter’s ovaries to an ergonomic height, of the every-next-day visits for a solid month to determine when things happen in there. If things are happening at all in there.

The women on the stoop, being Canadian and therefore disinclined to do anything that may be perceived as impolite, do not ask. Not even when we go back into the ultrasound room do they say a word. Not when we arrive, sleepy and cheerful, and not when we leave holding hands.

And the staff say and do nothing to answer for it. No one stumbles and uses Ishai’s former female name when calling him into the ultrasound room, not even once, no one “forgets” or slips up and calls him
she
. Not even once. I imagine that the waiting women must assume that there’s some other reason for men to attend, some sort of new treatment or test they’ve never heard of. Maybe they imagine he’s a sperm donor, or requires some other kind of ultrasound for some other purpose. I haven’t asked.

Some of the technicians are quite nice, and some are clearly not on board with this program, but either way they’re professional and efficient. The woman who opens the clinic at 7:30 promptly and takes everyone’s blood is Gloria, whose boyfriend often walks in five minutes after she opens with a tall cup of black tea and a kiss for her, and she’s our favorite among the staff, the one who refers to me as Ishai’s “co-pilot” (a kind of gender-free language that we come to treasure) and has obviously seen and measured a lot of couples in her time at the gateway to baby having.