Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

Diane had recently bought a pack of tighty-whities and he saw the yellow-and-blue-striped waistband sneaking out of her workpants. What was she? She was girlish but not womanly, she was an androgyne off the Left Bank, her choppy blunt cut like a WASPy little girl or a Dutch man, her signature red hooded sweatshirt zipped all the way up under her black pleather bomber jacket. Her huddled concentration, her finger in her mouth as she read, her brow furrowed—over what? what were her emotions? did she have emotions?— Diane was Combat Rock, she was a song building, she was—what was that? a fuzzbox—she was Albertine, a tiger’s paw, a marble faun in a pocket garden, a whiskey sour, a traffic light turning red at twilight. Did Paul love Diane for her looks? Yes. No. Okay, yes. But what did it mean to love her looks? He could see the contrary position: some family Thanksgiving, the suburban television magazine agonies (too big, not feminine, too big, messy, dirty, bovine, slow). Her jaw like a statuary angel, her ears poking out through a sheaf of hair, her bangs in her eyes, her clavicle (new word), her broad features, her straight hips and hard small bumps of breasts in her frayed tee shirt. Her melancholy blankness, her hidden stores of thought and pain. Paul stared at Diane, remembered the day he’d met her in the Michigan kitchen, tried to hold onto whatever first invited this compulsion to stare, tried to understand, to puzzle her out, to possess through figuring out, to maint...

He could be Polly for four weeks straight, he was pretty sure. The longest he’d gone so far was at Michigan, a week, and that had turned out fine. The switching back and forth was the hard part, not so much the being. At first he was always conscious of his concentration, but eventually he’d plateau, he’d hit his stride and maintain.

He could tell she liked that he was girlier than her, liked that she was so much bigger than him, liked to do little things for him, but sometimes he did wonder if she liked liking what she liked.

Tony Pinto had said stay, and Paul had left. Diane had said stay, and Paul had stayed. Maybe Paul was growing up.

Sometimes Diane would leave her peacoat on for hours after she got home, like a blanket or armor. To warm her or to keep him out, Paul wondered.

“We need at least one more person,” Diane mused, as if Paul hadn’t said anything. He felt a stab of shame. Maybe he was superficial. Maybe his true colors were beginning to show. Maybe he didn’t have what it took to be a lesbian punk rocker Riot Grrrl activist.

Whereas Diane was all resistance. What they did with their bodies was just one part of it, for Diane. Diane’s mind was elsewhere a frustrating fifty-one percent of the time, by Paul’s reckoning, and she wanted him in the elsewhere with her. She wanted more from Paul, more seriousness of purpose. She would respect his process if he were an artist, he thought, but what did he do besides “make commentary” and dress himself variously? His life was superficial, surfaces to be polished and re-seen. He’d painstakingly assemble an outfit that told a story (willful debutante experimenting with heroin, say, or cowgirl gone to town on a Saturday night, or revolutionary princess) and then he’d take it for a walk, possibly rework elements of the outfit on the fly if one of the thrift shops was open, catalog responses both verbal and otherwise. That could be a whole day. A good day. He was happy enough to have abandoned his schooling, greedily reading in a lineage of his own devising and necessity. He considered putting together a new zine, maybe a girl-power type of thing, though he was a bit old for Riot Grrrl. They were mostly teenagers, three or four years younger than Paul. A cultural eternity. He didn’t want to intrude. Was he already intruding on their gender? Maybe, but it was his too, right? His body did whatever he wanted, so he belonged in all the genders.

Men and women alike confounded Paul; they were so rule-bound. Straight people seemed confused by each other, so anxious to find camaraderie within their gender, so startled by differences between their bodies, always pinning explanations for the inevitable gulf between humans on chromosomes. Diane wasn’t like that. For Diane, women were the norm. She never mentioned what she once called Paul’s “body of origin.”

Paul got up. He was tired of talking, tired of being wrong.

“Pink Moon?” he asked again. “Like Nick Drake?”

Paul started to cry. Not fair to be ambushed while romantic songs were playing.

Diane sighed, an angry exasperated sigh Paul hadn’t heard before. Now he’d done it. Rewind! Rewind! He stared at her. He held his breath. “I just feel like we don’t collaborate well,” said Diane. “Why, because I’m not a vegan? I’m not political enough for you? You know why I can’t get arrested.” “I know,” said Diane. “Okay, so that’s what this is about?” “You want to be everything, all the time,” Diane said. Her voice caught. “I just want a girlfriend. I’m afraid you’re going to get bored of being a girl, and then where will I be?” “I love being a girl,” said Paul. “I don’t even know if I can go back now.” “Why, have you been thinking about it?” Diane was crying too now. Paul felt very French for a moment, crying with his lover at a café. “No,” he said. “No, of course not.” “Seriously,” she said. “Seriously, I know you. You even said it yesterday, how mutable you are. What happens in five years, a year even? It’s in your nature. I don’t want to keep you from your nature.” “I was talking about astrology. Sagittarians are mutable fire,” said Paul. “It’s a metaphor. I’m not that mutable. I haven’t changed in months.” “But you want to change again sometime, right?” Paul considered. He had changed, of course, pretty recently, but nowhere near as much as he could have. He probably would want to change again at some point, maybe not back for good. He was only twenty-two. What could he know about the future? He imagined them together in five years. They’d be twenty-seven. Well, sh...

“Come here,” she said. They didn’t wait to get their clothes off. But when they were done he knew they were done.

He chose the first diner with a good name: Sparky’s. A hopeful name. Maybe he could be sparky again, as someone else.

“Okay,” said Paul, removing his headphones. Liz Phair was playing. He wondered if the skinny waiter picked the music. “Good album,” said Paul. The world was his breakup tape.

“They’re always hiring at Different Light,” he said. “But don’t mention your girlfriend.” “Ex,” said miserable Paul. He put his headphones on but didn’t press play. If he was Polly right now he’d probably cry. Polly was kind of a crier, something Diane had teased him about. Paul didn’t cry. What else did Paul do or not do? He’d have to remember or find out.

Oscar smiled. Pityingly, Paul thought. Chickens don’t bartend in the big city. Paul was a rube. He thought back on the bartenders at the gay bars in New York; he’d have to make himself bigger, butcher, maybe even hairier—all harder work than the other direction.

Monogamy was unhealthy, possibly even unsafe, Tony had said. Paul wrestled internally with the implications of this logic, but adopted the position anyway, to be closer to Tony Pinto. Interestingly, Diane had shared Tony’s conclusions about monogamy: for her it was just another way the patriarchy controlled women’s bodies. They’d never been officially monogamous, just provisionally (and actually, for the most part) while living in the same room. Diane. Paul suspected Diane wanted monogamy but couldn’t admit this breach in her politics. But what about him? He’d liked it too. He’d liked the dinner parties and the stocked pond and the surprising coziness of occasionally not having sex. He liked somebody telling him what to do. He experienced a heavy, almost intestinal, crush of despair, and stopped in the park across from a big anonymous stone fortress: high school or jail, he wasn’t sure which.

What if Diane knew about his activities last night, yesterday afternoon? How he’d been a boy, gotten sucked off as a boy, cum as a boy, walked through the heart of gay San Francisco as the simultaneous subject and object of the male gaze—nothing she could share; he was unrecognizable as her lover. Paul couldn’t understand desire that could be turned off, a circuit breaker routed through particular body forms. He’d imagined Diane as a boy, and loved her. Unfair! he thought-cried. Fuck her, he thought, proud of himself and a little hungry.

He strongly preferred to have sex with or talk to people who liked being queer. He was less excited about people still shaking off the poisons of their homophobic families or small towns, or anybody raised religious who was currently ambivalent rather than angry about that religion: they might be (likely were) dirty and wild in bed but Paul found the shame, self-loathing, obsessive post-coital showering deeply unhot. He was not curious about other people’s families or spiritual beliefs. He was not excited by normal AT&T gays. He did not himself care to assimilate into the power structures of heteropatriarchal white Christian America, was bored and horrified by those who did.

He’d wait another week, he decided. Maybe something would happen, the universe would provide a sign. He slouched by the periodical wall, waiting for hot people to come in.

His best option was the bookstore. He reexamined the bookstore staff. Tattoos: check; hair dyed in Play-Doh colors: check; playfully unclear genders: check; overalls with glitter tube tops: check double check. He could work with these people. He knew he’d get the job if he tried for it, in the same way he knew when someone was about to agree to sex.

Paul smarted at this unfairness of apartment hunting: you needed an apartment with a phone to get an apartment with a phone, like you needed a job to get a job, or money to get money. But worse—you needed a phone to get a job, so you actually needed an apartment to get a phone to get a job, so the apartment was first, but you needed a job to get the apartment. Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction.

“Come in, darling,” Ruffles said. He was maybe in his thirties, and so stylish Paul couldn’t breathe properly at first. The counter girl must have thought he was cool enough to live with Ruffles, and a proud calm infused Paul’s body.

“We’re going to just eat you up,” said Ruffles, slipping the Shirley Bassey record back into its sleeve and putting on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Ruffles was clearly a tastemaker. Maybe Paul could sit at his feet and learn, an ephebe to Ruffles’s Socrates.

He’d gone as his scruffy girlish-boy self to Ruffles’s house, had introduced himself as Paul—a mistake, he now saw. What if Diane wanted to get back together? But at least he’d have a phone number for that bookstore application. But then if he got the job, he’d have to go to work in his boy body. Everything was impossible and his stomach hurt. The coffee crash had begun.

Gay men were so full of contradiction, he thought, as he began systematically paging through a Bazaar for pictures of the holy trinity of supermodels: Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista. Paul understood the feminist critique of the fashion world. He too was anti-fur and pro-positive images. He agreed models were too white and too skinny, but he loved these strange beings, their lost boyishness and their ennui and their dioramic emotional rearrangements.

But Paul loved Linda, who was tortured and mean and hard and the kind of gorgeous that hurt, all angles and rage, she walked the catwalk in pain she was too proud to show. Never feminine, if feminine meant at all soft. Never pretty.

Paul wondered briefly if Franky was like him, but somehow he thought not. Franky knew what he wanted forever, Paul thought. That was the difference between them. Paul knew what he wanted at any given moment, for sure. Right now he wanted more to drink.

Cool was relational and conceptual; cool took work, cool was a meritocracy which, with all its flaws, he still preferred to the aristocracy of genetics.

They made out for a while, Franky’s hands stretching all over Paul’s impostor man body.

PANEL 2: Wide shot. Dream bubble. Handsome College Boy asks Paul to prom, Paul turns around & sees self in mirror = girl in dress. DIALOGUE: Handsome College Boy: Would you like to come to prom with me? Paul: I’ll check my schedule. I’m kidding. Of course I’ll go to prom with you. PANEL 3: Close-up. Paul’s bed, morning. Paul wakes up, touches his body, he IS a girl. THOUGHT BUBBLE: What the!?! Justin? Can this really be happening? Must…change…back…Got to…hide… PANEL 4: Medium shot. Hotel room, morning. Justin asleep in other bed. Paul panics [how to show?], changes back [not sure how to show—maybe motion lines?].

He drank one more shot, the burn like cock-gagging—a means to an end, yet so sexy in and of itself.

He crossed the street and used all the change in his pockets to buy two Boston cremes. He leaned on the counter, eating his donuts out of the bag. Paul liked any food that exploded into his mouth: grapes, Freshen-Up gum, soup dumplings. There was something pleasing, something orderly, about swallowing a mess.

Magic could be anywhere, Paul knew, but the odds were better in certain places.

He laughed. They were underwater. Paul was a merman, a very bold fishy. He remembered how he was magic, and the guy stood up.

When he chanced to look up and across the diner, he saw Franky ordering coffee at the counter, his soft faded Flipper tee shirt hanging loosely over Ben Davis pants in that way Paul could never achieve, that casual perfection which came from actually skateboarding for transportation.

The ouzo went down fast into Paul’s empty stomach, cough syrup for his soul. His soul had a cough. That made him laugh a little

And Griselda, the most beautiful lesbian on any rooftop on the Lower East Side, near Rainier like a cat, the only person to whom Rainier looked for approval, Patti to his Robert—the real star, the true man of the two. Tony Pinto was their son,

Delany knew what he was, Paul realized—yes, married, but a man who loved men; light-skinned, yes, but a light-skinned Black man; writer; native New Yorker; intellectual. Delany was so certain, had always been certain. He’d busted through everything in his way, and on the other side he’d found morning orgies inside trucks by the docks. Delany at nineteen had seen hundreds of men fucking and had jumped in, had been pure body. Paul at nineteen had seen hundreds of people lying down in the streets, dying-in, and had run away.

“You’re a changed man,” said Ruffles one morning, desultorily pouring cornflakes into a bowl. “I’m not a man,” said Paul.

He skipped the Bs so he wouldn’t have to see Bikini Kill and Bratmobile and the Breeders—Diane lived in the Bs.

He wondered when people had the time to take heroin, let alone procure it. Paul was already so busy with drinking, sleeping, cruising, and standing around the bookstore he barely had time to keep up with the monthly issues of Sandman, let alone go to school or make future plans, and forget questing for drugs. He didn’t believe in doing something painful in order to get a pleasure reward. Except maybe for anal sex,

He felt a slight panic rising; he was off script and would have to improvise.

Paul wanted to be Robin and Candice, couldn’t choose. He didn’t have that in him, he thought. They were playing at a much higher level. He watched them leave, Candice tucking one motorcycle helmet under one sturdy bicep and carrying another, free hand languidly cupping Robin’s hip. Paul felt himself both truly provincial and hopelessly effete; what made him think he could compete with a motorcyclist?

“What are we?” Robin supplied. Robin turned the hammer around and began removing tacks from wood. “I mean…” said Paul. “You want to know what I really think?” Robin said. “Yes,” Paul said. “We’re like everybody else, only more so.” “No, seriously,” Paul said. “We’re just what we are. You’re asking the wrong questions, Polly.”

“I love you,” Derek said. He looked at Paul with tender eyes and a raw red nose. They’d never said this before, and Paul felt sick and a little violent at the thought of what he was about to do, what Derek was making him do. “I love you too,” he said, and went to work.