Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

“You don’t even know how lucky you are,” said Jane. “It is virtually impossible to get a girl to have a one-night stand even, let alone just hook up in a car, without having a whole conversation.” “That is such a lie, Jane, and you know it,” said Paul, pushing his chair back from the table and taking one last look around the café. “You have one-night stands all the time. The butch girl from Toronto? Or that poet with the teeth? I have to be at work. Come down to the bar and lie to me more later, okay?”

Paul could make himself be attracted to anyone. This was one of his virtues. This was one of his virtues and one of his skills. He practiced, as a kid and later in life, in elevators, but the game could be played anywhere one was trapped with people. The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone. The game was best when hard, when he had to sell himself on a stranger.

Paul had practiced eye contact on girls at his high-school dances: look, look back, hold, score. It was all tricks. There was a trick to it all. Why didn’t other people know that?

“Some covers are queerer than others, approach jouissance, like the Raincoats’ mesmerizing cover of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’ in which a tranny-chaser’s admirably bold declaration of desire pales in its subversion next to the Raincoats’ queer-on-queer fantasia of a slightly neurotic but fairly confident British butch picking up a sexy and significantly taller femme. In Suzi Quatro’s bouncy ‘Born to Run,’ Springsteen’s working-class lament becomes a queer kid’s lusty paean to the joy of getting out of town with a dollop of conquest, persuading the closeted Wendy to come out. But more rarely, a man-type person might cover a song made famous by a woman-type person. Sometimes metal guys—like Megadeth’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ’—or grunge bands—like Nirvana’s ‘Molly’s Lips’—do covers of girl songs, but mostly these man-type people are super-queer countertenors, you know, Klaus Nomi, Neil Tennant, Jimmy Somerville, Marc Almond, who channel Motown divas or bubblegum pop stars. In these songs, the payoff is always in the uncanny, the repetition-with-a-difference, the photorealism, the trompe l’oeil.” Paul

“These people have never heard of Joan Nestle,” said Paul, with a calm Jane found enraging, a calm that echoed her brothers’—the puerile, penile calm of success. Even the best ones are patriarchal, Jane thought.

Dykes were so cool. What could be more punk than being a dyke? What better way to say fuck you to the Man?

She didn’t know where she lived. Everything she owned was in her car, and she’d come to the festival as a last hurrah with a bunch of her friends from Olympia, including her best friend Zoe, who’d gone on the prowl and left her.

Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear split LP

SIDE A: I Am a Poseur - X-Ray Spex Pretty on the Inside - Hole Cherry Bomb - The Runaways What’s Inside a Girl? - The Cramps Rebel Girl - Bikini Kill Pumping (My Heart) - Patti Smith Golden Thing - Throwing Muses Rid of Me - PJ Harvey Touch Your Woman - Dolly Parton If I Was Your Girlfriend - Prince Beauty and the Beast - David Bowie That’s Really Super, Supergirl - XTC People Are Strange - Echo and the Bunnymen Paul

Paul knew that some people didn’t consider the lyrics when making mixtapes, but he always did. Occasionally he’d choose a song for ironic purposes or to say the opposite of what the lyrics said or for litote (for instance, “Rid of Me”) but always lyrics were involved in the decision. Paul disliked instrumental music. He wanted stories, all the time. He wished he could make a tape of all the moments from films he wanted to show her, but how was that even possible? Maybe if he hooked up Jane’s VCR to another VCR and rented all the movies…He felt that old familiar electricity surging up in him, a desire to accumulate and then display a complete collection. He imposed a small measure of self-control and returned his attention to the mixtape.

Was it entirely ethical to copy a song, or multiple songs, from a mixtape someone else had made you? What if you changed the order? What if the person who made you the mix had copied at least half the songs from Just Say Yes, Volume III: Just Say Mao, which you later discovered while looking through their CDs? What if the person who made you the mixtape was in love with you but you weren’t in love with them? What if the person who made the tape was in love with you and you had been in love with them, maybe, but you weren’t anymore? Was it really even okay to copy any songs from a mixtape? Paul decided it was okay if the tape had been given to you in the spirit of true love and had then become part of who you now were. It was not just okay, it was in fact crucial, then, to share this with your new love, so they could understand you.

Where was Jane? he wondered. Probably with that barista, cuddling somewhere. Lesbians. He stretched the bar phone’s cord into the keg closet and called Christopher, who refused to leave his studies and come entertain Paul. Lesbian, thought Paul.

Everything was happening so quickly. He wished he could somehow videotape this entire night, internal and external, to pore over later, to parse, to own. He couldn’t keep up with his own life, he thought. He should really keep a journal. “Can

Outside, Diane leaned Paul up against the side of her car and stared at him. “I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” she said. “I can’t believe you want to go out with me.”

The first tape you ever got from someone was always an adjustment in how you thought of them, an insight into how they saw themselves. Diane was much cooler than Paul had originally thought; she wasn’t secretly cool, she was actually cool. She was an artist, not just a fan. He wondered if she’d still like him after they spent six weeks together. She knew some of what he was, but not all.

What was sex but newness? And sensation and conquest and intrigue and desire and romance and fantasy, and specific people sometimes, sure, but not always.

As a kid he’d been as interested in girls’ bodies as boys’: the thrill of information versus the thrill of the unspeakable.

He spotted her right away, leaning against her VW in a blue flannel under a blue-and-tan western-style ski vest. She looked like the promise of a mustachioed young truck driver who’d take you to IHOP and play Gram Parsons in the cab on the way, minus the mustache.

When he was close enough, she took his ’70s thrift-score Lady Trojans softball duffel and slung it over her puffy blue shoulder like a team captain. “I guess chivalry isn’t dead,” he said. “I can’t wait to fuck you,” she said right in his ear with her hot breath. Paul also couldn’t wait to be fucked and had suffered through nine-plus hours on a stale-smelling bus from Albany to the Cape for that express purpose. He followed her to a stall in the public bathroom at the back of the Mini-Mart, and they curled their fingers into each other, mouths on necks, backs against metal walls, boots braced against the toilet.

into a sort of crow’s nest attic room, where they embarked on a thirty-six-hour reunion sex fantasia, breaking only to tiptoe down to the kitchen to retrieve plates of vegetarian lasagna or tofu curry left on the stove by Diane’s thoughtful and now-absent housemates. By

Diane didn’t have whatever “it” was either (a trust fund, Paul thought, or maybe a childhood spent in Westchester), but she had something else, something different from everyone in the room, something different from other girls. Diane was as fascinatingly blank as any man. And as frustrating. A shiny reflective surface and Paul a magpie. The mystery of her cheeks, her dimples ever-shocking when she’d smile at him from across the bed or table.

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?—

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?—

What kind of creature was she, dark and earth-smelling, a rustic, topsoil-encrusted fingernails and all. The musk of her armpits at night, her red lips the texture of rose petals, the hard muscle of her arms, the occasional gray hair he’d find, her eyelashes like tarantulas’ legs, she was Zeus’s own sweet cow and his tender cupbearer at once, placid slow expanses of skin and what Paul knew to be called big-boned. She was bigger than him-as-Polly or him-as-Paul, a few inches taller and wider. Her shoulders were broader than his. You’ll stretch it! he thought helplessly when she’d borrowed his shirt that morning, but no, better, he’d sacrifice his shirts for her. He’d wear the stretched-out shirt thinking Diane’s body was here and I am now inside the space she left, I fit myself inside her shape. “Is

When his ass began to ache, he headed out, stopping on the way to inquire about a library card. The nice old showtunes queen behind the desk advised Paul to send himself a postcard in order to establish residency. No ID needed! This was indeed gay utopia, he thought, walking back to the house to eat whatever he could find and wait for Diane.

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. Inside

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.

He liked his new look, enjoyed this foray into androgynous style, liked the little fuck-you shadows of femininity he deployed. He wasn’t trying to copy Diane, but he did like them to be complementary.

When he did sleep he dreamed of Diane, the worst dream—the dream where she still loved him—and when he woke he was alone again.

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. Bookstore

Christy was full of love, Paul thought. 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.

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.

Paul’s mother had always said things would seem better in the morning. Paul woke up to another rainy day, which should have been romantic but just felt cold and clammy. He showered and pulled on clean jeans. He was okay. His mom was right. He just needed sleep.

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.

He understood that he had failed the test. What do you do after you fail the test and you’re still alive? ×

went to find her girlfriend, whom she discovered in flagrante with

He hated not-knowing. How do you know if you like something because the corporate radio brainwashers want you to like it or because it’s actually good and you have an internal sense of what’s good, which is a sign of your essential worth as a person?

Butches must be working class, ideally also vaguely alcoholic, with an undercoat of physical menace, whereas femmes could be—maybe even should be—from privileged backgrounds, slumming it in collective houses.