Read Online Trans-Sister Radio (2000) by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online
Authors: Chris Bohjalian
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at wasn't going to be her cup of tea. And so we broke up. But we're still friends.
BANKS: And my mother? How did you tell my mother?
STEVENS (sighs audibly): Badly. Oh, Lord, Carly: really and truly badly.
Chapter 7.
allison
AT FIRST I THOUGHT HE WAS JOKING.
Then I thought it was a fabrication to let me down easy: We were about to break up.
And then I began to fear I was insane, because I was in love with a lunatic.
The mind, I can tell you, reels. It reels, then recoils. It begins a retreat into a series of images and ideas that are clearly related to the news you've been given, but not exactly relevant. He is sick, he is ill, he is deranged. He needs help.
No, he is beyond help, he is way too far gone. He is a deviant beyond therapeutic salvation. He is delusional.
Then: He can't possibly be serious. He is, outwardly, much too normal for that sort of surgical mutilation.
But because you don't instantly stop loving a person--our history, albeit a short one, didn't simply evaporate on that ledge at the edge of the woods--you begin to wonder about yourself. You wonder first how you missed all the signals, because certainly the signals were there. They had to be.
Hadn't your ex-husband warned you?
And then you begin to consider the possibility that, on some level, you didn't miss a thing. You heard the hints, and you understood them. But you didn't care, because, deep down, you are that way , too.
Whatever that way is.
Finally you just get sick. At least I did.
I didn't vomit, but I did put my head between my knees and stared down at the white and silver and gray of the rock, and allowed the waves of nausea to roll over me. And when he tried to touch me, when he tried to rub the back of my neck, I believe I told him to get his hand off me.
His disgusting hand off me.
I was angry, and I wanted to hurt him.
Before Dana told me his plans, we had a glorious late summer together. His course ended on the first day of August, and he wouldn't be in a classroom again for over a year.
And so we were like two teenagers for the entire month: four-plus weeks with no jobs to attend to, and really very little responsibility. Oh, I was going by my own classroom for an hour or two every day--getting the room the way I wanted it, revising my lesson plans, weaving what I had learned the past year into my curriculum--but I've never viewed my August responsibilities as work. I'm too excited about the imminence of a new semester, and the arrival of my new students.
And so Dana and I went to movies and dinner two and three nights a week, we read on my terrace in the afternoons, we went for hikes all over the state.
My best friends--women, all--told me they no longer saw me, and the single ones confessed they were jealous.
Dana and I were making love, it seemed, all the time. I'd never had a lover as attentive as he was, I'd never been with a man who was so relentlessly focused on me. My pleasure. What I wanted. We didn't spend a whole night together until the second Saturday in August, but as I recall, we saw each other every single day up until then that month, and almost every time we were together, we would find a moment alone to seduce each other. Once, in a largely empty movie theater in Middlebury, of all places, when our interest in the film was starting to flag, he crouched between my legs on the floor of the cinema and pushed up my dress, and I shocked myself by coming in public.
I would never have allowed a man before Dana to do such a thing. I would certainly have been incapable of an orgasm.
But--and this matters in ways that say much more about me than about Dana--he was the first man I'd ever been with who had absolutely no hair on his chest. (At the time, of course, I assumed it was simply genetic. I hadn't a clue it was hormones and electrolysis.) There was something about Dana that was at once exotic and safe and--almost like an aura--tender. He was, without question, the most unthreatening man I'd ever been
BANKS: And my mother? How did you tell my mother?
STEVENS (sighs audibly): Badly. Oh, Lord, Carly: really and truly badly.
Chapter 7.
allison
AT FIRST I THOUGHT HE WAS JOKING.
Then I thought it was a fabrication to let me down easy: We were about to break up.
And then I began to fear I was insane, because I was in love with a lunatic.
The mind, I can tell you, reels. It reels, then recoils. It begins a retreat into a series of images and ideas that are clearly related to the news you've been given, but not exactly relevant. He is sick, he is ill, he is deranged. He needs help.
No, he is beyond help, he is way too far gone. He is a deviant beyond therapeutic salvation. He is delusional.
Then: He can't possibly be serious. He is, outwardly, much too normal for that sort of surgical mutilation.
But because you don't instantly stop loving a person--our history, albeit a short one, didn't simply evaporate on that ledge at the edge of the woods--you begin to wonder about yourself. You wonder first how you missed all the signals, because certainly the signals were there. They had to be.
Hadn't your ex-husband warned you?
And then you begin to consider the possibility that, on some level, you didn't miss a thing. You heard the hints, and you understood them. But you didn't care, because, deep down, you are that way , too.
Whatever that way is.
Finally you just get sick. At least I did.
I didn't vomit, but I did put my head between my knees and stared down at the white and silver and gray of the rock, and allowed the waves of nausea to roll over me. And when he tried to touch me, when he tried to rub the back of my neck, I believe I told him to get his hand off me.
His disgusting hand off me.
I was angry, and I wanted to hurt him.
Before Dana told me his plans, we had a glorious late summer together. His course ended on the first day of August, and he wouldn't be in a classroom again for over a year.
And so we were like two teenagers for the entire month: four-plus weeks with no jobs to attend to, and really very little responsibility. Oh, I was going by my own classroom for an hour or two every day--getting the room the way I wanted it, revising my lesson plans, weaving what I had learned the past year into my curriculum--but I've never viewed my August responsibilities as work. I'm too excited about the imminence of a new semester, and the arrival of my new students.
And so Dana and I went to movies and dinner two and three nights a week, we read on my terrace in the afternoons, we went for hikes all over the state.
My best friends--women, all--told me they no longer saw me, and the single ones confessed they were jealous.
Dana and I were making love, it seemed, all the time. I'd never had a lover as attentive as he was, I'd never been with a man who was so relentlessly focused on me. My pleasure. What I wanted. We didn't spend a whole night together until the second Saturday in August, but as I recall, we saw each other every single day up until then that month, and almost every time we were together, we would find a moment alone to seduce each other. Once, in a largely empty movie theater in Middlebury, of all places, when our interest in the film was starting to flag, he crouched between my legs on the floor of the cinema and pushed up my dress, and I shocked myself by coming in public.
I would never have allowed a man before Dana to do such a thing. I would certainly have been incapable of an orgasm.
But--and this matters in ways that say much more about me than about Dana--he was the first man I'd ever been with who had absolutely no hair on his chest. (At the time, of course, I assumed it was simply genetic. I hadn't a clue it was hormones and electrolysis.) There was something about Dana that was at once exotic and safe and--almost like an aura--tender. He was, without question, the most unthreatening man I'd ever been
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