“What the fuck happened to you?”
Cara’s raised voice and sharp language added to my anxiety — no, fear. She stood in front of the table, her fists clenched. I could feel the couple at the next table staring, but I didn’t care, not in the face of Cara’s fury.
I sat mute, trying to return her gaze, trying desperately to make my voice do something. I’d arrived early for our rendezvous, afraid that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to show up. She was half an hour late.
“I almost didn’t come. I shouldn’t have come. You tell me, Jaëll—what the fuck am I doing here?”
She made no move to sit — just stood there, eyes drilling into me.
“I want to apologize.”
A snort of pure disgust.
I didn’t blame her.
I had returned from London. San Francisco was the scene of the crime, where I had dumped Cara without explanation the year before, without even a good-bye. I just…disappeared. One evening we were in the audience at the ballet, and I up and disappeared backstage. Then into the St. Francis Hotel. Then to Europe. Just like that. A chain of unexpected, chance events that, in hindsight, were all so inevitable and predictable.
What had happened to me? I was largely at a loss myself. Sometimes…she just took over. How was I to explain this? I didn’t even understand this…this compulsion to be female. Something was horribly wrong with me, something I didn’t understand, something no one could understand, something that could not be fixed and must be kept secret.
It would be another decade before I understood that I was female. In 1980, at age 22, all I knew was that I was hopelessly trapped in a man’s life that I wanted no part of, a life that I tried so hard to come to grips with — to “go straight” — only to have it all come apart. A life that I needed to escape, one way or another. Cara was the innocent bystander, caught in the ugly blast of my impossible gender.
How had it come to this? Before Cara I made my living “sugaring” — a few weeks with this man, then that man, then a couple of months with a woman, then another — but I gave that up when I fell in love. I took a normal job and tried my best to be a straight man, even if I barely looked the part.
But there was the dance. Ballet was my escape, my refuge. I had survived since age 15 by throwing myself into classes and rehearsals. Six days a week, for a few hours, I was held safely in a female space, surrounded by other women. If there were…incongruencies in my situation (that I hated pas de deux, that I couldn’t take toe class, that I couldn’t do a second-position split because my hips wouldn’t turn out fully, and that the tights revealed…that), if I could not be the girl of my dreams, well, I could at least surround myself with femininity and illusion. Ballet consumed me.
Thus my disappearance backstage at the performance to meet people I wanted to be and to breathe their air, leaving Cara standing alone in the lobby after the show.
“I stood there and waited for you for two hours.”
The waiter came, and Cara sat and ordered a coffee, though she clearly didn’t want to. She glared at me with a raw challenge.
“Well?”
“I went to England.”
This wasn’t going to make any sense.
Cara had put up with so much during our year-and-some together — my moods, my obsession, my unreliability, my drinking. As I’d discovered with other women, she was attracted to my femininity but also didn’t fully appreciate it. A certain kind of “liberated woman” was attracted to a female personality housed in what appeared to be a male body — a very young, strong, slender, pretty dancer’s body. My experience was that they soon wanted me to be more of a man than I was, than I could be. I was deeply in love with Cara, and I tried very hard to be her man, but I was not good at it. Over time it became harder and harder to hold the illusion of that man together, and backstage at the ballet, when an Englishman slipped his room key into my pocket, well, quite suddenly I couldn’t any longer.
“Meet me in the hotel bar in an hour.”
Standing backstage as the after-show bustle went on around us, I had been listening to his posh accent for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. I wanted something very, very badly. Without consciously intending to, I had reverted to professional behaviors, and he’d no doubt caught the signals. Nonetheless, his presumption was staggering. And so was the draw.
He was maybe 20 years older and very attractive, not only for his looks and English charm but also for his very expensive attire — his watch alone was worth more than everything I owned, never mind the cufflinks. He held the key up so that I could see the St. Francis emblem on the fob. Then, when I made no move, he dropped it into my blazer pocket. This was a guy who always got what he wanted.
“I’ll get that from you then. Order drinks on the room. This is for the cab.”
A 20 followed the key into my pocket. The hand came up and rested against my cheek as he held my eyes for a moment.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business.”
In the hour or so since abandoning Cara in the lobby and ducking backstage, I had, in effect, become another person, an earlier person, a female person and a professional. She had taken over—had, in an instant, returned me to who I had been before Cara, before I fell in love, when love had been a business. I had flipped from performing the role of a straight man to once again understanding myself as a bisexual woman. And also, suddenly and unexpectedly, I had slipped back into “the business” even as Cara waited in the lobby wondering what had happened to me.
“I never knew what happened. Not a word. I never saw you again.”
Cara ignored her coffee. I wanted to sip mine—my throat was so dry—but I felt that would be rude. I sat with my hands in my lap and tried to return her gaze. It was difficult; my eyes kept sliding away against my will.
“And now, months later, you call out of the blue and want to meet. You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
There was no way I could explain to the woman who had loved me that I had left her standing there while I hooked an Englishman and went off to spend the night in his hotel. And another. And then went with him to Los Angeles for a week. And then back to London. That I had just…walked away from everything.
Gender dysphoria will do that to you.Agony renders the present worthless.
And it felt good to be in luxury again, to be appreciated by a man, to be out of that other role and back on the bottom. To be taken care of and admired and treated with grace and courtesy. To meet simple demands. To be free of the responsibility for making things happen, to just let them happen to me. It felt like calm, like home.
“You went to England?”
I realized that there was no way I could explain any of this. That there was no point in trying. It couldn’t be done. I would be returning to Europe shortly, to another life. I was a ghost, and I should have let her be. I had only stirred up her pain and added yet more. I could have sent a postcard. I had wanted to apologize, not for her but for me, for selfish reasons. I saw that now. I wasn’t hoping to help her feel better; I was hoping to help myself feel better about this shitty, shitty thing I had done. I’d thought to explain, justify, excuse, absolve. I was wrong again.
I was so tired of being wrong.
“I…no…I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.”
“Cara…”
“Sorry for what, exactly?”
I opened my mouth again, but nothing came out.
“You know what? Fuck you, Jaëll.”
Her chair scraped back abruptly; the table rocked; and I didn’t see her walk away. I just stared at her untouched coffee as the tears came. I didn’t even know who I was crying for — her, me, the me of before, the me that should have been — all of us, I suppose. We’re all victims of this…tragedy. No one can live like this.
I left San Francisco. I never saw her again.
