Mack blew just exactly the way you’d expect him to.
Quietly.
“I think you’re both forgetting something,” he said, raising his face from his glass, his voice ominous. “You’re both omitting one little detail out of all these plans – one little, very important, detail.”
There was not a peep out of Maggie or me, even when he paused.
“You’re both forgetting about me.”
I don’t know about Maggie, but what I felt, right then, was deep shame. I looked miserably at his stern, too calm, face.
“I think, since this discussion concerns me and my future, that I should be allowed to have some say.”
“Sure, Mack,” Maggie said meekly.
“You’re planning out my life, you’re making decisions for me, but you’ve never even thought to check with me.” He looked at Maggie with a steel eye. “Pimping for me is definitely out. In fact, the whole idea of turning me back into a woman by having me go down on hundreds of women is out. Didn’t you hear what I told you? I’m not a lesbian. I won’t have sex with another woman, in any way, shape or form. I do want to be a woman again (here he gave me a curious look – one that I dared interpret as meaning he wanted to be a woman so he could have a relationship with me), but I can’t do it the way you’re thinking, Maggie. That’s just out.
“Don’t either of you understand what I did? The magnitude? Don’t either of you realize what men and women really are? I thought one was better than the other – but it isn’t. And transexuals? Tranvestites, transgendered, pansexual – it’s all good, those are all different ways of being. But not when you hate! Not when you hate what you are, or when you hate what anyone else is!!
“Don’t you see how beautiful, how sacred, our bodies are, made so differently? Don’t you see what a sacrament making love is? Gay love, straight love, any kind of love. How it shouldn’t be defiled? Be wasted? Be abused? Don’t you understand how wrong it was, what I did? I was given a beautiful body, and I spit on it. I spurned it. I rejected it as inferior. I hated it – because men hated it. Men raped it and controlled it and made fun of it and objectified it. And if you two fools think that that wrong can be righted, that I can have any kind of life, after what I’ve done, you’re mistaken. I’m paying for my crime. I have my own life, a life of atonement, of suffering. And that’s preferable to what you’re thinking of for me. I want no part of either of you. I did wrong, but at least in the process I learned something that is priceless. I learned that women are not inferior – no one is inferior. And I’m never going to dishonor that again.” Mack got to his feet, turned away from us, and left the room. I heard his footsteps go up the stairs, and the faint opening and closing of his bedroom door. And then nothing.
After a time Maggie got up, mumbling something about going home. I sat listlessly at the table and didn’t answer. She went out the door with a mumbled good-bye, and I echoed her words. In a second, though, she was opening up the door again and coming back in.
“Almost forgot my tupperware,” she said. “That’s the reason I came over, you know. Mom sent me for her tupperware; she needs it back.”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay, I’ll get it.” I had washed it after we ate the soup, and it lay in the dish drainer. I got up and got it, fitting the lid on and handing it to her as she stood, half in, half out, of the door.
“I didn’t know he was here, you know,” she said as I handed her the container. “I really didn’t. I didn’t plan to do that. But when I saw him – you know . . .”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I know,” I said quietly. We both knew. Right now we both knew a darn sight more than we ever wanted to know, actually.
“And I’m sorry about the . . .” Here she raised her knee, and I blushed, and nodded. I wasn’t going to hold it against her. It all happened in the heat of the moment, under the influence of Mack’s weird power. I didn’t blame her.
“See you later, then, Doug. Take care,” she said as she went out the door. I closed it gently behind her.
And then I was alone, alone again, alone like I’d always been, and now, always would be. My tiny, vague hope, my dream of happiness that had glimmered so faintly but so promisingly for a brief time, all that was gone – dead and buried. As I guess it should be. I should have known better, I thought, than to get my hopes up. A wife, a family – it’s out of my reach, out of my league. Better get used to it, Doug. Just better get used to being alone.
But, really – I was not alone. There was someone in the house with me – someone upstairs. Someone who needed comfort – and someone I needed to say something to. And in a few minutes I was standing in the upstairs hall outside his door.
There was only a moment of hesitation before I tapped gently with my fingertips on the dark wood. I listened for a response, but there was none. I tried again, knocking with my knuckles this time, a little harder, a little louder. And again. Then, when I listened – my ear pressed to the door – I caught: “Come in”, and I turned the knob and went in.
The room was shadowy and dark. Mack had drawn the shades, and only a little light came through the old lace curtains on either side of the edge of the window shade. Mack lay on the bed, face down, his face buried in a pillow. His feet hung over the bottom of the bed; he was considerate enough, even in his grief, to not dirty the spread with his shoes, and I found this small example of his thoughtfulness heartwrenching.
“Mack?” I said softly. Humbly. As I made my way to the bed. “Mack, do you mind if I . . . could we talk for a minute?”
He didn’t answer. I was beside the bed now, and though I knew I shouldn’t, I sat down gently near his left hip.
He didn’t move.
“Mack,” I said softly. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
I saw his shoulders rise and fall, as if he sighed heavily. I wanted so much then to put a comforting hand on his back – I wanted to slide my hand back and forth across his shoulders so badly that I actually grabbed my right arm and held it tight to my side. I would not touch him. It was clear to me now that it only intensified the desire to touch him more, intensified it until it was unbearable. I thought briefly of people quitting smoking, which I had never done, but it sounded hard – or heroin addiction, or something – a force that you want to give in to like crazy, but that you have to resist with all your might. And it wasn’t just that I knew that – that wasn’t the reason I wouldn’t let myself touch him ever again. It was really because he had asked me not to. I loved him. I loved him, and he had asked me not to do something – and so I wouldn’t. The irony, the heartbreak of not being able to touch – with even just one finger – the person you loved was not lost on me, but I knew if I let it in, if I thought about it, or even allowed it space in the back of my brain, I would be in the clutches of anguish and despair. So I didn’t. But I saw its light shining in the distance. That I could not completely block out.
So, if I couldn’t touch him, I could at least talk to him. I could maybe reach him – touch him – with my words. That was all I could have – so I would use it to the fullest. I would let my feelings show. I would let them out. I would touch him with my words.
“Mack – I’m sorry for the incident in the kitchen. I’m sorry for trying to touch you. I won’t do it again – I promise.” This sounded weak even to my own ears, like an empty promise that I was making while knowing full well I could not keep it. I’d have to amend that.
“I really won’t, Mack. I know now – I know what it does. It makes me want to all the more. But I’m okay now – I’ve got myself under control. And you – you asked me not to. So I won’t.” This wasn’t going at all well. So much for touching him with your words, Doug, you fool. You know you’re no good at any kind of interaction with a woman – touching or talking or anything.
Yeah, I know, I answered myself back hotly. But this isn’t a woman. Mack’s a man now, he’s still physically a man. And I can talk to men okay. For the most part. At least it’s easier. So leave me alone and let me do this.
That inner bickering now over, I tried again to reach out and connect with my Mack.
“You know, I wasn’t in with Maggie on this. I thought her idea was insane. Disgusting. I’d never, never …” What was I trying to say? “You do what you want, Mack. What you feel comfortable with. I would never – I mean, I won’t try to push you, or convince you, or anything like that. God knows, I want you to be a woman again more than anything – I mean, because that’s your wish. That’s what you want. So, you know, I …” My voice trailed off. This was just going abominably. I wanted to say something so much – but I wasn’t sure how. Or even really what it was that I wanted to say. Except that somehow it contained the words, ‘I love you.’
I wished Mack would react a little – that he would give some sign that he had even heard me. But he lay still, his back rising and falling very slightly. I gripped my arm tighter. My control was so sorely tested that it was beginning to slip. I bit hard on my tongue – too hard. The inside of my lip worked better. I increased the pressure, then released it to open my mouth.
“What I guess I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to – I don’t expect you to, or want you to, do anything that you don’t feel is right. And your speech – I mean, the things you told us about men and women – about the beauty of it, of – ” my throat started to choke up. I was too close to my own emotions. God – please help me. This is so hard. “That affected me so much. I mean, it’s so true, isn’t it? How men and women and every kind of gender and variation are sacred, and that m-making love is like a sacred thing . . . I feel that way, too, Mack. I do. I always have. And I’ve always wanted to find someone who believed it, too, and who loved me, and then we could get married, and – and have children, you know? It’s so true, it’s so beautiful, and I love kids, I’ve always wanted them, and you know, I’m thirty-five. And I’ve never even had a date. It hurts so bad, and I’ve looked for years – for so many years, for someone to love, and the more time goes by, the more hopeless it seems. I can’t talk to women, I just am such a miserable failure in that way, and it just seems like it will never happen, and every year there are even less and less women – single women, I mean, they all get married, and I see them, all these pretty women, and they have babies, and they’re hugging them, and wheeling them in the stroller in the evening, the women and the men together, the husbands and the wives, and sometimes it hurts me so much that I just don’t know what to do. I just can’t take it, I can’t stand it, and now here you are – and now I – I f-found – you’re actually a women, see, and so it – I mean if you could change back, be a woman again, then – I – I mean, we – Oh God, Mack. I just am trying to say that – God, Mack – I love you. I love you. I just love you. And I don’t know what to do.”
There was no response. No response at all. My words rushed on, out of control. “I love you, Mack. I – I don’t mean like Maggie – like the way Maggie loves you. She says she loves you, but I think for her it’s just – it’s sex, or I mean, it’s – you know, it’s not real love. But for me – Mack, it’s not just your attraction, your magnetism – I mean, I feel that, and – but Mack, this is real love – my love is real love, it’s not just because you’re – you’re what you are. I mean, I love you as a person – I love who you are – “
I broke off abruptly; Mack was turning over.
I’m not sure what kind of response I expected. I had already come to know Mack well enough to realize that he would not necessarily react as I would expect. In fact, he often exhibited a strange kind of perversity, countering my passionate emotional outbursts (and there had been more of those in the last two days than I had ever had before in my entire existence) with the opposite response than I assumed he would have. And now, in this way, Mack did not disappoint me. But in every other way, he did. His face was completely impassive. My declaration of love – the speaking of three words that no human being had ever heard me utter before – had not moved him. I am no stranger to hurt and rejection, but they felt particularly sharp at that moment.
“Doug. You don’t love me. You can’t love me. You don’t know me at all. You don’t have the slightest idea of who I really am.”
Mack could be distressingly heartless. Mack was different from me. Mack is different from all of us. “But maybe you will. Maybe you’ll get to know me a lot better.”
I’m sure I looked confused, and I didn’t know how to reply. But Mack went on.
“We’re going to see a lot more of each other for a while, Doug. I’m going to need your help. Because I’m going through with Maggie’s plan.”