A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Jane Spencer collects pictures of slim young men. In the bottom drawer of her desk, between swatches of silk and old business cards for Spencer Interiors, she has two photos of James Dean, one of a deeply wistful Jeremy Irons in Brideshead, arm in arm with the boy holding the teddy bear, a sepia print of Rudolph Valentino in 1923, without burnoose or eyeliner, B. D. Wong’s glossies as Song Liling and as his own lithe, androgynous self, and Robert Mapplethorpe slipping sweetly out of his jeans in 1972. She has a pictorial history of Kevin Bacon, master of the transition from elfin boy to good-looking man without adding bulk or facial hair.

The summer Jessie Spencer turned five, she played Capture the Flag every day with the big boys, the almost-six-year-olds who’d gone to kindergarten a year late. Jane never worried, even in passing, about Jessie’s IQ or her eye-hand coordination or her social skills. Jessie and Jane were a mutual admiration society of two smart, strong, blue-eyed women, one five and one thirty-five, both good skaters and good singers and good storytellers. Jane didn’t mention all this to the other mothers at play group, who would have said it was the same between them and their daughters when Jane could see it was not, and she didn’t mention it to her own sweet, anxious mother, who would have taken it, understandably, as a reproach. Jane didn’t even mention this closeness to the pediatrician, keeper of every mother’s secret fears and wishes, but it sang her to sleep at night. Jane’s reputation as the play group’s good listener was undeserved; the mothers talked about their knock-kneed girls and backward boys and Jane smiled and her eyes followed Jessie. She watched her and thought, That smile! Those lashes! How brave! How determined!

Jane sometimes worried that Jessie was too much of a tomboy, like Sarah and Mellie, even faster runners and more brutal partisans; it was nothing to them to make a smaller boy cry by yanking up his underpants, or to grind sand into the scalp of the girl who hogged the tire swing. These two didn’t cry, not even when Mellie cut her lip on the edge of the teeter-totter, not even when Sarah got a splinter the size of a matchstick. But Sarah and Mellie, in their overalls and dirty baseball jerseys, never had the boys’ heartless prankishness, the little devils dancing in the blacks of their eyes. Jessie had exactly that, and the other kids knew she wasn’t a tomboy, never strained to be one of the boys. There was no teasing, no bullying line drawn in the sand. Jane knew that one day soon, in the cove behind John Lyman School, the boys would pull out their penises and demonstrate to Jessie that she could not pee standing up, and it would be terrible for Jessie. Jane was wrong. Jessie watched the boys and practiced at home, making a funnel with both hands and a baggie. When Andrew and Franklin went to pee on the far side of the rhododendron, Jessie came too, unzipping and pushing her hips forward until there was, if not a fine spray, a decent dribble. The boys thought nothing of it until first grade, and when they did and the teacher pushed Jessie firmly into the girls’ bathroom, she walked home at recess, horrified by the life ahead, and Jane could not coax her back for a week.

It was worse when Jane took her to get a simple navy blue jumper for a friend’s wedding. Jane held it out, pleased that she’d found something in Jessie’s favorite color without a ruffle or a speck of lace, and Jessie stared at it as if her mother had gone mad, wailing in rage and embarrassment until Jane drove her to Macy’s for a boy’s navy blazer with gray pants and dared the salesperson to comment. They compromised on patent leather loafers and a white turtleneck. People at the wedding thought only that Jane was her fashionable self and Jessie adorable. Very Kristy McNichol, the bride’s mother said. Driving home, Jane knew that she had managed not to see it, as you manage not to see that your neighbor’s new baby has your husband’s eyes and nose, until one day you run into them at the supermarket and you cannot help but see. Jessie slept the whole way home, smears of buttercream on the white turtleneck, rose petals falling from her blazer pocket, and Jane cried from Storrs to Durham. She had appreciated and pitied her mother and adored her father, a short, dapper man who cartwheeled through the living room at her request and told his own Brooklyn version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales at bedtime. She had liked Jessie’s handsome father enough to think of marrying him until he was revealed to have a wife in Eau Claire and bad debts in five states. It did not seem possible that the great joke God would play on her was to take the love of her life, a wonderfully improved piece of Jane, and say, Oops. Looks like a girl but it’s a boy! Sorry. Adjust accordingly. It took Jane all of Jessie’s childhood to figure out what the adjustment might be and to save fifty thousand dollars to pay for it.

How do you get the first morning appointment with the best gender-reassignment surgeon in the world? It cannot be so different from shopping at Bergdorf’s, Jane thinks. She looks twice at the pretty brown-skinned receptionist behind the big pine desk. The woman’s shoulders are enormous; the fabric of her teal jacket pulls hard across her back, and when she reaches for Jess’s file, the seams of her straight skirt crack and bend over her powerful thighs. Jane doesn’t want to be distracted by thinking about this person’s femaleness, genetic or otherwise. Jane’s job is to be pleasant and patient as a gesture of respect, to be witty, if possible, and to convey, without any vulgar emphasis, that she is the kind of woman who really, really appreciates good service.

“Lovely flowers,” Jane says. “The white alstroemeria. What do they call them? Peruvian lilies, I think.” Jane knows what most flowers are called.

Marcella Gray puts her hands together like a bishop, clicking her long red nails. She knows what Jane is thinking. Her own daughter calls her the Deltoid Queen. Her husband calls her Queen Lats. Marcella loves bodybuilding and Dr. Laurence, and when he added transsexuals to his practice she didn’t love it, but she learned to live with it and the little irony that came with being their receptionist. Jane Spencer is a well-bred pain in the ass, but the boy looks like he will make it. Tall enough, small hips.

Jess hears Jane charming across the room and looks up from Newsweek, smiling at Marcella and running a hand through his black hair. It is a killer smile, white teeth and a dimple near his blue eyes. Marcella smiles back, which is more than she usually does. Jess doesn’t think that Jane can get them a better appointment, but it’s not impossible. Jane got the registrar at Reed to accept that Jess Spencer who begins there next January is a boy, even though Jessie Spencer finished her freshman year at University of Michigan as a girl. It had been Jane’s thought that the anonymity of big Michigan would not be a bad idea. Substance abuse and black-market hormones and botched surgeries are the tragedies of transsexuals, but Jess suspected that pure loneliness would do him in. He had not gone out for a beer with a pal or kissed a girl since he started cross-dressing in earnest. He wouldn’t go out with his transitioning self, and he didn’t want the kind of person, boy or girl, who would.

Once you know there are transsexuals, you see them everywhere. Short, pear-shaped men. Tall, knobby women. When you walk out of the waiting room of the North American Gender Identity Clinic, everyone looks peculiar. You flip through magazines and think, Hmmm, Leo DiCaprio? There’s something about him. And Jamie Lee Curtis? Look at those legs.

In her own mirror Jane now looks odd to herself. Maybe she’s morphing; her feet look funny, her shoulders seem as wide as Marcella’s, and there is a dark downy space where her hairline seems to be receding. Maybe she’ll cross over before Jess does, except she’ll look like Don Knotts and Jess will look like one of Calvin Klein’s young men. She would like to take Jess shopping before the surgery. If Jess goes for a western look, she could wear cowboy boots and gain a couple of inches without resorting to lifts.

Jane goes through the line in the caf, musing. Low-fat carrot-raisin muffin, girl food. Cheese Danish, boy food. Coffee, black, boy food. Tea, girl food. Bottled water, tough call. Bagel, also gender-neutral. Another mother from the support group sits down across from Jane. Jane remembers that her name is Sheila and she is an accountant from Santa Fe, but she cannot call up the child’s face or name. Sheila pours three packets of Equal into her coffee. “I had breast cancer, you know. I don’t have a left breast. It must be someone’s idea of a bad joke. These girls lop them off. We try to keep ours.”

Jane says, “Well, for them, it’s like their breasts are tumors. For them, I just don’t think their breasts ever feel to them the way ours do to us.” She thinks, And that would be how you can tell that they’re transsexual, Sheila.

Sheila looks at Jane sideways, pursing her lips as if to say, Well, aren’t you understanding? Aren’t you just Transsexual Mom of the Year? Maybe Sheila doesn’t think that, maybe she just resents Jane’s tone or her navy silk pantsuit and pearls, or maybe it’s just Jane. She’s not cuddly. The other mothers look sad and scruffy, faded sweatshirts and stretched-out pants, as if all their money has gone to the therapists and endocrinologists and surgeons, leaving not even a penny for lip gloss or new shoes or a haircut. There are two fathers in the group. One is the soft, sorry kind, the kind who sits weeping in the front row at his son’s arson trial, the kind who brings doughnuts to the support group for Parents of Guys Who Microwave Cats. The other one, the General, is the kind of big, blunt man Jane likes. He’s not in uniform, but there’s no mistaking the posture or the brush cut or the tanned, creased neck or the feet in black lace-ups planted square on the floor. When he talks to someone in the group, he doesn’t just look at them, he turns his entire head and shoulders, giving a powerful, not unpleasant RoboCop effect. Jane likes him much better than his son-turned-daughter, a shellacked, glittery girl with a French manicure and pink lipstick. This man protected his slight fierce boy, steered him into karate so that he would not be teased, or if teased, could make sure it did not happen twice. Loved that boy, fed him a hot breakfast at four a.m., drove him to tae kwon do tournaments all over Minnesota and then all over the Midwest. They flew to competitions in Los Angeles for ten and eleven, to Boston for under thirteen, then to the National Juniors Competitions, and there are three hundred trophies in their house. That boy is now swinging one small-ankled foot, dangling a pink high-heeled sandal off it and modeling himself not on Mia Hamm or Sally Ride or even Lindsay Davenport (whose dogged, graceless determination to make the most of what she has, to ignore everyone who says that because she doesn’t look like a winner she won’t ever be one, strikes Jane as an ideal role model for female transsexuals) but on Malibu Barbie. And the General has to love this girl as he loved that boy, or be without.

Sheila picks up the other half of her sandwich and says, “Jo”—or perhaps Joe? — “just walked in. I think we’ll spend the rest of the break together.”

Jane looks at Jo, an overweight young woman who must be going into manhood; if she were going the other way, they would already have replaced the Coke-bottle glasses with contacts and done something nicer with her short, frizzy brown hair and treated her jawline acne. Jane thinks, No wonder you’re such a misery, Sheila. Your Jo, waddling through life, will never be an attractive anything. Jane drinks her coffee and thinks that it may be that in this world good-looking matters more than anatomical anomalies — that like well-made underwear, good-looking itself smooths over the more awkward parts of your presentation and keeps your secrets until the right moment.

Malibu Barbie begins the next group. Dying to talk. She bats her eyelashes at her father, which is not what Jane would do if she wanted to win this man over, and then she looks around the room. Her makeup is better than Jane remembered; its not Jane’s taste, it’s more the department store makeover look, but she’s done a good job. Subtle blush, the crease of the eyelid slightly darkened, black mascara framing the big brown eyes. At the thought of this boy teaching himself the stupid, necessary girl tricks that Jess refused to learn and now doesn’t need, Jane’s contempt dissolves. Who does not change and hide? Maybe calf implants and tattooed eyeliner and colored contacts and ass lifts are just more trivial, even less honorable versions of gender surgery. Jane doesn’t really think so, she thinks that augmentation and improvement are not the same as a complete reversal of gender, but it does occur to her that if it were as easy as getting your eyelids done, and as difficult to detect, there might be more transsexuals around and they might be considered no worse than Roseanne or Burt Reynolds.

“I’m a woman,” Barbie says. “I’m as much a woman as any of you.”

Of course, she does not mean, As much as any of you MTF transsexuals; she means, As much as you, Jane and Sheila and Gail, as much as you, Susan, who Jane suspects has been chosen to lead this mixed group because she manages to radiate unmistakable genetic femaleness without offering up a single enviable physical quality. Susan is the permanent PTA secretary, the assistant Brownie leader, and even the least compelling transsexual woman can feel her equal, and Barbie and the other pretty girl in the room, Pamela, can feel superior. The envy of the biologically misapprehended, of people who know that God has fucked them over in utero, is not a small thing, and the anger that plain women feel for pretty ones is a hundred times worse when it takes such drive and suffering just to get to plain.

Susan does not pick up the challenge; she doesn’t even hear it as a challenge.

“Of course you are. And what does that mean to you?”

“It means this.” Pamela speaks up. She and Barbie are a tag team of newly discovered feminism and major trips to the mall. “It means this culture looks down on women and it despises transsexuals, and as both, we don’t plan to take it lying down.”

Take what? Jane thinks. Take fifty thousand dollars’ worth of hormones and surgery and a closetful of Victoria’s Secret? (It is amazing. You could stand next to naked post-op Pamela in a locker room and all you would think is, Jesus, what a great body she has.) Take the fact that because you were raised as a boy, however unhappily, there is still something there, some hidden, insistent tail of Y chromosome, that calls out when the world ignores your feelings, when it’s clear that you are not the template or the bottom line of anything important, I don’t have to take this shit?

“Barbie and I have invited the Transgender Avengers to come to a meeting.”

And Barbie’s father looks the way military men looked when their sons grew their hair long and left the country. “Who the hell are they? Barb, I thought the point was to just become a woman, just live your life as normally as possible.”

Barbie thrusts both slim arms out in a martial arts jab, and her silver bracelets jingle up her tan, hairless arms. She says, “I’m a fighter, Dad. You know that,” and Jane thinks, Oh my fucking God, and she and Jess rise at the same time to go laugh in the hall.

Jess says, “Oh, Jesus. I don’t know what to say. Transgender Avengers — is that next to Better Sportswear?”

Jane and Jess walk toward the lobby; they have twenty minutes before the meeting with Dr. Laurence, and Jess knows that Jane will want a cigarette before they go choose what kind of penis Jess will have.

Jane smokes every now and then. She hates to smoke in front of Jess. She certainly doesn’t want Jess to smoke, but she has thought that a small cigar, every once in a while, might help. It is all small things, Jane knows. She is now practically a professional observer of gender, and she sees that although homeliness and ungainliness won’t win you any kindness from the world, they are not, in and of themselves, the markers that will get you tossed out of the restaurant, the men’s room, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. (It is incredible to Jane that a big feminist party that has room for women who refer to themselves as leather daddies, and women wearing nothing but strap-on dildoes and Birkenstocks, and old women with sagging breasts and six labia rings, should draw the line at three women in Gap jeans and Indigo Girls T-shirts just because they were born male.) If you take hormones, if you dress in a middle-of-the-road version of whatever your size will allow (no bustiers without a bust, no big Stetsons on guys barely filling out size sixteen in the boys’ department), if your fat is distributed in the usual ways and you are not more than six inches off your sex’s average height, the world will leave you alone. It may not ask you for a date, but it will not kill you and it will probably not notice.

Jess would like to walk into Dr. Laurence’s office, go into a deep sleep, and walk out with his true body. He has known and seen this body in his dreams, behind half-closed lids, in quick glances at the mirror (with a few beers and a sock in his shorts), and he knows that it is not the body he will have. He’s seen the phalloplasties on a couple of transsexual guys, both the plumped-up clitoris version and the hot-dog version with the silicone implant balls, and neither makes him happy. Inside of himself he is Magic Johnson, the world’s greatest point guard. When he flips through Dr. Laurence’s photo album, it’s clear that he’ll be more like Anthony Epps of the Continental Basketball Association’s Sioux Falls team. Jess lights one of his mother’s Kools. In high school, when he played basketball on the girls’ team, a distant cousin of Chamique Holdsclaw said to him, “It’s true you all can’t dunk, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play.”

It would please Jane to know that it was Jess’s smile and not her shopping good manners that got Marcella Gray at reception to fiddle with the appointment book. Right after they pick the most realistic penis, somewhere between the little and the deluxe, Dr. Laurence says, “It looks like we’re good to go for the day after tomorrow.” He puts his hand on Jess’s shoulder. “You did great with your top surgery, this is going to go fine. A year from now, six months from now, you’re going to be a happy young man.” Dr. Laurence believes in this work. He believes in going to El Salvador to fix clubfeet, cleft palates, and botched amputations, and he believes that it’s his job on this earth to give people a chance to live life as it should be lived, whole and able and knowing they have been touched by God’s mercy. Dr. Laurence believes that when someone like Jess is in the womb, there is a last, unaccountable blast of the opposite sex hormone and the child is born one sex on the outside and the true one on the inside.

Jess and Jane walk back to their apartment; the clinic has a row of condos, upscale and fully equipped and three blocks from the surgical center. Men and women come and go, with companions or nurses or large doses of Percocet, doubled over with pain in March and out of the chrysalis in May or June.

“A little sunbathing?” Jane says. Everyone looks better with a tan, and it will be a while before Jess can lie on their sundeck again.

Just two years ago, they lay naked in their backyard, sunblock on their nipples and white asses, reading and drinking club soda. Now they turn away from each other to strip down to their underwear. Jess goes into the kitchen for two bottles of lime seltzer, and Jane sees the dark hair on his golden arms, his neat round biceps, the tight line of muscle at the back of his arms, and the two thin ridges of scar tissue on his chest. She nagged him to massage the scars four times a day with vitamin E oil and a mix from her dermatologist, and now they have almost disappeared. Jane watches this handsome boy-girl beside her put down the bottles and stretch out on the chaise.

“Don’t burn,” she says.

“Oh, all right,” Jess says. “I was going to, but now I won’t.”

Jane watches her, watches him, until Jess falls asleep, a lock of black hair falling forward. Jane pushes it back and cries in the bathroom for an hour. She leaves Jess a note, suggesting that they get in some entertainment while they can and go out for Chinese and a movie. They have gone out for Chinese and a movie once a week for almost fifteen years, even when Jessie would only eat rice and chicken fingers. When Jessie was at Michigan, that was what they missed the most. Jessie sent an occasional note home, written on a stained and crumpled Chinese takeout menu. When Jane opened the envelope, the smell of General Tso’s Chicken came up at her.

When she hoped that Jessie might just be a lesbian, when Jessie also thought that might be it, her hair short and spiky in front, carved into little faux sideburns, long and awkward in back, Jane took them on vacation to Northampton, Massachusetts, the Lesbian Paradise. Jane found out that Jessie’s appalling haircut had an appalling name: the mullet. Surely Nathalie Barney and Barbara Stanwyck and Greta Garbo, all lesbians of the kind Jane would be happy for Jessie to be, would not have been seen in mullet haircuts and overalls. Jessie was so happy her mouth hung open. If she took her eyes off this unexpected, extravagant gift, it might disappear. She squeezed her mother’s arm and then dropped it, reluctant to show just how much this parade of everyday lesbian life meant to her, more than any other trip or present. She worried that her mother might think that all the other presents and the trips to Disney World had been wrong or unnecessary, and they had not. But it was true that this trip was the only time Jessie did not feel like a complete impostor.

Jane was just happy to see her daughter happy again. She could live with this, easily, especially with Jessie bouncing beside her, smiling right up to her thrice-pierced, beautifully shaped ears. There were unfortunate outfits, of course, and more of those haircuts on women who should have known better, and although some women were admirably, astonishingly fit in bicycle shorts and tank tops, more were too heavy for their frames, cello hips trying a John Wayne walk, big breasts swinging under washed-out T-shirts. Hopeless, Jane thought, but not bad. Jessie ate like a hungry boy, for fuel, for muscle and bone and growth, and as she worked through a double chocolate chip cone from Herrell’s, her ears turned bright red. Jane started to turn around, to see what it was, but Jessie hissed, “Don’t look,” and despite Jane’s hostile maternal impulse to demonstrate that it was her job to monitor public manners, not Jessie’s, she sat still for another ten seconds and then strolled over to the wastebasket and dumped her half-eaten cone, pretending, if anyone cared, that she couldn’t eat another bite. What had turned Jessie’s ears scarlet? A man or a woman, beautiful as Apollo is beautiful, and in the cropped silver hair, loose jeans, layers of Missoni sweaters, and brown polished boots there was no clue at all and Jane thought, Goddammit, go home, we’re looking at lesbians here.

Jane liked Northampton. The Panda Garden Chinese Restaurant, elegant gold earrings shaped like ginkgo leaves, and the beautiful blunt hands of the saleswoman unfolding Italian sheets, snapping thick ivory linen down the length of a pine table, charmed her, and she still visits every couple of years on her own long after Jess has come to prefer Seattle and Vancouver.

Jane walks to the mall. They need toilet paper. Jane needs emery boards. She has to get vitamins and Tropicana Original orange juice (testosterone has not changed Jess’s lifelong hatred of orange pulp and of green vegetables) and high-protein powder for shakes and maybe some books on tape until Jess has the energy to read.

Jane strolls through the entire mall, buying funny socks and aloe vera gel and Anthony Hopkins reading The Silence of the Lambs, and winds up at the Rite Aid, the least glamorous stop on a not very glamorous list. She recognizes the man at the end of the aisle. Not part of Dr. Laurence’s staff, she would have noticed those hazel eyes. Someone she knows from home? Did she decorate a house for him? An office? Cheekbones like a Cherokee and flat waves of slick dark hair like a high-style black man from the forties.

“I’m Cole Ramsey,” he says, and Jane smells bay rum aftershave. “I think I saw you at the medical center? Down the street?” He is not really asking, he is Southern. And he keeps talking. “Forgive me for being so forward.”

Jane has goosebumps and her chest hurts, and it has been so long since she’s had these symptoms that for a moment she thinks she’s getting the flu. She introduces herself and drops the package of emery boards, which Cole Ramsey picks up and holds on to.

“May I walk along with you?”

“Through the Rite Aid? Be my guest.”

By the time they’ve finished shopping and bought a Pooh Corners mobile from the Disney Store for Cole’s brand-new nephew, Jane knows that he is an endocrinologist who sometimes consults with Dr. Laurence and has his own regular-people practice on the other side of Santa Barbara. Cole likes to talk. He talks about malls and why he enjoys them (“Of course, I also like kudzu, so there you go”) and Dr. Laurence (“A good man and a good surgeon — a rare combination, not that I should bad-mouth the profession, but most doctors are half-people and most surgeons are not even that”) and the poetry of Richard Howard (“He’s so decorous but so willing to disturb”), and he tries to talk Jane into dinner.

“My son’s having surgery day after tomorrow. Tonight’s his last chance for Chinese food.” That’s enough information, Jane thinks.

“Of course. Just a drink, then? Or a post-shopping cappuccino?”

Jane calls home, and Jess, still drowsy from the sun and anxiety, says, “Fine. Go. Whoop it up.”

Jane says, “I’ll be home no later than seven, and we can go out for dinner and catch the nine-thirty movie.”

“Whatever, Mom,” Jess says. “It’ll be fine. I’m going back to sleep.”

Jane falls on her bed, after the sixteen-ounce Bloody Mary with Cole Ramsey and the beer with Jess and their all-appetizer dinner and malted milk balls at the movie, and she thinks of Cole and exhales happily. His soft, light voice. The focused, flattering attention. The self-deprecating jokes. Jane has not had a close gay male friend since Anthony died in ’88, and Cole is charming and such a pleasure to look at.

In the morning Jane and Jess kick around until it’s time for him to check into the hospital. They play gin and walk to the bookstore and waste time, and eventually they pack and watch an afternoon rerun of Friends. They act more like pilots before a big mission than like patients. At the hospital Jess is hungry and nervous and unwilling to let Jane sit with him any longer.

“Love you, Mom,” he says.

“Love you, too, honey,” Jane says, and thinks, Oh, my brave girl.

Jane sees Cole in the hospital lobby, patting the cheek of a fat blond nurse. When he sees Jane, he gives the nurse a squeeze on the shoulder and she hugs him, her wide body hiding him from view. Cole hurries to catch up with Jane.

“You must have just left your son. May I walk along with you?”

They walk through the parking lot, into the wet grass and waving palms and blooming Jacarandas of the small, unexpectedly tropical city park.

“This is nice,” he says. “A little bit of Paradise we didn’t know about.” He makes it sound as if he and Jane have been exploring municipal parks together for years.

“You have a good relationship with the nurses,” Jane says.

“Patients and nurses are about everyone that counts in a hospital.”

“I bet that one’s in love with you,” Jane says. She’s teasing; she and Anthony used to talk about women who fell in love with him with a particularly gratifying mix of compassion and malice.

“Oh, I’m over fifty, no one falls in love with me anymore.” Cole sits down on a bench and pulls gently on Jane’s hand.

“Don’t be silly. Men have it easy until they’re seventy. And look at Cary Grant, he looked fabulous until he died.” And he was gay too, she thinks.

“Well, I’m not Cary Grant, I’m afraid, just a skinny doc from South Carolina. Not that I wasn’t a fan. Particularly Bringing Up Baby.”

“Well, yes,” Jane says. “One of the best movies ever made.” They talk through the movie from beginning to end, and he applauds her imitation of Katharine Hepburn, and when they get to the scene with the crazy dog and poor Cary Grant in Hepburn’s peignoir, they laugh out loud.

Cole looks at his watch and sighs. “This has been just lovely, but I do have to run.”

Jane looks at him. “Of course. Someone waiting at home?” It would be nice to be friends with a gay couple. She could invite them over for dinner, for pizza at least, while Jess is in the hospital, or maybe while he’s recuperating and getting bored.

Cole looks down at his hands.

“I’m in mid-divorce. I promised my soon-to-be ex-wife that we could do a last furniture divvy tonight. We’ve been trying to stay out of the lawyer’s office as much as possible, but that does mean that we spend far too much time talking to each other. Comes under the heading of no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.”

“What good deed?” Jane is trying to figure out whether he means “wife” in the sense of “woman I am married to,” or “wife” in the sense of “man in my life who played a kind of wifely role.”

“Oh, you know. I don’t want to bore you. The good deed of ending twelve years of unhappy marriage with an amicable divorce. After God answered my prayers and sent her the kind of man she should have married in the first place.”

Straight? Jane thinks.

Cole holds Jane’s hands in his. They are the same size.

“I am sorry to have to run, and even sorrier that this kind of dreary talk should ruin our little moment. I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t have to,” Jane says. “It’s a safe couple of blocks.”

“It will be a pleasure,” he says. “And it will be my last pleasure for a few hours.” He smiles. “Except when I insist that my wife take back some of the horrible furniture we got from her mother, the Terror of Tallahassee. I used to hope our house would just go up in flames and we could start again.”

Actual wife, Jane thinks.

At the doorstep Cole says, “I have to tell the truth. I saw you before our serendipitous meeting in the Rite Aid. You were daydreaming in the cafeteria. You looked so far away and so lovely. I wanted to be wherever you were.” He brings her hand to his mouth, kisses it right above the wrist, and goes.

In bed Jane holds her wrist gently and hopes very hard that Jess will be all right. She does not believe in God, but she believes in Dr. Laurence, and she believes that people who are loved and cared for have a better chance in life than people who are not.

Cole rings the doorbell at midnight.

“Forgive me. You must have been sleeping. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I do. I was thinking about your energy, your mix of acceptance and strength, and I felt in need of it.”

He talks nonstop, flattery and Southern folk sayings, snatches of Auden and Yeats, a joke about sharks and lawyers whose punch line he mangles, and finally Jane pours him a glass of wine and wraps his hand around it.

“You must think I’m demented,” he says.

“No, just worn out. Actually, I thought you were gay.”

Cole smiles. “Oh, my. I wouldn’t mind being, except that that would require having sex with men.” He looks right at Jane. “That is not my preference.”

“I’m embarrassed. I don’t know why I thought that. Your manners are so good, I guess.”

Cole pats her hand. He doesn’t look surprised or offended. “Crazy Creole mother. Jumped-up Irish father. I was terrible at team sports. Just barely American, in fact.”

Jane pours herself a glass of wine and yawns. Cole loosens his tie.

“Spending all my time at Dr. Laurence’s clinic, I could have been wondering if you were, you know, genetically male.” Jane smiles.

Cole laughs. “Mmm,” he says. “If I were not my mother’s son, if I have a few more glasses of wine, if you allow that robe to slip open another inch or two, then I might say, Oh, dear Jane, it would be my great pleasure to satisfy your curiosity.”

There is a long silence. Cole touches the side of her face with two fingers, from her brow to her chin, and Jane leans forward and kisses his temples and then his cheek.

“I’m so out of practice,” she says.

Cole kisses her neck, and the goosebumps return.

“No,” he whispers. “There’s no practicing for this.”

They kiss on Jane’s couch until dawn, unbuttoned and unsure, hot, restless, and dreamy. In between, Cole says that his back is not great. Jane tells him, as she has not told anyone, that her doctor thinks she’ll need a hip replacement by the time she’s sixty.

“The erotic life of the middle-aged,” he says. “Let’s soldier on.”

Cole undresses Jane a little more, and at every moment of skin revealed he kisses her and thanks her. He sits behind her, biting her very gently down the spine until she cries out. Jane turns to face him, now in just her underpants, and sees that he has taken off only his shoes. She puts both hands on his belt buckle. Cole lifts them off firmly and kisses them.

“Let me go on touching you,” he says. “For a little longer.” And he holds her hands over her head and kisses the undersides of her breasts and the untanned shadows beneath them.

His beeper goes off.

Jane puts her robe back on. “The vibrating ones seem more discreet.”

She feels clotted and cold, and to stave off shame (really, she has known him just a couple of hours; really, is this what she does while her only child lies in a hospital bed?) she is prepared to make him feel terrible, but his hands are trembling and he cannot put his feet into the right shoes.

“I have to go. Like the Chinese sages, crawling with charity, limp with duty.” His jacket is on, his beeper is in his pocket. “But I am prepared to grovel, for weeks on end, if necessary.” His thick hair sticks up like dreadlocks, and there are wet, lipsticky blotches on his shirt. “I’ll come look for you tomorrow in the hospital, if I may.” He stands there, slightly bent, expecting a blow, as if this is the right, inevitable moment in their relationship for Jane to backhand him.

Jane shrugs. After all his trouble, his shirttail is hanging out.

“Jane. Forgive me, please.” He says “Forgive me, forgive me” until he is out the door.

Jane sits in the hospital waiting room until two p.m., and after they wheel Jess from the recovery room to his bed she sits next to him, leaning forward from the green vinyl armchair, her hand on his arm. His waist is bandaged, and tubes run from his left arm and his lower body.

The nurse, busy and kind, says, “His vitals are good, but that’s pretty heavy anesthetic, you know. He might be out for another hour or two.”

“Thank you,” Jane says. “Thanks for your help.”

An hour later Jess opens one eye and Jane brings him the water glass. He takes a sip, gives her the thumbs-up, and falls back asleep until the nurse wakes him at six for painkiller and antibiotic. Jane is still sitting there when the shift changes and a new nurse, equally busy, equally kind, sticks her head in the door.

“Everything looks good. You know what they say about the difference between God and Dr. Laurence? Sometimes God makes a mistake.”

Jane says, “Thank you so much. That’s nice to hear.” And thinks, Another group of people to be pleasant to.

Jane walks home, through the little park again, scuffing her feet through the ribbed curling leaves on the path. Cole is sitting on the steps of the condo, two bouquets of red roses beside him. He stands as she comes up the walk, and then he bends down to pick up the roses, huge and stiff in green tissue and white ribbon. Jane doesn’t like roses, she especially dislikes the cliché of ardent red roses, she doesn’t find short men attractive (the two she’s slept with made her feel like Everest), and she doesn’t want her life to contain any more irony than it already does. And standing on the little porch of the condo, barely enough room for two medium-size people and forty-eight roses, Jane sees that she has taken her place in the long and honorable line of fools for love: Don Quixote and Hermia and Oscar Wilde and Joe E. Brown, crowing with delight, clutching his straw boater and Jack Lemmon as the speedboat carries them off to a cockeyed and irresistible future.

Cole says, “Dum spiro, spero. That is the South Carolina motto. While I breathe, I hope.”

“Well,” Jane says, “I expect that will come in handy for us.”