The Female Man

I

Who am I?

I know who I am, but what’s my brand name?

Me with a new face, a puffy mask. Laid over the old one in strips of plastic, a blond Hallowe’en ghoul on top of the S.S. uniform. I was skinny as a beanpole underneath except for the hands, which were similarly treated, and that very impressive face. I did this once in my line of business, which I’ll go into later, and scared the idealistic children who lived downstairs. Their delicate skins red with offended horror. Their clear young voices raised in song (at three in the morning). I’m not Jeannine. I’m not Janet. I’m not Joanna.

I don’t do this often (say I, the ghoul) but it’s great elevator technique, holding your forefinger to the back of somebody’s neck while passing the fourth floor, knowing he’ll never find out that you’re not all there.

(Sorry, But watch out.)

You’ll meet me later.

II

As I have said before, I (not the one above, please) had an experience on the seventh of February last, nineteen-sixty-nine.

I turned into a man.

I had been a man before, but only briefly and in a crowd.

You would not have noticed anything, had you been there.

Manhood, children, is not reached by courage or short hair or insensibility or by being (as I was) in Chicago’s only skyscraper hotel while the snow rages outside. I sat in a Los Angeles cocktail party with the bad baroque furniture all around, having turned into a man. I saw myself between the dirty-white scrolls of the mirror and the results were indubitable: I was a man. But what then is manhood?

Manhood, children… is Manhood.

III

Janet beckoned me into the limousine and I got in. The road was very dark. As she opened the door I saw her famous face under the dome light over the front seat; trees massed electric-green beyond the headlights. This is how I really met her. Jeannine Dadier was an evasive outline in the back seat.

“Greetings,” said Janet Evason. “Hello. Bonsoir. That’s Jeannine. And you?”

I told her. Jeannine started talking about all the clever things her cat had done. Trees swayed and jerked in front of us.

“On moonlit nights,” said Janet, “I often drive without lights,” and slowing the car to a crawl, she turned out the headlights; I mean I saw them disappear—the countryside blent misty and pale to the horizon like a badly exposed Watteau. I always feel in moonlight as though my eyes have gone bad. The car—something expensive, though it was too dark to tell what—sighed soundlessly. Jeannine had all but disappeared.

“I have, as they say,” (said Janet in her surprisingly loud, normal voice) “given them the slip,” and she turned the headlights back on. “I daresay that’s not proper,” she added.

“It is not,” said Jeannine from the back seat. We passed a motel sign in a dip of the road, with something flashing lit-up behind the trees.

“I am very sorry,” said Janet. The car? “Stolen,” she said. She peered out the side window for a moment, turning her head and taking her eyes off the road. Jeannine gasped indignantly. Only the driver can see really accurately in the rear-view mirror; but there was a car behind us. We turned off onto a dirt road—that is, she turned off—and into the woods with the headlights dark—and on to another road, after which there was a private house, all lights out, just as neat as you please. “Goodbye, excuse me,” said Janet affably, slipping out of the car; “Carry on, please,” and she vanished into the house. She was wearing her television suit. I sat baffled, with Jeannine’s hands gripping the car seat at my back (the way children do). The second car pulled up behind us. They came out and surrounded me (such a disadvantage to be sitting down and the lights hurt your eyes). Brutally short haircuts and something unpleasant about the clothing: straight, square, clean, yet not robust. Can you picture a plainclothesman pulling his hair? Of course not. Jeannine was cowering out of sight or had disappeared somehow. Just before Janet Evason emerged on to the porch of that private house, accompanied by a beaming family: father, mother, teen-age daughter, and family dog (everyone delighted to be famous), I committed myself rather too idiotically by exclaiming with some heat:

“Who are you looking for? There’s nobody here. There’s only me.”

IV

Was she trying to run away? Or only to pick people at random?

V

Why did they send me? Because they can spare me. Etsuko Belin strapped me in. “Ah, Janet!” she said. (Ah, yourself.) In a plain, blank room. The cage in which I lay goes in and out of existence forty-thousand times a second; thus it did not go with me. No last kiss from Vittoria; nobody could get to me. I did not, contrary to your expectation, go nauseated or cold or feel I was dropping through endless whatever. The trouble is your brain continues to work on the old stimuli while the new ones already come in; I tried to make the new wall into the old. Where the lattice of the cage had been was a human face.

Spasibo.

Sorry.

Let me explain.

I was so rattled that I did not take in all at once that I was lying across her—desk, I learned later—and worse still. Appeared across it, just like that (in full view of five others). We had experimented with other distances; now they fetched me back, to make sure, and sent me out, and there I was again, on her desk.

What a strange woman; thick and thin, dried up, hefty in the back, with a grandmotherly moustache, a little one. How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.

Aha! A man.

Shall I say my flesh crawled? Bad for vanity, but it did. This must be a man. I got off its desk. Perhaps it was going out to manual work, for we were dressed alike; only it had coded bands of color sewn over its pocket, a sensible device for a machine to read or something. I said in perfect English:

“How do you do? I must explain my sudden appearance. I am from another time.” (We had rejected probability/continuum as unintelligible.) Nobody moved.

“How do you do? I must explain my sudden appearance. I am from another time.”

What do you do, call them names? They didn’t move. I sat down on the desk and one of them slammed shut a part of the wall; so they have doors, just as we do. The important thing in a new situation is not to frighten, and in my pockets was just the thing for such an emergency. I took out the piece of string and began playing Cat’s Cradle.

“Who are you!” said one of them. They all had these little stripes over their pockets.

“I am from another time, from the future,” I said, and held out the cat’s cradle. It’s not only the universal symbol of peace, but a pretty good game, too. This was the simplest position, though. One of them laughed; another put its hands over its eyes; the one whose desk it was backed off; a fourth said, “Is this a joke?”

“I am from the future.” Just sit there long enough and the truth will sink in.

“What?” said Number One.

“How else do you think I appeared out of the air?” I said. “People cannot very well walk through walls, now can they?”

The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There’s no sense, after all, in behaving that way towards a perfect stranger; where’s the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear. The door opened at this point and a young woman walked in, a woman of thirty years or so, elaborately painted and dressed. I know I should not have assumed anything, but one must work with what one has; and I assumed that her dress indicated a mother. That is, someone on vacation, someone with leisure, someone who’s close to the information network and full of intellectual curiosity. If there’s a top class (I said to myself), this is it. I didn’t want to take anyone away from necessary manual work. And I thought, you know, that I would make a small joke. So I said to her:

“Take me to your leader.”

VI

… a tall blonde woman in blue pajamas who appeared standing on Colonel Q----’s desk, as if from nowhere. She took out what appeared to be a weapon… No answer to our questions. The Colonel has kept a small revolver in the top drawer of his desk since the summer riots. He produced it. She would not answer our questions. I believe at that point Miss X----, the Colonel’s secretary, walked into the room, quite unaware of what was going on. Luckily Y-----, Z-----, Q————-, R———— , and myself kept our heads. She then said, “I am from the future.”

QUESTIONER: Miss X---- said that?

ANSWER: No, not Miss X----. The—the stranger.

QUESTIONER: Are you sure she appeared standing on Colonel Q----’s desk?

ANSWER: No, I’m not sure. Wait. Yes I am. She was sitting on it.

VII

INTERVIEWER: It seems odd to all of us, Miss Evason, that in venturing into such—well, such absolutely unknown territory—that you should have come unarmed with anything except a piece of string. Did you expect us to be peaceful?

JE: No. No one is, completely.

INTERVIEWER: Then you should have armed yourself.

JE: Never.

INTERVIEWER: But an armed person, Miss Evason, is more formidable than one who is helpless. An armed person more readily inspires fear.

JE: Exactly.

VIII

That woman lived with me for a month. I don’t mean in my house. Janet Evason on the radio, the talk shows, the newspapers, newsreels, magazines, ads even. With somebody I suspect was Miss Dadier appearing in my bedroom late one night.

“I’m lost.” She meant: what world is this?

“F’godsakes, go out in the hall, will you?”

But she melted away through the Chinese print on the wall, presumably into the empty, carpeted, three-in-the-morning corridor outside. Some people never stick around. In my dream somebody wanted to know where Miss Dadier was. I woke at about four and went to the bathroom for a glass of water; there she was on the other side of the bathroom mirror, semaphoring frantically. She made her eyes big and peered desperately into the room, both fists pressed against the glass.

“He’s not here,” I said. “Go away.”

She mouthed something unintelligible. The room sang:

I wet a washcloth and swiped at the mirror with it. She winced. Turn out the light, said my finer instincts, and so I turned out the light. She remained lit up. Dismissing the whole thing as the world’s aberration and not mine, I went back to bed.

“Janet?” she said.

IX

Janet picked up Jeannine at the Chinese New Festival. Miss Dadier never allowed anyone to pick her up but a woman was different, after all; it wasn’t the same thing. Janet was wearing a tan raincoat. Cal had gone round the corner to get steamed buns in a Chinese luncheonette and Miss Evason asked the meaning of a banner that was being carried through the street.

“Happy Perseverance, Madam Chiang,” said Jeannine.

Then they chatted about the weather.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Jeannine suddenly. (She put her hands over her ears and made a face.) “But that’s different,” she said.

Janet Evason made another suggestion. Jeannine looked interested and willing to understand, though a little baffled.

“Cal’s in there,” said Jeannine loftily. “I couldn’t go in there.” She spread her fingers out in front of her like two fans. She was prettier than Miss Evason and glad of it; Miss Evason resembled a large boy scout with flyaway hair.

“Are you French?”

“Ah!” said Miss Evason, nodding.

“I’ve never been to France,” said Jeannine languidly; “I often thought I’d—well, I just haven’t been.” Don’t stare at me. She slouched and narrowed her eyes. She wanted to put one hand up affectedly to shade her forehead; she wanted to cry out, “Look! There’s my boyfriend Cal,” but there wasn’t a sign of him, and if she turned to the grocery-store window it would be full of fish’s intestines and slabs of dried fish; she knew that.

It—would—make—her—sick! (She stared at a carp with its guts coming out.) I’m shaking all over.

“Who did your hair?” she asked Miss Evason, and when Miss Evason didn’t understand:

“Who streaked your hair so beautifully?”

“Time,” and Miss Evason laughed and Miss Dadier laughed. Miss Dadier laughed beautifully, gloriously, throwing her head back; everyone admired the curve of Miss Dadier’s throat. Eyes turned. A beautiful body and personality to burn. “I can’t possibly go with you,” said Miss Dadier magnificently, her fur coat swirling; “There’s Cal, there’s New York, there’s my work, New York in springtime, I can’t leave, my life is here,” and the spring wind played with her hair.

Crazy Jeannine nodded, petrified.

“Good,” said Janet Evason. “We’ll get you a leave from work.” She whistled and around the corner at a dead run came two plainclothes policemen in tan raincoats: enormous, jowly, thick-necked, determined men who will continue running—at a dead heat—through the rest of this tale. But we won’t notice them. Jeannine looked in astonishment from their raincoats to Miss Evason’s raincoat. She did not approve at all.

“So that’s why it doesn’t fit,” she said. Janet pointed to Jeannine for the benefit of the cops.

“Boys, I’ve got one.”

The Chinese New Festival was invented to celebrate the recapture of Hong Kong from the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek died of heart disease in 1951 and Madam Chiang is premieress of the New China. Japan, which controls the mainland, remains fairly quiet since it lacks the backing of—for example—a reawakened Germany, and if any war occurs, it will be between the Divine Japanese Imperiality and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (there are twelve). Americans don’t worry much. Germany still squabbles occasionally with Italy or England; France (disgraced in the abortive putsch of ’42) is beginning to have trouble with its colonial possessions. Britain—wiser—gave India provisional self-government in 1966.

The Depression is still world-wide.

(But think—only think!—what might have happened if the world had not so luckily slowed down, if there had been a really big war, for big wars are forcing-houses of science, economics, politics; think what might have happened, what might not have happened. It’s a lucky world. Jeannine is lucky to live in it.

She doesn’t think so.)

XI

(Cal, who came out of the Chinese luncheonette just in time to see his girl go off with three other people, did not throw the lunch buns to the ground in a fit of exasperated rage and stamp on them. Some haunted Polish ancestor looked out of his eyes. He was so thin and slight that his ambitions shone through him: I’ll make it some day, baby. I’ll be the greatest. He sat down on a fire plug and began to eat the buns.

She’ll have to come back to feed her cat.)