"I actually quit," she said, taking a deep drag on the cigarette, "back when I thought I was pregnant." At my puzzled look she explained, "False alarm. Or 'hysterical pregnancy,' as they put it. If it happened to men, you know they'd call it something like 'stress-induced symptomatic replication,' but women, we're hysterical , right? Like, 'Oh, my God, I burned the roast, and -- ' " She looked down at her stomach in mock-surprise. " 'Whoops! Honey, do I look pregnant to you?' "We laughed, and that led to a general discussion of the peculiarities of men in general . . . and as I listened to Lyn's good-natured but very funny catalog of male excesses, not so different from the catalog of female excesses I'd listened to from men, something occurred to me, something crystallized after all these years.
All my life I'd felt like a member of a different race, human but not-human; similar but separate. And now I realized that this was, to some degree, how men and women viewed each other, at times -- like members of a different species entirely. I saw it even more clearly over dinner, because even though Davy and Lyn had a good, loving relationship, there were the inevitable rough edges. Toward the end of the evening they got into a heated argument, as they were showing me around the soon-to-be-renovated basement, over what color tile would be used; Davy kept insisting it would be red, while Lyn said that wasn't it at all, more like terracotta, and they went on like that for almost a minute before I stepped into the breach with:
"Uh . . . Davy? When you say red, you mean like a fire-engine?"
"No, no, darker than that, more like -- like -- "
"Brick?"
"Yeah! Yeah, like brick."
"That's terra-cotta," Lyn said, exasperated.
"Well how the hell am I supposed to know that?"
After a moment, both Davy and Lyn loosened up and Lyn even suggested I should stick around and interpret while they were redecorating the house. We went upstairs, had some wine, watched a little cable . . . me stealing glances at Davy and Lyn, snuggled up together . . . and slowly my mood darkened. I liked them, liked them both; Davy's steady presence, Lyn's manic energy. I could fantasize myself falling in love with or marrying either one. Everyone in the world, it seemed, could look forward to that -- male, female, gay, lesbian, they could all find a partner. Everyone except me. I was grateful when the movie ended and I could retire, alone, to the sofabed in the living room.
Lying there under a thick, warm quilt, listening to the tattoo of raindrops on the roof, I drifted asleep . . . and had a nightmare I hadn't had in years, the one that had plagued me so often as a child, the one that drove me to my parents' bedroom years before.
I looked up to see the ceiling was dropping toward me, as, beneath me, the floor was rushing up. It happened too fast to do anything but shut my eyes against the coming collision; but when I hit, I didn't hit hard but soft, as though both floor and ceiling had turned to feather-down and were now smothering me between them. Out of the corner of my eyes I could see a thin wedge of light on either side, kept there only by the obstruction of my own body between floor and ceiling; then the wedge shrank to a slit, then a line, then a series of small pinpoints. I fought against the pressure but it was useless, the pinpoints of light vanishing one after another; I tried to take a breathe but couldn't, my chest in a vise, unable to expand or contract; I was dying, I was defeated, I was --
" Pat! Pat, wake up!"
I was in the vise, and I was being held by my shoulders by Davy; my eyes were open, but I was in both places. He shook me, and the vise opened a crack; shook me again, and it fell away. I was in the living room, and I was awake; but I was still terrified. I broke down, as I hadn't in years -- not since that day in the woods -- but instead of shame and humiliation I felt pain, and loneliness; only the sense of apartness was the same. I held desperately onto Davy, tears running down my cheeks, trying to hold sleep at bay. Davy held me, and stroked my back, and after I'd finished he looked at me, put a hand to my cheek, and said in a soft, sad voice: "I think it's time I made it up to you," and then he was kissing me, tenderly. Part of me wanted to stay like that for the rest of my life, pretending to be what he wanted and needed, suspended forever in illusion; but I drew back, shook my head, tried to pull away. "Davy, no -- your wife, I can't - "
And then there was a hand on my shoulder; a small hand, not very heavy, and I could feel the tips of her fingers on my skin. I turned. Lyn sat in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, looking not at all angry or disturbed; I started to say something, but she just shook her head, said, "Sshh, sshh," and leaned in, her lips brushing the nape of my neck, her breath moving slowly along the curve of my neck to my face, my mouth . . .
She knew. All along, she must have known
Lyn gently pushed me back onto the bed, just as I became aware of a pleasant tickle on my legs; I looked down to see Davy, his hands stroking the knotted muscles of my calves, his lips moving slowly up my legs, covering them with tiny kisses.
Lyn took my face in her hands, put her mouth to mine, and our tongues met and danced round one another in greeting . . .
And then I felt something I had never felt before -- a mounting pressure, a thrilling tension, as though every nerve ending in my body were about to burst, but didn't, just kept building and building in intensity -- a pleasure I had never known, never imagined I could know. And it was then that I realized: the doctors had been wrong; all of them. Very wrong. I wasn't lacking in erogenous tissue. My whole body was erogenous tissue.
All it needed was the proper stimulation.
I finally worked up the nerve to see my parents; when Mother opened the door there was a moment's shock at my appearance -- so different from the flirty blonde teenager who'd run away years before -- but then she reached out and embraced me, holding me as though I might blow away on the wind. Then Daddy stepped up out of the shadows of the living room and did something odd and touching: he reached out and shook my hand, the way he might greet a son coming home from college; and then kissed me on the cheek, as he might a daughter. It was his way, I think, of acknowledging I was both, and neither; his way of telling me that they didn't love a daughter, they didn't love a son . . . they loved a child.
Funny; for years I thought of myself as a freak, a useless throwback to another time -- but despite all the psych courses I'd taken, all the books I'd read, I never really thought about that time, eons before recorded history, when my kind shared the earth with men and women. Why we vanished, or died out, may never be known; but the real question is, why were we there in the first place? It wasn't until Lyn, and Davy, that I began wondering . . . thinking about how, in the millennia since, men and women had had such difficulty understanding one another, seeing the other's side . . . as though something were -- missing, somehow. A balance; a harmonizing element; the third side of a triangle. Maybe that was the natural order of things, and what's come since is the deviation. All along I'd been thinking of my kind as throwbacks, when perhaps we're just the opposite; perhaps we're more like . . . precursors.
The basement's been converted, not into a recreation room as once planned, but into extra living quarters; I have a bedroom, for when Davy and Lyn want to be alone, and a small library/den where I can study. So far, no one's been scandalized by the arrangement; lots of people room together to save rent or mortgage payments, after all. I've enrolled at the University of Washington, aiming first for my Master's, then my Ph.D., in psychology . . . because now, finally, I think I know what that purpose is I was seeking for so many years. If the statistics are right, our numbers will be doubling every ten months; thousands more like me, going through the same identity crises, the same doubt and fear and loneliness . . . and who better to help them than a psychologist who truly understands their problems?
Lyn's quit smoking again, but this time, happily, the pregnancy isn't a -- what did she call it? -- 'stress-induced symptomatic replication.' And I can't help but feel that after so many false starts, maybe, somehow, it was me who tipped the scales -- gave them that extra little push they needed. Afte
r all, who's to say life can't be transmitted just as easily in saliva or sweat as it is in semen or ova? We only have one problem now: the nagging suspicion that when it comes time to buy baby clothes, neither pink nor blue may be appropriate. Green? Yellow? Violet? Take my word for it: there's big money to be made here for some enterprising manufacturer, one ready to tap an expanding market. Wait and see; wait and see.
Alan Brennert, The Third Sex
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