“Huh,” says Reese. “When I tortured myself thinking about what women you’d love instead of me, a rural Jewish Chinese mink farmer was not what I came up with. My stereotyping has failed me.”
“I’m not sure she’s so happy I’ve picked her either.”
“So why does she put up with you, may I ask?”
“My rugged masculine good looks, obviously.”
Reese scoffs. He’s still too pretty by half; the once rhinoplasty-perfect nose now broken but still delicate, and those light blue eyes that, in old photos, would have come out empty-white, one of those colors that required photographic technology to evolve before it could be captured on film.
“Is she queer at all, this woman?”
Ames had thought a fair amount about this. “I don’t think she appreciates queerness so much as she came to feel ambivalent about heterosexuality. I know those two aren’t the same thing. She’s attracted to masculine bodies, of that I’m sure.” He flicks his wrist in a semi-ironic indication of his own now-curve-depleted body as evidence. “Although perhaps not men as a class. A lot of what she liked about me, she says, is how different I am from the other men she’s dated. I think what she might be attracted to is my gender, the traces of queerness about me—with me she gets queerness without ever having to name it or dredge up any attraction to women. But now that she knows I was once a transsexual, she acts like it’s the only reason I am how I am. Everything she liked about me before is suddenly fraught. She’s not taking it well.”
And it’s true, she hasn’t been. She declines his calls, and speaks to him only enough to keep up appearances at work. A few days after he told her, he caught her staring at him across a conference table, her eyes almost unfocused, the way one stares to make sense of an optical illusion. He recognized what she was doing: She was making him into a woman in her mind, an exercise that he’d done countless times himself but in reverse—the ugly involuntary method by which his hateful vision broke a trans woman’s face down into component parts, then remodeled them in the brain to strip away the apparent feminization and see what she had looked like before transition. His brain was an asshole, because the result of this exercise was to triple his insecurity. Given how easily and involuntarily he did it, even while aware of the high fucked-up quotient, he imagined how frequently other people without his sensitivity had done it to him.
He guessed that his take on Katrina’s queerness was one that would predispose Reese to at least not hate Katrina. The mention of motherhood would have softened Reese up, and now he finished her off with secret moments of weird gender feels or confused faggotry: Reese’s bread and butter.
“I get it,” Reese says when he finishes. “So everything is upside down for her, right? Post-divorce, now she’s pregnant. She’s kind of a weirdo, and she’s unsure about what she wants. She’s questioning herself. And so you’re thinking she might just let you invite another woman to raise your baby with her?”
“Don’t make me sound so sinister,” Ames responds. But he has presented the argument with a sinister cast in an appeal to Reese’s sensibilities. It hurts less to discuss a baby that she would desperately want to love and raise in the same way that Cruella De Vil discusses puppies.
“Please. You come up with the most fucked-up shit,” Reese says. “You are so weird and devious, even when you were doing that Martha Stewart thing you did with me, and definitely while you’re doing this fake cis thing. But I get why you think it will work. You pitch her on the idea while she’s confused and trying to figure out a new way of seeing the world. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that your plan?”
“No! I actually want to do this right. Be good to her. I think this gives her every option— an extra option, even. If she wants to raise a baby on her own, I’ll pay child support and do what I can. If she wants an abortion, obviously I will support that. And finally, if she wants me as a father, I will say yes, and then propose that you enter our lives.”
“Ah,” says Reese. “Once again, Reese is your plan C.”
“I’m doing my best here, Reese. I can’t force her to do anything. I don’t even want to do that. The thing I am totally against, however, is the outcome where she gets an abortion, then she hates me, while you go on hating me too. The everyone-hates-me option, which, frankly, is looking the most likely. I want to avoid that.”
Reese made a scoffing noise. “That’s only the worst outcome for you. Maybe for us, being free of you would be ideal.”
“And then you’ll pass up yet another chance to be a mother.”
Reese flinches slightly and doesn’t respond.
“Reese,” Ames continues, “I’m sorry I can’t promise anything. But I’m asking you to consider an option where you’re a mother.”
“I’m here. I’m entertaining you, even if this is so messed up. But now”—Reese puts two fingers on his shirt—“I have questions. Tell the truth. Do you love her?”
“I want good things for her. I for sure don’t want to hurt her.”
“Answer my question, Amy.”
“Yes. I love her. We don’t say the word ‘love’ to each other. But I love her.” He can’t seem to make eye contact, and instead peers upward at the breeze rustling through the leaves above.
“Second question. Do you still love me?”
This was maximum Reese. Asking such a thing at the moment when she had the ultimate advantage—when he’d just laid out his feelings for another woman. “Yes and no. Some days I still love you and some days I don’t.”
Reese waited, sensing there was more. So he let her have as much of the truth as he could bear. “But the days I don’t love you…I have to work hard to make those days happen. The days I do require nothing of me. You were the most important person in my life for so long, and then…then everything went wrong and we just disappeared to each other. When I think about raising this child with you, well, it feels like a kind of redemption. Romantically, fuck, who knows if we would ever be right for each other again? It all fell apart so badly that I hesitate to even hope for that. But if we weren’t meant to be lovers, it doesn’t mean that we weren’t meant to be family. Every single time I remember the state of things between us, I want to cry. I thought it would fade, but it hasn’t; it’s just changed. If we don’t try again, it’s like our time together…Not only did it end, it was like it never was.”
“You’re the one who disappeared, Amy. Look at yourself.”
He rushes on, over her comment, afraid to lose the moment. “But that’s why I’m trying to see this as an opportunity. Right? What if we could make those years together into something new? All of our past could be the groundwork for something lasting.”