Perhaps equally important, as a mother, she saw herself finally granted the womanhood that she suspected the goddesses of her childhood took as their natural due. She’d set herself up for it, once. She’d been in a lesbian relationship with a trans woman named Amy—a woman with a good job in tech, and who became so suburban-presentable that when she spoke, you imagined her words in Martha Stewart’s signature typeface. With Amy, Reese had gotten as close to domesticity as she figured possible for a trans girl—the trust and boredom and stability that now had the faded aspect of a dream recalled right after you wake. They even had an apartment by Prospect Park—the kind of bright, airy space that evinced enough good taste and stalwart respectability that the idea of showing adoption agencies where they lived had been one of the lesser obstacles to motherhood.
But now, three years later, as Reese’s odometer clicked up into her midthirties, she began to think about what she called the Sex and the City Problem.
The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.
Yet, for every generation of trans women prior to Reese’s, the Sex and the City Problem was an aspirational problem. Only the rarest, most stealth, most successful of trans women ever had the chance to even confront it. The rest were barred from all four options at the outset. No jobs, no lovers, no babies, and while a trans woman might have been a muse, no one wanted art in which she spoke for herself. And so, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and graves into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability.
When Reese lived with Amy, she aspired to the Sex and the City Problem herself. It felt radical for her, as a trans woman, to luxuriate in the contemplation of how bourgeois to become. It felt like a success not to have that choice made for her. Then Amy detransitioned and it all fell apart.
Now futurelessness had crept back into view. Now Reese made other women’s prizes her own bliss, and made babies out of viruses.
“All right,” she says, after they’d been driving for about ten minutes.
“All right, what?”
“All right. Let’s see if you can get me pregnant.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Her cowboy starts to say something, but she cuts him off. “Only, if we’re going to do this, you’ve got to start treating me better. You’ve got to treat me like the mother of your child.”
He reaches over to pinch her side. “Mother of my child? C’mon. You don’t want that. If I put a tadpole in the well, then you’re gonna want to be the knocked-up sixteen-year-old from the bad side of town. You want everyone knowing it’s ’cause you’re an easy slut.”
She squirms away from his pinch. “I’m serious. Treat me better.”
He frowns, but keeps his eyes on the road. “Yeah. Okay. I will. Let’s get some food,” he says, braking at a red light.
“Really?” They were driving to her neighborhood, Greenpoint, and he often wouldn’t eat with her in that area. He knew too many people who lived there. Once she forced him to go out to a vegan buffet by her house, and he barely made eye contact the whole time. His gaze instead jerked to the door whenever someone new came into the place. After that, she let him drive her south, or sometimes into Queens. Never Manhattan, never Williamsburg, where his wife made her social life.
But now, she says he can fuck her without a condom and all his rules go out the window. Reese has a moment of satisfaction. Her body is the ultimate trump card.
“Yeah,” he says, “maybe you could run in somewhere and pick up some takeout.”
Of course. Takeout. With him waiting in the car. She nods. “Sure, what would you like?”
* * *
—
In the Thai restaurant, she doesn’t order anything for herself. He loves curries, spiced to a barely edible Scoville level. She does not. She’ll make herself something at home after he leaves. She’s scrolling through Instagram when her phone rings, and it’s a number she doesn’t recognize, some out-of-state area code. Her cowboy uses Google Voice so her texts don’t show up on his iPad at home, which his wife sometimes borrows, and Google often routes the calls through weird numbers.
She hits the green Answer button and brings the phone to her ear. “I got you green curry with beef, five-star spiciness,” she says by way of a greeting.
“Hey, that’s nice of you, but if you remember, I was always such a wuss about spice.” A man’s voice. Warm and smooth, but none of her cowboy’s drawl, which he somehow managed to keep, even through his years in New York.
She lowers the phone, checks the number. “Who is this?”
The man’s tone changes, not quite apologetic, but inviting. “Reese. Hi. Sorry, it’s Ames.”
Out in the car she can see her cowboy, the glow of his own phone illuminating the glasses he only wore to read. She turns away, as if he might overhear her through the glass windows of his car, the plate glass of the restaurant, over the clang of the kitchen and the talk of the scattered customers.
“Why are you calling, Ames? I didn’t think we were speaking anymore.”
“I know.”
She waits, holds her lips together. She can hear him breathing. She wants to make him talk first.
“I’m not calling to bother you,” he presses on. “I was hoping for your help.”
“My help? I didn’t know I had anything left for you to take.”
He pauses. “Take from you?” His bafflement sounds genuine. This was his whole problem. That he couldn’t see what he had led her to lose. “Maybe I deserve that. But I promise I’m not calling for that. It’s almost the opposite.”