When Amy detransitioned herself, she promised never to let anyone see her as she had seen William that night. Never to pant for inclusion from trans women. Ames wanted no pity and rejected their disgust. But despite Ames’s rigid need for dignity, for all the careful lines he drew to respect the differences in how he lived and how trans women lived, they called to him in a siren song. Whenever a girl passed, the William inside of him begged to be let free, to run toward her pleading pathetically to be noticed, to bask in every moment of her icked-out attention. The obvious answer to keeping other girls’ pity and disgust at bay had been the hardest—the addict’s moment of clarity: Cut off those girls cold turkey. Because a single indulgence, and you’re William.
The past is past to everyone but ghosts.
Except now, hear the whispered call, feel that ache: Girl, you wish.
* * *
—
A temporary chain-link fence rises behind the bench on which they sit in the park, casting fish-scale shadows on Reese’s shoulders and face. “Okay, Daddy-O, so you got some woman pregnant,” Reese says. “I’m still waiting for what that has to do with me.”
The “Daddy-O” indicates half his work of explanation is done: The insult would have no bite if she thought he had come to terms with fatherhood.
“Come on, Reese. Just be civil.”
“Daddy,” Reese says. “You might as well get used to hearing it.”
“Not if you’d listen instead of taking shots at me!”
Reese pulls back. “What do I have to do with it? So far as I can tell, I’m not taking shots at you. I’m defending myself from whatever you called me here to rub in my face.”
“You have everything to do with it!” Ames’s voice rises into an exasperated near-shout so that a couple of passing college girls, maybe a little tipsy, stare at him, then make wide eyes at each other and glance at Reese like: You poor woman. This is how Reese has always fought with him. Preemptive defense. Ames puts his hands on his lap, with the palms facing up. A few months ago, he’d seen an interview with the actress Winona Ryder in which she said that when she wanted to appear unthreatening in her films, she often sat with her hands folded palms up on her lap, because this communicated openness and vulnerability, a gesture that Ryder had credited for her reputation as delicate. Ames has been trying out the gesture ever since, in an attempt to defuse arguments, especially ones where maleness comes across as threatening. Carefully and quietly, he says, “I’m trying to tell you that I want you to consider being a mother to this baby.”
Last week, after Katrina showed him the pregnancy test, he went home and lay in bed like a morose sea lion, moving only to scan through, yet again, Katrina’s only social media account—Instagram. After gazing at Katrina’s face for an hour, he pulled up Reese’s account, as was his habit when lonely or distressed, a habit he’d never quite been able to break. If he went far enough down in her feed, there were pictures of her from when they lived together—all the pictures with him were erased of course, but in many others, he knew that he was standing just off frame. Looking at a shot of her wearing bunny ears from an Easter morning in their apartment, he tried to predict her scoffing reply were he to tell her that he was a father. In that exercise, he was surprised to brush, for the first time in hours, against a feeling like hope. It had only ever been through her, with her, that he could imagine parenthood. Why not again? Reese—the trans woman from whom he’d learned about womanhood—would see his fatherhood and dismiss it. To her, he would always be a woman. By borrowing her vantage, he could almost see himself as a parent: Perhaps one way to tolerate being a father would be to have her constant presence assuring him that he was actually not one. This possibility dovetailed with what he wanted anyway: to be family with Reese once more, in some way. So why not in parenthood? Was it such a wild proposal to contemplate? Were Reese to help raise the child too, everyone would get what they wanted. Katrina would have a commitment to family from her lover, Reese would get a baby, and he, well, he’d get to live up to what they both hoped he could be by being what he already was: a woman but not, a father but not.
“What? You want me to consider being a mother to this baby?” Reese does not have her palms facing up. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Yes it does. Listen to me.” But Ames has not fully convinced himself that his plan makes sense either, that he isn’t speaking out of a deluded panic. That the game pieces for Katrina and Reese that he has been pushing around his mental chessboard bear only dubious relation to the movements possible by the actual Katrina and Reese.
He laid it out. Katrina wanted him to be a father. If Ames could not, in fact, be a father, then Katrina did not relish the idea of being a single parent, and would schedule an abortion. Ames, for his part, wanted to stay with Katrina, and he could envision himself becoming a parent, but not a father. He knew, however, that Katrina didn’t have the queer background to allow for that distinction, and that despite all his best intentions, she would default to the assumptions inherent in a man and a woman raising a child together. Unless he could find a way to escape the gravity of the nuclear family, no matter what he called himself, he’d end up a father. He didn’t need to explain this to Reese. She knew that no matter how you self-identify ultimately, chances are that you succumb to becoming what the world treats you as. “That’s where you come in,” Ames says, allowing for few pauses so that Reese couldn’t interrupt him until he got it all out. “I want you to raise a baby with me, and Katrina. With three of us, it’ll be confusing enough to break the family thing. Katrina won’t know how to see me as anything but a father, but you will; and speaking from experience, your vision, your way of seeing things is infective. Together, maybe we could be a family that works.”
Reese says nothing.
“Think about it, Reese. You could be a mother. You could raise a child. Like we always wanted.”
“I’m going to get up and leave,” Reese says finally. “You’ve lost it. I thought I couldn’t be shocked by your dumbass transformations anymore, but even I couldn’t have predicted that you’d come back to me proposing to become a bigamist. What the actual fuck.” But she doesn’t get up and leave. She doesn’t move at all. He catches his breath, waiting for her to say no, to say that she’d never raise a kid with him, to close the door on the best offer he’d ever have to put on the table. If she wouldn’t accept motherhood from him, she’d never accept anything.
“Is that how little you think of me?” Reese continues after a minute. “That I’d accept some second-rate motherhood? And meanwhile, why the fuck would this other woman carry a baby for a transsexual and an ex-transsexual. Who is this woman? What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing is wrong with her. I don’t even know if she’ll be open to the idea. I haven’t proposed it.”