Nuvein Fiction | A Man Is Just A Woman by Elaine Hatfield

A Man Is Just A Woman
by Elaine Hatfield

About the Author

Elaine Hatfield is a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii. Her first novel, Rosie was published in June 2000 by Sterling Press. She has published more than thirty short stories in American, Canadian, Australian, and Indian literary magazines such as Aim, Aura Literary/Arts Review, fourW, Green's, Nite-Writer Äôs Literary Arts Journal, Manushi, Phoebe, Pleiades, Studio, and Tucumcari Literary Review. Two of her books have won the American Psychological Foundation's National Media Award. In recent years she has received Distinguished Scientist Awards (for a lifetime of scientific achievement) from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, and the University of Hawaii. Nuvein Magazine is proud to publish her work A Man Is Just A Woman, which will also be available soon on audio on the Nuvein Magazine Audio CD coming out in January 2003. To request your copy please email Enrique Diaz at editor@nuvein.com.

         She met him at a poetry reading and, for a while, he was everything she had ever wanted.
         Susan had only been teaching for two years when Mark (Beaky) Harriman, her principal at Stevenson High, assigned her to develop a Human Sexuality course over the summer break. Teenage pregnancies, socially-transmitted diseases, street drugs, and even AIDS had begun to creep past Stevenson's leafy borders. So Mr. Harriman had said that the "only" favor he'd ask of her during the summer break was to develop a sex syllabus that "pulled no punches" while, of course, "being sensitive to Stevenson's parents' concerns." That was all.
         Susan was always amused when the self-centered assumed they were requesting the merest trifle, when in fact they were demanding the impossible: "All I'm asking for is your love"; "Just one more chance"; "All I need is a small advance—just a few thousand." Susan tried to escape by protesting that she didn't know anything about sex, but Beaky Harriman had a solution at the ready. Each summer the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana sponsored a two-week workshop on sex education. He had reserved a place for her.
         Actually, Susan ended up enjoying her time at the Institute. She usually took a rather long time to make friends. At mixers she tended to disappear into the wallpaper. She had once overheard a Stevenson matron's introduction that sort of summed things up: "And over there is Susan, . . . uh, Susan somebody or other. Never mind, she's nobody." Susan was, she had to admit, "nobody." Her students sometimes referred to her as "old Dobbin" behind her back, and the description was apt. Her wispy, cornsilk hair persisted in sticking out at odd angles above what must be confessed was a bit of a horse face. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were so blonde they were almost invisible and her large cornflower blue eyes gazed placidly out of a mud-lark face. Dobbin was definitely a dray, not a stallion. But once people got to know Susan, they quickly changed their mind about her. She was sweet-natured and kind, but with a wicked sense of humor. These traits had won her few passionate lovers, but she had rafts of chums.
         At the Kinsey Institute, though, people formed fast-friendships fast. Susan met Tony De Cano and most of her fellow students Sunday night at a get-acquainted reception in Morrison Hall. They sat around talking and sorting through their orientation packets to see if there was anything doing at the University during their stay. They were thrilled when they found that W. S. Merwin would be doing a reading that evening. They decided to have dinner at The Tao and then walk over to the University Theatre together. Susan and Tony got on well together. They found all the same things charming, touching, or irritating. When Merwin began to recount the Comte d'Allers's (Fatty's) nefarious schemes while he was mayor of Saint-Val for raising money to preserve the town's ancient buildings—starting with his own château, of course—Tony started to smile, his mouth twitching in an effort to repress excessive amusement. But Susan caught the expression with a sideglance, and it was too late: both were convulsed with laughter. They couldn't stop. They spluttered and giggled and pinched their lips tight together to stop themselves; but nothing helped. Finally they had to leave the hall.
         Soon they were looking for each other in the mornings so they could sit together during all the meetings, whispering and nudging each other with their elbows everytime something tickled their funny bones. And at the Kinsey meetings there was a lot to smile about. . . . The Institute didn't fool around. Classes were scheduled every day from 8:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. The participants previewed a mind-numbing selection of graphic videos, evidently so that once they knew all there was to know about sex they could select the best of the aids for their classes. Somehow Susan didn't think that any of the films would receive a "Sensitive to Stevenson Parents' Concerns" (SSPC) rating. They watched: Dr. Boggs, wearing scrubs, solemnly demonstrating "self-pleasuring" techniques on anatomically correct figures. Hunky young gay men making athletic love in bedrooms ablaze with more flickering red votive candles than Susan had seen at Easter midnight mass. They watched men and women, men and men, women and women, and men and women all in a jumble, playing at love. "Love is a many gendered thing," Tony whispered after the last video. Susan choked back her laughter. Most of the sex films seemed to be accompanied by sitar music. Evidently the films had been shot in the l970s when Ravi Shankar was at his peak. There is nothing particularly erotic about the twanging sounds of sitar, of course, but soon all the audience had to hear was the throbbing, off-key rhythms and they'd respond with spontaneous giggling and good natured cat-calls: "Bring on the girls"; ". . . GUYS"; "Sing Melancholy Baby!"
         The group listened to sober lectures on the STD's: the old-time favorites—syphilis and gonorrhea—and the newer villains, chlamydia, herpes, and AIDS. The teachers were given free samples of condoms in red, yellow, and green; ribbed and smooth, lambskin and latex and a sample packet of the new one-size-fits-all female condoms. The gigantic size of the latter set off yet another round of nervous laughter. It was loads of fun.
         In the evenings, Susan and Tony sometimes went to dinner at The Tao (there wasn't much else open), and took long walks around the Arboretum.
         They spent one rainy afternoon looking at the Institute's collection of ancient pornographic films. They started with the oldest films ever made. They were old silent films, flickering in black and white. They saw several mini-cartoons in which the best-beloved children's cartoon characters—Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop and Krazy Kat—cavorted in a startling fashion. In one early movie, the newest invention, a dangerously unstable airplane, pretended to buzz a nude bather, who had assumed she was safe from prying eyes. In her attempt to keep the pilot from seeing more than he should, she managed to reveal more than she hid.
         Most of the other Institute participants had been watching a Boston Celtics-Detroit Pistons' game, but when that ended they straggled into the video room. The group looked through the collection of tapes and decided to view the first porn film ever made in color: "Loves a Licking." The scene opened with Lance "Big Boy" Cannon just about to consummate his marriage to Hot Honey, who was naked except for her bridal veil. Evidently, the thick-witted but generously endowed hero had been too busy with wedding preparations to rehearse, for he didn't seem to have his part down. He looked groggily at Honey's breast. He seemed to recall that he was supposed to do something, but what? He tried to sneak a look at the cue-cards cunningly placed on the pillow to his right. He strained to make out his lines. He sounded out the words. Clearly not a speed reader. He had it! Then he reached out and pinched Honey's right nipple. Like a safecracker. Two turns to the right, one to the left. That should do it. Then, back to the script. Now, Lance was stalled, looking befuddled.
         “My God!” Susan whispered. “What a performance!” The rowdy crowd evidently agreed with her, because they soon started shouting out instructions.
         “In the front,” one guy yelled. “Right there, below her navel.”
         “Draw him a map,” another one shouted.
         “Shussssh!” the audience hissed.
         The last film of the evening, "Sexual Variations," was a stunner. It illustrated "fist fucking." A man's brawny fist and forearm seemed to disappear inside his partner. To the accompaniment of jarring sitar music, of course. There was a collective gasp from the audience. Silence. Anguished "Argggghs." Then a cheerful Bronx cheer from the audience: "And his Timex is still ticking!" stopped the action cold. Everyone went home chuckling.
         Weekends the whole group went out to dinner. They drove over to Molly's Cafe in the outskirts of town. After dinner, people came home a little drunk and slightly out of control. Sometimes they went out dancing at Buddy's Tavern, inventing goofy dance steps on the spur of the moment. Somehow it seemed appropriate to just jump up and down, "doing the jump shot," or "building a house," mimicking moving concrete blocks, hammering, stringing wire, and so on.
         More often the whole gang went swimming. The Kinsey staff tried to keep the attendees in check: "There will be no nude swimming from 9:00 to ll:00 p.m. tonight," they'd announce in a firm tone at the end of the afternoon meetings, "We mean it!" Susan was never sure if the announcement was meant as a back-handed invitation to do the forbidden or as a warning. If it was a warning, why announce the time? In any case, people dutifully showed up at 9 p.m. buck naked.
         Back home in Ann Arbor, Susan often sauntered along State Street at dusk, in the hope of spotting strollers with red striped hair, nose rings, or something that would add a little excitement to her rather dull life. She did the same thing in the natatorium, only here the swimmers were nude. Such an array of bodies! One old man, sparse of hair and full of figure, had the tiniest penis she had ever seen. Of course she hadn't exactly seen a huge array of them. Another old man with a huge barrel chest was more generously endowed. One woman was so fat that her body reminded Susan of a waterfall. Rolls of fat fell in waves, riffing over her triple chins, cascading over the contours of her breasts, tumbling over her stomach, finally coming to rest at her quivering thighs. One young woman had the contours of Granny in the Playboy cartoons. Susan delighted in sneaking little peeks at all the variations. Of course, a privileged few young men and women were absolutely gorgeous. She didn't spend too long looking at them.
         Susan and Tony eventually started slipping shyly into the water, tossing their bathing suits on the ledge of the pool, and swimming together in the dark. It was very romantic.
         On Tuesday, during the second week of the conference, Susan and Tony sat in on a panel discussion of "The Transgendered: New Perspectives." The Institute had invited a group of ¢‘™ and ™‘¢ cross-dressers and transsexuals to come to Bloomington to talk about their lives and to answer questions. Susan was transfixed. She arrived for the symposium a little early and so she stopped in the ladies' room to comb her hair, powder her nose, and go to the bathroom. She had just entered one of the stalls and was beginning to unfasten her skirt, when she happened to look up. She exhaled a little shriek. There, hulking over the partition in the stall next to her, obviously amused, was a woman, sort of. Her chrome orange hair was whipped and frothed into a wedding-cake confection. It must be a wig, Susan thought. It had to be a wig. The woman's face was pale except for her eyes (which were rimmed with a smudge of kohl) and her mouth was a swipe of tangerine Day-Glo lipstick. She tottered on four-inch platform spikes. No wonder she towered above Susan. Susan realized she must be one of the panel members. "How do you do?" she said primly, refastening her skirt. She didn't have to go to the bathroom after all, she decided.
         The Trans panel went well. Most of the participants were very sweet. They talked about their childhoods and the certainty they'd had early on that they didn't belong. The years spent in psychotherapy attempting to adjust to the "inevitable." Then, finally, the decision to switch genders: to begin to experiment with actually living as the opposite sex to make sure that was what they wanted, to begin hormone replacement therapy and, sometimes, to opt for surgery. A few members of the panel reveled in being out there, in everyone's face (obviously the choice of the man in the bathroom). Most panelists said that what they wanted was to "fit in" and become invisible. Tony whispered to her that he'd chosen to be invisible. Susan laughed and said that when she was in the bathroom she'd have preferred invisibility too. "Plastic man," she said, "has always been my role model. He fits in anywhere."
         Then, Susan challenged Tony and a couple of his chums to a bet. The Transgender panelists consisted of two distinct groups: Tall, somewhat husky women (who had once been men); and tiny little men (who had once been women). "Which group will get the most respect?" Susan asked. "Men or women? Nature or nurture?" Usually, people treat men with more deference. There are a lot of reasons why this is so. Men have a habit of command. They talk more and they talk louder. They interrupt. They spread out in space. And, people treat men with more respect. They pay rapt attention to men's every word and ignore women. In large groups, Susan had read in Psychology Today, when men ask a question, people in the audience smile their encouragement. When woman ask the same kind of question, audience members look annoyed and roll their eyes. "What would this audience do?" Susan asked. Tony bet that since the Kinsey audience was liberal in the extreme, they would treat ¢‘™s and ™‘¢s with equal deference. Susan disagreed. She was willing to place her bets on nurture—the tall, husky women would get the respect. Both turned out to be wrong. In this panel, clothes made the man (or ™‘¢). The audience hung on every word of the tiny, little men, and ignored, interrupted, or dismissed the big broads.
         When the conference ended, Tony and Susan couldn't bring themselves to say good-bye. She had to go back to Ann Arbor and he had to stay in Bloomington for a few more months at least, but they decided to keep dating long-distance. They traded e-mail notes, ran up huge Sprint bills, and penned impassioned love letters. They were wonderfully compatible.
         During Christmas break, they decided to meet "midway" in San Francisco for a two week tryst. In San Francisco, every day was crammed with fun. They had coffee and croissants at Green's in Fort Mason. In the mornings, they hiked through the Strybing Arboretum, strolling along little paths, up to their ears in sunflowers, stream violets, sulfur flowers, and poppies. At the Cartoon Art Museum, they had a chance to giggle over strips from the l890s (The Katzenjammer Kids and Mutt and Jeff), the early l900s (Popeye, Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, and Little Orphan Annie), the l930s (Lil' Abner), the 50s (Pogo, Peanuts), down on to the present day—admiring the bittersweet humor of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. They went out in the evenings. They saw Herbert Blomstedt's transfixing last performance of the Missa Solemnis, the Opéra de Lyon's spirited production of L' Amour des Trois Oranges, and they logged in ten hours of Kieslowski's Dekalog at a Roxie marathon. They cheered (the pure-as-the-driven-snow heroes) and booed (the dastardly villains) in Beach Blanket Babylon, and saw a show at Finocchio's in North Beach. They had dinner at the Stinking Rose, La Folie á Deux, and Basta Pasta.
         They decided to get married.
         Then, in the midst of all this, it almost fell apart. Tony asked the fatal question: "Would Sue's parents be able to handle the fact that he was transsexual?" Susan couldn't handle the question. Her first thought was that Tony was joking. She managed a feeble "ha ha." It was no joke. Why hadn't Tony told her? she asked. But he had, he insisted, perplexed. She had known from the first. "When?" she asked, incredulous. "Don't you remember? When the Trans panel talked about possible life styles. Then. I told you I was transgendered and had chosen to be invisible." He was right, he had warned her. She just hadn't taken him seriously.
Susan's first thought was that she would have to break up with Tony. But that seemed crazy. How many times had she said to her girlfriends, when they said they were intimidated by some man or other: "Men are just like women. They simply come in bigger packages. Try thinking of Joe as a woman. You wouldn't get upset if a woman wasn't free on Wednesday night . . . had to cancel a date . . . . would you? You'd try again." Tony was just a man in a smaller package. She agonized for two weeks. Would she really dump the most perfect man she had ever met just because he happened to have been a woman?
         So they married.
         Susan's parents attended their May wedding and gave Tony their exuberant stamp of approval. Susan did not, of course, mention that Tony had once lived a very different kind of life. Tony's parents did not attend the wedding. They were both in their late 80s and as fragile as spun glass, and so—just as Tony had decided not to tell them he was switching genders—he decided not to risk telling them he was getting marrying. He was afraid the shock might kill them. The De Cano's knew that Toni was living with Susan in Ann Arbor, but they assumed that she was just a dear friend. They still dropped sweet little notes to Antonia or Toni now and then, or dime store notepaper bordered with blue pansies, reassuring him that someday the right man would come along.
         For the first three years of their marriage, Susan and Tony were wonderfully happy. Susan had finally found a soul-mate. They had to be apart in the daytime, of course, but they didn't enjoy it. When they saw something that delighted them, they kept wishing the other were there, so they could nudge each other and giggle about it. Every night after work, they hurried home, had a drink, and puttered around making dinner together. Often they experimented with something slightly exotic. They stirred, stuffed, shirred, and sizzled Haka platters, Mongolian hot pots, Sushi, Ethiopian breads and Hawaiian kalua pig and poi. After dinner, they settled down to snuggle and to watch one of Tony's latest foreign film finds.
         Tony was their cultural guide. He conscientiously read reviews of all the latest concerts, films, and exhibits in the New York Times and the Michigan Daily and ordered the best of everything from Borders Bookstore.

         For Susan, who had only sparse experience, Tony was a wonderful lover. He thought she was beautiful. He gently touched her eyebrows, eyes, and the curve of her lips. They made leisurely, languorous love. Just the way she liked.
         They horsed around a lot. They invented droll characters with silly personalities. Tony spoke for "Jeremy Just," earnest, true-blue, and oh-so-responsible. Obviously an oldest child. Then there was "Newt-the-Neglected," who whined "What about me?" at the slightest provocation. A born martyr. Susan's favorite, of course, was the dapper "Moishe Moskowitz" (aka "Mousie Boy"), a tiny Fred Astaire clone, a gentilhomme in tuxedo. Susan invented some little feminine characters too—imaginary daughters she professed to despise. There was LuLu, clinging, doting on Dad, who she wanted all for herself. LuLu's nemesis, her twin sister and dark side actually, was Girl, evil of eye and razor of tongue. Girl: Woman Warrior, Amazon, and sooooooh "PMS-y" crabby. The mythical Girl was often to be found sitting on the edge of the bed, furious, arms crossed, to "show them." And, of course, there was Kat Mandu, a hot little number, a mouse in a small black garter belt. Everyone loved Kat, even Mom. It was all very silly and lots of fun.
         Then, a serious problem arose. Tony's father Frank had Alzheimer's for quite some time. Recently he had started to get worse. The family doctor said he probably had only a month or two to live, at most. Tony's mother Teresa was ill, too. She had had two strokes and she wasn't expected to live too much longer. She couldn't cope. Tony's parents were hoping he could come home for just a few months and sort things out. Tony knew it was his duty to go. But the idea of going without Susan was more than he could bear. Both of them agreed. They would go together.
But there was another, minor problem. Tony had never told his parents that he was now not Antonia but Anthony. He had also never told them that he and Susan were married. They still thought that she was that nice young school teacher that Toni roomed with. They were still hoping Toni would marry and settle down. Now was obviously not the time to try to tell them. Both he and Susan realized that when he went home he should simply adopt his old persona. Antonia or Anthony, he was still Tony. He would look the same (he had always worn short hair), dress the same (in a striped shirt and jeans, just as he did now), and act the same. But, of course, things would be somewhat different. Back to the old Nature/Nurture debate. Did Susan think she could manage it?
         Also, Susan would have to pretend to be a friend, not a lover. Could she manage that?
         Susan could not see why not. She had known of his previous life for three years, and it certainly hadn't caused any problems so far. Their silly little make believe characters—Jeremy, Girl, and Kat—flirted with gender reversals and incest all the time. They delighted in gender diversity. Susan didn't see how it could possibly cause any problems now. She reminded Tony of Socrates' dictum: Women are "but men turn'd outside in"; men, "women with their inside out." She wasn't going to give up the chance to be with Tony because he was a little inside out, was she?
         Tony's parents turned out to be extremely sweet. They were a matched pair. Teresa reminded her of a little Tasmanian devil. She had bright anthracite eyes, a tiny snub nose, and a small chin. She was intelligent, energetic, and filled with devilment. Frank was definitely an Emperor Tamarin monkey. He had round cinnamon eyes, the skin underneath a bruised sienna. His thick, white walrus mustache, which twisted down at the ends, was just like the Tamarin's.
         There was never a dramatic moment at the De Cano's when Susan started thinking of Tony as Antonia; no single moment when passionate love was lost. It was just that over the two months that they cared for Tony's parents—as Toni caressed Teresa and Frank, deferred softly to the old Tamarin patriarch and conspired girlishly with her mother about how to deal with him—slowly, invisibly, all was lost. At some point, Susan began to think of Toni as a girlfriend and not as a lover. She couldn't even identify when the change happened, but once the "click" occurred, somehow she could never manage to feel passionately about him again. She loved Toni, but she was no longer in love with Tony.
         Susan and Toni were sensible people of course. Susan tried talking to herself. She reminded herself that once they got back to Ann Arbor all this would change. She just had to be patient. But months passed and her feelings remained the same. Tony hadn't changed, but Susan had. She scolded herself. How could she let Tony's sacrifice spoil everything? It was so unfair. It was, but she couldn't help herself. It shouldn't matter. But it did.
         In the end, Susan and Toni surrendered. In March, they decided to divorce. Men may be "just women in larger packages" (or in Tony's case "the same size packaging"), but for Susan, in the end, it was the logo that turned out to be everything.