GOOD COMMUNITY, BAD COMMUNITY, INSIDE/OUT

“So that’s basically what’s been going on,” Tracey summed up news of work and family life in a long-distance phone conversation with his best friend, Michael. “Oh, yeah, one other thing—I’m a woman.”

We gradually stopped socializing as a couple. The clumsiness of making excuses for one or the other of us—usually him—to be absent from any gathering was preferable to being in company with others, where I would find it excruciating to present ourselves as still married and Tracey would find it excruciating to present himself as male. We had separate friends the other didn’t see. Tracey had many confidantes who were active participants in his life, as cheerleaders, fashion consultants, wellsprings of cast-off clothes. I lived with our ordeal in isolation for many months before I began to let others in, finally telling one friend everything and a few others something, basically that our marriage was a sham and that I couldn’t bring myself to say why. There were people who considered us both friends, but by the time our marriage disintegrated there was no one we both felt close to, wanted to be close to, no one we both sought out as an ally. No one except Michael.

Michael had been Tracey’s friend for over fifteen years. Over time he had become my friend, our family’s friend, our children’s honorary uncle. Because he lived across the country, he was long oblivious of what was happening in a marriage he had once admired, as he would not have been after five minutes in our presence. It was during that long-distance phone conversation that he first heard about the little glitch in his and Tracey’s claim on male bonding. Michael’s memory is that in the midst of routine catching up, Tracey told him, “Oh, yeah, and I’m a woman.”

Michael flew out to see us. It was spring, roughly midway through our two years of post-marriage cohabitation. I wouldn’t have any idea what time of year his visit happened if I didn’t have the photographs Michael took and sent me after: the children and tulips, bright flashes of color against gray skies.

In a packed weekend he spent time with the children, time with Tracey, and time with me. Because he already knew what was going on and I didn’t have to be the one to drop the bomb, because he had a better sense than anyone outside our family of what we were losing, Michael was easier for me to talk with at this point than many of the friends I saw regularly.

I took him out to dinner at a little restaurant desperately trying to pretend it was in New York or San Francisco and not on a sleepy New England main street. Over our inventive fish entrées I spilled everything that had been going on—from my perspective. Until that evening, Michael had taken only the trans-eye view of our situation. But now I told him, “Tracey thinks I’m just going to go along with anything he does. He thinks he’ll gender-bend at will and I’ll bend myself around it—that we’ll stay married!”

“I guess I thought so, too,” Michael said quietly. “At first I was just shocked when he told me. But then I assumed you’d stay married and go along with whatever he wanted. I never thought about how this must feel to you.”

Michael told me about an exchange he’d had with twelve-year-old Adam that afternoon.

“Have you ever heard that sometimes a man feels like he’s a woman?” Adam abruptly asked him.

“Yes,” Michael said. He’d heard. He waited for Adam to continue, but after a brief silence Adam changed the subject and spoke of other things. Michael was the sole person to tell me about this brief conversation. Tracey, who was present as well, never mentioned it.

Adam’s remark shocked me. Did it spring from his observations? Overheard conversations? I’d been telling myself that though the kids might be aware that something was wrong in our home, they didn’t know what that something was. At the same time, I was increasingly troubled by Tracey’s erratic behavior with the children, and I shared some of that with Michael now. Among other stories, I told him about a recent incident involving Lilly.

“Guy-woman?” My toddler looked up, frowning, from the lunch I’d just set before her.

I froze.

“Guy-woman?” she persisted. It was a question. At the age of two she wasn’t given to speaking in complete sentences. Something had confused, maybe disturbed her. She was asking me to explain it.

I had arrived home minutes before. She had spent the morning alone with Tracey, who now bustled in and out of the kitchen, getting ready to leave, a little smile playing about his lips. This, actually, is how I always picture the Tracey of those two post-marriage years of living together: getting ready to leave. Sometimes still present in body, never in mind, enigmatically pleased by thoughts and plans only he could know. I looked at Tracey, waiting for a reaction to our daughter’s words. He had none. He was oblivious to Lilly’s question or was choosing to ignore it.

Meanwhile, she wasn’t giving up. “Guy-woman?”

I had no idea what to say. I could only think, How does she know? She seemed to be troubled by something she had seen. I didn’t say anything in particular to Lilly that day or on the several subsequent occasions when she repeated her question. I reacted with stupefied silence, then changed the subject, distracted her. Tracey was still living as a man, certainly in our community. It would be a long time before he would begin to present himself as a woman in our neck of the woods and even longer before our children or I would see him “dressed.” I had begun to realize that I didn’t know what he was getting up to when he was away from home. Now it terrified me to think I might not know what he was getting up to when he was home—and I wasn’t.

I brought Lilly’s question to the therapist I had recently begun to see. “If she’s asking that,” the therapist said firmly, “he’s dressing up with her. There is no other possibility.” Armed with this professional opinion, I confronted Tracey.

“Why is Lilly asking about a ‘guy-woman’?”

As had become usual at this stage, he responded with immediate anger. “I’ve never heard her say anything like that!”

“Well, she’s said it to me. You don’t know why? You’ve never dressed up in front of her?”

For a moment, it was clear that he was about to deny that he had ever done anything of the kind. Then he seemed to catch himself. With just as much belligerence as before, he snapped, “Yes. I dress when I’m alone with her. I didn’t think she would be able to tell you.”

Tracey refused to believe that there was anything wrong with dressing up, secretly, in women’s clothes with a toddler who thought of him as her father. With relying on her to be too inarticulate to communicate her confusion. He refused to hear the distress in her repeated question. Like me, he told his therapist what had been going on. As on several other occasions, he reported that she backed him up, condescended to me, and saw no cause for concern. “She said there’s nothing wrong with dressing up with Lilly behind your back, but that I should just tell you I won’t do it again if that makes you feel better.”

If Tracey’s therapist wasn’t worried about Tracey’s judgment, Michael was. The things he heard from me that night, the details of our family life that Tracey hadn’t mentioned, made Michael concerned about all the members of our family. It also made him angry. In the property division splitting couples go through, the allocation of friends must surely be most painful. In our case, the political correctness quotient meant that much of what I had thought of as my community went to Tracey. In an unforeseen development, I got Michael.

When we left the restaurant that night and got in my car to drive home, Michael looked dazed by all that I’d told him. But not so dazed that he didn’t ask, rather anxiously, if I wouldn’t like him to drive.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m perfectly fine. What makes you think otherwise?”

“Just the fact that you had two glasses of wine with dinner,” he explained. “And that you’ve forgotten to turn on your headlights.”

For the first time in what felt like forever, I laughed. Sober, if a bit preoccupied by this first outpouring of my private anguish, I turned on the lights and negotiated the country roads home as smoothly as ever.

The next day, the last of Michael’s visit, he and Tracey went for a long walk together. Later, Michael recalled that Tracey took this opportunity to tell him that he refused to leave our home. That he vehemently denied the necessity for our marriage to end. Michael’s concern for the children and for me would ultimately alienate Tracey and silence his confidences. But at this stage of the game, Tracey still valued their friendship and could view Michael as his, or perhaps our, mutual ally. Michael is a therapist, an eloquent and persuasive speaker. During this visit he had a profound impact on Tracey. An impact I can now see as a powerful illustration of the benefits of letting people in over isolation. (Okay, duh. But that was me: I needed to have this powerfully illustrated.) On our own, Tracey and I were going round and round. Deadlocked. Dead-ended. Michael was a bracing blast of oxygen into our stale impasse. He found the words to make Tracey begin to see our situation in a new light. He explained to Tracey that I was living a lie. I no longer had a husband or a marriage. I was outwardly still pretending that I did, and the pretense had become untenable.

“The outside has to match the inside.” That’s what Michael told Tracey.

The outside has to match the inside. With great reluctance, I was coming to understand that this was true for Tracey. In the Valley of the Politically Correct, it was a right that everyone would ultimately fall all over themselves to insist on for him. Michael was the first person to apply that right to me.