LAST KISS

Two weeks after Tracey moved out, I had a birthday, not the best one I can recall. A friend brought me flowers and chocolates shaped like frogs wearing tiny crowns.

“Because,” she said, “you married the prince who turned into a frog.”

*   *   *

When I think of our intimate relationship at its best—say, making love on the rug in front of the fireplace the winter we lived in Oregon, as we spent any number of evenings after our older children were in bed and where we conceived our youngest child—I see it in hazy, soft focus. I see the flames, the glow of firelight. I don’t feel the heat. I don’t taste raw sexual desire. I don’t hear—anything. Tracey didn’t talk, during or about sex. Talk about sex made him uncomfortable. Because he didn’t, I didn’t.

During one of our early conversations about his relationship to his body the summer our lives unraveled, I blurted out, apropos of nothing, that when we got together in our late teens I expected him to relax over time. “I thought you’d get more comfortable and eventually we’d be able to talk about sex the way I did with my friends and boyfriends in high school. I waited for it to happen. But it never did happen. You never relaxed. After a while I realized that we would never have that kind of openness. It made me sad, but I accepted it. I gave up on it. I stopped waiting.”

Having blurted this out, I felt confused. I added, “I don’t know why I said that.”

Tracey nodded.

For me this felt like a major admission. Even to say we didn’t talk about sex was talking about sex. It felt taboo to say it. To admit there had been a barrier all along in our relationship. To say what amounted to: You’re sexually uptight. If our marriage had been a place where Tracey’s true gender identity went unrecognized, it had also been a place where my sexuality had not found full expression.

I don’t know what Tracey thought of this because he didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem to make him uncomfortable or defensive. On the contrary. If it made any impression at all, it would have bolstered his argument that he had in some way never been present in our marriage. It could have made him feel that he had failed me, but failing me was no longer his concern. Much less to his liking was another conversation in which I protested that he had been an obviously willing partner in an active intimate relationship with me for over twenty years, that it wasn’t hard to tell when a man didn’t wish to engage sexually with a woman, and that such indicators had never occurred between our sheets. Tracey didn’t want to hear that sort of observation. The reality that he had noticeably been with me as a man for over twenty years didn’t fit into his new story about himself.

In truth, I don’t think any of this much mattered one way or the other. To Tracey, that is. It mattered to me. I was caught up in parsing our relationship. Tracey was busy re-creating Tracey. What did the man he had been for over forty years have to do with that?

*   *   *

The way Tracey saw it, he was changing one little rule of play (his gender) and I was running away from the game. My sexuality was not at issue. That is, not for Tracey. His vague implication was that we’d work things out in bed—or not. Tracey offered as a model a woman he’d heard about who stayed with her trans husband and gave up on intimacy altogether, inside or outside of the marriage.

“Why couldn’t we continue to live together like that couple?” he wanted to know.

“What if you decide you don’t want to be with a woman?” I asked him. “What if you end up wanting a man?” I had read that the post-operative sexuality of transsexuals is difficult to predict, with roughly a third continuing to be attracted to the gender they were always attracted to, a third switching gears, and a third having no sexual inclinations whatsoever. “What if I bend and twist and wrap myself around this thing just to stay with you and in the end you don’t want me?”

Tracey smiled and without hesitation said, in a bemused tone, the words he’d already said to our son: “Of course, divorce is always an option.”

My therapist, herself a lesbian, assured me that my sexuality was not something I could switch on demand. My feeling was that if I had been a lesbian, I would have been a lesbian—I wouldn’t have been with a man. And if I did want to be with a woman, then I would want to be with a woman—and that was what Tracey was not. Though it proved remarkably difficult for me to do it, at some point in this process I had to admit to myself that Tracey was no longer a man. He also wasn’t, for me never will be, a woman.

So why couldn’t I just give up on a sexual life for the sake of an intact family? Though usually for different reasons, people do it every day. There’s a lot of support for giving up on one’s sexuality, as a woman, as a married woman, as a long-married woman. There is very little support, very few models, for not giving up. I myself had relinquished the hope of the kind of intimate connection, communication, passion, that I knew on some not quite conscious level I really wanted and was capable of. That should have made it easier to give up on sexuality altogether. Shouldn’t it? But it didn’t. Maybe I’d given up too much, too easily, without anyone asking. Now someone was asking.

I’ve always had a problem with people telling me to give up. Telling me that wanting something I want is wanting too much. I’m not talking about wanting the moon and I’m not talking about wanting a Porsche, not that there is anything wrong with wanting the moon or a Porsche, these just don’t happen to be the sorts of wants I’m talking about here. I’m talking about wanting something that is elemental, something that, when I look around me, is quite ordinary to want and indeed to have—for other people. I grew up working class, and my parents did not have upwardly mobile dreams for their daughter. They didn’t get why I needed to go college. If I had to go, what was wrong with secretarial courses at a local community college? “Why isn’t that good enough for you?” My parents couldn’t understand ambition as a driving force, a force to which things like pessimism are sacrificed. There were family stories—to be sure these were short stories—of relinquished dreams in both their distant pasts. They were only telling me that I didn’t need what they had shelved themselves.

Tracey turned everything in our lives upside down and inside out to get what he wanted. To be himself, he said. So it’s ironic that he expected me to … er, cut off an essential part of myself, leave behind a vital part of life, in order to stay with him. But another way to look at it is that Tracey was asking me to give up on something that at this point he didn’t feel the necessity for himself. I realize this now. He had lost what sex drive he’d once had. Sexuality is lodged in the body, and Tracey was an unhappy camper in his. He had probably never been a fully realized sexual being. He had ceased to be a partial one. He couldn’t understand sex.

None of my friends have had even remote experience of anything like my specific situation, but for a long while it wouldn’t have mattered if they had—I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone anything anyhow. Knowing no one who’d been where I was, I went where everyone in need of information about (or fellow sufferers of) anything goes these days: online. At first I found nothing but sites advising men about where they could find women’s shoes and hosiery to fit them. Then I tried a site where transsexuals and their family members communicated with one another. For a while I read the postings on the bulletin board for people who had been known as husbands and wives before being reduced to significant others, then further marked down to “SOs.” Actually, “SO?” seemed an apt designation for my role. With the exception of a single, elderly man, all the participants were women. In a fringe twist on “Stand by Your Man” (Even When He Isn’t One), the women told themselves and one another that they owed it to their spouses to eat whatever was dished out. Yes, their husbands were putting them through hell. Yes, they seemed to care only for themselves. Yes, they could be emotionally abusive. But didn’t their husbands really have it much worse? Wasn’t it a wife’s job to be supportive—no matter what? One woman protested that she couldn’t stay with her husband, he’d told her that he was really a heterosexual woman and planned to look for a man after the great transformation. From a fellow sufferer she got this response: Stay with him anyway. Huh? I wanted to tell them, Stop taking this on yourself! But I never entered the fray. Not just because they wouldn’t want to hear what I had to say. The almost unendurable grief they described was too familiar. And who was I, after swearing no more, no more, to tell anyone else when it was time to move on?

When I did start talking with friends about Tracey and the how and why of ending our marriage, no one said, Oh really? Guess what: My husband wears lace panties, too! Not one. But when I talked about the impossibility of remaining in a loveless, sexless marriage, of my astonishment that he would expect this of me, friends—mostly but not exclusively women—had stories to share.

“My husband and I don’t sleep in the same bed,” more than one friend confided. “We have separate bedrooms and once in a while when we feel like spending a night together, we do.”

“My wife and I don’t have a sexual relationship,” another friend told me.

“We haven’t had a sexual relationship in years,” confessed others.

No one ever said: I don’t have a passionate relationship—why should you? Nevertheless, these kinds of admissions from friends made me sad. They made me uncomfortable about insisting on having a romantic, sexual marriage or not having one at all.

“Wow,” a friend mused one day. “I don’t know what I would do if I loved my husband and he did something like this.”

I laughed, shocked, and gave her a do-you-realize-the-first-part-of-what-you-said look. But she was fully conscious of what she had said, and she meant it. She and her husband get on reasonably well and neither is looking for an exit out of the marriage. But it isn’t love. She makes no pretense that it is. Nevertheless, she was able to look at me, at my marriage, to hear what I was saying. She got it. My marriage was about love. It certainly was for me.

This was a small, important moment with one of the first friends I told the truth about my marriage. My friend responded empathetically even though my take on marriage is so different from her own. Not everyone needs sex or romance. Not everyone wants them. But there are times when I’m urged to pour my passions entirely into my children or to cultivate my friendships and leave men behind, and I know the advice isn’t about me. It’s about what the person pressing it has given up. I don’t hear this from friends who are sexually and romantically engaged or who’ve made peace with their lack of engagement. It takes a generosity of spirit to meet a friend where she is, rather than where you are coming from, rather than where you want her to be. Judaism teaches that God pulls it off every time. Therapists are supposed to be capable of this kind of emotional omnipotence, but most probably aren’t. (I’m lucky, mine seems to be.) The rest of us have to strive to be there.

My friend’s matter-of-fact revelation about her marriage was painful. It’s the kind of thing that I almost never used to know about my friends and that I now hear about all the time. I’ve been offered so many such glimpses into my friends’ intimate lives that I’ve come to feel that good marriages are not the norm. At my blackest moments, I’ve wondered how it is that people can exuberantly, extravagantly celebrate weddings that set the happy couple off on a path that will likely end in a place with which I’m now all too familiar—divorce court. This doesn’t mean I’m antimarriage. After a period of disillusion, I am, alas, more of a romantic than ever.

*   *   *

In the good times, once in a while I used to dream of losing Tracey, and we would laugh together at my fears. The scenarios proposed by my sleeping mind of a Tracey coldly indifferent or unfaithful struck the real man as so absurd that he couldn’t even take them seriously. Which was, of course, reassuring. Then, during the two years when reality became nightmare, I occasionally had cruelly happy dreams that Tracey came back to me. In his old face and his old clothes, that’s what he’d say: “I’ve come back to you.” I’d wake to the knowledge that this person was dead. I had to retrain my thoughts, even my sleeping thoughts. I had to leave him behind. After a while I stopped dreaming of Tracey. I stopped dreaming. I slept very little. One day I was visited by a waking specter, the image of a face, eager, receptive, open, full of laughter and compassion. The face of the friend I wished I could tell what had happened to my life, the one who would understand what this loss meant for me. His face. Gone forever.

Serving witness to the dismantling of the face I had loved, there was no step that didn’t sear. No stage was passed without mourning. But even in the course of watching someone die, there are moments of special agony when the pain is so acute, the reality and totality of the loss so stark, that it occupies a special place in memory. For me, such an occasion was when Tracey told me he was going to shave off his mustache. The beard was long gone, his hair had grown out, clothes and voice were changing, and still I begged for the life of a mustache. Because of the way I’d reacted to surprise changes in appearance, and because he knew how hard this one was going to be for me, he warned me that one day soon the mustache was going to go.

Months before, I had said to him, “If you knew you were going to break up our marriage, why didn’t we go away for a weekend alone together first? Didn’t all our years together deserve a real good-bye?” During the spring before the June night of his momentous announcement, we had spent a weekend in a fancy hotel with a beautiful marble tub in our bathroom. I had wanted to take a bath together in that tub, but with three children sleeping in our room it hadn’t happened. “Why didn’t you make sure we took that bath?” I’d asked him. He never responded to these questions, beyond looking baffled. He had gone so far down his rabbit hole that I don’t think they made any sense to him.

Now, in this moment, I understood that I had a chance to bring our love affair to a proper end.

He was on his way out somewhere when he told me about the mustache. I was sitting on the living room sofa.

“Kiss me,” I said to him. “One last time.”

He thought that I was threatening to kill myself. I couldn’t explain that the last time he would kiss me with his mustache was the last time he would kiss me. I had said all that I could say. He kissed me. His mustache brushed my lips. We had not kissed lately, but before lately there had been twenty-some years of kisses. This one was the last. It was a real kiss. It was a good kiss.

I wish I could say it was over then, that he walked out the door and I never saw him again. It would make for the perfect ending. It didn’t happen that way. But in a very real way, that was the end. It was over. I would never be married to this man again.

I went into a deep freeze that would last a long time. In some ways, it seems in retrospect that this freeze predated the dissolution of my marriage. In some ways, it seems as if it had no beginning, as if it were always. However it began, I do know exactly when and where it ended. I know who I was with when I melted.