“I wanted to see you, to see if I’d want to see you,” he told her. This interested her, but only vaguely, it seemed.
“Ivy told me your family is exiled in some way you don’t care to discuss,” she said. Her eyes as wide as the sea. “But now that you are standing here I see that you personally are probably in exile from yourself, maybe ever since the day you were born.” He frowned, evidently annoyed. “And you know this how?” he asked, sharply. “Are you a museum curator or a shaman?”
“There is a particular kind of sadness,” she replied, dragging on her Gauloises, looking like Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou, “that reveals a man’s alienation from his own identity.”
“This modern obsession with identity revolts me,” he said, perhaps too emphatically. “It is a way of narrowing us until we are like aliens to one another. Have you read Arthur Schlesinger? He opposes perpetuating marginalization through affirmations of difference.” He was wearing a trench coat and a snap-brim fedora because summer was coming but had not yet arrived, like a woman making false promises of love.
“But that is what we are, aliens, all of us.” A faint shrug of the shoulders and the suggestion of a moue. “The point is to become more precise about the types of aliens we choose to be. And yes I have read that old dead straight white man. You should look at Spivak’s work on strategic essentialism.”
“Do you want to go somewhere for a whiskey,” he asked, still sounding irritated as he asked it, and she continued to regard him as someone a little simple who was in need of intelligent assistance. Her stockings had black seams running up the backs of her calves. “Not now,” she said. “Now, you should come inside and learn about the new world.”
“How about after that?”
“After that, still no.”
They spent that night together in her Second Avenue apartment. There was so much to talk about that they did not have sex, which was overrated, he said. She didn’t argue but made a mental note. In the morning he went downstairs to get her croissants, coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, and the Sunday papers. The keys were on top of a little mahogany table in the hall, a sort of box on legs, not an antique but a good reproduction. He lifted the lid and saw the gun lying on the small red velvet cushion, a pearl-handled Colt revolver, also a good reproduction, probably. He picked it up, spun the revolving cylinder, put the business end against his temple. Afterwards he said he did not pull the trigger, but she was watching him through the open bedroom door and heard the click as the hammer hit an empty chamber. “Found the keys,” he said. “I’ll get breakfast.”
“Don’t spill anything,” she called after him. “I don’t want a mess on the hall carpet.”
Riya, that was her name. Quite a girl. Just three or four years older than he was but already holding down a senior position at the Museum, as well as crooning love songs some nights on Orchard Street, and making her own indie fashion line from old lace and black silk, often with floral brocade motifs, Oriental-themed, Chinese-and Indian-style. She was half Indian and half Swedish-American, her long Scandinavian surname, Zachariassen, too much of a mouthful for American mouths, so just as he was D Golden she went by Riya Z.
The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.
“Come inside and learn about the new world.” There was a museum for Native Americans on Bowling Green and there was the Italian American Museum on Mulberry Street and the Polish American Museum in Port Washington and there were two museums for the Jews, uptown and downtown, and those were identity museums too obviously but the MoI—the Museum of Identity—was after bigger game, its charismatic curator Orlando Wolf was after identity itself, the mighty new force in the world, already as powerful as any theology or ideology, cultural identity and religious identity and nation and tribe and sect and family, it was a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field, and at the heart of the Identity Museum was the question of the identity of the self, starting with the biological self and moving far beyond that. Gender identity, splitting as never before in human history, spawning whole new vocabularies that tried to grasp the new mutabilities.
“God is dead and identity fills the vacuum,” she said to him at the doorway to the gender zone, her eyes filled with the bright zeal of the true believer, “but it turns out gods were gender benders from the start.”
Her black hair was cut short and close to the head. “Great haircut,” he said.
They were standing amid pots and seals and stone statuary from Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. “The Great Mother, Plutarch says, was an intersex deity—the two sexes both present in her, not yet split apart.”
Maybe if he rented an old convertible, red and white with fins, they could go for a drive, maybe all the way across America. “Have you seen the Pacific Ocean?” he asked her. “It’s probably a disappointment like everything else.”
They went on walking. The Museum was dark, punctuated by brightly illuminated objects, like exclamations in a monastery. “These Stone Age objects could be transgender priestesses,” she said. “You should really pay attention. It’s as important for cis people as for the MTF community.”
The word took him back to childhood; suddenly he was studying Latin again, with fierce attention, to destroy his brothers’ power to exclude him by using the secret language of Rome. “Prepositions that take the accusative,” he said. “Ante, apud, ad, adversus circum, circa, citra, cis. Contra, erga, extra, infra. Never mind. Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. I get it. The Alps now divide the sexes.”
“I don’t like that word,” she said.
“What word?”
“Sex.”
Oh.
“Anyway, God is not dead,” he said. “Not in America, anyway.”
MTF was male to female, FTM was vice versa. Now she was pouring words over him, gender fluid, bigender, agender, trans with an asterisk: trans*, the difference between woman and female, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, nonbinary, and, from Native American culture, two-spirit. The Phrygian goddess Cybele had MTF servitors called gallae. In the African room the MTF okule and the FTM agule of the Lugbara tribe, the transsexual Amazons of Abomey, Queen Hatshepsut in male clothing and false beard. In the Asia room he stopped in front of the stone figure of Ardhanarishvara, the half-woman god. “From Elephanta Island,” he said, and clapped his hand to his mouth. “You didn’t hear me say that,” he said to her with genuine ferocity.
“I was going to show you the fanchuan costumes from cross-dressing Chinese operas,” she said, “but maybe you’ve had enough for today.”
“I should go,” he said.
“I’ll take that whiskey now,” she replied.