“The Undiagnosed”

Boys will be boys / play with toys /
so be strong with your beast.
–Mick Jagger, “Memo from Turner”
*

I remember that night. The party was in a ballroom, a magnificent rented room—Le Fin de Siècle—and I was supposed to wear a costume. I wore my father’s clothes. He was dead, so I came as any dead man or my father’s ghost. Hamlet’s father’s ghost manifested Hamlet’s desire; but I didn’t imagine my father whispered to me, I didn’t imagine a murder had to be avenged.

No one at the party knew what man I was, and, like so much of life, it was only in my head. Costumed, I felt I could not be myself, which had obscure benefits.

The ballroom was decorated with streamers and flowers, tiny incandescent lights trailing the walls, larger globes attached to the high ceiling, then more tiny lights running the length of it. I hated the room’s having been rented, as if grandness could be, intimating that all my pleasures were temporary and, worse, for sale.

Small lamps shaped like flames lit the requisite white cloaked tables. The flames twinkled on and off, inflecting the partygoers’ faces with unintended seriousness or grotesqueness. They couldn’t see themselves, how unholy shadows created other masks on their faces and marked them as tormented or angry. Visible to themselves, they might have been dismayed or thrilled. Some lust after distortion. But the unintended is frightening. It illuminates what schemes never do and becomes more indelible than anything that could have been made up or that people could have made themselves into. Accidents and mistakes, like an end game or a tragic virus, carry eternal consequences.

I am consumed by consequences, layered with them.

There was a long table heavy with food, another with wine, another hard liquor, another dark desserts. By the time I arrived— late, I hadn’t wanted to show up—people were sated or acquiescent. Some were loonily high or indifferent; the drugs were available in a ridiculous bathroom. Some masqueraders were nearly rigid, or hoping to feel anything, and some were playing a game of promiscuity called choice.

A man dressed as a fool leaped in front of me and screamed, Are you happy? Another, dressed as a rose, exposed his penis to three men—his penis was a thorn in his side. Four women, parading as witches, laughed hysterically. I dislike women who dress up as witches. They are low minded and unimaginative.

I wiggled uncomfortably inside my father’s suit. I didn’t want to think of his body. I remembered the long, dark hairs on his forearms, the hairlessness of his upper arms and chest, his hazel, illegible eyes, his uneven, uncontrollable mouth, his penis when he urinated, and dressed as a man, I began thinking about men I’d known, and wondered casually, noticing other costumed miscreants and misfits, if I could remember every one of them who mattered to me, and even those who hadn’t and didn’t at the time when time was unimportant, and if I could see them in my mind’s eye and reckon with their foreign, familiar bodies, their alien, similar lives. I’d been raised as a woman. I didn’t feel I was one, and I didn’t care that I didn’t. I didn’t know how men felt, what instantly occurred to them, raised as they were, with other postures imposed and other awarenesses impressed upon them. I watched movies about men, I read books. I had sex with them and hung out with them. I had men friends and enemies. I knew men as plumbers, theorists, hairdressers, scholars, bartenders, teachers, lovers, translators, butchers, artists, carpenters, musicians, landlords, actors, paupers, writers, dentists, shoemakers. (Dentists arouse my sympathy, and I particularly like shoemakers.)

I knew men who had no trouble being men, I knew men who were dubious about being men, I knew men who wanted to be women, I knew men who hated women, and those who relished them like succulent meals, I knew men who loved men, I knew men whose best friends were women, I knew men whose fear of vaginas vanquished them (they couldn’t go through tunnels), and men who couldn’t piss in men’s rooms. I knew men who had sex in subway toilets, men who were celibate, men who hated sports, hated books, had eating problems, who hated life, and I knew men who hated how much they needed women, and others who turned their backs on them. I knew men who were depressed and men who were never unhappy (those blessed few). I knew men who were affectionate, lusty, friendly, remote, stupid, tender, courteous, shallow, sexy, cerebral, bold, cowardly, crude, pretentious, kind, and on and on.

I won’t go on.

I couldn’t remember them all, there were too many. And dressed as a man especially, I felt I knew nothing about them as men. Men qua men, I mused to myself, watching people dance and eat. I also knew little about women, in the same way, being a flawed one, having rejected or scorned what being a woman supposedly entailed. No child? No man? No food? Anyway, the categories were too general, sweeping in their assumptions, and I resist cultural imperatives and operate inside them.

The door opened, and Clint Eastwood entered. He cast a long, romantic shadow. He was rugged, too, as magnificent and big as the space where he was now temporarily installed like a tower. Not the Martello Tower, not Pisa, Watts, not the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, but a tall, lean man, who seemed he would never fall, like the Twin Towers.

I wasn’t surprised to see him, I’d been expecting him for years. Sometimes I conjured him after watching one of his movies, and then in dreams I knew him intimately. Dreams, the mind’s gifts, can be sweeter than anything reality offers, and they satisfy me more than sex. Or, they are sex.

Usually when I think about someone, he or she eventually turns up. In a train station, in a bookstore, crossing an alley, around a corner, that face presents itself, stamped onto the present like postage. I have sometimes thought, overdue postage.

Now Clint was here. I was happy, maybe relieved.

The way I remember it, I strode, as best I could, awkward in my father’s suit, across the floor toward him. I was trying to imitate a man’s gait. Do they throw their shoulders forward more than putative women? Clint was engaged in a subdued kind of shoot-out. He couldn’t help himself, or the other men couldn’t help themselves. Their faces were shot through, anyway, irradiated with alarm and fear; maybe they were just stunned. Clint stood near, and they were dwarfed and dimmed by his cinematic luminosity. Stars do shine, and the men’s faces registered that fact, also that Clint had taken the thin cigar from his mouth, after he had rolled it around his lips several times, the way he does in Sergio Leone movies, which usually means something bad will happen or some decisive move will be made.

(I was, I discovered, in a state of amazement, so close to my hero, when I don’t have a hero, almost incoherent, and my suit felt even more uncomfortable.)

Clint was rock steady. I thrilled to his stillness, the way he held the world inside him. Silent, contained, he was unsettling as a nature morte. Decisiveness itself is still, like death. And he was, for me, a picture of a man. Maybe the main picture I had in mind against which what were called men were measured, in subtle and obvious ways.

Clint is not like my friend Hamlet. The dear, antagonistic hero acted unmanly, Ophelia and Gertrude growing out of him like branches from a tree. Hamlet had to punish and sever them, or betray his femininity. Their hateful womanishness, their weakness, that baleful susceptibility was only to himself and to other men. Nothing but men.

I thought, suddenly, men must really suffer an awful anxiety of influence. The father’s ghost does linger and loom, it must threaten to suffocate them. I noticed some costumed men in the room jockeying for position, and I fit them into this idea.

My neurotic father’s suit felt like a prison. But I didn’t want to kill him, even if it’s the murder I might be forced to commit, later. I could be forced to duel him, when I get around to experiencing my masculinity more fully. I took fencing in college, I remembered.

En garde, ghost.

Look at Clint, I remonstrated to myself, see how he doesn’t lean or buckle. But the suit, and a duel, these entrapments didn’t fit me. I felt extreme and silly. I wanted to slap my face. Electrifying music heightened all my responses. I was as reactive as a hive. My heart pumped, an ecstatic organ played by Brother Jack McDuff or Jimmy Smith. I needed the soundtrack, a background score, and whatever was playing, whoever the DJ was who moved time along, or kept events in time, I was glad of it. I had lost track.

I took a breath, to steady myself, and shut my eyes. With the beat, I opened them and studied the masqueraders coolly again, especially the men, when I could discern them. It was hard to maintain a distance. Each was dressed as someone he wanted to be or someone he didn’t want to be, so he demonstrated a remarkable and aggressive display of self-love or hatred, enacting “I am this,” “I am not this.” A short, skinny man strutted as a wrestler, a tall, fat one flailed his apron—a rude housewife.

I became a restive, captive character to their ambivalence. I understood it and abhorred it, also, since unrelenting duality infuses everything I do. Every act, too, is against my limits. The body, the first limit. I try to control it, tame it, inflict pain on it, pamper it, release it, wrest it from its history or its shape. I have attempted to abandon it, gorge it, starve it, scar it, mask it, disgrace it, take pride in it, humiliate it, and disown it. But I awoke in it each morning. Still, I didn’t envy those who surgically tailored themselves into different bodies. I wouldn’t even pierce an ear.

I bet Clint likes his body, I thought, I bet he likes his sharp features, the cool set of his face, I bet he was often embarrassed by how handsome he was. Aging now, he had bravely exposed his flaccid chest, and even so I couldn’t forget him as a young man.

The man with no name.

I wasn’t his type, not the kind he married or mated with, who looked like the same woman each time, which has a certain economy—men don’t have to abandon their mothers, really. But as a man, I thought, maybe he’d like me. I puzzled over this funny notion and wandered away from him.

I like to sit alone, I always have, at parties. I took a seat on a long, crimson, silk couch. Silk doesn’t wear well, and it was another sign that the night, and other things, would not last. Dressed as a man, I might incite the notice of disguised strangers who would tell me things I’d never heard and hadn’t bargained for. Maybe Clint would come over, if I didn’t bother him.

He was glorious across the magnificent, rented ballroom, spotlighted and standing beside a woman dressed up as Andy Warhol—fright wig, shock-white powdered face. Late Warhol. Clint was showing her his boots, and others were clustered around him, hopefully. Now he looked up, with a wry, exultant expression, and in that instant, I caught his eye. Maybe I looked like someone he once knew. He bent down again, showing the group the special stitching and tooling, and then nodded, waved or motioned to me. I returned his nod. I distinctly recall the vertebrae of my neck clicking in anticipation.

Clint strode across the shiny black floor, the way I wished I could have.

Once he was beside me, I didn’t know what to say. He was silent, too, but that was characteristic of him.

Finally I told him I was wearing my father’s clothes. You’re imposturing your father? he asked.

Sort of.

Sort of? he asked.

My father was a difficult man to know. I’m not sure if men are different from women in any interesting way.

Men want sex, settle for money, comfort, mostly everyone settles. What do you want to know?

Whatever you can tell me, I answered.

Clint told me about his father, his father had once dug a hole in the ground, a large hole, no, a pit, and lived in it, as a protest, for a week. He pissed and shit there—he ate ants. Right in the backyard. His father was an ordinary man, a businessman in a small town. But his life, Clint said, depended on his proving he could do this. It was about his manlihood.

Had it been challenged? I wondered. Had he been in a war?

Did he want his mother? Is anyone ordinary?

To Clint, I asked, How did his living in a hole affect you? Well, he said, I’ve never really thought about it.

Two Apache dancers—male and female—raced across the floor. The male lifted the female and sent her crashing to the ground. Then the female lifted the male and did the same.

Equal opportunity, Clint remarked.

Both of us stared, and I thought of animals, horses especially, being broken.

Three people of indeterminate sex strolled across the floor, wearing sandwich boards: He-Male, She-Male, E-Male.

It’s not a good time to be a man, Clint said, looking at my suit.

He turned the collar up and then turned it down.

Being a woman doesn’t appeal much, either. Both positions defy me, in any case, I explained.

Clint said he was uncomfortable with prearranged affiliations, and I said, I didn’t feel patriotic to a sex. I appreciated the animal in me, I said, but felt I had no nature, certainly no great love of it, so any nature in me was second nature. In all things I just wanted to do what I wanted, without resistance from others, without unnecessary conflict. Life’s object was to get as much pleasure as possible or to avoid pain. I took that to heart and let the notion guide me.

We were silent for a bit then, in our own kind of Western, I realized, at least philosophically, and while I pondered my own speech, or outburst, he seemed to chew it over, too.

He told me he hated violence but was also drawn to it. I told him I loved Unforgiven.

He became embarrassed. I wanted to touch his face as if it were a computer screen.

I must be drawn to violence, too, since I enjoy your movies, I went on.

What about Tightrope? he asked. The later ones—not the spaghettis . . .

You’re not renouncing those, are you?

I don’t turn my back on the past, he said. Only the women? I asked.

Clint looked a little angry then. I worried I’d alienated him. But he just stretched and squinted, his eyes disappearing into thin folds of tanned flesh.

I had to ask him.

Are you afraid to die? I said.

Nope, he said. When your time comes, it comes. Do you really feel that?

Yes.

Because Westerns are all about death, that’s why I asked. Oh, well, he said, if you put it like that . . . but I’m not.

Unforgiven is about that. It’s about killing, he said. Death, I said.

We can stop killing, we can’t stop death.

Clint astonished me.

In that instant, I felt I was married to him. And that night, while I watched men and women cavort and sulk, flirt and look dejected, though I felt like an observer, the way I usually do, I felt I was looking for something, too, not just at something. With Clint next to me—we sat this way for the rest of the evening, talking and not talking—and in my father’s suit, sometimes forgetting I was wearing it, I thought, I don’t look like my father, I’m looking for my father. (I didn’t say this to Clint.) And when I find him, I’m going to have to slay him, as in days of yore.

I couldn’t believe I thought that. Maybe I didn’t. I know I’ll never find him.

Later, when Clint left me, to return to the adoration of others, or to being himself, whoever that was, if he could ever be himself, what I wanted to do was go to the movies. I wanted to watch his movies, the early ones. I wanted him like that, then and always.