Find your light; they can't love you if they don't see you.
—Bette Midler
I'm just borrowing from the idiom.
That's the phrase that came to me as I crossed Main Street in front of the Airline pub.
The sidewalk and curb were February dirty. The ice was the color of spilled coffee with milk, and the snow lay where it had fallen—a fossil in the neck of the curb.
I was headed for a meeting with an engineer at the Old Jail. We'd probably traipse through the icy cell block and go "down cellar," into that long, narrow, pointless black corridor flanked by the fat sewer pipe.
I do like being male. I was pretty certain about that.
I liked men—certain kinds of men. The ones with the short auburn hair at their temples and the luxurious, superfluous, unconcealable eyelashes. Those with arms—too long—like gangly alabaster levers with down.
It's worth mentioning—for the sake of accuracy—that these arms invariably originate from the short sleeves of a pale yellow Supima cotton polo shirt.
Or am I simply describing G— in that early 1980s photo they took of him on Martha's Vineyard? Everybody knew what was happening in that situation.
Am I happy that the moment was documented? Or (more likely) bitter that he was not then mine (nor would he have consented to be even if we had met).
I married above my sexual station. It comes with its own set of difficulties.
Yet in my fifth month of being sober I started wearing charm bracelets. Not the unisex ones or (even worse) the wrist accessories designed for "men" but the full Grace Kelly, clacking against the desk as I type here. And last month I granted myself permission to graduate from the questionable leather clutches that drew derision from the guys in Garden Club to a proper purse.
I have one in cognac and another in black pebble.
The question of whether I'm coming or going is apt, here. Whether I am taking leave of the carnality of my body at its youthful best—in the face of testosterone's betrayal somewhere around sixty-five—or coming home to a broken childhood that sought refuge in adult women.
Ladies with handbags and driving gloves. Elementary school teachers with rayon crepe scarves and car keys in folded leather cases the color of cornflowers.
I'm just the snap of a cigarette lighter or a furtive application of lipstick away from feeling safer, breathing deeper. The noise my bracelets make against the dinner plates as I wash them does for me what ocean breakers do for writers, or woebegone lovers.
I spent my childhood in my great-aunt's closets, among shoeboxes with labels like Air Step and Naturalizer, touching the beaded fox's eye of a fur collar with my index finger, or clicking open a shiny alligator purse that hadn't seen the light of day since Truman.
Chic in his unconcern, blind to peers or expectations, solopsistic, sissified, that child's temerity is something I could use, here, in these years beyond my erotic career. All the work of fitting out this vessel—so late in my life—knowing it to be henceforward incapable of sail, feels pointless.
Yet to wear, again, something like the pixieish face I had in my early thirties is, I deem, a worthy game. More and more each night it smiles back at me when I brush my teeth, now conjoined with a neck of flesh gathered and dangling beneath the chin.
Functioning like a beta-blocker, the flash of metal from my wrist in meetings speaks louder, now, than my old uncertainty—a little bitchier, taking its tones from the trombone's smear, like a spoken smirk.
The effrontery of others, so many decades of disparagement, fits easily into my purse rather than my heart.
Ironically, it was my half-brother who said it best:
I mamanSo I'm an elegant manI'm a manClara Bowes and open toesAre what I am
Yes, I think I am coming home.
