Chapters (29)
He had his own problems with feeling like an impostor. There were moments when he was dining or drinking or having a conversation with a heterosexual friend or colleague, even an abundantly tolerant person, and saw a look of benevolent curiosity cross his or her face, and felt, suddenly, as if he’d been cast off to some vast plain of ambiguity and otherness, where his features were shifting and his gender was indistinct. Then he’d be overcome by his own curiosity—perhaps a bit less benevolent—about himself and where he belonged among women and men in the big picture of life. More than once, he’d felt that way with Jane herself. But never, he realized as he gazed down the beach, never with Russell. He’d always felt solidly in place with Russell, unambiguously male, even when engaged in the least manly of activities.
“But when you’re with your husband,” he said. “Then you know who you are—a real mother, a real woman. No?”
“Oh, well,” she said, and set Gloria’s book down on the white plastic table beside her. “Dale could make anyone feel like a real woman.”
He was silent for a moment, hoping that the Gulf breeze would blow this little slip out to sea, but it must have blown it right back into her ears, for she turned her head away and took off her glasses. “Shit,” she said and reached into the pocket of her bathrobe for a pack of cigarettes.
The colors of the sky had darkened and spread along the horizon like a stain. A gust of warm wind blew and an empty soda can rattled across the edge of the patio. One of the little girls on the beach screamed and ran up to the road where her mother was sitting on a low seawall.
“That appointment book I gave you,” Jane said. “I’d love you to do me a favor and throw it out. I can’t decipher the code anymore and even if I could, half of it is lies, stuff I made up to impress someone else or kid myself.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Jane,” he said. “Why are you telling me all this?”
The wind shifted and the soda can rattled back across the patio. “I honestly don’t know,” she said.