The first time he saw her she was singing karaoke at a queer dive bar. It was 2011, the early Obama years, a time of Hope. On a small stage lit up by strands of pink and gold twinkling lights, she held the mic in her hand with the ease of a professional lounge singer. She wore a motorcycle jacket flapped open over a tee shirt cut at the neck and a short skirt, and leather boots crisscrossed by a maze of silver zippers. Her brassy hair was cropped short and sleek, like a flapper from the roaring twenties. Jay wished he had brought his camera.
“Y’all ready for a little Dolly?” Over the cheers, she launched into “Jolene,” starting in a low croon that swelled into the beloved sing-along chorus. Her voice was beautiful and big, electrifying. A zipper of nerve-endings flickered to life across his chest. He’d just had top surgery three months ago and the tee shirt felt soft and thrilling on his bare skin.
He turned to Sarah. “You know her?”
“Her name’s Ava. We met before but she probably doesn’t remember me.”
Jay worked with Sarah at a coffee shop in the East Village. She was around thirty, close to his age, and had her finger on the city’s queer pulse. Occasionally, when she didn’t have a date or a better offer, she invited him places.
“She’s hot,” he said.
“She’s trans, you know.”
“So am I.”
“I’m just saying,” she started, stopped herself. Ava walked off the stage to applause and a piercing whistle. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
They made their way through the crowd over to Ava, drink in hand, encircled by friends and admirers. When Sarah introduced them, Ava held her eyes on Jay, sizing him up. I know what you are, she said without speaking. Yesterday, Jay had injected his first shot of testosterone, and though of course nothing about him had changed, not yet, he felt different, like he’d materialized from a thick, tenebrous fog.
“Jay, I was just about to go out for a cigarette. You want to join me?”
He’d quit smoking a few years ago, but he followed Ava out the front doors and when the brisk night air hit his neck and rolled down his spine, he shivered. He wore only a tee shirt because now he could—no more binder squeezing the breath out of him or undershirts layered over smashed breasts. Freed of his protective armor, he felt strong, and puffed out his narrow chest.
They stood on the corner. Under the dim glow of a street lamp he could see her blue-gray specked eyes, the lashes flecked with inky mascara. He had to look up as they talked. He told her she had a killer voice. “Only when I sing with Dolly. She’s my muse,” she said. She hailed from the mountains of Tennessee, which surprised him. He’d pegged her as Jersey or possibly even a born-and-bred New Yorker—she had that swagger, that nervy confidence. When he told her he was from Kentucky, which was technically true, her face opened with delight. “Appalachia? You’re a mountain boy.”
He saw no reason to tell her otherwise as the beautiful word boy landed like a firefly on the top of his head, blazing a warm glow down to his feet.
They talked a while longer, and then Ava dropped what was left of her cigarette on the sidewalk and smashed it with the toe of her boot like she’d stepped into an eighties music video. “Want to come over to my place?”
Caught off guard by her directness, Jay couldn’t speak. Ava’s hand grazed his and his skin fired up like she’d flicked him with a lighter, even his earlobes buzzing.
He found his voice. “I do,” he said.
_____
Jay left Ava’s place the next morning. She lived in a railroad apartment on the top floor of a dilapidated row home in Williamsburg, not far from the queer dive bar. Jay also lived in Brooklyn, but in the far reaches of Sunset Park. There was no easy way to get to his place from Ava’s. He caught the L into the city, then boarded the R train to take him back into Brooklyn.
His roommate had already left for work. She worked long hours in advertising and spent most nights at her girlfriend’s. Jay stretched out on his bed, a full-size mattress that ate up most of the room, in a patch of sunlight, feeling exhausted and euphoric, like he’d just run across the city’s bridges, suspended above dark rivers. The night had started off clumsily, too much fumbling, too many questions, Is this okay, is that okay?, but their bodies knew more than they did and finally they listened, gave themselves over to limbs and skin and friction and fluids.
In his tiny room in the small patch of sunlight, Jay remembered Ava’s curious strong hands sliding down his chest, the alluring cigarette-liquor taste of her. Between the fucking, in the softer, vulnerable spaces, they’d shared pieces of their lives as if they were feeding each other peach slices. Ava worked as a hair stylist for a queer-owned salon and sometimes answered phones for a call center to make ends meet. What about singing? he asked, and she just laughed. She could play guitar, she admitted, and she sang about the place she’d fled. She wrote stories, too, she said, but she hadn’t published any yet. Jay told her he had come to New York for art school. Since graduating, he’d shown his photographs in a few group shows. He aspired to the intimacy of Nan Goldin holding the camera on her beautiful friends, and the boldness of Catherine Opie baring her scarred, tattooed, butch body. He usually didn’t have the funds to make prints, but a few of his photos hung on the walls of his room, a collection of faces and bodies of friends and lovers.
“You should document yourself, that’s where the money is,” Ava had said, grazing her tongue over his grafted nipples. “Play the trans card. Be lurid, shocking.”
That wasn’t his style. But hadn’t he, just like every trans man, obsessively photographed himself before and after top surgery? He knew he would also document the changes triggered by testosterone—he hoped for biceps and chest hair—but these photos would be for his eyes only, a private map of his corporeal journey, proof of existence: I am here.
His phone dinged and he flipped it open.
Bad boy, want to get dinner?
Grinning like a fool, he picked up his roommate’s moody cat and told her he was going on a date, and she squirmed and leaped out of his hands.
_____
They met at a sushi restaurant where Ava was a regular and the waiter brought them extra sake and special rolls that weren’t listed on the menu.
“First time I tried sushi, I had no idea what to do. I unrolled the seaweed, picking out the raw fish, and ate the rice with a fork.” Ava laughed at herself. “What a hillbilly.”
Older than him by a decade, Ava had arrived in New York fifteen years ago. She had not been back to Tennessee since. “I wanted to see my granny, but my dad told me he’d shoot me if I came back looking like a girl.”
Jay had started to smile when she used the old-timey word “granny”—he didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone use that word, not with sincerity—then stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Ava shrugged. She said her granny died a few years ago and she didn’t attend the funeral. “I’ll probably never go back, but I miss the mountains. Most of my friends don’t understand. You get it, don’t you?”
Jay could have corrected the misunderstanding then—yes, he was from Kentucky, but not the mountains. He’d lived the first few years of his life in the leafy suburbs of Lexington, before moving with his parents to central Ohio. He didn’t tell her any of this. Instead, he recalled the few visits he made to see his grandparents in eastern Kentucky. Yes, he got it, he said, he understood.
“Are you close with your parents?”
Jay used the chopsticks to snap up a piece of yellowtail. “We’re broaching parents already?”
“I move fast, what can I say?”
He saw his mother and father a couple times a year. He had no siblings. The visits were tense and delicate, and occasionally explosive. His mother was a real estate agent, his father a divorce attorney, and they belonged to a conservative Methodist church. When he came out, they assured him he was going through a phase. His mother once offered him $500 to shave his legs. He took the money.
“They’re not so bad,” he said.
“Lucky you.” He wasn’t sure if she believed him or not. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have any expectations that he and Ava would last beyond a few hookups. He remembered one time in Central Park he was watching a bevy of swans gliding along when suddenly one lifted its massive wings and rose up from the water in a noisy whoosh and flew away, a shocking thing to witness. Look at me, it seemed to be yelling, did you forget I was a bird? He could already tell Ava was not the type to settle down, that she could, at any moment, explode into a flurry of feathers.
She reached for his hand. The rings on her fingers were cold and heavy, and he felt a sudden urge to stick her fingers in his mouth and roll his tongue over metal and skin. His body tingled with the memory of last night, her pinning him to the mattress.
“I’d love to photograph you,” he said.
Her cheeks flushed. “Sounds trashy,” she said. “I’m so in.”
_____
Three months later, as Ava nibbled strips of bacon and read the newspaper on her laptop, Jay danced around with his camera. The late morning light shone over the table and the butter dish and Ava’s bare arms. From the tiny speakers, Dolly Parton’s voice rolled out like a mountain river.
“I could shoot you all day,” Jay said. He had already amassed hundreds of digital shots of Ava, tight close-ups and wide-angle shots that hummed and sparked. She’d grown used to him looking at her from behind his camera, which she understood was like another appendage. “It’s your way of seeing,” she said. “Your way of being yourself.”
Now she said, “Enough already. I look like shit.”
“You look stunning.”
She raised her middle finger and he released the shutter.
Three months in, and Ava the swan had not taken flight. Yesterday, when Jay had gone to the salon to pick her up after work, she had introduced him to a customer as her boyfriend, and the word shot through him like the first sip of whiskey, warm and golden. He hadn’t been in a long-term relationship, if that’s what this was, in several years. In his twenties, he’d spun through a carousel of long-term girlfriends and called himself a dyke because he had no other way to understand or see himself.
“Sing for me.”
“It’s too early for that,” she said. “And I’m too sober.”
He loved to listen to her play her guitar, especially when she slid into an old-time country song. The sound of her aching voice matched her tender descriptions of herself as a curious, lonely kid, picking up stones from a creek bed or soaking up her grandmother’s soup beans with cornbread. Joy and weariness carried her voice, a worn-out toughness.
“Then tell me a story,” he said.
With each story she told about growing up in Tennessee, Jay felt closer to her, as if she were slowly building a house for the two of them. Many of the tales were hard and sickening, like her father threatening to shoot her. Ava laughed ruefully about her mother, who loved church more than her. “She kept calling me transgenderal. Like, I knew you was transgenderal.” But she also told tales of wonder and joy, about spirits in the woods and her granny’s love for professional wrestling.
“Why don’t you tell me something for once?” she challenged.
“Nothing interesting to tell.”
“You can’t do all your talking with your camera. You’ve hardly said anything about growing up.”
He set down the camera. Whenever she pressed him, he talked about his grandparents’ place instead of where he grew up in Ohio. He described hillsides of wildflowers and the snake skins his grandfather nailed to the shed, and shared a memory of snapping beans with his grandmother, but in his telling, it was his father nailing up the snake skins, his mother snapping beans. The lie was stupid, but seemed irretractable now, intricately threaded into their relationship.
Ava smiled with recognition. “I spent many of my days on the front porch, breaking beans.”
From the speakers, Dolly sang about a true love. Ava told him about her first time going to Dollywood.
“I thought Dolly lived there, like a queen in her palace. It’s all I talked about. Then, when I was nine years old, my granny, who had been saving her money, took me for my birthday. It was like I’d stepped into heaven.” She described Dolly’s refulgent, happy face plastered on mugs and tee shirts, her voice floating in each section of the park like the voice of God. When Ava realized Dolly wasn’t actually at the park she had erupted into tears. “A bona fide hissy fit,” she said.
To appease her, her grandmother had coaxed her into the gift shop and let her pick out a birthday present. Ava chose a bubblegum pink tee shirt with Dolly’s face on it, a girl’s shirt.
“Granny didn’t blink, just bought me that shirt and told me how pretty I looked. I think about that a lot. My granny didn’t have any words to describe me, but she could see me.” She held her eyes on him. “You’ve ever been to Dollywood?”
He said he had not.
“We should go. It’s America’s number one destination for rednecks and queers. We’ll ride all the rides, two transsexuals on the loose.”
“I don’t do rollercoasters,” Jay said.
She threw back her head, laughing. “Come here,” she said, and he eagerly straddled her lap. He couldn’t get enough, ever. Ava’s hot hands, the lilt of her voice, her unbroken gaze—he needed to be near her, like a stupid moth burning up in the light.
Most of the time, Ava was joyous and funny, but he’d also witnessed this other side, and though he’d never admit it, not to her or himself, her sadness attracted him as much, if not more so, than the light. When sadness webbed over her, she was a glorious spider, caught in her own tangled threads.
“You sure I’m not too much for you?” she asked.
“No way,” he said emphatically, but he didn’t know if he believed it.
She pushed the hair from her eyes. “I’ve been like this most of my life. The sadness. It’s like this knotty seed inside me that will never bloom into a flower.” She grew quiet. “Transitioning’s made things better, but it’s no magic wand.”
_____
Around each other, they had discovered a newfound joy in getting naked and exposing themselves, especially their top, less complicated halves. Ava wore lacy push-up bras, the trashier the better, and when she unhooked the latches and shook herself free, he pressed his lips to her nipples. They had wild kinky sex—Ava in knee-high boots, ordering him to his knees, Yes ma’am, yes ma’am.
Ava’s skin was adorned with old-school designs bursting with color—a pin-up mermaid, an anchor, a broken heart. Faded scars that she didn’t like to talk about crisscrossed on the insides of her wrists and arms. She had secrets, everybody did. Jay preferred, for himself, the black dots of pointillism: an elm tree, a fox. “Hipster tats,” Ava called them, and flicked her tongue into the knife lines carved into his chest.
When, hours later, they made themselves get out of bed, Ava studied her reflection in the mirror, turning this way and that.
“I hope my tits get to be at least a B-cup,” Ava said. “I’d love to have big tits.”
“Mine were C’s,” he told her. “They were nice, I guess.”
“Damn, too bad you couldn’t give them to me.”
The estrogen and testosterone-blockers helped Ava shed unwanted muscle mass. Her skin grew softer, her hair thickened and shone. Her tastebuds had awakened and intensified, and she possessed a keener sense of smell.
“My god, women are so much more evolved,” she said.
At this point, Jay had been on T for about three months. He was ecstatic when he stopped bleeding (no more cramps, tampons, squishy pads between his legs) and curious as his voice started to change. At first it sounded strange to his ears, a noticeably lower pitch but not particularly deep.
“Oh, no, do I have trans guy robot voice?” he fretted.
Ava laughed—a glorious, honking laugh. How he loved that laugh. How he loved her.
Sometimes the desire between them felt like they would devour each other in a hot cyclone of skin, recognizing in each other flashes of the bodies they’d once possessed, as their own hurtled toward dark blue dreams of the unknown.
_____
“Finally,” his mother accused. “You’ve been impossible to reach.”
Jay told her he’d been busy working.
“At the café?” she asked with disdain. His parents didn’t understand why he’d wasted all that education to sling coffee and were embarrassed that he’d spent all his schooling on art classes. He didn’t tell her that he was now sharing a studio space in Greenpoint and that a few gallerists had shown interest in his work. His mother didn’t care for his photographs. She complained that everyone looked too serious and sad. “Don’t they know how to smile?”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” she asked. “Do you have a cold?”
“No, this is just my voice.”
The silence ticked by. Jay could picture his mother talking to him from her new SUV. Hair styled and sprayed in place, her perfect makeup. She viewed his transition as a direct assault on her, on women, on femininity. In a few minutes, she’d step into her office and close a deal.
“Your father keeps asking if you’re coming home for Thanksgiving.” She paused. “He misses his little girl.”
Jay hadn’t been close to his father since he was a kid, when he used to lug around his father’s briefcase. His father had harbored dreams that Jay would follow in his footsteps and go to law school, but he had never expected Jay to look like some younger, scrappier version of him.
“I don’t know if I can get the time off,” he said. “I’ll try.”
When he hung up, he saw Ava watching him. She wanted to come home with him, she said, to meet his parents. He promised to take her. Just like he promised he’d go with her to Dollywood. One day.
_____
In the fall, Ava’s roommate moved out and Jay moved in. With boxes stacked around the living room, they drank cheap wine and ordered in Chinese food. Ava put on an Etta James record and they danced in the kitchen like a couple in a Hollywood movie.
“Is this what straight people do?” Jay asked, laughing.
“Oh, honey, I don’t think they’re even that interesting.” She took a drink of wine. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be boring? What if you never had to even think about gender? How easy things would be.”
“You’d hate that life,” he said.
“You’re right.” She pulled him in closer, her hand on the back of his neck. “I love who I am, especially who I am when I’m with you.”
Ava had grown her hair to her shoulders, and she indeed required a B-cup to hold her beloved breasts. She went through several painful, expensive sessions of electrolysis, paying with a high-interest credit card. Jay sprouted a faint mustache, sideburns, and a splotchy, sandpapery beard. His body weight shifted, and his hips were no longer so wide. He documented his own changes, but mostly he continued to photograph Ava. Each photograph was a love letter to her.
They delighted in their physical changes, though they also believed their genders didn’t depend on the science of hormones or surgeries, that to be trans was to enter—to soar—into a bigger, blurry, transgressive cosmic space. They were discovering who they’d always been but had never had words to explain. Ava’s face bloomed with fullness and a dimple appeared on her left cheek. Jay looked boyish and young, except for his new receding hairline. Every day he stared at his scalp in the mirror. He asked Ava if he should stop T. “You gotta make a choice, baby. Lose your hair or your guns,” she said and squeezed his new rock-hard biceps. Things were good. They were happy. On Sundays, they gave each other their shots—the drawing up of hormones, the prick of the needle, the sigh—and then went out for dim sum.
_____
One night they were going to meet up with some of Ava’s friends at a bar in the East Village. They stood near the center of the crowded train, each holding onto a pole. A wide, military-muscled white guy bumped into Ava and said, “Sorry, ma’am.” Then he looked closer. “Yo,” he said, slapping his friend’s shoulder. The pack of bros all looking now. Ava stared straight ahead. Jay gazed down at his boots, ears burning.
The bros’ voices turned up a notch—they wanted everyone to hear, especially Ava.
“That chick is a dude.”
Ava glanced at her phone, trying to look bored. The men didn’t see Jay or they didn’t care. He was a small white man, unremarkable.
“Are you a man or a woman?” they laughed.
Before Jay started T, his high, girlish voice had often betrayed him. Whenever he was addressed as “ma’am” or “lady,” he felt jolted by a primal blast of shame and fear and self-hatred, like he’d been flayed open, exposed. It was impossible to make cis people understand the pain, what it felt like to be misgendered. A barrage of punches to the gut. Face slaps. Like being spit on.
“Ava, let’s get off at the next stop,” Jay said quietly.
“Fuck that.”
“Ava, come on.”
She put her phone away.
One of the men said, “This fucking—,” followed by the terrible slur. The other passengers pretended not to hear. The train screeched and slowed down.
Jay tried to move around Ava, to block the men from looking, but the train lurched and he nearly fell. Ava clutched the pole, the heavy rings shining from her fingers. She always wore them when she went out at night. She made sure the bros saw them. Gave them a single cool glance.
“Imagine being so insecure about your manhood that you need to talk shit about strangers,” she said. “Imagine having no one, no girlfriend, no close friends, just this stupid posturing. How fucking sad.”
“Bitch—”
The train doors opened and Jay grabbed her by the hand. They slipped through.
“Fucking assholes,” Jay said.
Ava’s cheeks were flushed but she was ice cold. She fanned out a compact and reapplied her lipstick.
“I should have done something,” Jay said. “Said something. I’m sorry.”
“Shit like that happens all the time.” They waited for the next train. Ava hooked her arm around him. “You were with me,” she said. “That’s enough.”
But it wasn’t. It shouldn’t be enough. All through dinner, Ava dominated the conversation, her friends delighting in her wit. But Jay couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d just stood there, silent. He wasn’t her knight. He couldn’t protect her—and she knew it, she’d always known this.
After the bill was paid, they sauntered over to a bar down the street. A DJ spun disco, and a couple of skinny gay guys and one drag queen danced, while others milled about. When Jay went up to the bar, Ava’s friend Carmen insisted on buying.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Ava this happy,” she said.
Jay said she made him happy too.
Carmen looked like she was deciding how to break the news to him. “Honey, you seem like a sweet guy. Listen, Ava may seem tough, but she’s delicate. You know what I’m saying?” She viewed him as a child. A stupid, innocent knight. “Be careful with her.”
“She talks to me,” Jay said. He wanted to say that Ava had bared her scars, and allowed him to touch her sadness. Instead, he kept it simple. “I know her,” he said.
Carmen gave him a guarded smile. “Let me buy you a drink, lover boy.”
_____
On a particularly cold day, a gallerist who Jay had been in conversation with came by his studio. Maureen looked over his prints, then said, “What are these?”
“I can’t show those,” he said.
As Maureen flipped through the prints of Ava, her eyes narrowed. Ava had told him she didn’t want the photos of her hanging on gallery walls, but now Maureen looked at him like a lover would, except better—because it wasn’t him she wanted, it was his work, his art. “Talk to her,” she said.
When Jay got home, he found Ava on the couch curled under a blanket with a bottle of wine. He felt a jolt of panic. “Are you okay?” he asked. When he left her that morning, she had seemed content, even happy, writing in a notebook. She said she was fine, that this was nothing but the winter blues. She swung her feet out of the way, making space for him on the couch. He ran his thumb over the latticework of scars on her wrist. Both of them had scars—wounds now healed—that told different stories of self-harm and self-emergence. Ava had started, slowly, to share details about her wounds, to tell him about the attempts. The most recent time had happened just a couple months before they’d met. In the hospital, a few staff members had laughed at her.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked now.
“Are you? You’re acting weird.” Ava straightened up, her shoulders pulled back like she was bracing herself. Later, she told him she didn’t know if he was about to break up with her or propose.
He told her about his conversation with Maureen. “This is a way to show trans people without exoticizing or sensationalizing them.”
“Not trans people,” she said. “Trans person. Singular. Me.”
But the more Jay talked, the less she resisted. A few weeks later, Ava said yes. “But I get to choose which ones.”
“Of course,” he said. “You choose.”
They spent weeks looking through prints, acting like a couple on a reality show renovating their house, all giddy, energetic, believing they could start again. The project seemed to draw Ava away from the dark tide that pulled at her, and she curated herself with a keen eye, intuitively understanding which photos worked and which did not. She buzzed with a kind of purpose that seemed to free her of her sadness. Her uncontained laugh returned, shook through the apartment like a bell that Jay never wanted to stop ringing.
_____
A couple of weeks before the show, the sun came out and the air tasted green like summer, and it seemed like everyone in the city was out in tee shirts and shorts and sleeveless dresses. They sat on the front stoop, drinking boxed red wine and looking through a shoebox of Ava’s childhood pictures.
They’d been talking about Dollywood again, which always cheered Ava up. Jay promised that after the show, they would make a trip. They would walk through the amusement park like any couple, a beautiful woman on the arm of a boring, shlumpy man.
“We’ll pass as dull heteros, maybe even Bible thumpers,” he said.
Ava described it: the throngs of sugar-jolted kids running around and the elderly couples studying the park map. Women with press-on nails and men in wrap-around sunglasses. Endless American flag tee shirts.
“We’ll watch a live performance of a mediocre country band,” she said. “Buy gaudy, ridiculous souvenirs.”
Jay picked up a snapshot of her—a shirtless kid, diapers—on her granny’s lap. Her granny had red hair too, pulled back in a headband. She wore a floral print shirt and pedal pushers, a cigarette between her slender fingers. There were pictures of Ava as a scrawny Goth teenager strumming a guitar. The photos were worn and slightly discolored, and like little doors opening Jay’s memories of his grandparents’ house. He hadn’t been there since he was a kid, but he could still see the knotty hickory trees and mist lying over the mountains and the coal trucks barreling down the windy roads. He recalled the old-timey dialect and the lightning bugs that sparked from the trees. The trailer homes near creeks, the single-room churches. The deep shame his mother felt whenever she went back there, like the thick, black mud stuck to the bottoms of his grandfather’s boots.
Ava drew more wine from the box and filled her glass. She drank too much, but Jay didn’t try to stop her. Minutes ago, she was carefree, but now he felt her drifting away.
Across the street, the neighbor kids were playing “Mother May I.” Jay had no idea that kids still played this and watching them made him feel mildly nostalgic, like looking at a faded, out-of-focus snapshot from the seventies, all that golden light, that yearning.
“You okay?” he asked, running his fingers down the ferocious orange tiger crouched on Ava’s bare arm.
“Me and my brother used to play that sometimes,” she said. “When he wasn’t making me play football or some shit.”
When she’d been drinking, Ava slid into an exaggerated drawl, describing the place she’d left with disdain and longing. Busted-up cars as plentiful as weeds, shooting up beer cans with her cousins. She found joy traipsing through the woods. “I felt content, alive,” she said. Her granny had educated her. She had showed her which plants would heal and which ones would make her sick. Taught her the names of the trees. Ironwood, black oak, sycamore. The towering tulip trees that dropped petals shaped like delicate cups with orange centers, jewels falling from the sky.
Ava closed the shoebox lid. “I’m just so tired,” she said.
The sunlight spangled across the sidewalk and the children’s clear voices rang out. Mother, may I take one giant step? Yes, you may. Jay hadn’t gone to see his parents for the holidays. His mother told him they wanted him to come home, but he would have had to shave his beard and listen to them misgender him over and over. He knew he couldn’t ever take Ava home with him.
“You think about having kids?” Ava asked.
The question surprised him. “No,” he said. “Do you?”
“Lord no,” she said. “I’d be a crazy mother. Like my own.”
Her face slipped under a mask of sorrow. Jay didn’t know what to say. He searched for something to lighten the mood, tried to change the tenor.
“Well, I did have a baby one time.”
Ava cocked her head. “Okay, you’ve got my attention now.”
“In high school, boys took shop, girls took home ec. We learned how to sew an apron, bake a cake. Take care of a baby. A sugar baby.”
Jay had lied to Ava about his parents’ jobs and where he grew up. He’d lied to her about growing up working class. He’d lied about roaming the land in their holler and about attending a small, fundamentalist church. He didn’t know why he couldn’t let her see all of him, to show his own scars, like she wanted. But now he shared this minor memory, one that was true, one that he’d blocked out until now. For the assignment, the girls were instructed to take care of a bag of sugar as if it were an infant. They couldn’t leave it alone for too long. They documented in a notebook when they pretended to feed it or change its diaper. If they went somewhere, like ball practice, they had to ask someone else to babysit. So Jay, as one of the girls in the class, had hauled around a four-pound bag of sugar, pretending it was real. As he described its yellow yarn hair, button eyes, and a red Sharpied mouth, he tried to keep his tone light and cheerful. But he remembered how alone and scared he’d felt. The path he was meant to follow was laid out as straight and solid as the blue-painted lockers that lined the halls. Gender wasn’t something he thought about back then—he just wanted to get away from the other kids, to be in a place where he didn’t have to pretend. His baby was a boy named Cody. After a couple of days, it started to leak all over the classroom, its sugar guts sprinkling out.
“I got a C+,” he said with a straight face, and Ava’s concerned frown shifted into a smile. She pressed her lips together, trying to hold back, but the muted giggles exploded into her honking bray. Jay laughed too. The sun felt warm and good, and he thought they would be okay. The kids stepped forward and back, Mother doling out rewards and punishments. Mother, see me, Mother, love me. Mother may I?
_____
All week before the show, Jay was nervous, amped up, and irritable—what if it bombed, what if Ava hated it? What if he’d wasted all his money and the grant on printing the photographs? Ava had said hardly a word, withdrawing into a private, airless space that he could not enter. She didn’t want to see the show until the opening. “I want to be surprised,” she said.
Then, opening night. Queers, friends, artists, and strangers crowded into the small Brooklyn gallery. “You’re gay famous now,” Ava said, sounding both proud and annoyed.
They walked in holding hands. Ava stopped and stiffened, as if she’d been blasted with cold air. On the walls hung large color prints. Ava smoking a cigarette and staring back at the viewer; Ava playing guitar; Ava’s face blurred with drunkenness, a caged look in her eyes; Ava stunning, naked. Ava hovering over the room like a beautiful, wild angel.
Jay felt proud of the work and wanted Ava to like it, wanted her to love it. The photos captured her buzzing aliveness without masking the dark ache. She slid her hand out of his. Spotting Carmen in line at the bar, she told him she’d be right back.
As Jay shook hands and thanked people for coming and schmoozed with collectors, Ava stood in a corner with her friends, ignoring the photographs, ignoring him. Carmen glared at him from across the room.
Sarah from the coffee shop came up. “Dude, these are fantastic. Is Ava happy?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, it must be weird, seeing yourself like that.”
“She helped me pick them out,” he said.
By now, Ava had downed a few glasses of wine, her twang more noticeable. He heard her say, “At least I inspire him, I’m his fucking muse.” The accusatory stab of her voice, the raw anger, surprised him. He had convinced himself she would marvel at herself through his eyes.
Hours later, they walked in silence from the train station to their apartment. Ava hadn’t said a word since they left the gallery.
“You said you were okay with all this,” he started but she cut him off.
“You used me.”
“I photographed you because I love you,” he said.
She lit a cigarette, her face droopy from the wine, eyes bloodshot. She looked suddenly, unbearably old.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t include any naked shots of yourself, did you?”
This was just like her, to turn everything around and blame him. “You chose that photo yourself, Ava! It’s a beautiful photograph. You’re beautiful.”
They lay in bed, not touching, a dark and still and lonely space between them. When he was sure Ava was asleep, Jay went in the kitchen and turned on his laptop and opened the files. He’d asked Ava, are you sure you want to do this, and she’d said yes. Now he closed his eyes and tried to imagine walking into a room filled with images of him plastered on the walls. He had happily accepted her agreeing to this without seeing the fear—that she, like him, wanted to both be recognized and to go unnoticed.
He gently shook her awake. “I’m sorry.”
She blinked, groggily. Her face softened. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It was just hard, seeing people look at me.” She held his eyes. “It’s hard how you look at me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s too much,” she said.
He pulled her on top of him. He wanted her to hurt him, but instead she stroked her hands along his face and over his shoulders, and they fucked like that, soft and sad. After, they spoke to each other in the dark.
“I won’t sell them,” he promised.
“Are you crazy? Sell those fuckers. Make money. You better, I’m worth it.”
Jay ran the pads of his fingers over her skin, afraid she might disappear or maybe that he would. “I don’t float away when I’m with you,” he said.
“I’m here.”
“You see me,” he said. He wanted her to say the same, but Ava looked past him.
There was a private language they used to know, but now the words had slipped away. He curled into the waves of heat rolling off her body. Like animals, their bare feet slid across the sheets and found each other, and they fell asleep like that, tangled up, their exhausted, elated bodies humming with words their mouths did not know how to pronounce.
_____
One weekend, years later—Obama was out, so was Hope—Jay was in the city and he ran into Ava in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She looked older, but was just as beautiful and striking as he remembered. Long fingers studded with silver rings. When she hugged him, Jay’s body tingled with a light sensation that he had not experienced in years. His body remembered the kind of love he’d had with Ava that he didn’t expect to feel again, desire mixed up with fear. Like walking along the edge of a spectacular canyon. Like swans flapping gigantic wings, soaring overhead.
They tried to act normal. Made small talk. Caught up on each other’s lives. Jay had landed a teaching job at a third-rate college in Pennsylvania and was engaged. His parents still misgendered him, but they planned to come to the wedding.
Ava had been in a long-term relationship, but now was happily single. She told him she’d been writing and publishing short stories.
“I’ve been trying to write about you.”
“Oh, really?”
“Now you’ll get a taste of how it feels to be on the other side.”
He must have looked stunned and hurt, because her face took on a tenderness. “I’m kidding,” she said.
“I deserve it,” he admitted. After they broke up, Jay had turned the camera on himself, like Ava had suggested, but felt more bored than exposed. Eventually, he moved away from photographing people, and started to look at what else was around—trees, shadows, blades of grass—trying to fill the hole in his life.
Ava said she’d published a short story about the trip they’d talked about for so long. “In the story, we go to Dollywood,” she said.
“What happens?”
“The character that’s you is afraid everyone will clock them, but nobody does,” she said. Instead, they’re read as a straight, cis couple, a realization that is strange and even slightly nauseating, like the pink puffs of cotton candy that dissolve on their tongues.
“In the story, you’re scared, but then you finally get on a rollercoaster.”
“Do I like it?”
“You do,” she said. “The trip is good. It saves the couple’s relationship. Saves us.”
“We should have gone.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s better to have the story.”
Jay felt a crack in his chest. “I didn’t tell you the truth.”
“About what?”
“Any of it. I grew up in a suburb in Ohio, not eastern Kentucky,” he said. “I made all that up, I don’t know why.”
Ava stared at him and he could not read the emotion papered over her face. She was inscrutable and gorgeous.
“What about the sugar baby?”
He remembered the story he’d told her, the sugar leaking all over his bag and falling through his hands. How he’d wept for his baby boy.
“That was true,” he said. “Every word.”
Ava blinked. Then, she smiled. Her face shifted to something lighter, and she threw back her head and laughed, and then Jay did too. How he had missed that sound, as big and clear as a trumpet, music that shattered the dark.
