The Lava in My Bones (23 page)

In mid-February, I was sitting forlornly in the Odeon café sweating in a Davy Crockett costume as your eyes, as usual, aimed down like rifle barrels between clouds. They forced me back to that time of unexpected snowfalls and breezes blowing powder across iced-over lakes. You were disintegrating me, and soon nothing would remain but trees and rock. Earlier that morning I'd put my house up for sale to move into a cramped city condo far from the forest. Moving wouldn't be enough to stop your eyes from staring. I studied a woman in a cocktail dress and matching pearls sauntering to the café counter. The men in Odeon ignored her, of course; they weren't attracted to women. I remembered the distress you felt when you realized women no longer interested you. “I've crossed a border,” you said with pain and elation, “and can never go back.”

The thought came to me in a lightning clap: I should become a woman. Then your eyes would shut for good. I removed my fur hat, pondered the raccoon tail swinging against my coffee cup.

The two saleswomen at Lulu's Boutique, Betsy and Reiner, winked in perfect unison when I explained what I wanted. They clapped their hands together and said, “So fantastic. This'll be fun!” But how disoriented I felt when they shaved my legs, plucked my eyebrows, and forced mesh stockings over my legs and high heels onto my feet. How confused I became when they attached foam pads to my hips and a silicone-bubble bra to my chest to give me an hourglass figure. The girls hid my penis by curling it down through my legs and taping it there in
a procedure that was disturbingly effective. They dressed me in a shiny silk blouse. The pleated skirt twirled when I walked. Betsy pinned a clamshell brooch below my neck and slipped jangling hoop bracelets on my clean-shaven wrists. Reiner spent a long time on my makeup, which she said I needed to have re-applied daily. The nylons itched against my leg stubble; my new panties felt like an egg cup clasping my pelvis. On my head they placed a heavy wig with feathered, rippling hair. “Its blond highlights,” chirped Betsy, “bring out a hidden hue in your cheeks.” The girls spent the rest of the afternoon teaching me how to walk and talk. Since I had no female friends or co-workers and only saw women about town, I didn't know how to behave. The girls gave me a new name: Veronika, Franz's voluptuous red-haired cousin.

I stepped onto the street and balanced on my heels, my bracelets jangling, the bra strap digging into my back, Dior perfume making my eyes water. I immediately sensed something had changed. I raised my head and saw, wonder of wonders—no eyes. I cried out in my deep male voice, “Fuckin' A!”

Out of nowhere in the endless blue, two spinning dots appeared that grew into identical spheres. So I lifted my forearms, flapped my hands up and down as if each wrist were an oiled hinge, and remembered the voice Reiner recommended, a descending falsetto, the sound a bird makes falling from a branch. I cried out, “Oh, how nice!”

The globes popped and vanished.
Erstaunlich!

Navigating Zurich's cobblestone streets in heels was difficult. I remembered not to “walk square” but “flow” as Betsy suggested. Yet new problems arose. One pair of eyes had disappeared, but
thousands of new ones opened up. Men leered at me from tramcar windows. Shoeshine boys snapped their rags at my behind. Bandanna-wearing cyclists rang their bells, toothless gypsies asked me to sleep on their sheets of cardboard, and men in suits stuffed business cards down my blouse. As a man I'd been a cool customer. As a woman I was a hot tamale. Every curve, hollow, and mound on my foam-bulging body was scrutinized, but unlike your eyes, which penetrated me, theirs glided along the surface of my skin and slid off.

Not only eyes opened but mouths as well. My life was full of new sounds.

“Nice jugs, Helga.”

“You got the curves and I got the angle.”

“Let's go to my place and watch your fondue bubble.”

Hurensohn!
Hands too materialized out of thin air, scampered across my blouse, made beak-like jabs at my breasts, flapped like windshield wipers across my back, or clung to my hips like burrs. Once, when I was waiting for the stoplight, a guy in overalls shoved his fingers up my skirt. I turned, slapped him with my purse, and cried out, “Oh, you cad!”—Greta Garbo's line from
Two-Faced Woman.
I was trying to be authentic.

The constant attention infuriated me. I wished I could walk into a coffee shop without being ogled. I'd always gotten attention from guys in bars but could control the result. I'd snap my fingers and say “Next!” Now, when even some unshaven dork whose breath smelled like horse manure smiled at me, I felt obliged to throw my head back, giggle, and flap both hands in the air like Marlene Dietrich in
Destry Rides Again.
(My mother
also flaps her hands.) I was beginning to understand the oppression of women, something I heard about once.

Men ogle, Sam, but women treat women no better. In the Jelmoli washroom, I was sitting on the pot when I overheard a lady at the mirror say, “The problem is that we've lost true femininity.”

Another woman answered, “You're right, Elke. We have to choose between independence with no sexuality, or sexuality joined to submission. We lose either way.”

I didn't know what they were talking about, but felt I should say something. I knew a lot more about women now. After all, I'd been one for two days.

So I abruptly hiked up my panties and pushed open the cubicle door. How exciting! This would be my first bonding with my sisterhood! “I just want you to know, girls, that I understand exactly what you're talking about.” I was disappointed to see that the women were wearing print cotton dresses and wool vests—probably secretaries. “Sometimes my dress clings so tightly to my hips, I fall if I try to run.” My voice was as high as a struck tuning fork. “But if I don't run, my hair won't have that windblown look. What should I choose, practicality or glamour? We have such terrible choices.”

“Excuse me, but there's a piece of toilet paper stuck to your pantyhose.”

Both ladies cackled like witches. It's women against women and men against women in this
verdammt
world! I was learning a shitload of stuff. (Sam, I know you think I'm dim-witted. I've noticed your subtle smirk. Do I mind? Not at all, laugh if it gives
you pleasure. I want you to be happy. Please, laugh!)

I decided from now on not to talk but to observe. For the first time in my life.

Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun.
German is a language of consonants; French, a language of vowels. English can't make up its mind. (Have you made up your mind about me, Sam, you sexy beast you?)

When I beheld myself in the mirror a month later, I no longer felt troubled. I was separate from my former self but now appeared very contained and complete. Huddled over a table at Odeon, I sipped my
Milchkaffee
and flipped through a glossy magazine. I'd been leered at so much lately that I didn't have the heart to glare at others. I remembered judging your bony elbows, Sam, and felt guilty. Darcy and Delial were at the counter, talking hysterically. I wanted to reveal myself to them but feared your eyes would open. My friends gesticulated wildly, sometimes staring into the distance and rarely making eye contact with each other. For a moment, I felt sorry for them.

Out on the sidewalk I frequently heard my name mentioned. I'd stop walking and, ear cocked, lean sideways into my own shadow, balancing carefully on my heels.

“Franz, what an
Arschloch!
I wondered where he went.”

“He's a prick if there ever was one.”

“He still owes me 500 francs.”

I was amazed to hear myself spoken of unkindly. Since I couldn't interject, now I was forced to listen.

“Franz came to my place once, stayed five minutes, got his rocks off, and left right away. Not so much as a thank you.”

“The guy's a total sleeping pill.”

Unable to defend myself, I felt strangely calm.

“He barely notices you. Before he comes, he'll call you the name of another guy. He doesn't differentiate between men.”

Didn't people understand I was the best lay in Zurich? Perhaps the people who'd enjoyed me had been cowed into silence. (I know you want to laugh at me now, Sam. Go ahead! Let 'er rip!)

I touched the corn-cob brooch at my neck and realized it was only you, Sam, who had wanted to make love to me more than once.

Some evenings, cutting bockwurst into bite-sized bits at the Spettle's counter, I heard stories about my unexplained absence. In one tale I'd been kidnapped by an Italian jewellery heiress and was now tied naked to a bedpost in a room on the outskirts of Milan where she and all the town virgins repeatedly milk me like a cow. “He'll never escape,” my ex-friend Hugo cried, slapping his kneecap. “Franz's dick's probably so sore he wishes he never had one.”

In another story I'd broken a mirror and the shards fell into an open vat of paint. I tried to remove them, but became fascinated by my reflection and accidentally tumbled in. The sides were too slippery to climb and the paint eventually solidified around my body. I was later removed, encased in a congealed beige block, and presently hang in the Kunsthalle Basel. My back is curved, my face pressed against my shins so that my body resembles an O. At first the piece was labelled
The Donut,
then
Pervert's Halo,
then
Franz Niederberger's IQ.
“I'm the one who suggested the last name,” Hugo screamed, laughing and slapping his other kneecap, his thigh and stomach. “I'm amazed they used it.”

In the third story, I was putting my paintbrushes away but discovered there weren't enough jars. I solved the problem by shoving three brushes into my mouth, one in each ear and nostril, and six up my ass. When I realized I could no longer breathe or shit and was, in fact, dying, I refused to remove the brushes—“He's such a neat-freak,” snickered Hugo—instead, I walked quietly into my backyard and lay under a tree. Rain fell and washed the paint from the brushes that protruded from my body like natural appendages. When the sun came out, the grass was stained every colour of the rainbow and I was dead. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Hugo shouted, whacking his shins, his neighbours' thighs, and my behind.

I preferred this story because of the quiet dignity I displayed entering the garden to die. But when the men continued to laugh uproariously, slapping salt shakers, cinnamon buns, billiard balls, beer glasses, and hot pokers, I wanted to tear off my wig, strip myself naked, and shout, “You stupid assholes, look: I'm Franz. How could I know you never liked me, you dick-shits!
Scheiss,
you think I'm a mind reader?”

But if I did this, your eyes would reappear in the sky, sterner and fiercer than ever, and send down rays that would pulverize me into a pile of ashes. So I snatched my purse from the counter and, remembering to shake my hips, minced out of the bar weeping a high girlie wail. I wiped tears from my cheeks with a silk handkerchief decorated with buttercups,
bluebells, and tiny, prancing fairies.

By the time I got home, I was crying. I felt so lonely. I didn't know how to make new friends or get a lover. Should I wait for some
Arschloch
to send me a sheaf of long-stemmed roses? Or hope some loser would throw down his jacket so I could step over a hole in the sidewalk? I was sick of taking steps shorter than twelve centimetres and always aiming my vocal chords at a high D-flat.

Each night, I'd tear off my dress and panties and release my penis from its prison of tape and cotton. From the space between my legs it'd swing forward like an ornery ogre roused from its lair, and I'd breathe a sigh of relief, glad it hadn't dissolved or been absorbed into my body. Some days I'd stop before a shop window and see reflected, in the distance, the glacier-tipped mountains. Why did nature still frighten me, Sam? For the first time I wondered if it mattered if people didn't like me as Franz. Nobody liked or knew Veronika, and, as Veronika, I could deal with that. I recognized how dependent Franz was on others' views. At times Veronika was almost indifferent. Indifference is freedom, Sam.