"beverley road"

and: Situations, Setups, and Stories

Mostly, I haven’t been writing that much fiction for the last three years, or at least, I haven’t been finishing things. When I do manage to finish something, it’s often the product of an impulse that in the moment feels trivial — unrelated to whatever project I think I’m doing, written in the spur of the moment. I rarely feel like they’re worth publishing properly.

My new e-zine, Situations, Setups, and Stories, is a collection of these more or less lighthearted stories, paired with extracts of other stories I started and didn’t finish, or didn’t finish to my satisfaction. It’s a way of taking stock, now that I feel like I’ve passed into a new stage (of which, more soon). It’s 150 pages and very uneven: I’d encourage any reader to dip into and out of it, open to a random page, try to finish the stories themselves, or otherwise treat it in any fashion other than that of a “book.”

Here’s one of those stories. I started writing it because I wanted to write pornography in the vein of Anaïs Nin, and it turned into something else as I wrote.

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I.

One ordinary Saturday in August, Beverley happened to be walking down Beverley Road in Brooklyn with a friend who isn’t in this story. Seventy degrees, a breeze blowing, the sun at a 45-degree slant on all the little terraced houses. Beverley had been out of college for two years, and she had been settling uneasily into her life as another one of those indistinguishable transplants with a mustache and big horn-rimmed glasses, a little bemused about his good fortune.

But that day, walking down Beverley Road, the knot that had been tightening inside her for two years unraveled over the course of about twenty minutes as she kept seeing the sign at each cross street, telling her where she was. Oh, right, she thought, and it became possible. The name undid it, and there was never any further question of what she would be named.

That evening, Claire arrived from Philadelphia and sat down with her across a table on a slightly slanted sidewalk, and began, Whenever I’m here, I have to confront my relationship with excess.

Tell me about it, Beverley said.

By then the sun was low and red. The hazy light and the atmosphere of warmth and repose in Manhattan that evening was leading Beverley to reflect a bit on her short life. In her late teens and early twenties she had had glamorous, intelligent girlfriends, who were all confused at Beverley’s apparent dissatisfaction with them. Her charm wasn’t her problem, it was what came after. Claire, the final term in Beverley’s Philadelphia series, came the closest to understanding her problem.

You’re good? It’s won you over? Claire said, spreading her hands in a semicircle, indicating the city around them.

Beverley wasn’t thinking about the question, and the questions behind the question. She was thinking about how she withheld a lot from Claire, made herself some sort of ideal interlocutor. Years of sitting across tables from her, straining to achieve some kind of ideal subtext, before and during and after the period they were having sex, more sex than any other relationship she had been in, and more desperate, greedy, inventive. The shadow of sex hovering over her, she decided to withhold a little more from Claire, surprising herself by deciding that Claire wouldn’t be the first one to know that she had made the insane, unthinkable decision to become a woman.

Mostly, Beverley said.

What’s the missing piece?

Well, my apartment isn’t ideal. And I’m not in love.

Not ideal how?

The location kinda sucks and I’m paying too much. I want to move to Brooklyn, but it’s just as expensive.

I could see you in Brooklyn, Claire said, and it occurred to Beverley that Claire had no idea what she was talking about and that it didn’t matter.

And you’re not in love? Claire went on.

No, Beverley said, smiling as if to say, it’s not a big deal.

She never felt a need, with Claire, to avoid the language of passion, always trusting that it would be folded back into syllogisms. This had been true, to the detriment of their relationship, when they had been together for a year and a half and had to start talking about their life together, as if it was an object that had been placed in the center of a table between them. It turned out they had mostly been avoiding each other, looking right above each other’s heads instead of making eye contact, so to speak.

I’m not in love, Beverley went on, But I’m not trying to be. I’m trying to stay open to it.

And Claire nodded, and smiled, and they got up and paid and walked the streets, down into Chinatown and back up into Chelsea, and bickered good-naturedly about continental philosophy as applied to cinema, which was the subject over which they first bonded and with which Claire was still preoccupied at Penn. Manhattan sparkled with the freshness of a changing season, still a cubist world of angles projected onto a flat surface, a cartoon beehive full of passionate, verbose beings. A spraying hose in front of a flower display made a rainbow, things like that. It was nice.

Claire crossed streets, decided on turns, seemingly at random but confidently. Beverley similarly felt like she had to keep up with the talking, was being led. Claire was someone through whom the world flowed, and when she talked in the language of academic articles about the status of the avant-garde, the nature of gentrification, and the social reproduction of class, it felt like she was just talking about her own life, because she was.

Glimpses of Beverley’s face in the windows of cars and closed stores. She never noticed before how much glass was in a city. Even grotesquely distorted by curved surfaces, it was easy to tell who was the man and who was the woman. When you’re out in public, you see men and women: that’s the kind of people that there are.

While they walked, into and out of a bookstore and two art galleries, they made increasingly intentional physical contact. Claire, never timid, was outright confident with her hands now. Once, to punctuate a point, she gave Beverley’s shoulder a brotherly punch.

What did we talk about when we were together? Beverley thought. They had been younger and life had more hypotheticals. Now they only had problems, and Claire, from the sound of it, was attacking all of them frontally, besides the question of what to do with her life when she inevitably quit academia. Everything else, though — sex, drugs, God, inner peace, anger, forgiveness, love, revolution — that was all being subject to dissection, with examples taken from her life. It seemed she had thought a lot about all of this, it didn’t sound improvised. Beverley had the opposite orientation toward life at the moment, but that was less fun to talk about.

Claire let it slip that she was here for a final-round job interview at a nonprofit, an administrative role at a cinema conservation foundation. Ah, okay, she had that figured out, too. As the sun passed over the lips of the ancient, otherworldly tenement cornices, the conversation shifted to the New-York-vs-Philadelphia thing, which was an indication that they were running out of conversational steam By that time, Beverley realized Claire had followed her back to her apartment. The one that wasn’t ideal. She wasn’t disappointed: Claire did tease her about that line, calling her a spoiled rich kid, before kissing her in the kitchen.

Words like lesbian and dysphoria floated up in Beverley and burst like soap bubbles. They were just words, it didn’t really matter.

I’m not open with Skylar, Claire said, almost offhandedly, after pulling away. One hand between Beverley’s legs, pressing uncomfortably hard on her cock, the other one just lightly pulling on her hair.

Oh.

I’m still going to have sex with you, Andrew.

Okay.

I just need you to be tactful about this.

They both laughed, a little uneasily, then they went back to it.

Claire pulled Beverley’s hair harder. Beverley whimpered a little bit, and Claire smiled and exhaled sharply. Is this what it had been like? The hair thing was new. And Beverley had a feeling it would stick around in her erotic life for a while, like a piece of furniture that seems like it’ll fit through a door exactly once.

I should have told her, she thought. No, it didn’t matter. Claire had shoved Beverley onto her back and was on top of her, straddling her.

Fuck, I’m wet.

I wanna taste, Beverley said automatically.

Sure.

Three fingers down and back up, with a harder pull on the hair. Beverley closed her mouth like she was at the dentist. Words like submissive and woman popped off in her mind like little flashbulbs. She was faintly aware that she was making little high-pitched noises.

You like that? Yeah, here, have some more, pretty boy.

And Claire hoisted her hips up to Beverley’s face. For a split second Beverley thought, Pretty boy? That was a new one, right? And a simultaneous realization that she only had faint recollections of what it had been like, those years ago, in that squalid apartment in New Haven. Memory had overwritten itself with each late-night retrieval, her hand under her boxers under her covers.

Then she didn’t really think any more, because her nose and mouth were saturated with Claire’s vagina. Claire made those usual squeaking noises as Beverley found her rhythm. Okay, I remember this part, Beverley thought. There was usually a moment, partway into having sex, where Beverley zoomed out of her body a little, started seeing what she was doing as ridiculous, some kind of grotesque physical comedy. Was it happening a little earlier this time?

You’ve improved, purred Claire, after some amount of time, dismounting in a fluid motion and scooting herself backward so her face was repositioned near Beverley’s cock. Nope, not yet, Beverley thought.

Some time later:

You’ve been tested recently, Claire said, mostly a question.

Yeah.

Cool. I still have the IUD, and I believe you.

Beverley didn’t love that but she went with it.

Oh, okay, she said.

Be still, Claire said. Just let me. Yeah. Andrew, Andrew —

It was all a little theatrical and porny, Beverley realized, a thought like a faint light from a zillion miles away, she was zooming away from the thought even as it caught up to her, redshifting. Yeah, it was all a little B-movie, a little unworthy of Claire. And that name, she was looking forward to getting rid of it, it was suddenly urgently uncomfortable, like a way-too-tight shirt.

Oh, you feel so good.

But that one’s classic, it always works. Her cock had been getting soft but it stiffened up again and became sort of numb. Claire felt good, too, then she felt like nothing, a vague circular pressure. Yeah, she was dissociating now. That was the word that everyone was using for it these days. Claire found her angle, which, right, she always ended by leaning way forward, hair curtaining Beverley’s face, and Beverley looked up at her and relaxed and waited to finally cum in her ex-girlfriend, which already had that retrospective quality of embarrassment.

Claire spat gently onto Beverley’s nose, and braced her forearm on the pillow as it ran down the side of Beverley’s face like a tear. Her breasts heaved against Beverley’s flat chest.

Oh, baby, Claire said breathily. She was really into it, Beverley realized. In the “throes” of it, a Victorian word that popped unbidden into her mind. Throes were a thing that you were in, and Beverley didn’t feel like she was in anything, not even really Claire at this point.

Baby, Beverley tried in return. Felt normal.

Fuck, fuck, oh —

Her breasts flapping up and down, bouncing off her stomach.

Oh —

Claire put her face right up to Beverley’s and breathed hard directly into her mouth. Faster, shallower.

Look at me. Fucking look at me. Oh, my god, look into my eyes —

Beverley realized she couldn’t and so she didn’t. It ruined the moment a little bit.

Thank you, Beverley said after Claire got off her.

Thank you, Claire said, and pushed herself up.

While Claire was in the bathroom, the words from before came back and didn’t leave this time. Accompanied by some other ones. Mostly they were labels. “Lesbian,” “dysphoria,” “submissiveness,” “dissociation,” and so on. This would be the last time having sex would be like that, Beverley realized. That unthinkingly, that automatic. The thought of seeking this out with other people — lying to them like she had, let’s be honest with herself now, just lied to Claire — was unthinkable.

Besides the sound of the faucet, her apartment was quieter than usual. The air conditioner was turned off and the other window opened wide for this evening that felt like a faint premonition of autumn, the air from outside activating a faint smell of cloth and dust in her apartment. Some cumbia playing from a car that sped past on Avenue C, then some trap, then some honking.

Claire in her apartment. Claire of the soft face, the silky brown hair down to her chest, the fat thighs. There she was, naked, her oddly square hip pointing out at a 45-degree angle, leaning on Beverley’s doorframe like she was in an old movie.

Mind if I stay here tonight?

Beverley smiled. She was smiling for herself, thinking now only of herself, of how odd it was that she had ended up in this position.

Held it a little too long.

Um, Beverley finally said, and let her mouth hang open, thinking. It wouldn’t work. It should be stopped right here and now. But how?

It’s fine, Claire said. You have work tomorrow, and I have that interview.

Right.

They talked a little longer, held each other, kissed in the door to the stairwell. Beverley couldn’t sleep that night. When she got up to pee in the middle of the night, she checked her phone, and saw that Claire had just texted her, got back safe. She was half tempted to tell Claire to walk the ten blocks to re-do that moment in the doorway. As if one could try out a different decision, rewind the tape. Or, Beverley could make a new decision, and walk to the apartment where Claire was staying, in a midnight madness of passion that she didn’t really feel. Her real feelings were mundane: she felt like she needed someone at this juncture in her life. She was realizing, for the first time, how alone she felt.

II.

Claire didn’t get the job. But two years later, she had burned her ship at the Comp Lit department and came back to New York to stay. They had been sending periodic emails, in which Beverley had finally told her she was transitioning, and had talked about how she had been doing the usual things. Exam tables, fitting rooms, paperwork, mortifying conversations in which she asked people to disbelieve their own eyes, then the asymptotic effort to make up the difference. Everyone called her the new name now, and more than once, they brought up the road in Brooklyn, and Beverley said, yeah, like the road, keeping one thing a secret.

She lived in a much nicer apartment in a wedding cake of a building off the Forest stop in Queens. She had gotten promoted at work somehow. Her boss at the agency, who had moved to Manhattan when everyone else his age had and fancied himself an old bohemian, recalled rosily how some old queen was so nice to him in ’92 when he locked himself out of his apartment in Two Bridges. She had helped him break in. Beverley had smiled at the anecdote, and felt herself sort of unworthy of it: she didn’t know how to break in to an apartment building. But, good lord, how much better than the alternative. She thanked God that she lived in New York City, where trans women are somewhat canonical, and continued with the normal course of her life.

Back at that slanted sidewalk table, under a heat lamp this time:

So, I’m destroying my life, Claire was saying, by way of introduction.

Right, yeah, Beverley said.

And you’re writing a screenplay? Claire said.

Yeah.

Perfect. What about?

Beverley twirled a strand of her silky brown hair.

It’s got a story, she began. But it’s mostly just like, this way of having an excuse to write about a particular way that trans people relate to each other, and how we talk about some things and avoid others.

Right, Claire said, unconvinced. Why don’t you start with the story.

Okay. So this guy sort of stumbles into his neighbor’s apartment, and it turns out that it’s this group of trans girls, right.

Claire nodded for Beverley to continue.

And he’s this total loser, right? Like, he just got dumped by his girlfriend, he has some shitty nonsense job, right.

Sure.

But one of the girls — this office worker who’s making a lot of money but who’s like, a little undersocialized, not in like a catgirl way, but.

A catgirl way? Claire laughed.

Her skepticism was always so warm, Beverley thought, everyone else lets me get away with such lazy generalizing, it’s like they weren’t even paying attention.

You know what I mean, Beverley said.

I don’t.

You know, like those trans girls online who are all on, like, Discord servers, they don’t go outside that much, and, like, jerk off with each other on video chats, make unlistenable electronic music —

I’m not sure I share this cultural context, Bev. I’m like, your average straight bisexual girl.

Okay, Beverley said, reddening. Never mind.

No, wait, go back to your screenplay. Do they like, fall in love and it’s like a romance plot with the two of them?

Yes, that’s exactly right.

I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

Yeah, uh. I mean, like, the point of it is that this guy kinda has to like, become friends with all her trans girl friends.

Okay. Why is that, like, an issue, Claire said.

Reddening more, she was sure of it. Well, she said. Like, by analogy, it’s sort of like a story where a straight person gets accidentally put into a gay context. He’s in a queer community as a straight person.

Sure.

Claire was smiling, that knowing smile that said that she knew more than she was saying.

Usually, that story is about how someone has really ended up where they don’t belong, right? But in this case, the guy is supposed to belong there. He’s a man in a relationship with a woman.

Uh-huh.

But he doesn’t. So it’s like, a traditional romance plot that has to compete for space with this story about acculturation.

Sounds like a traffic jam, Claire said.

How could Beverley explain this to Claire? Beverley had, after some furtive searching, finally found the girls and it was like she had stepped into a parallel reality. She was trying to convey that, or had been. The feeling of new life, but now, her life wasn’t that new. An attempt, then, to see outside of it. She hadn’t really been working on it since the promotion, it just seemed like the right thing to talk to Claire about.

They painfully and slowly got off that track, and Claire launched into her precise reasons for dropping out of graduate school, which had simplified dramatically since Beverley had last heard from her. She had a saintly certainty now, making an example of her life instead of using her life for examples. Subletting in furthest Inwood and racing her savings. In a way, it’s the only possible direction she could have been preparing herself for.

I mean, ultimately, I feel like I’m a lot more at peace now, just on a day-to-day level, Claire said, in concluding. So I know that it’s the right decision, even though from an objective perspective I should have just like, gotten a job at the library.

That’s awesome.

I can talk all I want about the specifics, but in the end it’s just that my head was full of clouds, and now it’s not.

I mean, what are you gonna do now?

I want to write some stuff. But mostly I’m just going to ask myself that question for a while.

What stuff?

Some essays. An editor at The Baffler wants something from me.

Oh, wow.

It’s not really that serious. He’s my advisor’s friend, he’s being nice to me.

Still.

As the conversation delved ever further into Claire’s chaotic first week in New York, episodes with a tenor that Beverley now associated with trans women she met who crash-landed here in their early twenties from the South or rural New England, Beverley’s phone had been buzzing in her pocket at a consistent clip. Group chat, probably.

First, Claire had gotten locked out of her apartment, and her idiotic roommate — a friend of a friend — had become convinced, through a perplexing misunderstanding, that the lock on the door was broken, and a call to a locksmith ensued, who arrived and could barely speak English and who immediately started disassembling the lock after Claire’s roommate tried to talk to him. Then, once that had been resolved, Claire had to hurriedly prep for an interview later that day, to be a programming fellow at a repertory theater uptown, while the roommate was having an acrimonious fight with her boyfriend in the living room of the apartment. Then she ran into someone on the way out of the interview, Nat Wong, remember her? They all ended up at Nowadays, and then at some rave in East Williamsburg until 7 AM, where Claire’s phone died.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. In the bar bathroom, Beverley looked. It wasn’t the group chat. Her apartment had burned down. Everyone wanted to know if she was okay. She texted all of them, bewildered, yeah I’m fine, I’m out rn, I had no idea. Footage of her bedroom window spitting flame was on Twitter. She faintly and insanely wondered who had taken that video, which unseen neighbor, who had been used to seeing Beverley sitting at the desk in that window. That desk which was probably just cinders now.

Claire had an oddly pained and almost weary expression when Beverley got back.

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about me. I wanna hear about you.

Beverley’s mind was a sea of noise. She sat down and blinked, thinking about the things she had in her bag. Phone, wallet, charger, keys, a copy of the new Katie Kitamura novel.

Wanna get out of here, actually? Claire said.

Sure, Beverley said.

It would come out of her in a second, she thought. It couldn’t not. My house just burned down, I just found out. She formed the words on her lips, but every time she looked over at Claire, who was midway through some other tirade, they caught. Time passed. They walked up Eighth Avenue in the encroaching chill. One block, then two.

I guess we could keep walking all the way up to Inwood, Beverley finally said.

Oh god, she thought, my fucking passport. And the stockpile of estradiol, and the photo album her mother had given her as a guilt trip thing when she transitioned, and…

Is something wrong? Claire said.

Everything else was replaceable. The diaries of her embarrassing early realizations: who needs them? She had a job, she had insurance. It would be fine. Just a total wipe clean, and her friends would help her out a bit, and…

Just thinking, Beverley said, really slowly, almost experimentally. She was surprised she wasn’t shaking. In fact calm had descended upon her like the coming of night. Telling Claire about this is pointless. Claire was the wrong person to be with her in this moment.

You’re allowed to lapse into silence when you know each other well: Beverley and Claire knew each other not at all by now. But Beverley couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would make any kind of difference.

She got her phone back out, scrolled through notifications almost without seeing them. People pleaded her to text them. So many people wanted certainty that she was safe, alive, unhurt. One of her friends, who seemed to take for granted that Beverley had survived, offered to let her take the spare room until she found something else. It’s yours, B. She’d have to take it. Gowanus. Maybe she’d look for an apartment out there, once she had any kind of money.

What are you thinking about? Claire said at the corner of Eighth and Fourteenth.

Nothing in particular.

Sure.

And Claire elbowed her playfully. Beverley thought about all the times she felt close to Claire, wished she could feel closer. She found herself wishing that it was six months from this moment, so that she could make recourse to irony. Claire was only good for her once she had sorted herself out, put her life into some kind of narrative shape. Somehow Claire had always seemed like the one who was real, living in the world, and so Beverley tried to withhold whatever pathetic sliver of reality her life represented from her as some kind of ridiculous attempt at revenge.

Claire seemed to take Beverley’s sustained, blank gaze for an invitation. She smiled wryly and looked down at her feet, drifting her body closer to Beverley’s. The sleeve of Beverley’s denim jacket made contact with the sleeve of Claire’s corduroy one.

They walked past the uptown A entrance, still not making any kind of commitment.

They kept not talking as the light fell, eventually holding hands, then Claire obscenely and awkwardly put her arm around Beverley’s waist, for less than the duration of a block, before letting go like it had never happened.