Resentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Two new converts, hippie girls turned Holy Rollers, informed me my sleeves were too short and my neckline too low. They were kind in that churchy, bless-your-heart kind of way. I bit my tongue and borrowed a sweater. In the summer months, when the tent turned into a canvas steam bath, I tried to steal a little comfort by going braless under loose blouses and covering the evidence with a shawl. Things jiggled when I raised my hands to pray, and people were scandalized. I couldn’t please God or the Terrellites, and I couldn’t stop the questions. Why was it more important to look holy than to live holy? Why did Brother Terrell and my family have so much stuff, when Jesus said to sell everything and give it to the poor? Why had an omnipotent God let that child die? I broached these issues with other believers as much as I could without betraying my family, and was urged to pray harder and not give in to the devil. My old misgivings about the ministry returned, and my resentment against God, the all-or-nothing ego at the center of the universe, grew. It was all his fault: my mother’s abandonment of my brother and me, the sadness at the center of her life. Then there was the secret of my sisters’ existence. The way they met their daddy in a roadside park after a tent service, so they could hug him through the car window. And there was the loss of that high-school boyfriend, a small grief that grew larger as I tallied the offenses.I tried to discuss my doubts and resentments with my mother, but I couldn’t get past her defense of Brother Terrell. Jesus had said that the poor would always be with us. It wasn’t his fault that he had to keep his family (her and my sisters) a secret. It was the fault of his enemies, who would use the information to destroy the ministry. Couldn’t I see that? When she wasn’t defending Brother Terrell, she was calling to tell me how depressed she was.“Sometimes, I just wish the Lord would take me.” It seemed to me that my mother saw death as the only way out. [image "008" file=Image00007.jpg] After nine months of trying to be a good Terrellite, I quit. I lacked whatever it took to live right, which in my mind was to abide by Terrellite doctrine. I also lacked the ability to stay married. My husband and I divorced, and I spent the next three years careening between sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the increasingly paranoid reality of the Terrellites. With their big egos, infidelities, and cash transactions, these worlds were surprisingly alike. All I had to do was change clothes and I felt at home.Despite Mama and Brother Terrell’s attempts to keep the whereabouts of her ranch a secret, IRS agents showed up in the small town close to where she and my sisters lived. This scared Brother Terrell.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  tasseled black loafers. Dressing inthedark,hehaddecidedtheywere the easiest toslip on.Hewas alsowearinghiscarcoat,beige and dingy, witha muffoffuratthe collar. Against thecoldhehadworn a hat,a gray felt Borsalino,witha redfeatherin theblackband.An old-timer's hatnow in1975.With hat,briefcase,andloafers,Milton might have beenonhiswayto work. Andcertainly he was walking quickly.He climbed the metal stepstothe train platform.Heheaded along it, looking forthetrashcanwhere hewas supposedtodropthe briefcase. The kidnappersaid it would haveanXchalked onthelid. Miltonhurried alongthe platform,thetassels onhis loafers bouncing,the tinyfeatherinhishat ripplinginthe coldwind. It wouldnotbe strictiytruthfultosay thathewasafraid.Milton Stephanides didnotadmittobeing afraid.Thephysiologicalmani- festations offear,theracingheart,the torchedarmpits,wentonin him withoutofficial acknowledgment.Hewasn'taloneamonghis generationinthis. There were lotsoffatherswhoshoutedwhenthey wereafraidorscoldedtheirchildrento deflectblamefromthem- selves. It'spossible thatsuchqualities wereindispensableinthe generation thatwonthewar.Alackofintrospectionwas goodfor bolstering your courage, but in thelastmonthsandweeks ithad donedamage to Milton.Throughout my disappearanceMiltonhad keptupabravefrontwhiledoubts workedinvisibly insidehim.He was like astatuebeingchiseledaway fromtheinside, hollowedout. Asmore andmoreofhisthoughts gavehim pain,Miltonhadin- creasingly avoidedthem.Insteadhe concentrated onthefewthat made himfeelbetter,the bromides about everythingworkingout. Milton, quitesimply,hadceased tothinkthingsthrough.Whatwas hedoing outthereonthe darktrainplatform?Whydidhegoout therealone? Wewouldneverbe abletoexplainit adequately. Itdidn't take himlong tofind thetrashcanmarked withchalk. Swiftly Milton lifteditstriangular greenlidand laidthebriefcasein- side.But when hetriedtopull hisarm back out,something wouldn't lethim: it washishand. Since Miltonhadstopped thinkingthings through, his body wasnowdoing the workforhim.Hishand seemed tobe sayingsomething. It wasvoicing reservations. "Whatif the kidnapper doesn'tsetCallie free?"thehand was saying. But Mil- tonanswered, "There'sno timetothink about thatnow." Againhe tried to pullhis armout ofthetrash can,buthishandstubbornly re- 503 sisted: "What if the kidnappertakesthismoney andthen asksfor more?" asked thehand. "That'sthechancewe'llhavetotake,"Milton snapped back, andwith allhisstrength pulledhis armoutofthetrash can. His handlostitsgrip;the briefcase fellonto therefuseinside. Milton hurriedbackacrosstheplatform(dragging hishandwith him) andgot intotheCadillac. Hestarted the engine.Heturnedon theheat, warmingthecar up forme.He leanedforward staringthrough the windshield,expecting me toappear anyminute.Hishandwasstillsmarting, muttering to itself. Miltonthoughtabout thebriefcase lyingout inthetrash can. Hismind filledwiththeimageofthemoneyinside. Twenty-five grand!Hesawthe individualstacksofhundred-dollarbills;there- peatingfaceofBenjamin Franklinin thedoubled mirrorsofallthat cash.Milton's throatwentdry;aspasmofanxietyknowntoallDe- pressionbabies grippedhis body; andin the nextsecondhewas jumpingoutofthecaragain,runningbacktotheplatform. This guy wanted todobusiness? ThenMiltonwouldshowhim howtodobusiness!Hewantedtonegotiate?Howaboutthis!(Mil- tonwasclimbing thestepsnow, loafersringingagainstthemetal.) Instead ofleavingtwenty-fivethousandbucks,whynotleavetwelve thousandfivehundred?This way Fithavesomeleverage. Half now, half later. Whyhadn't hethoughtofthisbefore? What thehellwasthe matterwith him?Hewasundertoomuchstrain...Nosoonerhad hereached theplatform, however,thanmy fatherstoppedcold.Less than twentyyards away,adarkfigureina stocking capwasreaching into thetrash can.Milton'sbloodfroze.Hedidn't know whetherto retreat or advance. The kidnappertriedto pullthebriefcaseout, but itwouldn't fit through theswingingdoor.He wentbehind thecan andlifted upthe entire metallid.Inthe chemicalbrightness Milton sawthe patriarchal beard,thepale,waxencheeks,and—mosttell- ingly—the tiny five-foot-four frame. FatherMike. Father Mike) Father Mike wasthe kidnapper?Impossible.Incred- ible! But there was no doubt. Standingon theplatformwas the man who had oncebeen engaged tomymotherand who, atmyfather's hands, hadhad her stolen away.Taking the ransomwastheformer seminarian whohad married Milton's sister, Zoe,instead, a choice that had sentenced him to alife ofinvidious comparisons, ofZoeal- ways asking why he hadn't invested inthestock market when Milton 504

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room. A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night. “Screw you too!” the Colonel shouted. Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, “She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That’s what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out. Me . That’s why the piss in the shoes. That’s why the nearly killing you. ’Cause you live with me, and they say I’m a rat.” I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I had heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn’t match “Paul” and “Marya” with faces. And then I remembered why: I’d never seen them. They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta. “How long have you been dating her?” I asked. “Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn’t even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad—my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice, and they’d have like a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there’s never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don’t we break up?” He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, “I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.” “But—” “I can’t believe they think that,” he said as he walked to the bookshelf and pulled down the almanac. He took a long pull off his ambrosia. “Goddamn Weekday Warriors. It was probably one of them that ratted out Paul and Marya and then blamed me to cover their tracks. Anyway, it’s a good night for staying in. Staying in with Pudge and ambrosia.” “I still—” I said, wanting to say that I didn’t understand how you could kiss someone who believed you were a rat if being a rat was the worst thing in the world, but the Colonel cut me off. “Not another word about it. You know what the capital of Sierra Leone is?” “No.” “Me neither,” he said, “but I intend to find out.” And with that, he stuck his nose in the almanac, and the conversation was over. one hundred ten days before KEEPING UP WITH MY CLASSES proved easier than I’d expected. My general predisposition to spending a lot of time inside reading gave me a distinct advantage over the average Culver Creek student. By the third week of classes, plenty of kids had been sunburned to a bufriedo-like golden brown from days spent chatting outside in the shadeless dorm circle during free periods. But I was barely pink: I studied.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese feels a flash of irritation. This is something Reese knows about. For all her mother’s absences, her carelessness about the task of child-rearing, Reese’s mother had insisted on the danger of cribs. It was the one thing her mom was very proud of—she had Reese in bed with her all through Reese’s infancy. It was an eighties parenting thing. Babies shouldn’t be alone at night. Later on, certain science confirmed it: Babies in cribs in the other room had elevated cortisol levels, and some childcare experts theorized that infants exposed to stress hormones nightly at such a formative age could end up locking in baseline stress levels for a lifetime. “When I worked childcare, I talked about this with mothers,” Reese says. “It stresses babies out to be separated at night. You give them separation anxiety. There were studies, even. It’s also way better for the mom. When you have to nurse, you just sleepily hold the baby, and then fall back asleep. Getting up, putting something on, sitting up, that makes you wake up completely. It fucks up your sleep rhythms. Besides, the only times people roll over on babies is when they are drunk or high.” Katrina makes a face. “What do you mean when you worked in childcare? I thought you worked at a gym daycare.” “T did! That’s childcare.” “Tt’s not exactly the same as a degree in child psychology.” That was mean. No, she doesn’t have a degree. Obviously Reese knows her own credentials. Reese chews her lower lip. She wants to say something cutting, but the hurt has come out of nowhere. Instead she looks away, staring hard at a rocking chair. The intimacy of the store dissipates, leaving in its place a cold, stupid, and banal consumer trap. “Tm sorry,” Katrina says. “I’m grumpy.” Reese nods, but still refuses eye contact. “Tt’s just that we have to do things the same way,” Katrina says by way of apology. “We can’t have a crib at my place, and she sleeps in your bed with you. We need consistency.” And this is Reese’s whole complaint. That in the end, when it comes to final say in how the baby will be raised, Katrina, the natal mom, will have that last word. Second-place mom, Reese, would be allowed suggestions only. Reese responds as she so often does when she finds herself in a position of strategic weakness: with a combination of passive aggression and grudging submission. She raises the bar-code scanner and pulls the trigger. It emits a little beep as a complicated network meshes to send the important data through space and time: Enter one Danish crib to a particular registry. “Thank you,” says Katrina. That night, Reese sits at the little glass laptop desk in her bedroom, logs in to buybuybaby.com, and sees that Katrina has removed the crib from their registry. CHAPTER TEN Eleven weeks after conception

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Masculinity had always been what allowed Amy not to feel. Early on after transition, Amy had fled that numbness; she had been for a time, with Reese, gloriously there and present and fragile. Amy had never shed her numbness completely, and later came to appreciate her own capacity for it as a useful tool. Iris, who excelled at sex work, talked about dissociation the same way: the superpower that let her succeed lucratively and heroically where the average mortal failed, succumbing to all the feels. Reese, however, didn’t believe in that spin; she could never quite complete the dogmatically radical leap that would transform dissociation from coping mechanism to superpower. In the back of Amy’s closet—her literal closet, mind you, the one that they shared in their apartment—lurked a gorgeous men’s Zegna suit, cut classically slim, in a deep black matte of fine carded wool. Amy had bought the suit her last year in college, from a resale shop where she pulled it off the rack, put it on, and with no tailoring necessary, discovered the Reservoir Dog in herself. In the post- transition culling of boy clothes, Amy had spared the suit, allowed it to survive, and granted it a clandestine life in the back reaches of the closet. Reese would have happily understood the suit as a sentimental keepsake, except for the fact that on rare occasions, she’d come home to find Amy actually wearing it, those malamute eyes a thousand yards away, slinking around like some kind of louche, androgynous James Bond. Generally and specifically, Reese had no patience for this nostalgic boy dress-up. Reese, despite herself, succumbed to a grudging respect for Amy in Her Suit, if only for how completely shut off and thus invulnerable Amy became when wearing it. Though the next day, she made sure Amy felt sheepish and bashful, as you do to a hungover friend whose careless drunkenness the night before forced you into a state of resentful awe. Detransition had been Amy’s slow ossification across this unreachable distance. A place where Reese could no longer touch her to hurt her anew. That is not gender, Reese’s guilt would argue, that is pain. All pain merits care, but not dogmatically egalitarian relativism. Katrina and Reese sit cross-legged on a four-by-five-foot scrap of Astroturf laid over the black iron of the apartment’s fire escape to

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The tower’s skeleton rises huge above the water, dark against an indigo sky. In each of the empty rooms hanging in the air, a lightbulb burns bare, warding off squatters and thrill seekers. From the ground, the visual effect of all those hundreds of suspended bulbs makes it seem as though a firework has been fixed mid-explosion against the night sky. Reese has thrown on a pair of fleece UGG knockoffs over a pair of pajama pants, and has a lightweight trench coat draped about her shoulders. A breeze abrades the black water’s surface, and tiny waves lap against the rocky revetment where Newtown Creek flows into the East River. Reese leads Ames through the construction debris to sit in the lee of the wind behind the sleeping body of a bulldozer. She pulls her knees to her chest, and wraps her long coat around them, making herself into a gray boulder in the dark shadow of the machine. Ames can’t help but fastidiously touch the treads of the bulldozer, testing how dirty he’d get leaning against them. With a shrug, he sits beside Reese. “So,” he says, “who is this guy?” Reese peers off over the river toward Manhattan. “He’s my boyfriend.” “The way Stanley was your boyfriend?” As Ames says it, an old resentment wells up. A fear that has been with him, and that he’s been trying to ignore. He’s afraid of Reese’s men. The way she finds them, and what she wants from them. The things they can give that she never wanted from him. After Stanley had broken Amy’s nose, Reese had apologized, she’d begged, she’d displayed her guilt. But she’d never given Amy what she really needed: the security that it would never happen again. Amy had never trusted that another Stanley wasn’t on the way, invited in by the woman who supposedly loved Amy, a man ready to call her a faggot and break her face. And she was right to be afraid because here he was again, breaking things in new and unexpected ways. “Ts this about Stanley?” Reese says slowly. “Because if it is, then you've already decided what’s going on and it’s useless for me to explain.” “T can’t help feeling that your men, somehow, they always manage to hurt me.” “You can blame me for cheating on you with Stanley, but nothing that came after was inevitable. You detransitioned because of you. Not because of my men. I won’t take the blame for that.” “Maybe you made me compete with them.” She peers at him in the dark, then laughs, unhappily. “Is that what this is about? This whole thing? Give me a baby, because none of my men can?” Ames rubs at the light stubble at the side of his chin, trying not to take the bait. “Will you at least tell me about this guy? So I don’t only hear it from Katrina?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese had not sent a thoughtful letter, Katrina went on, and this comparing of Katrina to a gentrifier who couldn’t handle spice? Which of them had grown up eating her mother’s Chinese food and which had grown up eating fried bread in Wisconsin? Please! Reese was not the only one who knew how to weaponize identity! Katrina glanced down at her cheese as she made this argument, as if her assertion might be undercut by its presence. Anyway, Katrina concluded, if Reese had disqualified herself, and she had, Ames now faced a decision. After the divorce, after Ames’s coming out, Katrina has come to the conclusion that she needs stability in her life. Especially if she is to have a baby dependent on her. She cannot bear another jolt to her idea of herself, or her plans for how to live. Therefore, she planned to schedule an abortion in the coming week. Ames must decide what he wants. He could either commit to be a parent and raise a child with Katrina or she will plan to end the pregnancy. She will not uproot herself even one more time. Moreover, she said calmly, if she had an abortion, she didn’t see how their relationship together could continue. Jon and Ames meet at a café on the Lower East Side. As always, Jon has driven his SUV in from Jersey and arrives twenty-five minutes late because he circled around looking for parking before giving up and paying at a garage. Jon goes first. He wants to quit his job, but he has a six-year-old son, and Greta has gone back to graduate school for an MBA. They will have only one income for the next couple of years. “Greta takes for granted that I'll be at the firm forever, so that she can go to school, for what, the third time now?” Ames has learned to be tactful when Jon complains about Greta, because Jon turns touchy and protective of his wife if Ames ever agrees with him. When it is Ames’s turn, Jon listens. Jon has recently shaved his head, and its bareness reveals an expressive topography of furrows as he frowns.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The accusation takes Reese’s breath away. The unfairness of it. First of all, let’s be honest: Katrina looks white. Second, are they playing Oppression Olympics? Ames begins to say it’s not like that, but Katrina still has her hand on his knee and she takes it away roughly, a rebuke. “Let me finish,” her voice remains soft. “I’m telling you how I felt. I’m telling you the things that your ideas made me feel. The angry ones and the less angry ones. But, I’m here. I called my mom, and I spent days thinking about it. I held on, even when I wanted to reject the whole suggestion. Because I tried to see things your way, Reese.” Reese blinks away the sting of precipitating tears. “So try to see things my way in return,” Katrina says. “Here is what I know. I know that I’m pregnant, and I know what being pregnant means for me. I’m excited. I told Ames this when I found out. I’m surprised to find I’m ready to take a chance on a family, with him, and I’m still ready. But we’re all swept away in what that could mean in the future, and we haven’t really thought what it means right now. I’ve been emotionally swept away too—How could I not be? For months I think I’m falling in love with this man, who is also my employee, and that alone is destabilizing. But then he responds to getting me pregnant by revealing he’s a former transsexual? Of course I got knocked over.” “It feels weird discussing this in a lobby,” Ames _ says, straightening and gesturing to a darkened hotel bar. “Can we, like, go in there to talk?” Katrina doesn’t move. “Why does it matter where we discuss this? If you can’t bear to talk about it now, in a lobby, how are we going to live it together in the open for our whole lives?” Ames looks at Reese for backup, but she just shrugs. She is impressed at Katrina’s steeliness. Yes, she sees that this woman could easily be in charge when required, a boss. It makes Reese feel safer, that the onus to be honest for this strange meeting isn’t all on her. In her head she reconsiders Katrina as a potential matriarch. Ames sighs and slumps back down, waving his hand. “Go on, babe,” he tells Katrina. “Thank you. I’ve been pregnant before, and I still have no children. Nothing came of my earlier pregnancy. We’re making the mistake I made with my ex-husband. He and I got emotionally attached to the idea of a baby. And now the three of us are making plans with the assumption that a body, my body, which has never produced a viable pregnancy, suddenly now will. There’s no way any of us should count on it working out.” Reese begins to interrupt but catches herself.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  At Michigan Avenue, the taxi pulls off the drive and shoves its way along Chicago’s best rendition of glitz. Their clients have chosen some bistro off the Magnificent Mile that bills its food as “Wisconsin cuisine,” a nouveau supper-club concept that only makes sense as the kind of food Chicagoans would decide New Yorkers need more of. Ames grew up in the Midwest, among the casseroles of St. Paul, which was why, he supposed, he didn’t have much tolerance for Midwestern aw-shucks. Out here, people acted like you were putting on airs if you majored in art history before you went to business school, much less changed your name and started shooting estrogen. The resentful Midwestern inferiority complex. The last time he’d seen his aunt, nearly a decade ago, he’d offered her French press coffee, and she’d sniffed that Folgers was good enough for her. She didn’t need anything delicate and foreign. “Good,” he told her, “because this will be dumping boiling water on grounds and waiting five minutes.” Then he transitioned and they hadn’t spoken since. In his aunt’s schema, changing one’s gender might rank as even more snooty than French press coffee. Now the taxi idles in traffic by Water Tower Place. Ames risks a glance at Katrina, who is gazing at the giant billboards of women in Victoria’s Secret. “Tm glad we’re getting to have dinner together,” Ames says inanely, as though by going with him to a business dinner, she’d agreed to a date. “You made the travel arrangements,” Katrina notes. “T mean, I know it’s for work, but I still love traveling with you. Remember when we made that weekend trip to Montreal?” They had spent almost the entire weekend in bed together. “Yes,” Katrina agrees. “You got me there under false pretenses.” The taxi driver took a peek at him in the rearview mirror. For a moment, Ames casts about for something truly awful to say to her, but he can’t think of anything and the urge subsides. She doesn’t deserve it. The past week without her closeness has illuminated for him just how much he has come to need it, how big a place she’s come to occupy in his emotional habits. At work, he’s spent the past several days maneuvering to spend time with her in situations that cannot devolve into demands that he make a decision about the pregnancy. His efforts had been assisted by their current project, another one of her weird marketing ideas: creating a nineties retro Giga Pet app for a pet insurance company. Because what would get pet owners more alarmed about their pet’s health than gaming out for them the many horrible ways that Fluffy might succumb? They’d have to hire out of house for programmers to create the app, at considerable cost, so Katrina and Ames came to Chicago to convince the clients to sign on to a simpler approach that could be done in-house, and thus add profits to the project.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The next morning, she woke up to an Amazon gift certificate for five hundred dollars delivered to the email account she used for fetish site communiqués. He’d sent it with a note. I saw you didn’t get a car home, even though I gave you money for one. I wasn’t paying for the pleasure of your company, but since that seems to be what you want from me (despite your little outburst to the contrary) I've sent you what I think you’re worth. Use it to buy some yoga pants to please me, and do whatever you wish with the rest. She entered the code into Amazon, and considered doing as she had done with the fifty, buying the cheapest pair of yoga pants that she could find so that she could pocket the rest. But looking at her options, she decided, fuck it, when unexpected yoga pants come your way, go full Lululemon. She hit the Purchase button, and said aloud, “T hate him.” But, considering it didn’t even cross her mind not to buy yoga pants at all, the heat that came over her wasn’t only from hate. She replied with a screenshot of the receipt and he wrote back an hour later. God, that was so easy. I didn’t even have to work to make you into a whore. I haven't fucked you yet, asshole, she wrote back. He replied with a second Amazon gift card for the same amount, along with an OpenTable reservation for seven-thirty P.M. that Friday to a steak house, and the instructions: Wear those yoga pants. Don’t tuck. “T fucking hate him,” Reese said aloud again, as she dutifully scheduled the date on her calendar. As she shaved her legs in her cramped tub before the date, she reached down and idly rubbed her shaving cream—covered clit, and said it again. If there is such a thing as a hate-fuck, theirs was a hate-courtship, with plenty of hate-foreplay. One week, in the midst of a January cold snap, he rented her a room at the Ritz-Carlton Battery Park, near his office. Once he had installed her in the room, he took away her clothes, leaving her only a one-piece swimsuit and the hotel bathrobes, so that she’d freeze if she left. She spent four days looking out at the frigid Hudson River, living off room service and waiting for him to stop by during his breaks to fuck her (or depending on his time constraints, to hold her face into a pillow with one hand, and jerk off onto her back with the other), turned on and resentful the whole time. At night, she invited friends to the room, and they drank bottles of wine on his room service tab, but she followed the rules, and didn’t ask to be brought anything else to wear.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Reformed Rake or Siren. People of this type were once happy-go-lucky seducers who had their way with the opposite sex. But the day came when they were forced to give this up—someone corraled them into a relationship, they were encountering too much social hostility, they were getting older and decided to settle down. Whatever the reason, you can be sure they feel some resentment and a sense of loss, as if a limb were missing. We are always trying to recapture pleasures we experienced in the past, but the temptation is particularly great for the Reformed Rake or Siren because the pleasures they found in seduction were intense. These types are ripe for the picking: all that is required is that you cross their path and offer them the opportunity to resume their rakish or siren ways. Their blood will stir and the call of their youth will overwhelm them. It is critical, though, to give these types the illusion that they are the ones doing the seducing. With the Reformed Rake, you must spark his interest indirectly, then let him burn and glow with desire. With the Reformed Siren, you want to give her the impression that she still has the irresistible power to draw a man in and make him give up everything for her. Remember that what you are offering these types is not another relationship, another constriction, but rather the chance to escape the corral and have some ran. Do not be put off if they are in a relationship; a preexisting commitment is often the perfect foil. If hooking them into a relationship is what you want, hide it as best you can and realize it may not be possible. The Rake or Siren is unfaithful by nature; your ability to spark the old feeling gives you power, but then you will have to live with the consequences of their feckless ways. The Disappointed Dreamer. As children, these types probably spent a lot of time alone. To entertain themselves they developed a powerful fantasy life, fed by books and films and other kinds of popular culture. And as they get older, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile their fantasy life with reality, and so they are often disappointed by what they get. This is particularly true in relationships. They have been dreaming of romantic heroes, of danger and excitement, but what they have is lovers with human frailties, the petty weaknesses of everyday life. As the years pass, they may force themselves to compromise, because otherwise they would have to spend their lives alone; but beneath the surface they are bitter and still hungering for something grand and romantic.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Please. You come up with the most fucked-up shit,” Reese says. “You are so weird and devious, even when you were doing that Martha Stewart thing you did with me, and definitely while you're doing this fake cis thing. But I get why you think it will work. You pitch her on the idea while she’s confused and trying to figure out a new way of seeing the world. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that your plan?” “No! I actually want to do this right. Be good to her. I think this gives her every option— an extra option, even. If she wants to raise a baby on her own, Ill pay child support and do what I can. If she wants an abortion, obviously I will support that. And finally, if she wants me as a father, I will say yes, and then propose that you enter our lives.” “Ah,” says Reese. “Once again, Reese is your plan C.” “Tm doing my best here, Reese. I can’t force her to do anything. I don’t even want to do that. The thing I am totally against, however, is the outcome where she gets an abortion, then she hates me, while you go on hating me too. The everyone-hates-me option, which, frankly, is looking the most likely. I want to avoid that.” Reese made a scoffing noise. “That’s only the worst outcome for you. Maybe for us, being free of you would be ideal.” “And then you'll pass up yet another chance to be a mother.” Reese flinches slightly and doesn’t respond. “Reese,” Ames continues, “I’m sorry I can’t promise anything. But I’m asking you to consider an option where you're a mother.” “Tm here. I’m entertaining you, even if this is so messed up. But now’ —Reese puts two fingers on his shirt—“I have questions. Tell the truth. Do you love her?” “T want good things for her. I for sure don’t want to hurt her.” “Answer my question, Amy.” “Yes. I love her. We don’t say the word ‘love’ to each other. But I love her.” He can’t seem to make eye contact, and instead peers upward at the breeze rustling through the leaves above. “Second question. Do you still love me?” This was maximum Reese. Asking such a thing at the moment when she had the ultimate advantage—when he’d just laid out his feelings for another woman. “Yes and no. Some days I still love you and some days I don’t.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ricky paused for effect. “She fucking lost it. She doesn’t say she has two towels. Or that she air-dried herself. Instead she starts screaming at me like, ‘What are you, a towel detective? Did you fucking solve the case of the folded towel?!’ It would have been almost funny, but she was so wild-eyed about it that it was straight- up alarming. Especially because she wasn’t trying to be funny, she wanted to demean me. It just devolved into what kind of insecure loser I was, leaving booby-trap towels in her room. Calling me jealous. Asking what kind of man I was who had to know where she was all the time. And I— You know, I just backed down, because what am I going to do, make my last stand over a towel? And as a result, I never really asked where she was that night. Or if she was gone for three days, or just one night. But I was dying inside, because it’s one thing to be like, okay, she’s seeing someone else. But the way she does it, it’s like she’s furtively hiding another life that you aren’t allowed access to. And here’s why it’s poison: On one hand, she has this incredible ability to sense what you desperately need to hear, to see your insecurities and placate them. On the other hand, she’s secretive and she lies. So it feels like the things she told me that felt so good are lies. That, in reality, everything I fear about myself is correct. It’s murder on your self-esteem. You doubt yourself. You end up feeling way worse about yourself when she leaves. “You know what the worst part is?” he continued. “I finally put together a conjecture: Whose towel was she probably actually using? That finance douchebag! Who was secretly paying for the apartment! Which she also hid from me! A guy who is jealous and has to know where she is all the time! The kind of guy she demeaned me for being is what she really wanted all along!” At this last statement, his hands flapped around like wounded seagulls. He inhaled, calmed himself, and picked up the dropped ratchet. “I’m telling you: personality disorders!” His assessment had been echoed even by those who’d never crushed out on Reese. Ingrid, one of the trans girls who’d been around Brooklyn at least as long as Reese, had said in half admiration and half condemnation, “Reese is the only trans girl in this city whose incessant drama really has almost nothing to do with the fact that she’s trans. Her drama is just what she makes for herself as a woman.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  You may think that if the victim is to be sacrificed, none of this mat- is the salt, the quality which prevents it front ters. But sometimes your effort to break off the relationship will inadver- becoming stale. tently revive the spell for the other person, causing him or her to cling to Restlessness, jealousy, you tenaciously. No, in either direction—sacrifice, or the integration of the quarrels, making friends again, spitefulness, all are two of you into a couple—you must take disenchantment into account. the food of love. Enchant-There is an art to the post-seduction as well. ing variety? . . . Too Master the following tactics to avoid undesired aftereffects. constant a peace is produc- tive of a deadly ennui. Uniformity kills love, for as soon as the spirit of Fight against inertia. The sense that you are trying less hard is often method mingles in an affair of the heart, the passion enough to disenchant your victims. Reflecting back on what you did dur- disappears, languor super-ing the seduction, they will see you as manipulative: you wanted something venes, weariness begins to then, and so you worked at it, but now you are taking them for granted. wear, and disgust ends the After the first seduction is over, then, show that it isn't really over—that chapter. you want to keep proving yourself, focusing your attention on them, luring — N I N O N D E L ' E N C L O S , LIFE, LETTERS AND EPICUREAN them. That is often enough to keep them enchanted. Fight the tendency to PHILOSOPHY OF NINON DE let things settle into comfort and routine. Stir the pot, even if that means a L'ENCLOS 417 418 • The Art of Seduction Age cannot wither her, nor return to inflicting pain and pulling back. Never rely on your physical custom stale \ Her infinite charms; even beauty loses its appeal with repeated exposure. Only strategy variety: other women cloy \ and effort will fight off inertia. The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry \ Where most she satisfies. — W I L L I A M SHAKESPEARE, Maintain mystery. Familiarity is the death of seduction. If the target A N T O N Y AND CLEOPATRA knows everything about you, the relationship gains a level of comfort but loses the elements of fantasy and anxiety. Without anxiety and a touch of fear, the erotic tension is dissolved. Remember: reality is not seductive. Cry hurrah, and hurrah Keep some dark corners in your character, flout expectations, use absences again, for a splendid to fragment the clinging, possessive pull that allows familiarity to creep in. triumph— \ The quarry I Maintain some mystery or be taken for granted. You will have only yourself sought has fallen into my toils. . . . \ Why hurry, to blame for what follows. young man? Your ship's still in mid-passage, \ And

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Yes, what did Reese expect? She supposed she expected a woman with whom she’d feel competitive, someone who might arouse Reese’s own catty bitchery, who threatened Reese’s supremacy in the areas in which Reese measured her own worth. That nameless amalgamation of characteristics that queers melded and tempered into a concept called “femme”: creatures so territorial that they clipped their own acrylic claws with barely functional political movements like “femme solidarity” or “femme4femme’” relationships so as not to rip each other to shreds. On one hand, Reese found the whole concept of the femme to be reductive and stupid and a little precious. On the other hand, Reese had no doubt that, inadequate as the femme rubric might be, she knew herself to be that thing that it sought to describe, and that thing was very real. Reese was intimately acquainted with the moment of dismay that comes with first contact with another femme, the sudden contraction of space within a room, as if it could no longer hold both of them, a feeling that she’d seen best dramatized, dorkily enough, in the movie Highlander. Although to everybody else, those moments of introduction appeared as a passing and polite coolness, when emotionally it was as if Reese were compelled to shriek There can only be one!, unsheathe her blade, and charge screaming into a mystical combat that would end in the beheading of one femme or the other. Amy had loved a femme for years. So Reese supposed that Ames would still love femmes. So, yes, Reese had expected Katrina would be a femme. But that wasn’t the person sitting with her on this couch. Not that Katrina wasn’t feminine. But the woman who now sits across from Reese—wearing a simple red and black color-block dress with clean lines, and minimal makeup, the planes of her face interrupted only by a scatter diagram of freckles and bounded on three sides by shiny brown hair—triggers no sense of competition. In fact, as far as Reese can tell, the Venn diagram of Katrina’s personhood overlapped with Reese’s own at only a single point of contact: Ames. Which was hardly even a point of contact. Who was Ames? Reese loved Amy. “Honestly,” Reese answers, “I suppose that I expected a rival.” It just slips out. “T don’t know whether to be flattered or disappointed,” Katrina responds. “Be flattered,” Reese says. “I didn’t mean to be insulting. I’m the worst. When I saw you holding hands with Ames, I had a moment. Normally a woman who casually claims my ex in front of me like that would find herself doused with holy water.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese and Thalia wait for Katrina in front of the McDonald’s by the Greenpoint stop on the G train. Thalia came along without requiring an invite. Reese had earlier volunteered to keep her company that night, her motherly attempt to staunch both grief and Thalia’s temptation to go out drinking with all the queers from out of town, both perennial ingredients in the recipes that Thalia fell back upon whenever she cooked up a truly messy evening. In return for allowing Reese to mother her so intrusively, Thalia felt entitled to the chance to witness and color-comment Reese’s own messiness. “So what’s your plan here?” Thalia asks Reese, flicking through photos on her phone while they await Katrina. “You're just going to bring this nice pregnant lady back to Iris’s amateur erotic massage parlor?” “Amateurs, by definition, don’t get paid,” Reese counters. “I live in a professional erotic massage parlor, thank you very much. But I texted Iris to put away the massage table.” “And what did Iris say to that?” “She hasn’t responded.” Reese retrieves her phone. “Oh wait, no. She texted. She says to fuck off, she’s not hiding anything for Amy’s baby mama.” Thalia laughed. “That sounds like Iris.” “Yeah,” Reese sourly agrees. “It does.” “Why did she hate Amy again?” “She didn’t hate Amy. She just thought Amy was a snob. She was there the day when I met Amy.” Amy and Iris’s mutual distaste had begun the night that Amy launched into a tirade against the prevalence of Candy Darling—worship among trans girls. The rant revolved around Amy’s oft-elaborated claim that trans girls never do anything. The best they ever hope for is for someone else to discover them, take an interest, and make them into a muse. But muses are passive. They have no agency and they reap no rewards—the rewards are reserved for those who use them for inspiration. Among the Factory girl trancestors, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis actually did things. Those two had a reputation for danger in their wit, vengeance, and unpredictability. They held Andy Warhol to account. But trans girls don’t worship those two. Candy Darling? She was just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous. Iris, a languid blonde waiting for a man to save her and make her famous, had tolerated Amy’s lecture in silence. When Amy finished, Iris coolly raised her skirt to reveal the photorealistic tattoo of Candy Darling’s face that decorated her entire upper thigh. “No,” disagrees Thalia, “Iris definitely hated Amy. She told me.” “You two shouldn’t be gossiping about me.” “We weren't gossiping about you, we were gossiping about Amy.” At that moment, Katrina ascends from the station and pops out her earbuds with a tug on their cord at the same time that she calls out a greeting to Reese. She’s wearing yoga pants and an oversized duster

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames had thought a fair amount about this. “I don’t think she appreciates queerness so much as she came to feel ambivalent about heterosexuality. I know those two aren’t the same thing. She’s attracted to masculine bodies, of that I’m sure.” He flicks his wrist in a semi-ironic indication of his own now-curve-depleted body as evidence. “Although perhaps not men as a class. A lot of what she liked about me, she says, is how different I am from the other men she’s dated. I think what she might be attracted to is my gender, the traces of queerness about me—with me she gets queerness without ever having to name it or dredge up any attraction to women. But now that she knows I was once a transsexual, she acts like it’s the only reason I am how I am. Everything she liked about me before is suddenly fraught. She’s not taking it well.” And it’s true, she hasn’t been. She declines his calls, and speaks to him only enough to keep up appearances at work. A few days after he told her, he caught her staring at him across a conference table, her eyes almost unfocused, the way one stares to make sense of an optical illusion. He recognized what she was doing: She was making him into a woman in her mind, an exercise that he’d done countless times himself but in reverse—the ugly involuntary method by which his hateful vision broke a trans woman’s face down into component parts, then remodeled them in the brain to strip away the apparent feminization and see what she had looked like before transition. His brain was an asshole, because the result of this exercise was to triple his insecurity. Given how easily and involuntarily he did it, even while aware of the high fucked-up quotient, he imagined how frequently other people without his sensitivity had done it to him. He guessed that his take on Katrina’s queerness was one that would predispose Reese to at least not hate Katrina. The mention of motherhood would have softened Reese up, and now he finished her off with secret moments of weird gender feels or confused faggotry: Reese’s bread and butter. “T get it,” Reese says when he finishes. “So everything is upside down for her, right? Post-divorce, now she’s pregnant. She’s kind of a weirdo, and she’s unsure about what she wants. She’s questioning herself. And so youw’re thinking she might just let you invite another woman to raise your baby with her?” “Don’t make me sound so sinister,” Ames responds. But he has presented the argument with a sinister cast in an appeal to Reese’s sensibilities. It hurts less to discuss a baby that she would desperately want to love and raise in the same way that Cruella De Vil discusses puppies.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yes.” Reese nods. “I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.” Speaking of divorced women, GLAAD chose Madonna to deliver a speech at the dinner, a very good talk in which she quoted James Baldwin, and then in the same breath, her own lyrics from a forthcoming album. That was how a true professional self- mythologized. Madonna’s speech was followed by an auction, with a real auction barker. Men—only men—bid on items like a Delta flight with a sleeping cabin to an eco-lodge safari in Botswana, which went for somewhere in the neighborhood of twice Reese’s annual earnings. Reese looked around the room for other trans women. She saw a cadre of them at a table nearby, actresses on a cable show, a couple of whom Reese knew glancingly, well enough to know that the year before, they were only surviving selling weed or turning the occasional trick. They were stone-faced throughout the auction. None of the money would go to trans people. GLAAD, like most of the big gay orgs, focused on messaging and lobbying; the money was not for trans people, it was to facilitate proper discussion about such topics as trans people. Accordingly, the ceremony and speeches had been heavy with emphasis on how much everyone wants to see trans women allowed into public bathrooms. Reese couldn’t give a fuck about public bathrooms. The Supreme Court had only made gay marriage lawful in the very recent past. These cis-gays buying themselves trips to Africa—their big victory had been domestic. They had rearranged possibilities for the American nuclear family and delivered unto themselves the gift of straight institutions: marriage, parenthood. Reese wanted the same for herself—no actually, she wanted more. Who needs your public bathrooms? We're already in your bedrooms, fucking your husbands, and we'll use the master bath, thanks very much. As far as Reese was concerned, if you didn’t want her in your bedroom, then maybe you ought to figure out how to get her a husband of her own, to be a mother in her own right. Otherwise, she’d do it her own way. Doing it her own way was, after all, why she was there.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She squirms away from his pinch. “I’m serious. Treat me better.” He frowns, but keeps his eyes on the road. “Yeah. Okay. I will. Let’s get some food,” he says, braking at a red light. “Really?” They were driving to her neighborhood, Greenpoint, and he often wouldn’t eat with her in that area. He knew too many people who lived there. Once she forced him to go out to a vegan buffet by her house, and he barely made eye contact the whole time. His gaze instead jerked to the door whenever someone new came into the place. After that, she let him drive her south, or sometimes into Queens. Never Manhattan, never Williamsburg, where his wife made her social life. But now, she says he can fuck her without a condom and all his rules go out the window. Reese has a moment of satisfaction. Her body is the ultimate trump card. “Yeah,” he says, “maybe you could run in somewhere and pick up some takeout.” Of course. Takeout. With him waiting in the car. She nods. “Sure, what would you like?” In the Thai restaurant, she doesn’t order anything for herself. He loves curries, spiced to a barely edible Scoville level. She does not. She’ll make herself something at home after he leaves. She’s scrolling through Instagram when her phone rings, and it’s a number she doesn’t recognize, some out-of-state area code. Her cowboy uses Google Voice so her texts don’t show up on his iPad at home, which his wife sometimes borrows, and Google often routes the calls through weird numbers. She hits the green Answer button and brings the phone to her ear. “T got you green curry with beef, five-star spiciness,” she says by way of a greeting. “Hey, that’s nice of you, but if you remember, I was always such a wuss about spice.” A man’s voice. Warm and smooth, but none of her cowboy’s drawl, which he somehow managed to keep, even through his years in New York. She lowers the phone, checks the number. “Who is this?” The man’s tone changes, not quite apologetic, but inviting. “Reese. Hi. Sorry, it’s Ames.” Out in the car she can see her cowboy, the glow of his own phone illuminating the glasses he only wore to read. She turns away, as if he might overhear her through the glass windows of his car, the plate glass of the restaurant, over the clang of the kitchen and the talk of the scattered customers. “Why are you calling, Ames? I didn’t think we were speaking anymore.” “T know.” She waits, holds her lips together. She can hear him breathing. She wants to make him talk first. “Tm not calling to bother you,” he presses on. “I was hoping for your help.” “My help? I didn’t know I had anything left for you to take.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Amy expected that Reese would understand that since she was the one who had wronged Amy, she had the responsibility to initiate the emotional processing. The next morning, however, Reese showed no inclination to process. It seemed unfair to Amy that she would have to do the work of bringing it up, of showing herself as hurt and in need of explanations and comfort. Reese ought to have been the one to debase herself by having too many feelings. That was the least she owed to Amy. Reese ought to have been eager to give it to her, unsparingly and unstintingly. Instead, Reese took a glassy approach, a brittle pretending that everything was already as before. They ate breakfast at the little wicker-and-glass table in the nook beside the kitchen; over toast, Reese talked about a cat she had seen the previous day, hiding and meowing under a car. The topic struck Amy as so inane and avoidant that she got up and began scrubbing dishes so that Reese couldn’t see her face. And on it continued like that all weekend, until Monday, when Amy first discovered the R, which gave her a concrete symbol to fixate on. Well, we shall sure as fuck emotionally process now, Amy thought when the BMW turned right, down Twelfth Street. Amy’s projected trajectory and that of the R would collide at the Bedford corner of McCarren Park. In the winter of the last year of her relationship with Reese, Amy began to call dominatrices for phone sex. This was a stupid habit, not for its expense, but because she expended the majority of her emotional reserves holding back an urge to inform these dommes that she was actually a very beautiful and desired transsexual, not just your average submissive phone-sex sissy. Of course, that was exactly the kind of fantasy in which submissive phone-sex sissies liked to indulge. After she had been at it a month—claiming that she couldn’t sleep, quietly slipping out of bed, wrapping herself in a nightgown, and sitting on the floor of the kitchen to dial—she ended up talking with a dominatrix from Detroit, who was clearly a man in India using a bad voice modulator over VoIP to slide his tone up about 80Hz. The encounter was so steeped in gig-era, digital-age poignancy that Amy stayed on the line for a whole half hour—indulging her own fantasy of domination at $2.99 per minute, indulging this Indian man in the fantasy that he was a dominatrix. The next morning, however, she felt even more stupid than usual.