It's about 9 a.m. on a perfectly miserable October morning, gray and drizzly, the last Saturday of the month, and I'm helping the best friend and housemate I've ever had pack her car for her solo trip to California.
It's the morning I've dreaded for months, since the day Marissa told me that all the pieces had fallen into place for her to go back out to San Diego, get herself set up, and stay for good. She'd be coming back for the rest of her stuff before long, and to see people, me included.
“But San Diego is my home, where I lived six years of the best life I've ever had,” she explained more than once. And then, being married to Kelly, getting away from that woman and then learning her dad had gone into the hospital, her mom was frantic, and she was going to have to come back to Buffalo because Mom was virtually helpless -- all of that had become the prelude to six years of grinding away in a bank's IT department at a job that was wearing Marissa down, while playing chauffeur to her mom four nights a week, leaving Marissa with pitiful scraps of time the remaining three nights in which to have a personal life. (Mom claimed all of Marissa's Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for her department store and supermarket odysseys, which often involved visiting many non-adjacent zip codes all in the same night.)
I first met her on a freezing bitch of a February night in 2019. I had come to my transgender support group partly on the urging of my landlady, because I had gotten rid of a real festering asshole of a housemate almost two months earlier, and I wasn't going to be staying in her rental house much longer without someone to share expenses. It was a rather auspicious night in some respects: against all odds I was able to get a parking space less than a block from the coffeehouse that hosted the group.
She was a very slender, slightly shy person, dressed in a white denim outfit and wearing a little mermaid pendant, who I wound up sitting directly across from; her look that night wasn't overly feminine, but not bad, and she mentioned she'd just come from work and hadn't had a chance to change. She explained that for the time being she was going with the name Roz, and that yes, she was a trans woman, preferred pronouns she, her, hers. I introduced myself right away, and we had several more minutes to converse before the group started.
She told me she had an apartment in a building on Elmwood Avenue, one of the nicer parts of town at least. “Although many's the time I've come in the front entrance to find a drunk homeless person sleeping on the stairs.” The door-closing mechanism worked so slowly that non-residents had all kinds of time to blithely stroll in before the door locked. Even though it would have been a good idea, none of the tenants ever stayed to make sure the door closed properly. Nor had anyone from building management ever come by to fix the door closer, despite several calls by Roz and other tenants; it closed, what was the big problem?
“Are you giving any thought to moving out?” I said, having heard all that.
“Actually, I kind of am.”
I said I very much needed a housemate, and suggested we exchange phone numbers and talk. She quickly agreed, and we called and talked, many times.
Right away, first conversation, I knew I liked her. She could put a rather complicated narrative together, and — most of the time -- I had no trouble following her. She could be funny in sly, deadpan ways that caught me off guard now and again. In certain areas, she was a lot smarter than me; in perhaps a few others, I was still an expert.
And, most interesting of all: the day I met her was the day she took her first estrogen dose, and began her transition. Over the months and years that were to come, I would watch her develop from slightly craggy-faced male to undeniably attractive woman. (Something I still consider a great privilege, especially as I took many pictures of her as she developed, so she'd have a record.)
She couldn't get out of her lease at her old building without losing her security deposit and any other dollars the management outfit could bilk out of her; April would be the earliest she could move in. We began seeing each other, having dinner after the Tuesday night transgender group, going out for dinner and drinks whenever she had time free from Mom.
The more time I spent with her, the more I wanted to spend. She was quietly engaging, smart, easygoing, a person I found it so easy to spend time with. (And I'm not the easiest person myself to spend time with. But Roz is. And she doesn't quite know that's true of her.)
My landlady decided this was one of the most wonderful people she'd ever met, after one meeting. Two months later she was in, with quite a celebration, during which the Great Western flowed freely. And she finally had a chance to really dress like, and be, herself.
(And that's the whole point. She felt more free, in so many ways, living with me, than she had felt with almost anyone else.)
She was essentially left-handed, like me, though she could play instruments right-handed, mainly guitar and keys. (Again, like me.) We'd both been breach babies, though I complicated my situation worse than she complicated hers. We both built plastic models (mostly cars, plus a few aircraft and weird vehicles from movies and television). We both liked beautiful women, and the interesting thing was that so many liked us. In general (and so contrary to my earlier life) a lot of people in our local haunts liked us as a couple, a lot.
That June, she treated me to a trip to New York City, three days of exploring the great old town as she knew it. ( That's something I love about that place: I've traveled to New York with different people over the years, and experienced a different city each time through the eyes, ears, even noses of each.) We went by train both ways, a mode of travel I hadn't enjoyed since childhood, rolling through the Adirondacks, the Catskills, following the Hudson down. A bald eagle alighted on the branch of a dead tree outside my window at one point, both vanishing behind the train almost instantly, yet imprinted permanently into my brain.
We stayed at a place billing itself The Hotel in New York City, and I was duly impressed. Together we prowled thrift stores (one with a decidedly punk flavor, called Search and Destroy), bookstores (the Strand, twice) and rooftop bars. We ate in some interesting bistros, including one in which the wait staff tried to convince us that the white wine they were serving Marissa was a rose’. (Needs to be an accent on that last e, but I can't find it.) And there was the rooftop bar we hit on a sunny day, with the Empire State Building only a couple of blocks away. Feeling reckless, I ordered a jalapeño mojito, and spent an hour getting it down. (I wasn't leaving it -- not at those prices.)
Returning home, we settled back into our routines of me pretending I liked retirement and Marissa pretending she could bear up under her job at M & T Bank. (I'm putting this piece of my mind out there: that bank had no idea how to build a positive environment for its employees, despite the diversity groups it put together for the optics. And I sincerely apologize to a number of people who tried to make of those groups a truly positive and empowering thing; I will say their efforts are a very good start, and not to be devalued or ignored … even though it did sound as if I just did.) She still had her mom to cater to four nights of every weekend, and no hope of meeting more of the people she really wanted to meet. Which was other women. Which I understood, and was fine with.
I had sensed at first that something was growing between us, in our first few months of living together. (It would be just like me to read too much into things.) I really thought we had a strong attraction to each other, something I felt strongly … but then something changed. She said (basically) that intimacy would change our friendship, a fear I know many people have in their own relationships.
But even a totally Platonic relationship was something I could live with, when it came to Marissa. A lot had happened in her past -- to wit, her seven-year marriage, while she was still living male, to a woman who got into road rage incidents, destroyed numerous vehicles, forced him to move to another city when he was least prepared to relocate, and generally mangled his finances for a decade after the divorce -- to make her uneasy about deeper relationships. I won't name Kelly's issue, but it is one of the most socially destructive mental disorders out there, and it has its roots largely in childhood abuse. (It was a marriage friends had warned Marissa not to go through with. I had the same thing, almost as bad, with my own first marriage. But sometimes, people like us wed in hopes of, well, fixing what's wrong with us. Like when your dad throws you into the deep end for your first swim lesson.)
There is someone she dreams of, who she has never met: a paradigm for all that she's wanted, all that's been taken away or promised but never given. Maybe she'll find that one; maybe not. Maybe she'll come back; maybe not.
What I know is, she loves me but she's not in love with me. I'm trying not to be in love with her … and it's not working. She's still on my mind, all day and most of the night. I'm still getting bulletins from her, and she's traveloguing a little on Facebook. (Pardon me: Meta.)
I want her to find whatever she's seeking -- mainly, as she was saying right along, her freedom. Too many people in her life took away her freedom for years, for reasons of fear and selfishness. She wants her life again; and I'm not the woman to take that away from her. Not if I really live her as I say I do.
She says she'll be back to visit. I believe her. At least there's that to look forward to.
I just wish … No, I'll keep that secret for now. Probably best that way.