A Plea for Eros

knew Iris had to put on the suit, but I never knew why except that her cross-dressing was connected to her translation of the German novella
The Brutal Boy,
a movement from one language into another, and that by pretending to be a man she loses some vulnerability and gains some power, which she desperately needs. It has never occurred to me until now that taking on a masculine position as a survival technique has roots in my own family, that in the suit Iris lives out the duality and uncertainty of my dreams, and that when she reinvents herself as a male character she is finally able to imagine her own rescue. As “Klaus” she also speaks differently, uses profanity, and adopts a confident swagger she associates with men. Not long ago, I met a psychiatrist who told me that she gives
The Blindfold
to a number of her female patients. “It doesn’t make them worse?” I asked her, only half-joking. “No,” she said. “It helps for them to see that the boundaries are important.” Iris’s cross-dressing is defensive, an escape from the openness, fragility, and boundlessness she connects to her femininity.
    Being Leo was not an act of translation. After a while, I began to hear him. I heard a man. It’s probably impossible to explain where he came from, but I’m convinced that I drew from the experience of listening to the men I have loved, my father and my husband, in particular, but also from others who have been crucial to my intellectual life—those disembodied male voices inside the innumerable books I have read over the years. Their words are in me, but then so are the words of women writers. Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes have also altered my imagination, and yet I’m not talking about sexual difference in terms of real bodies but am reiterating Winnicott, “…. I was now no longer thinking of boys and girls or men and women,” he writes, “but I was thinking in terms of the male and female elements that belong to each.” After years of experience, Winnicott learned to listen to his patients in a way that transcended anatomy. Reading means not seeing the writer. Marian Evans became George Eliot to hide her sex, and it worked for a while. Flaubert’s declaration
“Madame Bovarv, c’est moi”
is as earnest as anything he ever said.
    As a reader of books, I’m convinced that words have an almost magical power to generate, not only more words but fleeting images, emotions, and memories. Certain novels and poems have had a power to unearth raw and unknown pails of myself, have been like mirrors I never knew existed. In every book, the writer’s body is missing, and this absence turns the page into a place where we are truly free to listen to the man or woman who is speaking. When I write a book, I am also listening. I hear the characters talk as if they were outside me rather than inside me. In one book, I heard a young woman who played at being a man; in another, I heard a man. In my dreams, I find myself pulled between the two sexes, wondering which one I am. Not knowing bothers me, but when I write, that same ambivalence becomes my liberation, and I am free to inhabit both men and women and to tell their stories.
    2003

Leaving Your Mother

    IT WAS VISITOR’S WEEKEND AT CAMP, AND I HAD MY TWELVE- year-old daughter, Sophie, in my arms as we sat on her bunk talking. From across the cabin I heard a girl moan, “I wish my mom would come. Where is she?” Another girl lying flat on her back in bed complained to the ceiling, “Yeah, I want to sit on
my
mom’s lap.” They were still waiting for their mothers to arrive. When the parents left that day, some children cried; some didn’t. Some clung desperately to their mothers and fathers. Others offered them only a quick, perfunctory hug. A veteran spectator of visiting weekend told me he could always spot the divorced parents, because when the mother or father said good-bye to the child, the boyfriend, girlfriend, or stepparent would stand apart—at a respectful distance of at least ten paces. Good-byes initiate separations, and it isn’t easy to part with one’s mother and father, even though we all do in the end. My husband likes to say that our job as parents is to raise children who are strong enough to go off and do well without us.
    When I was seven and my sister Liv was five, we bid goodbye to our mother and father and took the train to Chicago with my great uncle