In One Person

round-the-clock care, made no objection to Harry’s apparently permanent transformation as a woman. The nurse fondly remembered Harry Marshall’s many female impersonations onstage.
    “Did the cross-dressing bug ever bite you, Billy?” Donna asked me one night.
    “Not really,” I’d answered her.
    My attraction to transsexuals was pretty specific. (I’m sorry, but we didn’t use to say “transgender”—not till the eighties.) Transvestites never did it for me, and the transsexuals had to be what they call “passable”—one of few adjectives I still have trouble with, in the pronunciation department. Furthermore, their breasts had to be natural—hormones were okay, but no surgical implants—and, not surprisingly, I preferred small breasts.
    How feminine she was mattered a lot to Donna. She was tall but thin—even her upper arms were slender—and she was flawlessly smooth-skinned. (I’ve known many women who were hairier.) She was always having her hair done; she was very stylish.
    Donna was self-conscious about her hands, though they were not as noticeably big and strong-looking as Miss Frost’s. Donna didn’t like to hold hands with me, because my hands were smaller.
    She came from Chicago, and she tried living in New York—after we broke up, I heard she’d moved to Toronto—but Donna believed that Europe was the place for someone like her. I used to take her with me on publishing trips, when my novels were translated into various European languages. Donna said that Europe was more accepting of transsexuals—Europe was more sexually accepting
and
sophisticated, generally—but Donna was insecure about learning another language.
    She’d dropped out of college, because her college years coincided with what she called her “sexual-identity crisis,” and she had little confidence in herself intellectually. This was crazy, because she read all the time—she was very smart—but there are those years when we’re supposed to feed and grow our minds, and Donna felt that she’d lost those years to her difficult decision to live as a woman.
    Especially when we were in Germany, where I could speak the language, Donna was at her happiest—that is, when we were together on those German-language translation trips, not only in Germany but also in Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. Donna loved Zurich; I know it struck her, as Zurich does everyone, as a very well-to-do city. She loved Vienna, too—from my student days in Vienna, I still knew my way around (a little). Most of all, Donna was delighted with Hamburg—to her, I think, Hamburg was the most elegant-seeming German city.
    In Hamburg, my German publishers always put me up at the Vier Jahreszeiten; it was such an elegant hotel, I think it gave Donna most of her delight with Hamburg. But then there was that awful evening, after which Donna could never be happy in Hamburg—or, perhaps, with me—again.
    It began innocently enough. A journalist who’d interviewed me invited us to a nightclub on the Reeperbahn; I didn’t know the Reeperbahn, or what kind of club it was, but this journalist (and his wife, or girlfriend) invited Donna and me to go out with them and see a show. Klaus (with a
K
) and Claudia (with a C) were their names; we took a taxi together to the club.
    I should have known what kind of place it was when I saw those skinny boys at the bar on our way in. A
Transvestiten-Cabaret
—a transvestite show. (I’m guessing the skinny boys at the bar were the performers’ boyfriends, because it wasn’t a pickup place, and, the boys at the bar excepted, there wasn’t a visible gay presence.)
    It was a show for sex tourists—guys in drag, entertaining straight couples. The all-male groups were young men there for the laughs; the all-women groups were there to see the penises. The performers were comedians; they were very aware of themselves as men. They were not half as passable as my dear Donna; they were the old-fashioned transvestites who weren’t really trying to pass as female. They were meticulously made up, and elaborately costumed; they were very good-looking, but they were good-looking men dressed as women. In their dresses and wigs, they were very feminine-looking men, but they weren’t fooling anybody—they weren’t even trying to.
    Klaus and Claudia clearly had no idea that Donna was one of them (though she was much more convincing, and infinitely more committed).
    “I didn’t know,” I told Donna. “I really