September, 2011

It was a Friday (of course) when Tom apprised me of her timeline for coming out.

She was going to wait until the 23rd of December, the last work day of the year. She'd first tell the high-level executives at DuckGoose in the morning — a courtesy, and also a savvy bit of office politics— and then make an announcement to everyone else in the company later in the day, when everyone was already in a really good mood. The idea was that we'd all have a week-and-a-half off for Christmas vacation which would give everyone plenty of time to get used to the idea before they met Tamara in January. New Year, fresh start.

"Does that work for you?" she asked. I knew that her question wasn't really a question, but a goodwill gesture to give me the illusion of empowerment which I genuinely appreciated.

I took out my iPhone and called up the calendar. "Unfortunately,"I deadpanned, "I am booked solid through the end of January. Would you mind holding off until Groundhog's Day?"

Tom narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "And if I see my own shadow I have stay in the closet for six more weeks, right?"

I smiled and shrugged innocently. "Hey, I didn't make the rules."

"Nice try, Aaron," he laughed. "Nice try."

My smile faded as my mind wandered. I turned back to my computer, absently clicking around the web. Tom was still talking, but I was just watching random images as they popped up on the screen. LOLCats. Some stupendously fat baby. Muammar Qadaffi being torn apart by an mob. Skyrim. Ashton Kutcher.

"Is that cool?" Tom asked.

Even though I hadn't been listening, I had still managed to absorb a few key words, enough to let me know that she also wanted to bring our lawyer, Jerry, into the loop. Have him look at our contract to make sure transgender wasn't a fireable offense. We both thought it unlikely — we lived in California, not Alabama or Idaho or Kentucky or Montana or Kansas or Georgia or Ohio or Wisconsin or West Virginia or Missouri or Alaska or Wyoming or Oklahoma or South Carolina or Michigan or Pennsylvania or Virginia or Arkansas or Nebraska or South Dakota or Louisiana or Florida or Michigan or North Carolina or Arizona or North Dakota or Texas — but Tom felt it couldn't hurt to check. And, besides, as our attorney, Jerry was legally bound to keep our confidence.

"Yeah," I said absently. "Jerry's great."

Tom looked at me. "You OK? You seem distracted. And that's really more my thing."

"No," I said. "I'm good." And then I changed the subject back to Tom. "Any idea how you're going to break the news to everybody?"

"I'm thinking maybe a song."

"Lola?"

"A little on the head, don't you think?"

(You see, Millennials, Lola is a very famous classic rock song by The Kinks about a transgender woman. Weird Al did a parody of it called Yoda.)

"Dude Looks Like a Lady? Walk On The Wild Side?" He gave me an impatient look. "I'll keep thinking."

"God," he said, "it'll be such a relief not to have to keep secrets anymore."

"For me, too," I said.

Which was ironic, actually, because for the first time in my life, I was keeping a secret of my own.

After that day when Tamara came to our house for the first time, and Samantha had bristled at my breezy assumption that that she was was perfectly fine with my lack of compliments, things deteriorated rapidly.

If you'll recall, when I was courting Samantha, I bought her presents once a month for a year, which was super-romantic... except that I also made it clear that it was only for a year. An exercise in expectations management. And I referenced a scene from When Harry Met Sally where Harry explains why he never drives women to the airport in the beginning of the relationship.

Quoth Harry: Because eventually you move on and you don't take someone to the airport and I never wanted anyone to say to me, "How come you never take me to the airport anymore?"

That struck me at the time as excellent life advice. But I had neglected to consider Sally's acerbic response. It's amazing. You look like a normal person, but actually you are The Angel of Death.

It turned out that there was a lot about me that I thought she had accepted, which in actually she had merely tolerated. But now, long-simmering resentments came to a boil and Samantha displayed a level of anger that I had rarely seen before, and almost never aimed at me.

So we decided to go to couple's therapy.

It was deeply embarrassing. We had always prided ourselves on being that couple. The one that other couples envied for our stability and compatibility, the one that single people turned to for relationship advice, which was most often about the importance of thinking the best of your partner, of giving them the benefit of the doubt. This was partially formulated because of Tom and The Destroyer. She always leapt to the worst interpretations of Tom's intentions and it killed their marriage. (Or would have, I assume, had gender dysphoria not beaten her to the punch.) And when we saw the marriages of friends and relatives crumble we were sympathetic, but it also reinforced our belief in the inviolability of our own union.

We told no one about out our marital discord. Not our friends. Certainly not our parents. We wouldn't even ask people for therapist recommendations; instead we turned to Yelp where we settled on Dr. Stephanie Sway. Eighty-seven reviews, five stars and conveniently close to our house. Proximity über alles.

For a guy who was one Family Ties episode away from becoming a clinical psychologist, I held a dim view of psychotherapy. I had two personal experiences with it. The first one was in high school, after my disastrous sophomore year, where I barely kept from failing in both Honors Chemistry and Honors Algebra II and only managed a C-minus in Honors English, of all things.

I told my parents that I was having performance anxiety — not the sexual kind, of course (that was still a few years away) — but I explained that I had frozen up on my tests and panicked on my term papers.

My father didn't even let me finish my bullshit explanation before he called bullshit on my bullshit explanation.

"He's fucking lazy," my father said.

Hole in one.

Because the truth was that I did very little of my homework, frequently copying off of my smarter — or in a pinch, dumber — classmates. I almost never read the books I was assigned and in more than one class, I forgot/didn't bother to turn in a major assignment.

But my mother took my side. She believed me when I said that there was a deeper issue involved, some mental block that was preventing me from reaching my full potential. And I have to say, while lying to my mother wasn't really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things — it's not like I stabbed her in the head or anything — there was something truly reprehensible about exploiting her love that way.

In the moment, though, all I cared about was dodging blame for my own irresponsibility and she credulously played into my hands, suggesting I see a psychologist.

"Waste of fucking money," my father said.

Waste of fucking money, indeed.

My shrink's name was Dr. Ballard. He was a pompous and pedantic behavioral therapist who wore colorful Coogi sweaters and liked to draw flow charts on his yellow pad, which he would then show to me in order to demonstrate the differences between reasonable and unreasonable thinking. He, too, believed everything I told him about my supposed irrational fears of failure — although given that he was paid by the hour he had no particular incentive to call me a liar — and we worked together to make things better.

And in the beginning of my junior year, things did get better. But it wasn't because I overcame my fictional fears and it definitely wasn't because I became a conscientious student, because I was every bit as sluggardly as before. It was because my work load was now much easier. I dropped down from the honors track, and in courses designed for middle-of-the road public school students, I did exceedingly well with shamefully little effort.

Dr. Ballard pronounced me cured — another success story! — and let me keep his final flow chart to remind myself of all the progress I had made. My mother felt vindicated and my father, despite his lingering skepticism admitted that he was wrong. Most important: The second half of high school was a breeze.

The second time in therapy was with Tori, my erstwhile super-hot receptionist girlfriend who I met oh-so-many years before while temping at Cambridge Capital. We had broken up four times and had, in defiance of all logic and parental advice — gotten back together for a staggering fifth. It was only a few weeks into our re-re-re-re-reunion when the familiar friction returned.

It was then that Tori said we needed to see a professional, to help us break the cycle. She got a recommendation from a friend and we wound up at the office of a fairly young, fairly inexpensive, extremely attractive blonde named Susan.

In our sessions, Tori and I clashed on virtually everything. The only thing that we agreed on, frankly, was Susan's legs. They were incredible. Strong and slender and shapely. Susan always wore skirts. It would have been a crime not to. A diamond in the dark.

Anyway, after therapy, as I drove Tori home, she would always spin out steamy fantasies of different ways to lure Susan into a threesome. By the time we reached Tori's apartment's we would both be incredibly horny. We would tear off each other's clothes and have scorching hot sex. And then go back to hating each other.

Other than that, though, Susan was mostly useless: Relentlessly nonjudgmental, infuriatingly neutral. She would assign us communication exercises that we were supposed to try during the week, which succeeded only in giving us new ways to get into arguments.

After five or six sessions — when it was clear that we were spinning our wheels and a therapeutic threesome was not in the cards — I decided to put an end to this futile relationship once and for all. But having broken up with Tori twice already I dreaded the prospect of doing it again.

So I got Susan to do it for me.

Tori and I were having a contentious back-and-forth about... I don't even remember. Something stupid, I'm sure. And in a flash of inspiration I turned to Susan, "What do you think?"

Susan seemed surprised. "What do you mean?" Up until this point most of her contribution to the conversation was asking And how do you feel about that?

"What do you think about our chances of making this work." She shifted uncomfortably, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. Yum. "You must have an opinion by now," I pressed.

Susan gathered her thoughts. "You're very different people," she said cautiously. "I don't like to make predictions, but if I had a gun to my head?" Which, coincidentally, was one of Tori's scenarios for getting Susan into a ménage à trois. "I think it's very unlikely that this will work."

In my peripheral vision I could see Tori glaring at me, jaw clenched. I dared not make eye contact, lest I burst into flames.

With Dr. Ballard and Susan, it was easy to manipulate the situation. In my mind, I had "won" therapy. I didn't get anything out of it, but I didn't want anything out of it. But this time it was different, because this time I was actually trying to solve something.

Based on her CV, Dr. Stephanie had to be in her mid-fifties, but she had blue and green streaks in her hair and vibrant, youthful outfits that failed to make her seem any younger. She wasn't attractive, exactly. Or even approximately. But there was a lot of life to her, as well as a world class I care! face.

Samantha and I were sitting on opposite sides of a tan leather couch, the space between us a perfect metaphor for the space between us.

"Let's start here, " Dr. Stephanie said on our first visit. "Aaron, do you want to stay together with" — she pointed at Samantha — "this chick?"

"Yeah," I said, a little thrown by her informality. "That would be super."

"And Samantha? Do you want to stay hitched to this dude?"

Samantha paused for a horrifyingly long time. That she had to even think about it made my blood run cold. Once again, I was staring incredulously at someone who I loved like they were a complete stranger. This was my wife. We had built a life together. I knew her better than anybody. Or at least I thought I did. Because never in a million years would I have imagined that the day would come when she would question our marriage. Question us. Question me. And perhaps the worst part was: I never saw it coming.

"Yes," Samantha finally said. "I think so."

Dr. Stephanie said, "Cool beans." Then she made some notes, tapping on her laptop keyboard. When she was done, she looked up and smiled. "OK, let's get this party started!"

I once went to a party where virtually everyone came down with food poisoning from undercooked chicken. By the time it was over, the house looked like the site of a chainsaw massacre, only instead of blood everywhere — on the floor, the walls, the ceilings — it was vomit and shit.

This party was worse.