Читать книгу In the Darkroom - Susan Faludi, Susan Faludi - Страница 15

My father stood in the doorway in her favorite crimson bathrobe; she wore it every morning of my first visit. It had a monkish cowl and angel-wing sleeves. She called it “my Little Red Riding Hood outfit.” It wasn’t entirely closed. “What are you doing?”

“I’m”—my voice squeaked; I looked down at the receiver in my hand—“phoning someone.”

“Who?” She eyed me, suspicious.

“Just a friend of a friend,” I said guiltily, though I was telling the truth. “She lives in Pest. She wanted to meet me.”

“There’s no time,” my father said.

“I just—”

“You’re only here another week.”

I set down the receiver. No time? I thought. I’d been here four days, and we’d only left the house once—to pick up her new Web camera at Media Markt. My confinement had me wondering whether my father’s elaborate home security system was meant to keep burglars from invading or guests from escaping. She kept the gate in the security fence locked on both sides. Merely to step outside, I had to ask her for the key. Stefánie’s Schloss was starting to feel more like Dracula’s Castle, and as the days passed, I was acting more and more like the passive captive, a character in one of my father’s treasured fairy tales, Rapunzel in the tower. Why didn’t I finish dialing the phone number? When my father refused to visit her family’s old summer villa a half-block away—a place I was eager to see, having heard about it all my life—why didn’t I just go knock on the door? If she didn’t want to venture out, why didn’t I hike down the hill and catch the bus into town? Instead, I retreated to my room, made resentful cracks under my breath, and attempted furtive phone calls when my father was out of earshot. I was slipping back into that twelve-year-old self, timid and sullen, fearful of Daddy. Who was no longer Daddy.

Yet inside the ramparts my reclusive father seemed determined, even desperate, to come out of hiding, or to bring at least one aspect of herself out for inspection. That first week she’d led me up and down the stairs, unlocking closets and cabinets, modeling outfits, donning makeup, and reciting labels (“Max Factor English Rose Lip Gloss,” “Wet n Wild Cover-All Stick,” “Vogue Self-Adhesive 100%-European-Hair Lashes, Trimmed and Feathered”). She was introducing me to “Stefi,” as she preferred to style herself, displaying the evidence of what she called “my new identity.”

Including and especially the evidence of her new physique. The robe seemed always to be falling open. Or the blouse. Or the nightgown. Every morning, she’d summon me to her room for wardrobe counsel. “Do these shoes go with this purse?” she’d ask, more often than not standing in her underwear. What does it matter, I’d mutter to myself, we’re not going anywhere. Or she would barge into my room on some pretext—“I think I left my stockings in here”—to present her new body in a negligee. Her exhibitions felt more like invasions. She said she was “showing” herself. But as the shows piled up, so did my distrust. What lay behind the curtain of her new transparency?

“This is where I put the things I wore when I first started ‘dressing,’” my father said on the second morning of my visit. We were standing on the third-floor landing, before a large, gray-metal locker. She extracted from her apron pocket a key ring worthy of a prison warden. After a half dozen failed attempts and a lot of rattling, she found the one that opened the creaking door. The locker’s contents might have outfitted a Vegas burlesque show: a sequin-and-beaded magenta evening gown with sweep train, a princess party frock with wedding-cake layers of crinoline, a polka-dotted schoolgirl’s pinafore with matching apron, a pink tulle tutu, a diaphanous cape, a pink feather boa, a peek-a-boo baby-doll nightie with matching ruffled panties, a pair of white lace-up stiletto boots, a Bavarian dirndl, and wigs of various styles and shades—from Brunhilde braids to bleach-blond pageboy to Shirley Temple mop of curls. “Why do you keep this locked?” I asked.

“Waaall … These clothes are more”—she considered—“flamboyant. They are from before the operation. Before I became a laaady. Now I dress sedate.”

Another morning, my father summoned me to the two computers in her attic office. Under the eaves was her image palace. On one wall were two locked doors. The first led to her reconstructed photographic darkroom, which she had had crated and shipped from New York in the summer of 1990. And then never used. The digital age had made my father’s talent for “trick photography” with film and print obsolete. Behind the second door was more photo equipment, including her old and giant photo-print drum dryer. The main room contained still more photographic supplies, several studio lights and jumbo rolls of paper for the advertising shoots she no longer conducted. An aluminum frame to hold backdrops was bolted into the floor.

The floor-to-ceiling shelves that wrapped around the central room held a video library: more than two thousand DVD, VHS, and Beta tapes of Hollywood epics, romantic comedies, Disney animations, TV sitcoms, mountaineering documentaries, and, to my dismay, a full set of Leni Riefenstahl films. (“Okay, she was a Nazi,” my father conceded, “but a greaaat filmmaker!”) She also possessed a vast array of digitized NASA footage—she subscribed to the space agency’s daily e-mailed download—and a cache of flight-simulator games. At her request, I’d arrived with the latest edition of Microsoft’s “takeoffs and landings” video, an unnerving item to be carrying in my hand luggage so soon after 9/11. My father wanted me to buy it in the States to avoid the import tax.

Tucked into the far alcove was my father’s electronic command station. Here she trolled the blogosphere, Photoshopped her images, visited the lunar landscape, and piloted her virtual fighter jets. We fell into a routine the first week, sitting for hours every day in front of a computer monitor, my father at the keyboard, me in a folding chair by her side, reporter’s notebook and tape recorder at the ready. Some mornings she wanted me to see all the cross-dressing Web links she had bookmarked to “My Favorites” in the years leading up to her operation: “Costume Wigs,” “Fantasy Femmes,” “Gender Bender,” “Gender Heaven,” “Just Between Us Special Girls,” “Maid Service,” “Miss Elaine Transformations,” “Mrs. Silks,” “Paper Dolls,” “Petticoated.com,” “Pink Gladiolas,” “Sweet Chastity Online,” “T-Girl Shopping,” “Top Sissy Sites” …

“You can find everything on the Internet!” my father exulted.

The longer we spent in the third-floor garret viewing virtual non-reality, the more frantic I became to escape into the world beyond the perimeter. If I stood at the attic window and stretched on tiptoe, I could just make out, over the chestnut and fruit trees and down the sloping hills and across the river, Pest, that fabled cosmopolis, the historic venue of so much creative and cultural ferment. At the turn of the century, Pest had been host to a spectacular upwelling of artists and writers and musicians whose works had packed the museums and bookstalls and concert halls, who’d painted and scribbled and composed in the six hundred coffeehouses, published in the twenty-two daily newspapers and more than a dozen literary journals, filled the more than sixteen thousand seats of the city’s fast-proliferating theaters and opera and operetta houses, and transformed the identity of the long backward capital into the “Paris of Eastern Europe.” The city in my mind was the one I’d read about in John Lukács’s Budapest 1900, the one the London Times correspondent Henri de Blowitz described in the late 1890s: “Buda-Pest! The very word names an idea which is big with the future. It is synonymous with restored liberty, unfolding now at each forward step; it is the future opening up before a growing people.” Blowitz’s city, I knew, belonged to a time long past. Still, my mind somehow wanted to hitch the city’s old aspiration to my father’s current one. Even when I was growing up, I’d felt that a key to my father’s enigma must lie in that Emerald City of István Friedman’s birth. I still couldn’t dispel the notion that to understand Stefi, I had to see her in the world where he was from, visit the streets and landmarks and “royal apartment” that little Pista had inhabited. But Pest was down the hill, visible only on tiptoe.

On those mornings when we weren’t lost in NASA rocket launches or Gender Heaven beauty tips, we were inspecting the images she’d assembled under “My Pictures.” Few of them were actually her pictures; most had been lifted from the Web. An exception was her Screen Saver image, a photo of a servant girl in a French maid’s outfit, a pink bow in her platinum blond curls. She had one white stiletto heel thrust out and was reaching down to adjust a stocking. The chambermaid was my father, who’d taken a selfie standing in front of a mirror.

Then there were the montages: images she’d pulled from various Internet pages, into which she’d inserted herself. All that long experience doctoring fashion spreads for Vogue and Brides had found its final form: Stefi’s face atop a chiffon slip originally worn by a headless mannequin. Stefi implanted on the long legs of a woman ironing lingerie in a polka-dot apron. (“I added the apron,” she said.) Stefi transported into an online Christmas card of a girl wearing a red ruffle around her neck and not much else. Stefi in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, captured in mid plié. Stefi in another maid’s outfit, this one belonging to a little girl, who was being disciplined by a stern schoolmarm in tweeds and lace-up boots. The girl held the skirt up in back to reveal her frilly underwear.

“I did these before I had the operation,” my father said, “but it was too extreme. Transvestite pretension.”

The theme of “before” and “after” was a recurrent one in these viewing sessions. My father seemed intent on drawing a thick line between her pre- and post-op self, as though the matron respectability she’d now achieved renounced her earlier sex-kitten incarnations, made them into a “flamboyance” that she no longer needed or recognized.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a link she’d bookmarked called FictionMania. I was hoping for narrative relief from the onslaught of images. “Oh, people make up these stories about themselves and post them on this site,” she said. “We don’t need to look at that.”

“Stories?” I pressed. I’d look it up later: FictionMania was one of the largest transgender fantasy sites on the Internet, a repository for more than twenty thousand trans-authored tales, the vast majority of them sexual. A popular story line involved a dominatrix (often a female relative) forcing a cowed man into feminine undergarments, dresses, and makeup. The genre had a name: “Forced Feminization Fiction.”

“You know, stories,” my father answered, “like they’re little boys and their mothers make them dress up as a girl as punishment and then their mothers spank them. And they have illustrations.” I reached for the mouse to click on the link. My father pushed my hand aside. “I wouldn’t even share that with a psychiatrist.” Not that she had one; she regarded psychiatry as one of those “stupid things” best given a wide berth. I asked if she had ever posted a story on the site.

“No, I just used some of the pictures they have on here. For my montages,” pasting her face onto one or another costumed playmate. She’d done more than that, though. Her upstairs hall closet contained stacks and stacks of file folders of forced feminization dramas she’d downloaded from FictionMania and similar sites, in which she’d montaged her names into the text (Steven “before,” Stefánie “after”). Her stash showed a predilection for subjugation and domestic service, often set in Victorian times: “Baroness Gloria, the Amazing Story of a Boy Turned Girl” (in which Aunt Margaret in Gay Nineties Berlin disciplines her nephew into becoming a corseted “real lady”) or “She Male Academy” (in which Mom sends her misbehaving son to the Lacy Academy for Young Ladies, a “vast mansion designed in the Victorian Gothic manner,” where whip-wielding mistresses exact a transformation: “Steven will become Stefánie; his bold, brash and arrogant male self will be destroyed and replaced with the dainty, mincing and helplessly ultra-feminine personality of a sissy slave girl”). Along with the altered downloads were a few stories my father had written herself. Her character stayed true to form, submitting to the directives of a chief housekeeper while an all-female crew of iron-handed maids order “Steven” into baby-doll nighties, Mary Jane shoes, and a French chambermaid’s uniform.

At the computer, my father had moved on to another page of links. “I haven’t looked at that website for two years at least,” she said of FictionMania. “It was just a—, like a hobby. Like I used to smoke cigars, but I gave it up. This was all before.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m a real woman,” she said. “But I keep these pictures as souvenirs. I put a lot of work into them; I don’t want to throw them out.”

She hadn’t stopped montaging; she’d only shifted genres. She showed me a few of her more recent constructions. Now she was the lady of the house: Stefánie in a long pleated skirt and high-necked bodice. Stefánie with hair swept up into a prim bun and holding the sort of large sensible pocketbook favored by Her Majesty the Queen of England. This was certainly a persona shift from the “sissy slave girl” in Mary Janes, or at least an age adjustment. And yet, it seemed less a repudiation of her erotica collection than a culmination of it.

The sex fantasies and lingerie catalogs in my father’s file folders in the hall closet were commingled with printouts of downloaded how-to manuals on gender metamorphosis (“The Art of Walking in Extreme Heels”), many of them narrated by virtual dominatrixes: “This is your first step on your journey into femininity, a journey that will change your life,” read the introduction to “Sissy Station,” a twenty-three-step electronic instructional on “finding your true self” by becoming a woman. “You will be humiliated and embarrassed. Most of all, you will be feminized.” The journey required, in different stages, applying multiple coats of red toenail polish every four days, beribboning testicles, and practicing submission with sex toys before a mirror.

“There isn’t any one way to be a trans,” a trans friend cautioned me some years later. “I think of transsexuality as one big room with many doors leading into it.” My father’s chosen door was distinct. But the big room, like any condo, had its covenants and restrictions. A reigning tenet of modern transgenderism holds that gender identity and sexuality are two separate realms, not to be confused. “Being transgender has nothing to do with sexual orientation, sex, or genitalia,” an online informational site instructs typically. “Transgender is strictly about gender identity.” Yet, here in my father’s file folders was a record of her earliest steps toward gender parthenogenesis, expressed in vividly sexual terms. And here in FictionMania and Sissy Station and the vast electronic literature of forced feminization fiction was a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step. How to tease the two apart?

My father clicked the mouse and a greeting card popped up: Stefi’s visage pasted onto a frilled lace gown, hands clutching a bouquet, above the card’s preprinted message, “Wish I could be a bridesmaid on your Wedding Day!”

“You sent this card?”

“Not this one. I’ve sent others.”

“To?” Who, I wondered, was the bride she wished she “could be a bridesmaid” for?

“Other trans friends,” my father said.

“People you know?”

“People who have websites. You know, ‘Internet friends.’”

My father had bookmarked some of these “friends’” websites: Annaliese from Austria who, according to her page, “dresses sexy,” is “a size 12,” and “loves to go shopping.” Margit from Sweden, who “loves” bustiers, plush teddy bears, and “the color pink.” Genevieve of Germany, whose blog featured shots of herself topless on a nude beach and a timeline of “my second birth.”

“These pictures aren’t retouched,” my father said, unimpressed. “They aren’t as good as mine.”

“Where are your family photographs?” I asked. Suddenly, I’d had all I could handle of bustiers and second births. “From your childhood.”

My father gave her dismissive wave. “I don’t look at those.”

“But where are they?”

Silence. Then, airily: “Oh, somewhere.”

“Somewhere where?”

She shrugged, kept clicking through her images. Finally: “I keep all the old stuff, the important documents, in the basement. In a lockbox.”

“Could I see them?”

“It’s irrelevant,” she said. “It’s not me anymore.”

I looked at the clock; the day was half over. Day Five in the fortress.

“Dad, Stefi, please,” I said. “Let’s go out. You can show me the places you love in the city. Show me where you used to go in Pest as a child.”

“It doesn’t pay to live in the past,” my father said. “‘Get rid of old friends, make the new!’”

“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” I said. At any rate, I was here to see if I could make a new sort of friend: her. If only she could drop her age-old obstinance long enough to allow it. But our interactions were persistently one way: instead of mutual exchange, a force-fed guided tour of frou-frou fashions and hard-drive fantasies. When was she going to let in the daughter she wouldn’t let out?

“I don’t want to go to old places,” my father said. “It’s not interesting.”

“It interests me,” I said, hating my whininess, my own age-old obstinance.

“You are off the subject,” she said, tapping an insistent pink-polished nail on my notepad. “I’m Stefi now.”

One late afternoon, we stood in the kitchen, my father peeling an apple with her latest Swiss Army pocket knife. It was the “ladies’” version, she noted, with an emery board and cuticle scissors.

“Can I ask you a question?” my father said.

I nodded, hopeful. She was never the one who asked the questions. Maybe this was the start of an actual conversation.

“Can you leave your door open?” she said. “You close it every night when you go to bed.”

I drew back, speechless.

“Can you leave it open?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be treated as a woman. I want to be able to walk around without clothes and for you to treat it normally.”

“Women don’t ‘normally’ walk around naked,” I said.

The blade snapped shut, and the conversational opportunity, if that’s what it had been, shut with it. She returned her ladies’ knife to an apron pocket.

That night, I closed the bedroom door. Then I reconsidered, and opened it a crack. As much as her intrusions disturbed me, I sensed that she wasn’t really targeting me. Or, if she was, it was only me as a mirror. After a while, a hesitant knock.

“Can you help me with something?”

My father was standing with her back to the door. She was in her bedroom slippers but still wearing her dress.

“I can’t get the zipper … Will you do it?”

I stood there for a moment, then reached for the zipper pull. I stopped when it was halfway down her back.

“You can get it from there,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

I watched her pad back down the hall. And wondered: how could someone so hidden be so intent on being unzipped? If, indeed, that’s what she wanted. All these exposures and disclosures seemed, literally, skin deep.

In the days to follow, my father continued her guided tour of surface ephemerality, leading me through the dresses in her closets, the lingerie in her bureau drawers, the cosmetics in her vanity table, the estrogen patches and dilation rods in her medicine chest, all the secret curiosities in her many Cabinets of Wonder. I couldn’t tell if she thought she was dispensing revelations or distracting me from the real secrets. Look at me, but don’t look at me. As the daughter of a photographer, I knew that letting light into a darkroom can illuminate the evidence or destroy it, depending on your timing. My father and I were in a battle over time, past and present. She wanted me to admire the decorations in Stefi’s new display windows. I wanted to know the contents of another sealed chamber: the lockbox in the basement.