Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

17. The Door of Life - March 2010

March 2010 The day before the day on which I had decided to die, I met the love of my life. It’s hard to explain why, but, as winter 2010 was ending, I realized that the life I’d fought so hard to create was unlivable. Mostly, it was the pain. Life hurt, and it seemed it would always hurt. The hurt came from all directions. It hurt to live apart from my children; it hurt to wake up and go to sleep without them; and often, too often, it hurt to see them or, rather, to see the chasms that yawned between us. It always hurt when, after a few short hours, I had to say goodbye. The divorce hurt, too. Not just the bruising legal process, which began in 2008 with my wife’s accusations that I was a danger to my children and concluded with a settlement that left me little time with my children and so little money that I had to spend my commuting nights in New York City on ex-students’ floors and as the overnight volunteer in a men’s homeless shelter, but the death of a quarter-century of love that the divorce process represented. I reenacted that death nightly in my dreams; the fact of it stunned me anew with every chilly e-mail exchange. I had loved my now ex-wife for more than half my life. The hole the death of that love had left would always be filled with pain. 225 17 The Door of Life It isn’t easy to “meet someone,” as they say, in middle age. It’s harder when the answer to a bland icebreaker like “What have you been doing lately?” includes getting divorced, sleeping in a homeless shelter, and dealing with the publicity surrounding transsexual transition. Not that I hadn’t tried. Shortly after moving out, in June 2007, in a frenzy of jealousy over my ex’s suddenly public relationship with another man, I had registered with eHarmony. I was jealous not of the boyfriend—even in my dreams, I couldn’t imagine rekindling my marriage—but of my wife’s apparent ease in turning from loving me to loving someone else. According to eHarmony’s newsletters, finding true love requires being “the real you”; now that I was the real me, it seemed only fair that true love should find me. But, in order to find each other, true love and I were going to have to weed through the desperately lonely throngs I found as I flipped through hundreds of ungrammatical profiles. At first, I found this process exhilarating. Simply by registering with dating sites—eHarmony was only the first of several—I had leapt from the bottom to the top of the romantic food chain. Scores of hopefuls were lined up before me, sorted and sifted according to my personal preferences. According to their profiles, they couldn’t wait to meet me, but I—I didn’t want them. I was an English professor; they were semiliterate. I was sane; they might not be. I wrote poetry; they kayaked. I was a practicing Jew; they were vaguely spiritual. I was ironic; their clichés were full of heart. The euphoria of rejecting dozens of potential lovers per minute soon turned to nausea. I wasn’t actually looking at other people; I was looking at myself, and, instead of true love, I had found a nasty, superficial, stuck-up snob, to whom physical beauty, well-formed sentences, and proximity to western Massachusetts mattered more than any quality of character. Grammatically, physically, and geographically , most of the human race wasn’t good enough for me; morally, I wasn’t good enough for them. I decided to stop looking at dating sites. Even if I did stumble upon the infinitesimal percentage of middle-aged singles who were close enough, educated enough, attractive enough, articulate Part Three: The Door of Life 226 enough, literary enough and so on, what were the odds that they would want me—the real me, the broke, broken-hearted transsexual behind the woman bubbling vaguely over coming to life I presented in my profile? And then, of course, there was the question of sex. My true self had never even romantically clasped someone else’s hand. I didn’t know what kind of sex I wanted, whether I wanted...