THE THIRD SEX
Alan Brennert
Pulphouse, Spring 1989

Alan Brennert was beginning to make a reputation for himself in the genre
in the l970s as a writer of finely crafted short stories, but then he was
lured away by Hollywood. Since then, he has served as executive story
consultant on The Twilight Zone during its recent television revival,
written teleplays for China Beach, The Mississippi, and Darkroom,
and has twice been nominated for the Writers Guild Award. His first novel was
Kindred Spirits; another, Time and Chance, was just published by Tor and a
story collection titled Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories is coming soon.

In spite of all this, he still finds time for the occasional short
story, which show up from time to time in The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction, Pulphouse, and elsewhere. He's lost none of his touch
-- as demonstrated by the brilliant story that follows, from Pulphouse,
about someone who is caught, quite literally, between two worlds.

I couldn't have been more than three years old, that night I wandered into my parents' bedroom; I'd had the dream again, the one where I was being crushed between floor and ceiling, unable to breathe or break free. Shaken, I raced down the hail, pushed upon my parents' door -- then stopped as I saw what they were doing.

Locked in a sweaty tangle of sheets, they were jerking back and forth, making short, breathless sounds; for a minute I thought maybe they were having the same bad dream I'd just had. Their arms were wrapped around one another, the two of them lying face-to-face, so close I couldn't tell where one began and the other left off. When they saw me, my mother called out my name, my father swore, they pulled apart with a wet, sucking sound and as the sheets fell away I saw a thick, curved finger between my father's legs, and between my mother's, another pair of lips. I rushed up, fascinated, asking a million questions at once; my father just looked at my mother, sighed, and tried to answer my questions -- what is that called? what is that for ? -- as completely and honestly as you can, to a three-year-old; and when I went to bed that night, I reached down under my pajamas and touched the smooth, unbroken skin between my thighs, and dreamed of the day -- Daddy never mentioned it, but I knew it had to come -- when my own penis or vagina would start to grow. But somehow, it never did.

I'd been a perfectly normal newborn infant in all other respects, though not the first of my kind to appear. At first no one had a clue what to put on the birth certificate, much less what to name me, so they equivocated and the name on the county records is Pat; Pat Jacquith. Later, of course, they realized I had to have some identity, and since they were hoping for a daughter, that's what I became . . . at least until that night in their bedroom. "You're Daddy's little girl," my father had always told me, but if I was a girl, why didn't I have what Mommy had, that second pair of lips, that bristly hair? All I had was a pee-hole; it hardly seemed fair. And in years to come, when Mommy would take me out, shopping for skirts, or dolls, or frilly bedclothes, I knew I wasn't really like Mommy, would never be like Mommy . . . and I felt ashamed. Ashamed to be seen in clothes I didn't belong in, pretending to be something I wasn't.

So I started picking fights, at school . . . jumping hedges, shinnying up hills, sliding down cliffs . . . anything to get my pretty dresses torn, or dirty. We lived in a woodsy suburb called Redmond, and between the ages of six and thirteen I could usually be found in t-shirt and jeans, hiking, bicycling, or swimming in Lake Washington. I was a bit taller than the average girl, a bit shorter than the average boy; my voice was pitched a little lower than most girls, a little higher than most boys, but with a scratchy quality that somehow made it acceptable for either sex. I had no curves to speak of, and as the girls had begun to blossom with puberty, I stayed pretty much the same, going on hikes or playing shortstop in sandlot baseball games; but even this new, tomboy role would start to feel wrong, in its own way, soon enough.

I was fourteen; it was summer; a dozen of us, guys and girls, were camping at Lake Sammamish. I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit, my only concession to femininity, and when I dressed in the bushes I was careful, as always, to keep my distance from the others. To my left, Melissa Camry was suiting up behind a stand of bushes; to my right, my friend Davy Foster -- a tall, loping blond who'd been my best pal for years -- was stripping off his clothes in back of a tall tree. I caught a glimpse of Davy's genitals, and a peek at Melissa's impressively large breasts, and I felt an erotic tingle, but for which one, I didn't know; and then they were dressed and into the water, and swimming between them I continued to feel excited, but confused, as well.

Afterward, Davy and I went hiking, our trail coming to an end at the crest of a low, but steep, cliff. The rockface was intimidating; neither of us could resist the challenge. We descended carefully, finding ample foot- and hand-holds for the first ten feet; then, midway down the bluff, Davy flailed about, looking for a foothold, not finding any: the cliff was sheer granite for the next ten feet. Davy called up to me, "Hard way down," and, propelling himself away from the cliff, plummeted into the bushes below. In moments I was faced with the same choice, and so, feeling almost like a parachutist, I followed his lead. We found ourselves lying tangled, ass-over-teakettle, in shrubbery. We looked at one another, splayed at weird angles, our legs looped through each other's, and started giggling. And couldn't stop. The harder we tried to untangle ourselves, the harder we giggled; we'd grab at a branch, trying to haul ourselves up, only to have the branch snap off as we fell deeper into the bramble. Davy leaned down to help me, his cheek grazing mine --

And then, somehow, we were kissing. I wasn't feeling the same kind of tingle I had earlier, but it still felt nice; the wonderful pressure of lips against mine, our tongues meeting, licking . . . Before I knew it Davy had his hand under my shirt (withdrawing it when he found that my tits were no larger than his); I slid my panties down around my thighs, part of me knowing I shouldn't knowing there was nothing down there for him to enter, but not caring. Davy's penis was stiff, the tip of it was flushed red; he guided it awkwardly toward my crotch --

And then he saw.

He stopped and drew back, eyes wide with shock and disbelief. "What -- " he started to say, and by then I knew I'd made a mistake, a bad one; but some part of me tried to pretend it would all be all right, and I reached out to him, imploring, "Please . . . Davy, please -- " There was fear, now, in his eyes, but I didn't want to see it. "We don't have to. We can just keep on touching, can't we, we can keep on kissing -- "

I tried to draw him closer to me, but he jerked back, jumping to his feet, swaying as he sought to keep his balance amid the thick bramble. Wordlessly he pulled up his pants, and despite my pleas, staggered out of the underbrush and ran like hell out of sight.

I cried for half an hour before getting up the courage to head back to camp, certain that I'd return to have them all staring at me, whispering about me behind my back; but Davy not only never told anyone else, he never said another word about it to me, either . . . because when we all graduated to high school the next year, Davy somehow managed to transfer to a different school

I never wanted to see again what I saw in his eyes, that afternoon; never wanted to feel so different , ever again. And so, two months before my fifteenth birthday, I simply decided to deny it. All of it.

Overnight, I was no longer Pat, but Patty. Out went the jeans and sneakers; now, to my parents' shock, I wanted dresses, and nylons, and makeup -- I became obsessed with learning everything there was to learn about putting on foundation, blusher, and eyeshadow. Mother was eager and willing to teach me, and my first hour in front of her dressing mirror I was amazed and delighted as my boyish features were transformed, through the miracle of Helena Rubenstein, into a soft, feminine face. My eyes, which had always seemed a bland brown, now looked almost exotic -- hooded and sophisticated -- with a touch of mascara and Lancôme; and as I carefully applied a coat of coral lip gloss, the image was complete. I stared at the girl in the mirror, so feminine, so pretty . . . and cried with joy and relief as I realized that the girl was me. Mother held me, relieved herself that she finally had a daughter again; that perhaps things might work out, after all.

Once I'd had a taste of what I could become, there was no stopping me: I had my ears pierced, and came to love the feeling when I shook my hair out and felt my hoop earrings jiggling to and fro; I even loved the sound my porcelain nails made when I drummed them impatiently on my desk in class. By the end of my freshman summer I convinced my parents to let me color my hair, and so I began the new year as a blonde, flirtatious sophomore, thrilled that boys would open doors for me, or light my cigarettes for me -- each ritual confirming my own femininity.

I dated around, saw lots of boys, but knew I could take the role only so far. The dates would often end up in a boy's car, parked at a romantic lookout, with the two of us necking hot and heavily, his hands roaming my body; my breasts were still nonexistent, but now, taken in the context of my new look, the boys didn't seem to mind. But the petting always stopped short of one point: when the boy's hand reached for my panties. I'd let him masturbate against them, or bring him off myself, but that was all. They couldn't know it was as frustrating for me as for them. They at least could masturbate, but all I knew was the pleasure of touching, of caressing, of kissing. I read about orgasms, listened to my girlfriends talk endlessly about them; the more I listened, the more envious I became. And so I kept searching, hoping that someday, the right boy, the right touch, might bring me that release, that . . . fulfillment . . . everyone else seemed capable of. Most of the boys I dated didn't see me more than once or twice before dismissing me as a tease; but that reputation worked to my advantage, too, because there was always a ready supply of boys who saw me as a challenge, a prize to be won, and I was more than willing to let them try.

It was in my last semester of high school that my parents unexpectedly whisked me away for a rare day trip into Seattle. At first they tried to pass it off as a whim, but as the white brick buildings of the university medical center swung into view, they dropped the pretense; they seemed excited and enthused, and I became more than a little afraid at the whisper of jealousness in their tones. I could tell the extent of their preoccupation because when, nervously, I lit up a cigarette, neither of them gave me any grief about my smoking. Whatever this was about, it was important.

They wanted to be with me when I saw the doctor -- a surgeon named Salzman, a balding, gentle man in his early fifties -- but Dr. Salzman insisted on seeing me alone. My heart pounding for no reason that I knew, I sat in his comfortable office, in front of his expansive desk; I took a pack of Virginia Slims from my purse, then hesitated, but Dr. Salzman just pushed a heavy crystal ashtray toward me and I lit up, feeling a bit more relaxed, but certain that this amiable man was going to tell me I had three days to live.

"You've grown up to be quite a lovely young lady," he said approvingly. "I imagine you don't remember the last time I saw you?"

I smiled, shook my head. "I'm afraid not. Was I very small?"

He nodded. "Seven months." He leaned forward a bit in his chair, saw my nervousness, then laughed, putting me immediately at ease. "Don't look so worried. There's nothing wrong with you, at least nothing you don't already know about." He paused a moment, then, in a slightly more sober tone: "When did your parents tell you? About your -- condition?"

It felt so strange, talking about this with someone other than my parents, but there was nothing threatening about this man. "They said it was a . . . birth defect."

Salzman nodded to himself. "Yes, that about covers it as well as a child could understand. But you're no longer a child, are you?"

Suddenly it was a welcome relief just to have someone to talk to, someone who wouldn't cringe in fear. "It's called -- androgyny, isn't it? I looked it up. But that's just something out of mythology, isn't it? How can I be -- I mean, why -- ?"

Salzman stood, paced a little behind his desk. "It used to be something out of mythology. Your case, eighteen years ago, was the first on the West Coast, but before that there was one in Denver, two in New York, a few in the Midwest . . . the incidences are still rare, less than one hundredth of one percent, but . . ." He circled round and sat on the edge of his desk. "You were lucky; the first few cases attracted the most attention. Lived most of their youth under a microscope, and for all that we still don't know anything about the causes. Your parents wanted you to have as normal a life as possible, so we restricted ourselves to periodic exams. There was nothing we could do until you reached maturity, anyway."

I sat up, snubbing out the cigarette in the crystal ashtray. "Do? You mean there's something -- "

"Slow down, now," Salzman cautioned. "What you are, you are; you have a . . . different chromosome, not X, not Y, something entirely new . . . and no one can change your genetic makeup. But we can give you a closer cosmetic resemblance to a normal female. We can start you on a course of hormone therapy to facilitate breast and hip development, augmented with silicone implants . . ."

I was leaning forward in my seat, my heart racing, barely able to contain my excitement. Dr. Salzman went on, "Now, as to sex organs, we can make a surgical incision in your -- please tell me if this is getting too clinical -- in your groin; then place a sort of plastic sac just inside the skin, and fashion a vagina and clitoris out of skin taken from elsewhere on your body. This is similar to what we do for male-to-female transsexuals, and it may require a follow-up operation to make sure the vagina remains open, but -- "

"Oh, Doctor, thank you," I said, tears starting to well up in my eyes; "You don't know how often I've dreamed about -- "

He held up a hand. "Don't thank me yet. There are limits. Like a transsexual, you won't, of course, be able to conceive children; but unlike a transsexual, whose vaginal lining is made of penile tissue, yours will be relatively insensate . . . no more sensitive to pleasure than any other part of your body. Do you understand?"

My hopes plummeted. "Why not?" I asked, voice low.

He looked at me with sadness and sympathy. "Because, child, you don't have any sex organs, and no tissue of the same sensitivity as a penis, or a clitoris. Perhaps the estrogen will give you some sensitivity in your breasts; perhaps not. This will be cosmetic change only . . . but won't that still go a long ways to relieving your gender discomfort?"

I thought about it a moment, my reservations melting away. I could go to bed with a man . . . get married . . . live something approaching a normal life. What did the rest matter, really? "Yes. Of course," I said. I stood, and couldn't help but hug him in gratitude. "When can I have the surgery?"

"We'll want to do a routine exam on you now, and if everything's satisfactory, we can do it whenever I can schedule an OR. Within the week, if you like."

When I left the office my parents saw at once the happiness in my eyes, and the three of us embraced, and laughed, and cried. All the way back they talked about how long they had been waiting for this day; how happy they were that their daughter was going to have a normal, healthy life. That night, there was laughter from their bedroom for the first time in years. The week until surgery passed quickly. And then, the night before I was to go to the medical center, I told my parents I was going out to meet friends, got into the flame-red Datsun my father had bought me for my seventeenth birthday, and I ran away from home.

I left a note, saying how sorry I was, explaining why I had to leave, and how I knew I couldn't live with their disappointment and betrayal. But I simply couldn't go through with it.

Oh, at first I was thrilled; I lay awake in bed, that first night, dreaming about being a girl, a real girl, for the first time. I had a date the next night, a new boy named Charles: good-looking, studious, and a little nervous. We ended up at the lookout outside town, but as we sat there, necking and petting, I realized nothing was happening -- not even the whisper of anticipation I usually felt with a new boy, wondering if this, maybe, were the one who would be different -- and as his hand reached under my blouse, I pushed him away with a little shove. "Charles, please don't. Let's go back to town." To prevent any further moves, I lit a cigarette and used it as a subtle shield between us. Charles turned slowly away, started the car, and headed back.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror and, reflexively, began to primp, more concerned with my own appearance than Charles, beside me. It wasn't until he dropped me off that I saw the hurt and anger in his eyes, and by then it was too late; he was gone before I could apologize. He hadn't even been in danger of discovering my secret; I'd just become bored, and used the same coquettish tone I always did to end the scene, without any thought to him. My God, I thought; what kind of selfish, manipulative little bitch am I turning into?

That night, I undressed in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door, and stood staring at my reflection, taken aback at what I saw. I saw a girl's face, immaculately made up -- pink lipstick, blue eyeshadow, a hint of blusher along the cheekbones -- framed by strawberry-blonde hair. A girl's face, sitting atop a boyish body... not muscular enough to be a boy's, but too contourless to be a girl's, either. The juxtaposition seemed suddenly, and painfully, ridiculous. Looking at the head of a Cosmo girl sitting atop a neutered body, I knew for the first time that I was neither boy nor girl, but -- something else.

I slept badly that night, and the next morning could barely bring myself to apply my makeup. As the days wore on, as the date of surgery approached, the operation seemed less like a deliverance than a . . . a mutilation. A plastic sac inside my groin? The thought made me shiver. And if I did go through with it, then what? I'd still have no sex organs, no orgasms; would I make the best of it, get a job, fall in love and marry? Or would I continue to search, irrationally, for that one man who might bring me complete satisfaction, in the process hurting how many others who failed to make the grade?

I looked at the fickle blonde in my makeup mirror, and knew which path she would take. I left her behind in Redmond that night I drove away; I stopped at a mini-mall on Route 22 and picked up a suitcase full of unisex clothing -- jeans, shirts, sweaters. At the nearest salon I had my blonde mane trimmed short, in a style of indeterminate sex; when the blonde grew out, I returned to my natural brown. I drove as far from Redmond as I could manage, with no particular destination, no purpose beyond discovering just who, and what, I really was.

A stranger, looking at me, had little clue to whether I was a man or a woman; depending on the pitch of my voice at any given time, I could be either one. It wasn't unusual for me to sit at the counter of a roadside diner, and for the waitress to ask, "What can I get you, sir?"; only to have the person at the cash register hand me my change with a friendly, "Have a nice day, ma'am." I became a chameleon, my gender determined as much by the observer's biases as by anything physical; and the further I drove,the freer I felt, a living Rorschach test with no demands put upon me to be one sex or the other.

I worked my way cross-country, waiting on tables, clerking in stores, delivering packages. I gave my name as Pat, which was both true and ambiguous. I'd never overtly state my sex unless it was absolutely necessary -- on a job application, or if I was pulled over for a traffic ticket -- and then only check "female" out of expediency, since that's what all my IDs read. But such instances were rare. It's amazing how much gender identification is really just in the eye of the beholder; I gave no cues, but each person I met brought his or her own lens to the focus of my identity. If I was driving fast, or aggressively, other drivers treated me like a man; if I was looking in a shop window displaying women's fashions, passersby would assume I was a woman. I could, with impunity, enter either a men's or a ladies' room; context, I discovered, was everything.

For the first time, too, I was free to follow my sexual feelings without playing a role. Working in a record store in Wyoming, I let myself experience, finally, the attraction I felt for women as well as men; I slept with a female co-worker, keeping the lights dim, and in lieu of intercourse I spent hours caressing her, holding her, massaging her clitoris with my tongue and fingers. She told me later she'd never really liked sex all that much, but this time was different; this time she was starting to see what it was all about. When a lonely, middle-aged man in a diner made a pass at me, I assumed he thought me a woman; but as we talked, it became apparent he took me for a young gay male. In his hotel room, I performed fellatio on him, and then -- careful to roll my underwear down only as far as necessary, explaining it was a minor fetish -- let him have anal sex with me; then we just held one another for a long while. And as I lay there, both times, feeling warm and happy, I realized with a start I had given no thought to that all-important "culmination" I had been in search of, so desperately, for so long.

Kansas City, Boston, Fayetteville, New York . . . my odyssey took me across the country and halfway back again. Sometimes I settled in various cities for months at a time, taking college-credit courses in psychology and sociology; but it was impossible to maintain gender ambiguity when you settled in one place for long, and eventually I'd get restless with being either man or woman, anxious to be perceived simply as me, and I'd be on the road again, searching.

One thing became clear: with more and more of these cases cropping up, the medical establishment could no longer dismiss them as genetic quirks. And a few times I even got to meet my kindred. in Fayetteville I met a 22-year-old living as a male, his full beard and hairy arms a testament to testosterone; an Army brat, he'd spent a good deal of time under the eye of military doctors, and it seemed to me his macho, swaggering pose was just that -- a pose to satisfy his family and government, forcing them to leave him in peace. In New York I was shocked to find another androgyne who'd set up shop as a hooker, catering to any and all sexual persuasions, willing to be either man or woman, stud or harlot; he/she had a collection of wigs, toupces, strap-on dildoes and sponge rubber vaginas, and his/her arms were riddled with track marks. I got out of there, fast, feeling sick and sad. And in Miami I met a young "woman" with long auburn hair, dazzling eyes made up exactly right, full breasts peeping out of a low-cut dress, long red fingernails; the surgeons had done an amazing job on her. We sat in an open-air café as she flirted with every man who passed, preening in her compact mirror, yet if I asked her about her past, what it was like growing up, she found a way to change the subject, a dweller in an eternal, and ephemeral, present.

In Tennessee I finally met someone who'd taken the same path as I: Alex, slender, sandy-haired, living neither as a male nor a female, shunned by family, working as a teller in an S&L. We were astonishingly similar in our outlooks, in the decision we'd both come to, and both of us longed for that same unimaginably distant thing: a sense of belonging, of being loved and needed and necessary. We came together, in desperation more than want, and made love -- as best as two neuters, two neither-nors, could make love. There were no sex organs to stimulate, but in our travels we each had learned much about touching, and caressing, and the sensitivities of the flesh; we could appreciate, as well as anybody, the gentle brush of lips along the nape of a neck, the sensuous massage of fingers kneading buttocks, the lick of a tongue inside the rim of an ear. It was very tender, and very loving, but when it was over . . .

When it was over, Alex stroked my cheek and said, almost sadly, "We're much alike. Aren't we?"

I nodded, wordlessly.

"I always thought when I found someone like myself, I'd be truly happy," Alex said, in a soft Tennessee drawl.

"So did I," I said, quietly.

Alex held me, then gave an affectionate peck on my cheek. "I'm sorry, Pat."

We were alike; too alike. Even our sexual responses were nearly identical. It wasn't just the lack of orgasm, it was . . . like making love to yourself; narcissistic, somehow. Patty, the strawberry blonde, would probably have liked it, but I felt only vaguely depressed by it. Both of us knew, instinctively, that the answer to our problem -- if there was an answer -- lay not in each other, but somewhere else.

My search, my quest for identity and purpose, was unraveling before my eyes. There was no purpose. There was no identity. I was neither man nor woman, yin nor yang; I was the line, the invisible, impossible-to-measure demarcation between yin and yang, as impossible to define as the smallest possible fraction, as elusive as the value of PI. I was neither, I was no one, I was nothing.

Not knowing what else to do . . . I went home.

I'd kept in touch with my parents, over the years; letters, postcards, a phone call on Christmas or Thanksgiving. At first they were furious, even hung up the first time I called; eventually though they forgave me, and lately they'd written of how much they wanted to see me again. They were growing old, and I was afraid that if I didn't go now, I might never get the chance; so I headed west, to Washington, to Redmond, and home.

But the closer home I got, the faster my heart raced, the weaker my grip on the steering wheel; finally, somewhere between Bellevue and Kirkland, I lost my nerve and pulled into a motel off 4O5. It was well past eleven, and after checking in I headed down to the all-night coffee shop in the lobby. Exhausted, hungry, and nervous, I sat at a corner table, ordered a sandwich, and began chatting with a man at an adjoining table; he had the smooth, charming sheen of a salesman, and as he flirted with me, I found myself unconsciously changing the way I sat, the way I crossed my legs, even the way I held my glass of iced tea. I leaned forward, my now very feminine body language belying my androgynous appearance. It all came back so quickly, so easily. Before he could make a proposition, I realized what was happening and hurried off, feigning a stomachache; I hadn't come this far to lapse back into old patterns.

I slept badly, and wasted most of the next day window-shopping in a Kirkland mall, putting off the inevitable as long as I could. I was eating lunch when I looked up to find a man staring at me from a table across the room; this time I fought off the reflex that had overtaken me last night and simply glanced away, but when I looked up again the man was standing in front of me, a quizzical look on his face . . . a face I suddenly recognized.

"Pat?"

It was Davy. For a moment I was stunned that anyone here would recognize me, looking as I now did, but of course Davy had always known Pat, not Patty. The embarrassment of that day in the woods came rushing back; I must have looked terrified as I jumped to my feet, spilling coffee all over the table, and started to hurry away, but Davy rushed after. "Pat -- wait -- "

Outside he took me by the arm, but it was the gentle look on his face, and the softness of his voice, that brought me to a stop. "It's okay," he said quietly. "I'm not going to . . . I mean, that was a long time ago, right?"

He was only in his twenties, and already his blond hair was thinning, but his eyes were still a bright blue, and now they seemed to be looking straight through me. Part of me wanted to run; thank God, I didn't. He let go of my arm, smiling apologetically. "Been a while," he said.

It took me a moment to collect my thoughts.

"I've been -- away," I said. "Traveling."

"Back for a visit, or to stay?"

I wished I knew. "A visit. I was going to head over to Redmond later and see my parents."

We stood there, awkwardly, for several moments, before he said, haltingly, "Look. If you've . . . got an hour to spare, I'd ... like to talk with you. Let me call my office, okay?"

"I really should be getting -- "

"Please?" What was that intensity, that desperation, I read in his eyes? "Just an hour?"

We skirted the edge of Lake Washington in his Jeep, a gray mist obscuring the few sailboats out on this drizzly day. We chatted innocuously for the first half hour, pointing out familiar sights, the snowy caps of nearby mountains, but fiuially, as we stood at a deserted lookout over the lake, Davy worked up the nerve to say what had been on his mind all afternoon.

"I'm sorry, Pat," he said, quietly.

I looked up at him. "Sorry for what?"

"For running," he said, glancing away uneasily. "For cutting you off like that. But I couldn't handle it. You were the first girl -- " He stopped, momentarily panicked that he'd used the wrong word, but when I didn't react negatively he went on, hesitantly, " -- that I was ever really . . . attracted to. I mean, you have no idea how many times I thought about it, about you, and me . . . when we were out hiking, or swimming, or in school -- "

I couldn't help smiling. "Really?" I said. "I thought you just thought I was just, you know, one of the guys.

"Yeah, well, that's the hell of it. Even though I knew -- thought -- you were a girl, I couldn't shake this weird feeling that you were a guy . . . that being attracted to you was wrong, somehow. So there we are, the perfect situation, and I figure, okay, I'll prove to myself she's just like any other girl, that it's okay for me to want her -- "

"Oh, God," I said, realizing. "And instead you found -- "

"Yeah," he said. "Talk about gender confusion. I freaked. And for a while, I wasn't even sure what I was, much less you." He looked away. "Later, I did a lot of reading, found out about . . . people like you . . . and when I was in college, I saw a therapist who helped me out. Then I met Lyn. But all during high school . . ."

I put a hand on his; now it was my turn to feel guilty. "Oh, God, Davy, I'm so sorry. I was so shaken up by it myself, I guess I never gave a thought to what it must've been like for you -- your first sexual experience and it's so . . . so bizarre . . . ."

He put his other hand on top of mine, and the warmth of it was familiar and comforting. "It's okay. I came out of it okay. But I wanted to apologize. For not -- " His voice caught. "For not being a friend."

I couldn't think of anything to say, so I hugged him, trying to release some of that guilt which had been dogging him all these years; as we stood there the light drizzle became heavier, and when we separated the sky was darker, the ground turning muddy as a gray slanting rain pebbled the surface of the lake. "I'd better get a move on," I said, glancing at the thunderheads on the horizon.

"Rotten weather to be driving in. Why don't you come home and have dinner with Lyn and me?"

The idea frightened me, I'm not sure why; perhaps it was the warmth of Davy's body, still with me after our embrace. "No, I better not," I said, and in my haste to get back to the car I took the muddy embankment a bit too quickly, my foot sliced sideways, I felt a pop in my ankle as I tumbled down the small incline. I yelled, swore, but Davy was right behind me, pulling me up with a strong arm; though the damage, damn it, had already been done. "Take it easy," he said, helping me hobble up the embankment to the road. The pain in my foot was overshadowed, briefly, by the feel of his arm around my waist, but I thought of the last time something like this had happened, the blind alleys it had led us both to for so many years, and I resolved it would not happen again. "I'm all right," I protested, his grip loosening as I moved away -- but the moment I took a step without his help all my weight fell on my twisted ankle and a stabbing pain shot up through my knee and into my thigh. I buckled, and Davy was there again to catch me.

"Come on. We'll fix you up back at my place."

I was hardly in a position to argue. We climbed into his Jeep, the rain drumming on its canvas roof as we headed down the road, and I cursed myself, wondering if I hadn't done this on purpose

We were dripping wet, our shoes muddied, when we entered Davy's tract home in Kirkland, but Davy led me unhesitatingly to a dining room chair, carefully propped my ankle up on a second chair, and headed for the kitchen. "I'll get some ice," he said, and as the kitchen door swung shut behind him I saw the flash of headlights outside the dining room window, then heard the hurried slap of footsteps on the wet sidewalk leading to the house. Oh, great, I thought. I looked around for Davy, thinking that this was going to be an awkward introduction at best, but without him here --

The door opened and, along with a spray of rain, a petite blonde in a damp gray suit entered, at first so intent on closing her umbrella she didn't notice me. Then she looked up, stopped in mid-stride, and stared at me, her face contorting into an almost comical look of apprehension.

"Oh, God," she said, in a fast Eastern cadence. "You're not a burglar, are you? I left Chicago after the third burglary. Please tell me you're not a burglar."

I had to smile, but before I could say anything Davy entered with the ice pack, introducing me as an old schoolmate; I couldn't tell from the look on Lyn's face whether Davy had told her anything more about me, but as soon as she saw my ankle she came over, wincing as she touched my foot, lightly. "Ouch. Hold on, I think we've got an Ace bandage in the bathroom." Within minutes she was wrapping a long, slightly ragged bandage around my ankle, as Davy took off the icepack. "Mud," she said with a sardonic grin. "There should be mud miners up here, you know, providing the rest of the country with our unending supply. Mud and rain, rain and mud -- "

She finished wrapping, secured the bandage with a butterfly clip, then let Davy wrap the icepack around the ankle again. "There. That should keep the swelling down." She stood, and for the first time I noticed the disparity in height between her and Davy; she stood on tiptoe, kissed him affectionately on the lips. "Guess what, dear heart," she said.

Davy looked apprehensive. "My turn to cook?"

She nodded. Davy sighed, picked up his raincoat from the chair he'd draped it over, looked at me. "You like Chinese?"

"Sure."

"Back in a flash." He was out the door and gone in a shot. Lyn turned, grinned. "Never fails. My turn to cook, I feel this obligation to make veal scallopini; his turn to cook, he goes out for Szechwan. Would you like some Tylenol for that foot?"

"Thanks."

With the Tylenol came hot coffee and a dry sweater; we shifted my ankle to the coffee table in front of the sectional sofa, and Lyn and I dried out in front of the gas logs, as we waited for the mu shu pork and kung pao chicken. I asked her what kind of work she did.

"Loan manager. B of A. You?"

"Retail sales," I hedged. "I've been on the road for quite a while."

"Back to visit your family?"

"Yes. Right."

She took out a pack of Salems, offered me one; and as she lit it for me, over the flame of the lighter I thought I could see her staring at me, oddly, trying to figure me out -- not muscular enough for a man, not round enough for a woman. Was I live, or was I Memorex? Or was it just my own paranoia?

"I actually quit," she said, taking a deep drag on the cigarette, "back when I thought I was pregnant." At my puzzled look she explained, "False alarm. Or 'hysterical pregnancy,' as they put it. If it happened to men, you know they'd call it something like 'stress-induced symptomatic replication,' but women, we're hysterical , right? Like, 'Oh, my God, I burned the roast, and -- ' " She looked down at her stomach in mock-surprise. " 'Whoops! Honey, do I look pregnant to you?' "We laughed, and that led to a general discussion of the peculiarities of men in general . . . and as I listened to Lyn's good-natured but very funny catalog of male excesses, not so different from the catalog of female excesses I'd listened to from men, something occurred to me, something crystallized after all these years.

All my life I'd felt like a member of a different race, human but not-human; similar but separate. And now I realized that this was, to some degree, how men and women viewed each other, at times -- like members of a different species entirely. I saw it even more clearly over dinner, because even though Davy and Lyn had a good, loving relationship, there were the inevitable rough edges. Toward the end of the evening they got into a heated argument, as they were showing me around the soon-to-be-renovated basement, over what color tile would be used; Davy kept insisting it would be red, while Lyn said that wasn't it at all, more like terracotta, and they went on like that for almost a minute before I stepped into the breach with:

"Uh . . . Davy? When you say red, you mean like a fire-engine?"

"No, no, darker than that, more like -- like -- "

"Brick?"

"Yeah! Yeah, like brick."

"That's terra-cotta," Lyn said, exasperated.

"Well how the hell am I supposed to know that?"

After a moment, both Davy and Lyn loosened up and Lyn even suggested I should stick around and interpret while they were redecorating the house. We went upstairs, had some wine, watched a little cable . . . me stealing glances at Davy and Lyn, snuggled up together . . . and slowly my mood darkened. I liked them, liked them both; Davy's steady presence, Lyn's manic energy. I could fantasize myself falling in love with or marrying either one. Everyone in the world, it seemed, could look forward to that -- male, female, gay, lesbian, they could all find a partner. Everyone except me. I was grateful when the movie ended and I could retire, alone, to the sofabed in the living room.

Lying there under a thick, warm quilt, listening to the tattoo of raindrops on the roof, I drifted asleep . . . and had a nightmare I hadn't had in years, the one that had plagued me so often as a child, the one that drove me to my parents' bedroom years before.

I looked up to see the ceiling was dropping toward me, as, beneath me, the floor was rushing up. It happened too fast to do anything but shut my eyes against the coming collision; but when I hit, I didn't hit hard but soft, as though both floor and ceiling had turned to feather-down and were now smothering me between them. Out of the corner of my eyes I could see a thin wedge of light on either side, kept there only by the obstruction of my own body between floor and ceiling; then the wedge shrank to a slit, then a line, then a series of small pinpoints. I fought against the pressure but it was useless, the pinpoints of light vanishing one after another; I tried to take a breathe but couldn't, my chest in a vise, unable to expand or contract; I was dying, I was defeated, I was --

" Pat! Pat, wake up!"

I was in the vise, and I was being held by my shoulders by Davy; my eyes were open, but I was in both places. He shook me, and the vise opened a crack; shook me again, and it fell away. I was in the living room, and I was awake; but I was still terrified. I broke down, as I hadn't in years -- not since that day in the woods -- but instead of shame and humiliation I felt pain, and loneliness; only the sense of apartness was the same. I held desperately onto Davy, tears running down my cheeks, trying to hold sleep at bay. Davy held me, and stroked my back, and after I'd finished he looked at me, put a hand to my cheek, and said in a soft, sad voice: "I think it's time I made it up to you," and then he was kissing me, tenderly. Part of me wanted to stay like that for the rest of my life, pretending to be what he wanted and needed, suspended forever in illusion; but I drew back, shook my head, tried to pull away. "Davy, no -- your wife, I can't - "

And then there was a hand on my shoulder; a small hand, not very heavy, and I could feel the tips of her fingers on my skin. I turned. Lyn sat in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, looking not at all angry or disturbed; I started to say something, but she just shook her head, said, "Sshh, sshh," and leaned in, her lips brushing the nape of my neck, her breath moving slowly along the curve of my neck to my face, my mouth . . .

She knew. All along, she must have known

Lyn gently pushed me back onto the bed, just as I became aware of a pleasant tickle on my legs; I looked down to see Davy, his hands stroking the knotted muscles of my calves, his lips moving slowly up my legs, covering them with tiny kisses.

Lyn took my face in her hands, put her mouth to mine, and our tongues met and danced round one another in greeting . . .

And then I felt something I had never felt before -- a mounting pressure, a thrilling tension, as though every nerve ending in my body were about to burst, but didn't, just kept building and building in intensity -- a pleasure I had never known, never imagined I could know. And it was then that I realized: the doctors had been wrong; all of them. Very wrong. I wasn't lacking in erogenous tissue. My whole body was erogenous tissue.

All it needed was the proper stimulation.

I finally worked up the nerve to see my parents; when Mother opened the door there was a moment's shock at my appearance -- so different from the flirty blonde teenager who'd run away years before -- but then she reached out and embraced me, holding me as though I might blow away on the wind. Then Daddy stepped up out of the shadows of the living room and did something odd and touching: he reached out and shook my hand, the way he might greet a son coming home from college; and then kissed me on the cheek, as he might a daughter. It was his way, I think, of acknowledging I was both, and neither; his way of telling me that they didn't love a daughter, they didn't love a son . . . they loved a child.

Funny; for years I thought of myself as a freak, a useless throwback to another time -- but despite all the psych courses I'd taken, all the books I'd read, I never really thought about that time, eons before recorded history, when my kind shared the earth with men and women. Why we vanished, or died out, may never be known; but the real question is, why were we there in the first place? It wasn't until Lyn, and Davy, that I began wondering . . . thinking about how, in the millennia since, men and women had had such difficulty understanding one another, seeing the other's side . . . as though something were -- missing, somehow. A balance; a harmonizing element; the third side of a triangle. Maybe that was the natural order of things, and what's come since is the deviation. All along I'd been thinking of my kind as throwbacks, when perhaps we're just the opposite; perhaps we're more like . . . precursors.

The basement's been converted, not into a recreation room as once planned, but into extra living quarters; I have a bedroom, for when Davy and Lyn want to be alone, and a small library/den where I can study. So far, no one's been scandalized by the arrangement; lots of people room together to save rent or mortgage payments, after all. I've enrolled at the University of Washington, aiming first for my Master's, then my Ph.D., in psychology . . . because now, finally, I think I know what that purpose is I was seeking for so many years. If the statistics are right, our numbers will be doubling every ten months; thousands more like me, going through the same identity crises, the same doubt and fear and loneliness . . . and who better to help them than a psychologist who truly understands their problems?

Lyn's quit smoking again, but this time, happily, the pregnancy isn't a -- what did she call it? -- 'stress-induced symptomatic replication.' And I can't help but feel that after so many false starts, maybe, somehow, it was me who tipped the scales -- gave them that extra little push they needed. After all, who's to say life can't be transmitted just as easily in saliva or sweat as it is in semen or ova? We only have one problem now: the nagging suspicion that when it comes time to buy baby clothes, neither pink nor blue may be appropriate. Green? Yellow? Violet? Take my word for it: there's big money to be made here for some enterprising manufacturer, one ready to tap an expanding market. Wait and see; wait and see.