What Kind of King

Barrie Jean Borich

We are standing in J.C. Penney’s men’s department when I realize what sort of king I have married. She is holding up ties, one with fluorescent triangles and intersecting lines, a pop art geometry assignment, the other a delicate Victorian print with inlaid roses that shimmer under the too–white department store lights.
    “I’m leaning toward this one,” Linnea says, lifting up the geometry lesson. The harsh lights above her head highlight the gray in her hair. We are surrounded here by the base elements needed to conjure up what is commonly called a man—hangers hung with navy blue, forest green, and magnet gray Suits and the caramel brown and unadorned black leather of men’s accessories under glass. Paracelsus, who inspired those Renaissance alchemists who wanted to cure the world with the medicine of transformation, declared that to conjure meant “to observe anything rightly, to learn and understand what it is.” Linnea conjures herself between the neat department store racks, and I am suddenly aware that for some time now she has been buying all of her clothes in the men’s department, even her classic black wing tips. Even her white tube socks with the red or green stripe along the top. Even the silk boxers she sleeps in, or wears under her clothes on special occasions. Even her everyday underwear, the bright red, green, and blue bikini briefs that come in a clear plastic tube, tagged with a color photograph of a hard–jawed man of northern European descent, thick, blond hair on his chest, a long, muscled swimmer’s body.
    I wonder what I am to understand about our bodies when I observe the two of us. I look at myself, my heavy eyeliner and mauve lipstick, a silk scarf tied around my throat that matches the leopard print of my gloves. Under my shirt I wear a satin underwire bra. I look at Linnea, noticing that the only items she buys outside of the men’s department are her plain cotton and lycra sports bras, the kind designed to hold the breasts still and out of the way. They are more comfortable than the Ace bandages women passing as men once used to bind their breasts, but with similar effect, the aim to draw attention away from the possibility of a bust line, never to lift and separate. In the days before gay liberation, women could be arrested, charged with transvestism, for wearing fewer than three articles of women’s clothing. On any day of the week, Linnea does not pass that test. Friends ask me why it matters what any of us wear. Our clothes, they say, are just the facile presentation of our surfaces. The real person is within, contained in the intangible soul. I want to agree, and then I find myself daydreaming about a leopard print dress of silk georgette I saw in a mail–order catalog, or I watch Linnea, a woman with a Ph.D. in literature, her face pursed in concentration as she tries to choose between two silk neckties stretched across her outstretched palms, and I feel certain there is something more than a surface at stake.
    Here at J.C. Penney’s, among the racks and cabinets of what is called men’s clothing, I can imagine Linnea in another time and place. She has an unremarkable singing voice, but is a fine dancer. She has been known to pull off a terrific lip synch and, unlike me, who has always had a hard time talking to strangers and who has never been able to swallow just one of anything intoxicating, Linnea is a model social drinker and can strike up a conversation with almost anybody. She would be great working in any kind of watering hole. She could have easily been one of the butches who worked as drag king impressarios in the mob–run show bars in New York, the Village, in the 1940S. She would be elegant on stage in a fine tailored tux, her hair cut short just as it is now, but slicked back smooth with Brylcream or Rose’s Butch Wax. She would change her name for the stage to Lenny, or maybe Johnny, after her Italian grandfather from Hell’s Kitchen, a gentle man tattooed from head to ankle. In the Village drag shows, Johnny/Linnea would be the king with the approachable face, handsome in her command of the gentlemanly arts, the mystery date all the ladies dream of, their faces lit amber in the boozy candlelight, Johnny/Linnea waltzing out before the bare–bulbed footlights, just as airborne as Kelly or Astaire, escorting Dietrich in a sea–blue sheath, dipping a reluctant Bette Davis or twirling a taffeta–clad Ginger Rogers under her arm.
    But what is it I see when I conjure up the image of Linnea on a drag king stage? The old European fairy tales say the kings are the ones above all the rest, the rulers of countries and people, but there are kings of property and also those who possess a kingdom of self–knowledge, the low–rent regents of self– rule who have always known who they are. A drag king is no one’s boss, an illusionary monarch, a magician with the alchemist’s amber light in her eyes. Some kinds of kings are easy to see—the military leaders, the oil barons, the presidents, prime ministers, and prom kings. There’s the King of Pop, the King of Rock, the Elvis impersonators swinging their hips in their beaded white jumpsuits. There’s the cartoon king selling fast–food burgers, King Kong scaling the Empire State Building again, the terrified lion wailing all the way to Oz, “If I were the king of the forrrrrrrest.” There’s the King of the Road, the King of Kings, the King’s English. There’s Linnea and my king–sized King Koil mattress. There’s that merry old soul King Cole. There’s King Midas, the King of the Hill, the King of Swing, and the Customer is King. I wonder what, if anything, this catalog of kings has in common with Linnea in her two–toned wing tips and creased trousers. Does she share some qualities with the kingly crested birds, the kingfisher, the ruby crowned kinglet? Is she the chessboard king? The laminated paper King of Hearts, ruler of the subconscious? The King of Pentacles, protector against evil spirits, a reliable husband but also a patriarch? What I see is the everyday checkerboard king, the player who has made it, panting, all the way to the other side of the board and now can move in whatever direction she chooses. So she does. She is a woman who wears men’s clothes, except they aren’t men’s clothes to her, just her clothes, the clothes she likes.

AT J.C. PENNEY’S she hands me the geometry lesson tie. I move in, squint to focus, then hold it back at arm’s length again. “No,” I tell her. “It’s too awful. It hurts my eyes.”
    I hand it back to Linnea, who falls away from me in a long sigh. “So you really hate it?”
    Behind the glass counter a thin–boned woman clerk watches our exchange, a steady smile on her orangy lips. This Penney’s is in a suburban shopping mall. I can’t tell if she knows what kind of king her customer is, won’t know unless she says the words, thank you sir or thank you ma’am. I have yet to meet a lesbian who doesn’t recognize Linnea as one of her own kind, but straight people often address her as a man, and when we walk through the gay cruising zones of Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, I watch the eyes of gay men fall from her face to her crotch and back up to her eyes, with just a fast glance toward me to wonder, I can only suppose, if I am his sister, his fag hag, or his wife of convenience. What people see depends on the context, on what they want to see, on what they are afraid to see.
    I think of an old friend of mine, a woman proud to show off her unshaved legs, “untraditional beauty,” she called it, wearing short striped skirts with big Doc Marten boots. She put up with every kind of heckling for years, but it was a department store clerk who finally did her in. One day, walking through a downtown Minneapolis store (with so many gay male employees some departments might be mistaken for an exclusive men’s club) my friend passed by a young woman working behind the polished glass cosmetic case. The woman had thin tweaked eyebrows, pores smothered under foundation cream, and a twitch, some violent itch to spit at a queer. She leaned over the glistening glass and actually shouted: “Look. A transvestite!”
    My friend’s breasts were not bound. She was a woman wearing many more than three pieces of women’s clothing, despite her way of walking, in the long gait she learned in the military—unisex boots, yes, but also Hanes Her Way panties, a crop top bra, a black–and–white flared miniskirt, a black scoop– necked top from the junior women’s department, slouch socks from women’s hosiery, red sunglasses from the women’s wall of the optical shop. Her furry legs, her soldier stride, her British made punk–boy boots—do three male props make her a masquerading woman? Would she be arrested? My friend stopped dead and said simply, “I’m a lesbian,” then continued on her way. When she got home she called the store to complain. But the skin around her eyes was too pale when she told me the story. She believed in being visible, in being out of the closet even under bleach bright department store lights, but this was too much exposure, a bad sunburn. Sometimes you have to cover up. The next day she shaved.
    In fairy tales it is common for a king to come upon his bride in disguise, masquerading as a beggar, a frog, a swan. The night I started falling for Linnea, I was the house manager for a lesbian theater, and she was a volunteer usher. We were still in our mid–twenties, and it was Saturday night. She was wearing a gray tuxedo with full tails and black velvet trim. I was wearing a little Jackie O suit—narrow skirt, bolero length jacket—made from a black knit fabric with a sunspot design sewn in with glittering amber thread. We had run into each other before—at parties, at the grocery store. We had never been unattached at the same time until now, but I had been watching her, been having fleeting daydreams of leaning into her embrace. I had warned friends not to date her first. When we talked I felt jolted into a full habitation of my body, surrounded by a bell of amber sunset, my skin glowing the color of that resin gem said to cure all ailments of the flesh.
    That night in the theater there was an elemental pull between us. I couldn’t keep myself from touching her elbow, her shoulder, her collar. When she offered to help me set up the box office, I accepted, but it was slow going. We kept stopping and staring, watching each other’s faces, a flimsy aluminum card table or a battered steel cash box floating like a Ouija board between us, until we both just laughed. I laughed because it was ridiculous—we had work to do, I had to find something to cover the table, had to sell tickets, had to ignore her. She laughed, she told me later, because she thought I was so pretty in my Jackie O suit.
    This night was the last in a series of shows I had been working on for over two years, with all of my closest friends, a group of lesbian actors, writers, and techies who had stumbled together through so much bad gossip, so many misbegotten love affairs, we needed to hire a professional mediator before we could finish what we had begun. My plan was to creep up to the front to watch this last show up close, but when we stood at the back of the auditorium as the house lights dimmed, Linnea let one arm fall over my shoulders and whispered, “This is it.” She meant the show, the end of something, but I heard more. This is it: the next part of my life was beginning. In that moment of total darkness before the stage lights came up, I leaned back into her, that golden brown bell descending again, my muscles falling limp as she held me up. Had she had the nerve to keep her arm flung across my shoulders, I would have stayed by her side, eyes closed, magnetized, ignoring the show until the house lights came back up again. But she pulled her arm away, and I was muscle and bone again, still hovering near but too shy to touch, wondering when we would really get together.

THE NEXT TIME I saw her was at an actual masquerade. Linnea was Patsy Cline, the crowd favorite of the women’s lip–synch show at Sappho’s Lounge, Tuesday nights when a downtown gay drag stage was transformed into a lesbian dance bar. That night’s performance also featured a Janis Joplin in a floppy felt hat, limp blond hair, patched jeans, and a tie–dyed T–shirt, who dropped hard to her knees at the climax of “Take it. Take another little piece of my heart.” There was a short, square, fair–skinned woman in a plain black mx and sand–colored crew cut, Whitney Houston’s polar opposite, who leaned into the words of “The Greatest Love of All” so earnestly she nearly knocked the unattached mike off the four–foot–tall stage. Two other women wore vintage black dresses and bright bleached hair—one a big girl, over six feet, the other short and thin–waisted—and performed a number in which Doris Day sang a duet with herself. Another woman squinted without her glasses and wore a flouncy white Ginger Rogers gown as she spun around the stage like a folk dancer to the tune of “Fernando’s Hideaway.” The sheer hem of her dress fluttered like a flock of magician’s doves.
    I didn’t see Linnea until she stepped between the glittering tinsel curtain strings. She wore a ruffled red dress that cinched tight around the waist then belied out to her knees, a plain brown wig that had been set in curlers and ratted, three–inch heels, and lipstick a brighter red than the dress. She was perfect, a Patsy Cline concentrate, a refracted and amplified twin, in the same way any gender illusionist is so much more than the real Judy Garland or Diana Ross or Barbra Streisand could ever be. I had never seen anything like it before, a woman impersonating a drag queen. When Patsy/Linnea twisted her hips while mouthing “I Fall to Pieces” through red lips, into an unwired mike, all the girls in the audience screamed, and I fell a little further into fascination.
    But when I approached her after the show to gush over her performance, I was confused to find nothing between us but dead air. Soon, however, I began to understand: she couldn’t recognize me from inside her disguise. “I was Patsy Cline,” she told me later. “Linnea wasn’t there, couldn’t be there, inside those clothes.” Surrounded by the red bar fog and the hot thump from the DJ’s speakers, she smiled at me politely with red lips that seemed to throb too in the pulsing light. A backstage star nodding generously to a subject fan. I was dizzy with deprivation, the molecules of my body pulling, scattering, spinning, but unacknowledged, uncaught. In the old European stories, the king rescues the soiled queen–to–be, curled up like a feral cat in front of a cold hearth, or redeems the selfish princess who only reluctantly shares her dinner with the croaking frog, her unrecognized lover. But I couldn’t wait for Linnea to recognize me. I needed to make a move; I had to conjure my king.
    I knew I was going to see Linnea at a party soon after, so I planned my wardrobe carefully. I chose an old pair of jeans, dyed green, the knees worn through, my sex–catching clothes. Ass–snug and knee–revealing, the pants had belonged to a woman I went out with only a few times. I borrowed them one night after she and I were soaked in a thunderstorm during a long walk around a dark city lake. She was pretty enough to have been a high school prom queen. I had never been involved with such a girlie–girl before then; all my former lovers tended to live a few degrees closer to the guy side of the scale. Walking with her was a bit like wandering in a mirror—not that we looked so much alike. She was shorter, had smoother features, fuller breasts, no ethnic nose, no south Chicago accent. The similarity was from a deeper place, as if we were broadcasting from the same pole. This woman and I went for lots of long walks, and I began to feel like an image from those soft–focus greeting cards you see in the drug store, two women in Victorian sheaths and heavy streams of hair, riding a bicycle together through the too–green countryside, bare skin touching, one nipple almost showing, one woman’s hair falling over the other’s shoulder as she leans forward to whisper. I was attracted to the sameness, the echo, and she seemed to like me too, so for a little while I thought we might be able to tune each other in. But then she stopped returning my calls. I was not heartbroken, but a little miffed, so I kept her pants.
    These were the jeans I wore to the party, along with the sunspot jacket of my Jackie 0 suit. Linnea wore tight jeans, cowboy boots, a wide belt. All night we circled each other in our friend’s kitchen, my body shifting inside my clothes like the shapes we used to make in grade school science class with metal filings and a little red magnet. Later we heard friends had laid bets. Would I take her to my two–room apartment with the whistling radiators? Would we do it right in front of the house on the hard bench seat of Linnea’s pickup? But she was too much the gentleman for that. She promised to call. We each left alone.
    During the week before our first date, I was a planet without an orbit. I wandered through shopping malls, looking for a costume to impress her, but found nothing. As the week dripped by, I found myself sweating when others shivered, was bundled up in wool shawls and fake fur coats while others complained the heat was turned up too high.
    Years later Linnea took me to see the famous magician Harry Blackstone Jr. He stood on an empty stage in a white tie and black tails and levitated a burning light bulb over the astonished, upturned faces of the crowd. Audience volunteers offered proof there were no wires, while Blackstone circled the stage, keeping the bulb ever above their heads, an incandescent vision. Anyone watching Linnea and me during our first kiss would have seen something similar, a suspended moment, amber lit and hovering. I wore black Capri pants and a little cashmere sweater from the 1950s. Linnea wore jeans and cowboy boots and a man’s dress shirt, just pressed. We stood close next to a steaming radiator, on the bright white stage of my bare–walled apartment. My body floated before her, quivering in its own glow. The slightest furl of her fingers pulled me closer.
    A decade has passed since that first kiss, and last week a woman we both know said to me, “I’ve noticed over all this time that you and Linnea have shifted the way you look, to opposite poles.” Have we? I wear lipstick more often these days. I used to think it was too much trouble. The sunspot skirt doesn’t fit, but I still wear the jacket. Linnea owns more suits, more ties, but she is older too. She takes dressing up more seriously. She doesn’t do lip–synch shows anymore, though we named our amber–haired dog Patsy Cline. Linnea used to wear women’s underpants (she refuses to call them panties), but switched because she likes how men’s underwear feels against her skin. It is the same with men’s shirts, men’s pants. Linnea also abandoned her thin ribbed white cotton man’s undershirts for sports bras because of gravity’s demands on her upper body, and I recently bought a Wonderbra, the movie–star cleavage push–up kind, to wear with a velveteen dress I rented for a gay wedding. We have both put on some weight, so our undergarment needs have shifted. That is the main change.
    When Linnea first started dating me, some women warned her not to. “She seems strange,” they told her. “Look how she dresses.” I did always wear a few more than three items of women’s clothing in the years most lesbians honored androgyny, and they may have been referring to my denim miniskirt, my black eyeliner, or my Jackie 0 suit. Linnea just smiled. She knew from chemistry which base elements yearn for each other. These days lesbians speak with another kind of certainty, separating our genders from our genitals, lining up beneath a myriad of headings: butch or femme; femmy–butch or butchy–femme; femme top or butch bottom; femme–to–femme or butch–on–butch; transgender or plain old lesbian feminist. And there are scientists now that tell us the old simple division of the world into easy categories, man or woman, boy or girl, is not precise enough to describe what may be five or more discernible sexes. But I don’t trust science to be expressive enough to catalog the variations in a magnetic field that pull some to their opposite, others to their mirror, others to a mosaic of variations between the two. The clothes available for us to wear may be to some a utilitarian surface, something to cover and protect the skin, to others another industry designed to profit from our confusion about our bodies, but to me, to Linnea, they are the choices we feel compelled to choose, our connection to some hum in the distance of existence to which we feel drawn as strongly as we are pulled to each other.

BUT ON THIS DAY, at J.C. Penney’s, we masquerade as regular shoppers. What I haven’t told her yet is that I love her men’s clothes because of how they make me feel, Queen Moon to her Sun King. I don’t think it is commonly known that you don’t have to be heterosexual to conjure such a feeling. “Buy the rose tie,” I tell her. “You’ll see.”
    “So you really hate the other one,” she says, glancing back at it over her shoulder.
    “This one is so nice,” I say. I hold it against her chest, my knuckles grazing her breasts, and I feel that old amber levitation, the pull of positive and negative poles, even on this cluttered stage, beneath this too–bright and unfocused light. Over Linnea’s shoulder I see the clerk watching us, biting her orange lips, her head cocked the way our dog Patsy’s head tilts when she doesn’t understand what we are trying to tell her. I am not sure what she observes in us. I would kiss Linnea right here, but getting kicked out of Penney’s might ruin the feeling.
    In Sanskrit the word for magnetized rock, the lodestone, is chumbaka, “the kisser.” In Chinese it is t’ su chi, “loving stone.” The central image of the alchemists was marriage, the union of opposites. They weren’t talking about women who broadcast from different poles, but then they were men among men and not talking about women at all. The lodestone is also a conjuring rock. We see ourselves rightly. We learn and understand what we are, king and queen of our own desire. At Penney’s, Linnea turns from me, but the kissing current keeps on flowing. She steps away for a moment, but only to buy this rose–stitched tie.

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of My Lesbian Husband—Landscapes of a Marriage, forthcoming from Graywolf Press, and Restoring the Color of Roses, published by Firebrand in 1993. She is the recipient of a Loft McKnight Award of Distinction and a Bush Artist Fellowship. She teaches at Hamline University and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

“What Kind of King” appears in our Spring 1999 issue.