An excerpt from the novel When I’m With You It’s Paradise…
…Leila was run down. After her trip east, as summer gave way to fall, she got sick again. And then, for a whole month, she didn’t get better, or she didn’t want to get better, which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t see friends, didn’t write, stopped going on walks. She spent the days, and the evenings, in bed. She saw a few clients, dizzy and ill in San Francisco hotel rooms. She looked at porn, edged for hours on end to fucked-up fantasies. She felt dysphoric (got off on her dysphoria), started looking at the blackpilled trans subreddits, felt herself getting uglier, or plateauing in her beauty, which amounted to the same thing. She made a lot of money from men by telling them to kill themselves, then she sent some of that to an online Domme in Canada, whose beauty and sexual power, whose body, whose pussy, hurt her in some supremely pleasurable way. Well past midnight, she took baths, and before bed she listened to the new Sally Rooney novel on audiobook (numbed with pleasure but dimly aware that all this bourgeois heterosexual drama, the drama of so-called human life in the twenty-first century, had nothing to do with her), with rain sounds on in the background, cups of rose tea she barely touched on her bedside table.
…Then, finally, she decided she’d had enough wallowing, enough slipping away: enough of the darkness that was endlessly erotic, endless. On a Saturday afternoon in October, she went to one of those vitamin injection clinics frequented by bougie yoga moms and had a hot Asian doctor, much younger than herself, inject Vitamin B and some other cocktail into her ass. She thought about the doctor, so obviously totally rich and manicured, a pretty tattoo on her arm, thought about what her life must be like, perfect and vacuous: vacuously perfect.
…After her appointment, she met Xylea for lunch near the lake. She hadn’t seen Xylea in a long time. Their friendship had kind of fallen off in intensity this year, though the mutual love and respect, and, on Xylea’s part for Leila, the touching adoration, was still there. Xylea had been bothering Leila to see her. It wasn’t that Leila didn’t want to, it was that they each had their own lives in different cities, San Francisco at times appearing as some inaccessible figment in her imagination. And she didn’t like going to Xylea’s place, one of those big new condos they’d built on Mission Street where they gave formerly homeless people who’d gotten into some program, because it was filled with cockroaches and dirty dishes, the carpet so dirty and cluttered it felt dangerous to walk on. The last time she’d been there, she’d taken the elevator with an elderly Black man who looked like Snoop Dog, dressed in full military uniform. I was in Vietnam, he said, then named whatever infantry company, regiment, whatever. We killed a whole lot of people, whole lot of people, he said, then started making these weird shooting sounds, pew pew pew, seemed to fall into a psychotic trance for a moment, until he snapped out of it and added, war is bad, war will make you do evil things. Leila paid for Xylea’s Lyft to Oakland, but Xylea said she had money now, wanted to pay for lunch. She’d met a guy, a new boyfriend, or a new sugar daddy, which amounted to the same thing. Leila got to the restaurant first, a completely empty Indian place on Grand Ave. that looked like it was about to close for the hours before dinner. When Xylea got there she hugged Leila incredibly tight and said, you always look so fucking hot, I always dress up to go out with you, you’re the reason I became femme, I always tell my friends that, about you. Xylea always liked to tell the story about how when they met she’d had some terfy beliefs, not hardcore terf but like wondered why Leila wanted to be so overtly feminine, overtly sexual, because she’d spent her whole life trying to escape that sexualization, trying to escape street sex work, escape being a woman, etc., but then she’d realized the uninhibited joy, power and autonomy in it, the giant fuck you to the world that an unapologetic embrace of womanhood signified, how it was even more meaningful that a trans woman would fight for womanhood, fight not just to be a woman but for the very reality of women itself. Leila always smiled when Xylea told this story, amused and a bit alienated by it, as one tends to be alienated by a kind of romanticized version of oneself told to you by another. Xylea talked about herself and about her new man a lot, jumped right into it, barely pausing to order a lamb tikka masala and a mango lassi. Straight girls always talked about themselves, and about men, Leila had begun to notice, it was a whole theme in her life. Sometimes she wondered if she even existed at all for these girls, these straight girls who adored her, the idea of her, or if she wasn’t just a convenient apparition, a hypersexualized but also hyper-empathic mirror of themselves. So he’s like super rich and a molecular biologist who like does secret work for the government, she said. He has two kids. He used to have three but one of them died, now his wife is a zombie, he stays with her just because someone needs to look after her, so she can be a mother to their kids, except it’s not really for the kids’ sake, but for hers. But he’s going to get a new apartment and put me on the deed, he says. Ugh, Leila, and he fucks me so good, his dick game is amazing. The only thing I don’t like about him is that he’s kind of transphobic, in like that Boomer way, like he thinks everyone should do what they want but when we’re in public and there’s a woman who’s obviously trans he’ll turn to me and ask, is that a real woman? That kind of thing. Uhuh, Leila said. The food arrived. They started talking about other stuff, about makeup, about tattoos. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the topic of being a woman, the metaphysical philosophy of being a woman, which was Xylea’s abiding obsession. You know, Leila said, I’m hard on trans women because I feel like these days they don’t want to claim womanhood, like they’re afraid to, which makes sense, given all the fascism out there, the transmisogyny and just misogyny misogyny. That’s why they use these cloying, fatuous words like “transfem,” “sapphic,” worry about “internalized misandry,” as if they truly were still men inventing an imaginary and ultimately childish world, just like what the transphobes think. But I’m harder on afab people who had every advantage and opportunity of cis womanhood and spit on it, take only what advantages them from it. The check arrived, the waiter clearly speeding them along. I call myself queer, Xylea said, because I’m often fucking queer men, but let’s face it, I’m a straight girl. Jason’s queer, she went on, kind of. How so?, Leila asked. Well like he made a guy suck his dick right before he killed him. He did what?, Leila said, shocked in spite of herself. He killed someone, you know I only date men who have. He does like top secret work for the government so he got away with it. It was his ex-girlfriend’s ex, a cop, one of the cops who got caught up in the child sex-trafficking ring a while back. I mean if he says he did, Leila said. Well I guess he could be lying, Xylea said, but he’s rich enough to pretend to be whoever he wants to be, and I’ll play along, the gangster’s girl. But I don’t think he’s lying, because like one time we were speeding in his car going 100 and a cop pulled us over, but he just handed the cop his government ID, talked to him for a minute, and the guy let him go, and then he drove off doing 100 again. So, you know, he’s into some shit. Leila felt sick to her stomach. She got why Xylea did what she did, but still, why keep putting yourself through that shit, dating one unstable sociopath after another?, since an unstable sociopath will never love you, will always fuck you in the end. But there was no point in telling Xylea this, she already knew this, she cherished the manic unreality of her illusions. That’s ultimately all heterosexuality is, Leila thought, manic unreality. Later she talked about it with Halle and Anna. Halle was like why would he confess to a murder he actually committed, but Anna said of course a man would boast about killing someone, especially a man who would kill someone like that, with the psychosexual sadism of a character in a Tarantino movie. They turned off the lights at the restaurant. I guess they want us to leave, Xylea said, laughing. They hugged goodbye and Xylea got in a car. Leila stood still on the sidewalk for a moment, suspended in the torpor of mid afternoon. What a meaningless fucking world, she thought. She looked up. The sky that day was beautiful, dazzling, a deep sapphire dream.