Lauren Levin

from Reversi

April 19, 2019

Dear Em,

Camille says, “We travel through time using tenses.”

I watch on YouTube as the backstage crew ties a ribbed bodice on the slim actor with saucer eyes, weaves it to his body with satin ribbons. They hand-pin each flounce with steady fingers. This is the start of a process that, after 2 hours, will have made a Desdemona.

Of Queen Elizabeth’s kingly rule, Marjorie Garber writes “A queen might have a king’s stomach, but the ordinary citizen did not possess the privilege of two bodies.” But I do. I have that privilege. Of bodies I have so many. Plus all the time piled up between us.

I’d forgotten how much we were texting, hadn’t gone back through my texts with you since the fire. I’d thought they were lost. But a couple days ago your name popped up when I was searching for someone else. I had spelled your last name wrong when I first put it in my phone, which now becomes the missing memory of the time I’d only heard your name aloud and typed it as it sounded to my ear.

We were writing back and forth fifteen times a day. On Election Day I was texting you from the Passport Office in San Francisco while frantically trying to get an expedited passport for a last-minute trip to Toronto. You started the text string, which I imagine I, in my courtship of you, took as a win.

I texted that when I gave the passport to the staff person, I had unwittingly handed them Tony’s expired passport instead of mine, snatched mistakenly from where they nestled together in our drawer at home. The clerk opened the little blue book, glanced inside, looked at me, and said “Did you change your gender?” As I wrote to you, Em, when they said this I was dumbfounded. Transfixed by the uncanny moment of recognition, I thought “What does the passport office see? How do they know?”

The Shakespeare industry is such that even scenes in plays have their own titles. Act 4, Scene 3, is the “Unpinning” scene, because Desdemona is undressed by Emilia, her servant. The unwinding of corsets and frills creates scenic time, an empty room. Not much happens. Desdemona, at moments, seems almost to be sleepwalking. She sings a song. She foretells, in words and behaviors, her gathering death. Emilia makes ribald and worldly-wise speeches.

Between the 17th century and the end of the 19th, the Unpinning scene was cut whenever the play was staged. For being dull, for impeding the action, for domestic feminine babble.

I think of us meeting to walk around the lake, our first real talk. We were walking together but facing different directions. You were on your way into openly identifying as a woman, me in the thick of my fears of moving away from that identification. I didn’t write about this at first, in these letters.

It felt like it disrupted the neatness of the circuit I could set up between us, as cis and trans women. And I was afraid to take up queer space, afraid to be hated, seen, loved, liked, assailed, mocked, or scrutinized. I didn’t want to be handled, as Emilia handles the cloth looped and draped over Desdemona’s body. Get the sheets. Unpin me. Here are the sheets you asked for.

In the Meisner exercise, two actors sit across from each other and respond to each other through a repeated phrase. The phrase reflects what is going on between them, such as "You look unhappy with me right now." The way a phrase repeats changes in tone, intensity, and interpretation to match the behavior each actor improvises towards the other. In an Unpinning scene rehearsal you can watch online, the young actor playing Desdemona, white-blonde and kittenish, tries out giving her lines with irritation, sulky, hotly defending Othello from Emilia’s jabs. She trails her fingers in a reflecting pool. You can see, in her expression, an idea forming itself. Suddenly she tosses a palmful of water into Emilia’s face.

Emilia reacts: for a moment her anger is shocked, unstudied. Then both actors laugh. They are playing with each others’ bodies. I wonder if a residue, a smear of uncomfortable feeling will remain in their relationship, now that both know how far the one actor will take the power the role affords her to poke at the other. The actors are there to depict relation and some of the ways it can go.

The unpinning scene gave Desdemona and Emilia so much time for idle interaction because of the costly material of an aristocratic Renaissance body. Rather than one tailored garment the royal wardrobe purchased lengths of costly satins, cloths of gold, to be pinned in various configurations.

Also, Elizabethan persons wore so many clothes. Men wore girdles to achieve a wasp waist, in imitation of women’s corsets. Women wore ruffs in imitation of men’s ruffs. Women were stiff and rigid as if made of metal, and their dress abounded in straight lines and sharp angles. Men were soft and padded, with wool, hair, rags, and often bran used to fill out their tights and costumes.

A writer in 1563 tells of a young gallant "in whose immense hose a small hole was torn by a nail of the chair he sat upon, so that as he turned and bowed…the bran poured forth as from a mill that was grinding…till half his cargo was unladen on the floor.” My contents rattling out, I can relate.

I try to imagine the Unpinning scene in its original staging. Was it titillating for the audience? A little unsettling? A woman undressing. A woman undressing another woman, and no man present. A woman undressing a woman who was actually a boy undressing a boy: theatrical illusion stripped away to reveal the boy’s body beneath the gown and the de-centered nature of desire, which travels crooked whether it stays with the body or goes with the clothes.

Of course, whatever else it was, it was also completely routine, since boy actors portraying women were the stage norm at the time. How routine it was hid the mystery inside it, the understanding that Susan Sontag says we get from drag: that gender has failed, and that its failure can be beautiful.

Maybe something so beautiful is too blinding to see from straight on; it can only be viewed from a different vantage point in time. Much as I couldn’t see myself for so long, even though I can do everything a man can do: read, write, wear makeup.

The first text in our text string was from me, September 6th, 2016. The last one from you, November 29, 2016, a few days before your death day. We saw each other the day you died. You came to my book launch with a little flowered scarf around your neck, your head cocked, listening, and your chin on your hand.

The way I remember it, you were about two-thirds back in the audience, the best position, and you had a pool of quiet about you, which cooled my angry, burning eyes when they met yours—you had that meditation look.

I remember that I walked out with you for a minute, to say goodbye. I wanted to see you off and to get out of the hot room for a minute. I was in a terrible mood, I didn’t know why. Looking back I want to say that like a dog I felt bad vibrations, disturbance in the ether, of Ghost Ship coming on. Our goodbye was nothing special, a little awkward. It was during the reading, when our eye-lines met, that was the little carved-out pocket, a pool of quiet before the onrush of the bad future.

The compartments, the situations, the temporal windings and blockades. The little dead-end street at the end of which is a scene with two people in it on a stage, in a gathered moment (fabrics gathered in the hand) before the world-violence of plot rushes in.

After the reading, you went to Mission Pie, and then to meet Donna at Ghost Ship, Satya Yuga. Nat knows this because she has the texts you sent—receipts. A year after your death, she re-enacted the progression, a kind of pilgrimage. This gives me the shivers.

Not that I think it is wrong to do it, even if I had the gall to judge. In fact, I can see many reasons to do it. She might have felt closer to you. She might have felt that she was shepherding you on a path out of life. That only with an audience could this performance end. She could have needed to see if she would survive it, coming that close to your death.

The Unpinning scene is the most intense secret transgression in a play full of open ones. I mean that the privacy of the Unpinning scene is only so deeply private because after it both women are going to be dead.

The audience’s eavesdropping on their sealed bubble (sealed unsuccessfully against time) is part of the sexuality of theater, how it articulates us as voyeurs.

I quivered around you—you were an open, sensitizing question. Considering how courtly you were, gentle and kind, what was the destructiveness I scented in you? Why didn’t you think you were beautiful? How had you made yourself so beautiful?

I want to say gender is the Paolo/Francesca question. The question of what exactly were you reading when you were overtaken by your desire?

I think the Unpinning scene got cut all the time because it’s the only scene in the play where two people who are alike in some ways and not in others meet without a predetermined end in mind. In Iago and Othello’s great scene, the Seduction scene, Iago comes in determined to deceive Othello; in Desdemona and Othello’s most extended scene, Othello has planned to kill Desdemona.

Although the scene between Desdemona and Emilia has its unchanging theatrical role, the two actors have no specific aims other than to talk. It feels uncertain.

Unpinning a black dress, a high-necked black dress. A champagne satin jacket. A little gold ring surmounted with a small U of zirconia. A brass ring with a tiny pink jade sun. A linen dress, long and swept, with a fringed neck. A list of lipsticks, a navy blue NASA coffee mug, a sagging leather bag, the sole of a shoe, a green pop-up ad for MacCleaner 3.

I’m wearing your orange cardigan again - I’ve felt need of it, your skin. I could always be coaxing your body to be mine.

The thing about unpinning is that it’s provisional. It’s not so much what we get rid of as what returns to us and where and when and how. If, in you, I could express my longing, is that identification? No — I want to say it’s expansion. The seeping into space of that which had never had its time.

Artworks are like a type of pin we take between our fingers to fasten the sheets of our material into new forms. Don’t we say that in writing, the writer themself should change?

I had completely forgotten the story I told you, about how I brought Tony’s passport instead of mine to the passport office. But when I read it in our texts, I found it comforting. When I said to you “Did they know something?” I shared the experience with you of my feelings around my gender changing. I knew we had talked about my fears but I didn’t remember to what extent. I wasn’t able to write this fast enough to hold on to what I knew. I don’t think it should matter to me but it does, that I had told you enough. For a little while we were queers together.

One of my trans friends was talking to Sara and referred to me as she and I realized hearing ‘she’ said that it felt weird to hear that so I told my friend and that was fine, and then I came home and said to Tony that though I was scared he wouldn’t be attracted to me I realized that I should tell him that I wanted him to think of me as ‘they,’ I wanted to have sex and have him be attracted to me but I was worried we had been wriggling though the loophole I had offered, initially, in my gender (‘call me she or they’) to continue with a status quo I didn’t like so well and he said he was still attracted to me and while he did think of me as ‘she’ he felt that would shift and he liked my clothes and that he had never thought of me as a “woman” in quotes with a woman’s fonts and theme music, he had never liked normal people, he liked me as Lauren, and so that was fine. So I wanted to sleep with him for the first time in a while, I’m always drawn to him and want to rest my hand on his collarbone or thigh but I wasn’t sure how he saw me and I tensely held myself away (which I didn’t realize until my friend called me she, that I had been holding that bottled up inside myself, I especially didn’t notice because Tony seemed to be doing the same in the stress of work) and so we were together, liked each other extra for a few days.

It seems strange or naive or essentialist to care about this so much, embarrassing to be so solemn about “being who I am." Can I just want to be called ‘they’ the way I have a preference for something, how I like difficult foods like artichokes and crustaceans. I don’t want to deny the fantasy between Tony and myself, between people, how we are always becoming other and multiple people in our exchange. Is it something about subject and object, in insisting that he could see me as I see myself? Because I said to Julian that ‘If he’s straight and I don't identify as a woman anymore, does that mean he can’t want to be with me?’ Because I would be the wrong object. Julian said well maybe he is straight and you are queer so he’s in a queer relationship. So he is queer too, and that will be ok. Or maybe he’s straight and you are queer and he is not queer and it is still somehow ok. And maybe Julian said something about the miracle of love in a way that was joking and also not joking, in its loving, biting, Julian way.

Because it does seem to be true that to remain loving someone, you can’t become them, not entirely, and you can’t kill them, again not entirely. And that that is something of a miraculous suspension, to be in this orbit with someone in which you never completely identify, never merge, never part, and never kill each other.

Pins undone, the garments fall away, devolving back to simple sheets. This is the freedom I call upon us, to be a creature, to be creaturely. The whole is precipitated by a desire to taste with the other’s mouth.

In my imagination, the Unpinning Scene is dreamy and gay. The two women pet and comfort one another as Desdemona is stripped down to her sapling boyishness, the unshaped piece at her core. She had grown like a crystal in a hyper-saturated solution of petticoats and lacings, now she’ll be reduced.

Ellis sends an old photo, of himself as former femme. He looks older in it than he does now, though he must have been pretty young, and I don’t know what to make of the elements colliding, his familiar mouth with the unfamiliar black hair, short severe unfamiliar bangs. I text back limply “Wow.” Emji writes “You hold your cigarettes the same way” and Ellis replies, “Sure do! Limpy faggy.”

I witness their exchange and it relieves me. I think of how ‘similarity and difference’ are inconsistent, metabolic. I even feel it ticking in my chest, washing through my limbs, the shifting proportions of different and same. I give Joel my ankle-length black sheer skirt. They are wasp-waisted with power shoulders in a salmon-pink femme suit.

The director talks with the actors about their interpretation. The one actor who plays Desdemona doesn’t understand how to make her character consistent. How could the knowing Desdemona of earlier acts, who laughs at Iago’s dirty jokes, claim that women never have affairs?

The director doesn’t address her point, but says something like “this conversation has a momentum and a muscle” — that the conversation between the two actors moves forward as an improvisation. That consistency is, in a sense, beside the point when he, as audience, can feel Desdemona’s surprise.

It’s true — her surprise inhabits the scene, and it’s thus, in the play, that there’s more life, excavated sideways, a hollowed-out room. It makes me sad. In the same way I’m sad to leave the time when you and I walked around the lake. However sculpturally I carve that moment it blows away like sand, rotates only in the distance, a faint beacon that the words I write carry me away from.

To write this, I have to ladle myself in my diminishing stock of grief like a bird put in the oven to roast. The most I could imagine would be to construct a chamber in which our interactions hold freshness, hold life. But even if I could, it’s the reader in that room with us, not me.

One thing you and I did achieve, Em, is that we were not mirror opposites, not split down the middle. We were not the same, or different. We were both a jumble of genders a bundle of preferences and an array of words set down on papers or screens.

We were most of all a dual performance, and a performance is the birth of an unknown body that we all have in the back of our heads.

Camille also says, “The past is here, merely hidden in the forest of current conditions.”

Love,

Lauren

Lauren Levin is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of Nightwork (Golias Books, 2021), Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018), and THE BRAID (Krupskaya, 2016), which won the 2016 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award. With Eric Sneathen they co-edited Honey Mine, Camille Roy's selected fiction (Nightboat Books, 2021). They live in Richmond, CA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.