Daria feels weird walking into a pub in Alphabet City with a bag on her back holding all she'll need for the weekend, but that's just the background radiation of weird that is Daria's life, and she can handle that much by now. Given her arrival time, they hadn't been able to meet elsewhere and head to the venue together. She's been dwelling on this meeting since the phone call where they'd arranged it, with the first question on her mind being how well she'll handle the first impression.
("Daria?" her best friend had asked. "I have some news." Voice in a low register, like the occasional-joint voice of their first few months as friends, but with the tempo of later years, upbeat even. "You don't get to call me a unicorn anymore.")
Daria appreciates the word sidle for how she approaches the bar. "Gin and tonic, please," she requests, resorting to her drink order for when she has no idea what drink to order. It lands sharp on her tongue. Not a stingy pour, evidently.
"Hi, amiga."
Daria answers her first question with the realization that it was very easy to see him. Her friend, so alike and so changed, even a few months of subtle shifts already piling up, so much less burdened than any time since, when, college?
"Hi, Jey."
He smiles unguardedly and gives her a hug that lifts her off the barstool. "Missed you," he says, with uncomplicated pleasure. Setting her back down, he asks, "Any trouble getting here?"
"No, not really. I have all my stuff." She pokes her toe against her bag.
"Cool. OK, I'm'a get a beer. And the singer is my friend and my second-to-last lesbian breakup, so you better not embarrass me tonight, OK?"
* * *
Jey lives with a different crew of artists now. It doesn't feel to Daria like there was drama involved there, only the regular housemate turnover. They have to scurry north after the show to catch the R or the N or some other train that Daria can't identify, out to the end of the line in some place that Daria doesn't recognize—the Astoria that's not the Waldorf, she thinks—to the quintessential half-converted warehouse. One of Jey's housemates arrives shortly after they do with a sack of late-night spanakopitas and stuffed grape leaves and cheese-filled dates and olives and baklava, all of which Jey stuffs Daria with. The talk is pleasantly small.
Daria's buzz from the bar has faded into her fatigue, and Jey settles her on a couch in a nook below a curtained window. "Comfortable enough?" he asks.
"Yeah." She's slept on far worse, and with far more questions. As Jey plugs her laptop into a wall socket and she settles headphones over her ears, she thinks that she really only has one.
* * *
Daria wakes to the smell of a toasting bagel.
"Give my regards to Broadway," she grumbles.
"Coffee?" Jey inquires, flourishing a full French press, not so violently that anything comes up the spout.
"Have I ever said no to that?"
"I think in eleventh grade, you only drank hot chocolate."
"In eleventh grade, you were a girl." It slips out. "Shit. Sorry."
"Well. That's what the evidence at the time indicated," he says. The bagels pop out of the toaster. "Plain cream cheese, or chive?"
"Chive. And to confirm, yes on the coffee. Milk if you've got it." She sits at the table that bridges the open kitchen with the adjacent space.
The bagel crunches as Jey spreads cream cheese over it. It's got what tradition calls "everything". It crunches again more loudly in Daria's head as she bites into it. "Mmm." She takes a swig of her milk-thinned coffee. "Mmm. OK, you're being weirdly nice."
"I like to think of myself as weird and nice," Jey says, "but in combination?"
"I mean, all of this, first thing?"
"I had the feeling that you had questions, and I didn't want you asking them on an empty stomach. Or without caffeine in your head."
"Thanks," says Daria. She stares into her coffee for a moment, then takes another swallow. "It's just one question, really. And I promise it's just an honest question, not a gotcha, not an attempt to ruin this bagel or anything."
Jey is pouring himself his own mug of coffee. "Shoot."
"Why did you wait three months to tell me?"
Jey sets down the French press, holds his coffee in one hand, rests the other on the kitchen counter he leans against, and regards Daria with an odd, tilted-head look.
"What?" Daria asks.
"I'm just trying to tell whether that is or is not also the question I was expecting. OK. Well. First. It's not because I didn't trust you to understand. Believe me, I read all the books in your bibliography when I was going through the intellectualizing phase of..." He uses the coffee mug to gesture briefly over himself, up to down. "All this."
"I like this so far," Daria says.
"Second. Ah, I didn't know when I started... how far I was going? I had put a lot into making the whole queer girl thing work, right? And this was a big thing. Part of me wondered if it would be simpler, or easier, just to... shave 20 percent off the top, you know? Just take what a low T dose would give me in private and not change much anything else, maybe. Turns out, no."
"All right," Daria fills the pause. "With you so far, I think."
Jey takes a stiff glug of black coffee. "I was worried, just a little bit, just a tee-ee-ny little bit, that this would change things between us."
"Why would it do that?" The question falls from Daria's lips in the moment before the answer strikes her.
Jey can read her realization on her face, but he wryly notes anyway, "Says the straight girl with the queerest vibes in the world." He watches Daria for a moment. "You're not running away screaming."
"I have a bagel to finish," Daria monotones. She takes another bite towards that end. "I think," she says around the crumbs, "we can hurt each other."
"Yeah."
"Because we love each other."
Jey half-closes his eyes and makes a sideways little smile. "Yeah."
"I think that maybe we've burned out the ways to shock each other."
"Really?"
"You just offered to change everything, I think. And I didn't run away screaming. I'm not half as scared as I would have guessed."
"So, what, like a third scared?"
"I'm still me, Jey." She fits the last of the bagel into her mouth and chews, deliberately. With that done: "We live on opposite ends of a train. But the fact that living at opposite ends of a train feels like a big part of the problem is... not what I would have expected." She regards him over her coffee mug. "I couldn't ask you to give up whoever you have here."
"You think I have anyone here?"
"I know you, Lane."
"Fair," he says. "I don't know how casual you and I could keep anything, though. Eventually. If it does happen. Because I know us, Morgendorffer." He steps around the kitchen table and rests the arm that is not carrying his coffee around her shoulders. She leans into him. "We were never just friends."
"No. But we couldn't have been lovers."
"No." Her coffee is just about gone. "But this is nice right now." She turns her head against his chest, feels what that feels like. "What did you think I was going to ask?"
"Hmm? Oh. Whether I really wanted you to stay on the couch all weekend."
"Vain bastard," she says without rancor. "Hmm. This is nice," she repeats. To see what it feels like, she puts her own arm around him.
They go the whole day without kissing. Daria momentarily phrases that fact to herself as "they made it the whole day", but that carries the wrong weight; they hadn't been feeling a pressure that they needed to avoid. The bulk of the time they spend at the American Museum of Natural History. It's one of the more Daria places to visit in the city, she thinks. Jey has a history of being a bit manic in museums and rushing through, stopping only when he's completely flabbergasted or flummoxed by something. Daria can remember more than one gallery trip where he spent five seconds looking at most paintings and half an hour at each of a few. She slows him down, and he likes that. She always wants to learn something new, because that's who she is, but whatever the subject, there always seem to be a few placards where she knows more than what's printed, because that's who she is. She'll do anything for the elemental joy of learning, the feeling that—just like its counterpart in artistic creation—can't be explained in terms of anything more basic, but can't be denied once it's felt. And this is a side of their friendship—relationship—themness that she finds too easy to forget: She'd helped him to feel that enough times that high school was survivable as at least a parody of it that was pointed in the same direction often enough to carry him through.
For dinner, they grab slices on the way back to Jey's. Of course they would. It's still the two of them, finding in each other what they need to face the world.
Daria checks her email on her laptop as soon as they get back. Of course she would. She's a grad student.
Then she sets the laptop aside. Jey is in his room, futzing with stereo cables. It's a tiny room, crowded, mostly bed. He turns to face her as she crosses the last steps between them and puts both arms around him. The first thing she does is turn her head and lean upon him. "Hey," he greets her, returning the embrace, not tightly.
"With whatever you've got going on here," Daria asks, "do you get kisses with someone you love?"
"Not 'love' as such," he says. It would be an admission if he were in a romantic liaison that had gone off. Instead, it's just a fact.
The fatigue of grad-student sleep debt and travel and a day on museum feet is catching up with Daria, and it relaxes her. So too does his embrace. "Then whatever else happens, I think that's something we can both use right now." She lifts herself up, slowly but steadily, and brings her lips to his.
It would never pass as a chaste kiss, but it's not hurried or trying to escalate, either. When Daria finally falls back, her mind extends beyond the present moment again, and she thinks that it felt more like a post-coital kiss with any other partner, when she's been motivated to seek those out and lucky enough to get them. Only then has the current of gratitude mixed in with everything else been so strong.
"We've hurt each other badly a few times," she says. It's not something she can forget. Whatever they decide, this will have to figure in it. "But we've been... respite for each other so much more often. I want that to win. Whatever that looks like now."
He can feel the way she's holding her weight. "Sweet Zombie Jesus, you're tired," he says. "And... with what I've got going on here, I do have to do some explaining before I start anything new."
"I don't." Someone else might make that sound flirtatious, but no one else would be here now, and Daria says it as just a fact.
"And I don't want to... spoil anything by trying it when I'm still... this early in transition."
"None of these sound like excuses," Daria observes.
"No. Just explanations." He tightens their embrace, momentarily. "Don't stay on the couch tonight. That's all."
"I'd like that." She can't help but smile.
"You want to get high?"
"... Yeah."
Jey rolls them a joint of a body-high strain. Three and a half years of overlap in college were more than enough to learn each other's tastes in this regard. After a few exchanges, they're getting thoroughly mellow, and Jey at least is riding the edges of the giggles. "So the rule for majoun," he explains, "is that half an hour after you eat it, you have to say these edibles ain't shit in Arabic."
They listen to music from the common pool of files they'd built over the years, airy and tranquil electronic tracks and piano solos. They're side-by-side on their backs when Jey says, "You've got to tell me how you got into monthly sex parties."
"Natural consequence of grad school," Daria says right off the bat. "No time for anything else."
"And... rules," Jey suggests. "To follow. And nobody there to make it emotional."
"It can be that," Daria admits. "But not... in a way that binds you to anyone. So, yeah." She crosses her legs at her ankles. "Most nights I feel like the least kinky girl there. Just like I always felt like the most straight girl out of all your friends. I've made being normal into a goddamn outsider trait."
"Maybe," Jey says, in a tone of mock speculation, "you've just always been abnormal inside. Deep down. Where nobody could ever see."
"Except those granted special access to my soul?" She emits one breath of laughter but drops the joking tone after that. "Whatever else we are, you've always been that."
Jey rolls over on his side to face her, and Daria turns her head to face him, and this time he does most of the work in closing the distance. Again, it's slow and grateful, warming without escalating. After they part and lie back again, he asks, "Why am I not more afraid?"
Daria offers, "Because we had a good day? Because that's felt good twice now? Because we've blown up our thing together enough times, and this doesn't feel like that again?" She echoes him from the morning. "We were never just friends."
"No," he echoes her, "but we couldn't have been lovers."
"No," she confirms. "But this is nice right now."
Daria isn't sure whether the thing they're building, one phone call at a time, is incredibly fragile or incredibly stable. On the one hand, either of them could stop it with a sentence, maybe a word. Just wait with a catch in the throat would make the other find fear and love pointing in the same direction, and it all would end. But, on the other hand, she's never felt even close to tempted to say that. Sometimes, in the quiet after their call ends, she finds herself thinking that, hey, couples fight sometimes, it sucks but it happens, and maybe all their past pain will just go under their version of that heading. Jey emails her photos every few days, candid but not salacious, pictures of him caught in the middle of painting or sculpting. It gets easier for Daria to believe that his gender identity won't be a problem for her on any level, however deep.
They haven't tried to have sex over the phone, but the topic is on the table for them in a way it has never been before. They discuss past partners, not the details of the act itself but those that had led up to it and those that had played out in consequence. What had made them willing in the moment, how they had felt the morning after. Jey's history of escapades is longer than Daria's, while Daria's is more bimodal, split more sharply between serious-and-regretted and fun-but-purely-casual.
One day, the call comes through at midnight, when Daria is in the thick of research. It's been about six weeks since Daria's visit to New York. She'd had to spend her travel budget this month on visiting Lloyd University, whose library archives the correspondence of a '70s author she needed to investigate. Jey has been light on contact for the past several days, blaming the preparation for a gallery-show opening in which he's supposed to have a piece—a small presence in a place with a high profile, for reasons that Daria doesn't entirely follow.
"Hello?" she says.
"Salvador Mallo bought my painting! He freakin' bought Luisa's Child!" He shrieks at a volume that actually makes Daria pull the phone back for a moment.
"The who and the which now? Salvador... as in Sabor, the director Salvador Mallo?"
"Jesus H. Fuck, Daria, I haven't been able to sit still. All I had really hoped for this opening was to eat the cheese cubes, you know? And then I saw this older guy looking at Luisa's Child, and then I noticed he was still looking at it five minutes later, and he seemed a bit familiar—not a silver fox type, but a little scruffy in that way that makes him more approachable—and then he asks me about it and I realize it's goddamn Mallo himself, he's shooting part of his new picture in America, and he came to our opening because my painting was on our website and everyone here fucking loves me right now. We talked for half an hour, about Luisa, about what she meant, about how happy he was that someone like me found her to be moving and done right and do you know what he said? He said, 'I don't know of any movies that are good enough to justify hurting people. Certainly none of mine.' And then he bought my painting!"
"Need some oxygen there?"
Luisa was a character in Alhazen's Memory, a movie that Mallo had directed in the early '90s. She'd become a trans icon for being so ordinary—or, perhaps better put, for not being fetishized, for being interesting in ways that were informed by being trans rather than stopping there. A bit part in a picture with many moving pieces, played by a trans stage actor who did very little else on screen.
In Jey's painting, a person is leaving a movie theater, alone, into a light rain. They're sveltly masculine in build but dressing in a soft-butch kind of way that suggests something about that is up for debate. One hand is out to deliberately catch the rain. They are quietly happy, quietly affirmed.
"Oh, Daria, I can't tell you... People are going to come to this show just to see the sold card by my painting. I don't know when I'm coming down from this high—I would have thrown in a blowjob for no extra charge."
"Um..."
"Hey, like you wouldn't too."
Daria, who is habitually indifferent to celebrity appeal when she is even aware of who they are, takes a moment out of her life to speculate what she'd be willing to do if the writer-director of Sabor were straight.
"Point reluctantly taken," she says.
"Jelly much?"
"Chatting with Mallo for half an hour because he found your work meaningful... maybe a smidge. A jot. More like an iota."
"I'll throw in oral sex for you to make it up," Jey says, the line tumbling out amid his manic glee, and suddenly it's all on the table more explicitly than either of them has said so far, and Daria can feel herself blushing, which is most unlike her, and she wants Jey Lane between her legs, which she discovers is quite a bit like her after all.
Quinn wants to go abroad for Christmas, which means visiting the family on Thanksgiving, which means that if she's coming all the way in from California then there's no way that Daria can plead out of visiting from Baltimore. They juggle the family logistics and decide that it'll be simplest if Jey takes the train and Quinn collects them both in the parents' car. Thus, Daria finds herself in the hall of Penn Station, lifting and stretching herself up into his embrace like, well, damn near every other short girl reuniting at a train station, she feels. It's disgustingly ordinary.
She wants rather badly for this holiday not to become a family holiday in the infamous sense, and her first step, she decides, is to lip-lock Jey for just long enough to respect the bounds of public decency and then turn to her sister and monotone, "Shocking news, Quinn. I'm straight after all."
"Don't worry," Jey adds, "I'm exactly the same in all the ways that drive you up the wall."
"Ha," Quinn says. "You two look good together. It's about damn time you figured that out, however you got there. Now, if you're done being obnoxiously normal, we've got a drive ahead of us."
"Lay on, Morganduff," says Jey. "And I call shotgun."
Daria follows this up with, "Call undisputed. I'm not putting up with you after you've had your legs squeezed for any longer."
"So this means," says Quinn, "he and I get to talk about you behind your back except to your face. Jey, did I ever tell you about the cat food incident?"
* * *
"A minute alone, Quinn?" Daria requests as they pull into the driveway at 1111 Glen Oaks. "Before we confront, I mean, reunite with Mom and Dad."
"Sure."
Once they are alone in the car, Jey twists around to face Daria in the backseat, one eyebrow in quizzical position.
"First thing," Daria says. "I don't want you to stop seeing anyone else on my account. Not yet. Maybe we'll never get to that point. And we're not there now. Agreed?"
"That seems like exactly the opposite request a girl usually makes of her boyfriend at around this stage, which makes it fitting for you, I suppose. Agreed."
"Next point," continues Daria, "I don't want Lawndale to get our first time."
"Our... Ah. Yeah. Whoa... Yeah." It's the most definitive that Daria has been that they will have a first time. For just a moment, Jey looks to be melting a bit, and then he rallies. "Makes it easier for my condition. You don't see my chest bare and unbound until I've had surgery."
Daria confirms with a nod—after waking to find him last time wrapped up as a bishonen burrito, she's not surprised—but she cannot resist asking, "You more afraid of my straightness or my envy?"
"Daria..."
"You were the prettier one of us," Daria says. "You're going to be the one who is so much more appealing that people wonder how I landed you."
"You really think I was the better-looking one?"
"Do teenage hormones lie? Let's ask Tom who he noticed first. Better yet, let's dig up Tommy Sherman's grave and—"
"OK, OK. 'Can you imagine me making out with anyone? Ever?'" Jey scoffs with fondness. "Funny how I've done a lot of that over the years. Also funny how the girl who said that now gets railed on the regular by men who don't even take the time to warm to her personality."
"Female, willing, and the personality is an impediment," Daria states.
"All right. Shelving the task of convincing you of your looks for later. Anything else?"
"Covered all my points. You?"
"Just one thing. I've got to see if this works." He unclips his seat belt and pulls the lever to drop his chair all the way back. And then he pulls her into what is, by a wide margin, their least decorous kiss yet.
"Dar-ee—oh, God, couple stuff! Nope, nyoope..."
Jey is carrying a cardboard box full of discarded circuit boards and a vision when his cell phone begins to ring. He pushes open the door their half-converted warehouse floor and drops the box, but not the vision, just in time to stop the phone from going to voicemail.
Pushing the box with his foot, he asks, "Q-girl?"
"Hello, Jey." Quinn's voice does not sound good. That voice from Daria would have meant an I kissed your boyfriend admission or worse were on its way. With Quinn, Jey hasn't a clue.
"What's wrong?"
"That's just it, I don't know if anything's actually wrong or if everything is perfect, and I don't know what to do."
This sounds... familiar. Jey leaves the box where it is and heads for his room. "Well. Why don't you talk me through it?" He closes his bedroom door and falls back on his bed. Tough mattress, all that he could find at the time, but Daria hadn't complained about anything that had happened on it during her visit. "I'm in a comfortable spot and I've got time. You in a comfy spot?"
"Um..." It sounds like Quinn is pulling up a chair. "Yeah. OK. So. You remember I'm going to Paris for Christmas with my friends?"
"Right, yeah."
"Well, it's really only two... friends. Margot and Madeline."
"Quinn, are you living in a French New Wave movie?"
"Yes, they're lesbians, Jey. I know that, everyone knows that. What I don't know is... what I am. For them. For me."
"That hasn't, well, come up before the visiting-Europe-together stage?"
"We do stuff that started feeling like dates. Me and either of them, all three of us together. I do the dishes when we have dinner at their place. I crash on their couch. We don't... sleep... Well, we did literally all sleep together on the sofa when we stayed up all night for a Twilight Zone marathon. But that was literal sleep."
"And the figurative kind of sleeping has never... been an issue?"
"I think I would have left if they'd suggested it. I don't know." It's almost a wail. "I'm a little more comfortable with them because we can slow-dance without my skin crawling, which never happened with a guy, but I just don't want more unless it's maybe to move in and share dinners all the time and make sure that the dishes always get done because they can be so useless sometimes." Quinn pauses for breath. "I went through college without having sex, Jey."
"Oh. OK. Well, do you feel bad about that? Like you actually missed something important? Or is it more like you didn't check off the box that everyone expected you would?"
"You know lots of weird people, right?"
"Is this a question about me being an artist in New York, me having lived as a bisexual girl, me being a bi trans guy, or me dating your sister?"
"I know there are guys who like guys and girls who like girls and guys who like both and girls who... Are there people who don't like anyone? In that way, I mean. Do you know people who want romance but don't want to touch sex at all? Because there have been a couple guys... and now with Margot and Madeline, every time we go out it's like this is it, this is what all those other dates were pale imitations of."
Jey considers. "The world is full of strange folks, Quinn. Even one strange enough to date your sister. Let me dig around in the ol' label bucket... How does polyamorous, biromantic asexual suit you?"
"Do the labels help?"
"Sometimes. 'We draw constellations, and then we steer by them.' That's something your sister wrote in the PhD thesis she's trying to finish."
"Huh."
"Listen, all I know is what you've told me, but it sounds like Margs and Mads aren't trying to get more out of you than you're willing to give. Maybe what you bring is what they've been missing. If you want my advice, talk to them before you go on your trip. Don't visit Paris under false pretenses, for fuck's sake."
"Talk to them?"
"Yeah. Tell 'em your bi trans guy friend said that he thinks you're some kind of biromantic asexual and that you need to be sure that whatever they're looking for is compatible with that. Maybe they're a pair of lesbian sheep who have just been waiting for you to make the first move this whole time. Or maybe you'll clear the air and have a wonderful Christmas in Paris."
"Th-thanks. Thanks, Jey."
"And if the Europe trip is a bust and you still want to travel, we'll have space in New York for you."
"With you and Daria, like, making noises?"
"To be determined," Jey says. "Talk with them. And let me know how it goes."
* * *
"Hi, Jey."
"Daria, Daria, the name that is music to my ears. What's up? You get on the train all right?"
"Yeah, everything's fine, we're about to hit Wilmington. Quinn just emailed me this picture. It's her and two other girls holding up a pair of eyeglasses in front of the Mona Lisa. Do you know who they are—old sorority friends or something?"
Daria is bundled up in her winter coat and smushed down under a woolen cap. After the confines of travel and then the December wind, her hair is on the edge of unkempt. Jey figures that she feels she looks like an owl that has lost its way.
He takes her coat and toes the front door of his home closed behind them. "Something to drink? Nog, wine, your default gin and tonic?"
"Something hot and sweet for now," she says. "Booze later." She tilts her head toward his bedroom. "I'm just going to put my stuff in the... not-the-couch place."
Jey has not met many women who were maddeningly beautiful, women who however they looked and moved and spoke came on with so much that they were powder kegs in the psyche. Women you would tear yourself apart over, and feel that you'd never love again, and maybe you wouldn't, not a kind of love that's worth making art about. It's a short list, mercifully, and one of the women on it is in his bedroom right now.
This occasion calls for the fancy cocoa.
He sets a tall mug of it on the table before Daria. She nods in gratitude, then takes a two-handed, full-bodied gulp, and nods in thanks again, her eyes closed as she savors the chocolate. She opens them again.
Jey says, "As I recall, you attached your train schedule to an email that read, quote, if both of us feel the same way when we meet, it happens this trip."
He's been reading Daria's subtle expressions long enough to know that she's amazed they've finally found themselves here. "Call me a liar," she says.
"No, you read me right." He takes a pull from his own cocoa mug.
"You've explained... what you needed to?"
"My New York squeeze isn't... a factor any more. Silly me. I thought that a casual ongoing thing with a bi guy would be just the ticket. Turns out..."
"I'm sorry," Daria says, honestly.
"It wasn't because of you. The..." He mimes sticking himself in the side with a T injector. "More of a problem than anticipated."
"You reached the point of wanting me long before I wanted you. I'm sorry for how much that hurt you."
"Forgiven long ago, Daria, but thank you, regardless."
"I wouldn't be me if I didn't feel the need to apologize right now," she points out.
"True. And I'm sorr—"
"Wait." Daria raises the fingers of the hand that is resting by the cocoa mug on the table. "You've done nothing that you need to apologize to me for. Maybe we'll have to work through the details of something later. Today, this trip, this isn't for that. Forgiveness taken as read, OK?"
"Well. All right," a smile teases over the rim of his cocoa mug, "for the time being we'll indulge your ego and let your apology stand noble and tall and alone."
"Knew you'd understand." Her voice drops in volume and pitch. "We were never just friends."
"No. But we could never have been lovers."
"No. But that stops tonight."
* * *
Christmas Eve means a dinner of egg-drop matzoh ball soup and red bean hamentashen and scallion latkes and holishkes with spring roll filling of shredded carrot, bean sprouts, sweet potato vermicelli... It means a mountainous stockpile of leftovers and listening to They Might Be Giants list all the places in New York that they are not visiting because they stay in Jey's room until the 26th and only leave for biological necessity.
It means Daria discovering the novel perspective that a man who had lived for years as a voracious bisexual woman could bring to several noteworthy activities.
It means Jey discovering how Daria looks sitting in his bed wearing an ancient red jacket and nothing else.