Tiresias

By Llywelyn Jones

Two stories woven and unraveled together: a young transgender student named Quinn helps his girlfriend escape from a violent home, while almost one hundred years prior, T. S. Eliot's life is given a fictional retelling. Discovering for himself how abuse survivors can mirror their abusers' behavior, Quinn finds himself mired in the continuing cycle over the course of two and a half years. A speculative romantic awakening for Eliot in Paris is derailed into his historically miserable first marriage. As four figures struggle with sexuality, destructive incompatibility, and the uncertain territory of trans-inclusive gender politics, the question becomes whether Quinn is trapped not only in one relationship, but also in a biography that is not his own… and a biography he himself has written.

 

Originally released in 2013, Tiresias became a finalist for the Transgender Fiction category at the Lambda Literary Awards. It has now been rereleased by the author in a new edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Llywelyn Jones
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781386052630

Llywelyn Jones

Llywelyn Jones is a writer and multimedia artist focused on prose fiction, ritual practice, performance, design, game narratives, language systems, and ecological futures. Holding a B.A. in philosophy and linguistics from Bard College, Mx. Jones currently lives in occupied Nipmuc/Pennacook territory alongside xir husband and cats.

Book preview

This novel would never have been completed

and would contain many more imperfections

if it were not for the following people:

instructors and family;

Oren, Phil, Jess S., Senia, and Wren, for knowing;

Emily, for reading;

Kate, for reading, and who will always be Virginia to me;

the rest of the friends she introduced me to;

Jess D., for reading and remaining my eternal heroine;

and my husband, for everything.

I. That corpse you planted last year in your garden

We open cold, like winter. It was a few years ago and I was in my second year of college. I had a dorm room all to myself, by a stroke of luck, and unlike the year before, I spent more time in there than outside, apart from classes. My introversion wasn't so extreme as to approach agoraphobia, and I had many things I could do beyond that great big door, if only wrathful upstate New York were not continually, mercilessly throwing snow and rain and wind against my tall, singular window. But then, I was only too eager to be kept inside, after all; a dead person had attracted my attention more than living ones, for which the living would soon chastise me.

.  .  .  .

Harvard University. A small fire is burning at the base of the main entrance to Gore Hall. A very, very small fire—the glowing, smoldering orange caps the end of a cigarette drawn slowly down again by smooth, patrician fingers. The lips that they left expel a thin smoke stream, and eyes lidded—feline—open to stare at the campus, which is hung with green buds on the trees. Tom is a tall, lean, gracefully slouched thing. Another might see his deliberate carelessness as trying too hard, but the needless effort looks elegant all the same. He also might not be trying. The pose could be in his blood as much as there could be the same clay that built the bricks of the surrounding institution—written on structure and plaque endlessly: Eliot, Eliot, Eliot. And off beyond the gates, down the streets and across the city, also endless, Eliot. Perhaps he knows that he could be king. Prince playing pauper.

Didn't see you at the bash last night.

At the words, Tom glances back behind him at the youth exiting Gore. He's shorter and his features less fine than Tom's, though he is still handsome even with his spectacles. Tom greets him with a grin that is more mystique than sincerity. If I went to every one you did, Conrad— Another drag of the cigarette. I'd go on probation again.

Don't play the innocent with me, I saw you swagger drunk as a lord out of the Lampoon the weekend before, Conrad insists.

Starting all those sentences with negative imperatives, you sound like my mother.

The first one wasn't imperative. And your mother is the one who would have you spending more time with your books, not me. How is she?

Despite his own quip, Tom's expression does wax toward filial concern, or at least there's a hint, and his eyes hold more. Well enough now. It remained a head cold, and everyone else is still in good health. He pulls himself out of his slouch, rubs a hand briefly at the small of his back, and allows his friend to lead them along the nearest path heading out of the Yard. And your family? Tone modulated as of providing requisite pleasantries, already losing interest in this train of discussion. He may have taken to Conrad once, after or because of learning the boy's familial melodrama—murder suicide, inflicted by father upon mother, a macabre business, enough to make Tom a companion. Not enough for Tom to perpetually guffaw and slap the knee in his pitiable friend's presence.

They're well, too. Said with a similar distance, for Conrad is nothing if not cut from another languid mold.

Their talk continues, their walk continues, they cut over the fresh-growing grass, passing the nearest dormitories, drifting to the Johnston Gate. Already the hectic, harried rush and clattering of the street can be heard. Ground can't be broken fast enough for the Cambridge extension of Boston's new underground trains—beyond the serenity and solid paternal walls of the Yard is a madhouse of trolleys. Clanking, voices calling. Motorcars here and there. The two youths emerge onto the avenue, turn to gaze upon the teeming Square. It's April.

.  .  .  .

The biography concerns Thomas Stearns Eliot, whose verse still seems a staple of the high school poetry curriculum but whose life seems a chorus of silent voices. I loved reading his poems the most. Most schoolmates seemed bored by the experience, especially the time that we listened to The Waste Land on vinyl, read by the Nobel Laureate himself. A reedy voice—the accent antiquated and distancing for teenagers born a century after his own squalling delivery.

But I didn't mind. I listened for the aching, interminably evocative beat of every line, the resolution of the stanzas, the absolute mastery of not only rhyme and rhythm but desolate futility. It was adolescent anguish, but not for youth possessed by romantic longings. It was something else. It dwelt deeper. It spoke with the voice that I gave to the chills that prickled my skin when I couldn't sleep from thinking of death. It rang in my ears as the voice of panic. Exquisite panic and revulsion, never to be fully contained.

Of course, when interest became hobby—when reading Eliot became knowing him—I encountered more than I bargained for. Peculiar but milquetoast story on the surface: youngest son of Boston Brahmins, raised in St. Louis, attends Harvard, studies abroad, undergoes collapsing marriage, in the process works at a bank and becomes an Anglican and British citizen, ultimately remarries to secretary several decades younger than he. Survived in fame by several poems, an influence on literary criticism, and the inspiration for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of questionable aesthetic purpose. The devil was in the proverbial details. Young Thomas, Tom to most, fell at least somewhat into that category of children called sickly. Tom would grow up to write of how influential a life on the banks of the Mississippi proved, but he was more greatly enamored of New England, and even moreso of continental Europe. He completed his bachelor's in three years but went on academic probation for a term, seemingly a frighteningly intelligent student but also an easily bored one. And what of the time abroad?

What of the time.

A young man from America (so-called) goes to Europe; the culture there is both exotic and superior, and he meets a young woman of mysterious or flighty nature whom he ultimately cannot attain because of his own sexual passivity. In some stories, she dies. I find this narrative, exemplified by the writer Henry James, patently uninteresting. But it has attracted many a biographer's notice already: Tom admired James—James who reputedly died a virgin—and to judge from all his documented correspondence and other communication, Tom had never been physically intimate with anyone before he went to Europe.

Did his life imitate the art he favored, or did the art he favored imitate his life? And the more that I read of his Jamesian excursion, the more that I had to relate it to others in my own way. How could a young man, full of promise, go from living a dream to marrying and participating in well over a decade of nightmare? The root had to lie in Europe. In Paris.

.  .  .  .

My cell phone rang, and it was a girl I knew. Her name was Ruth. She was probably someone I knew well enough to call her a friend, even a good friend, so I decided she merited an interruption from my biographical travails. You answered! You're there! she exclaimed right away.

I'm here, I said.

I wasn't accepted to Harvard. I had done well enough in grade school that everyone expressed an assumption that I would go there, or to some other Ivy, surely Harvard because I was a New Englander and oh my father had gone and so on, but in my young iconoclasm I'd failed to match the perfect applicant profile and I'd most likely failed to smile obsequiously enough at my interviewer. I was saved by the call of a college near the Catskills whose character you'd expect of anything positioned so close to Woodstock. This college was a paradise of beautiful scenery, of sequestered and monastic contemplation. Of leftism, the institutionally approved kind that still costs you $50,000 a year. Of cannabis. Of kink. Of acceptance. Of fields, green and meant for performing cartwheels at midnight. In fact, it was better than being in the Catskills; go to the west of campus and you would see the blue silhouettes across the mighty river instead. The trees were spidery-branched and deader in the cold months than what I'd known, the festive evergreens of home. Here, when the leaves fell and I walked alone along the paths whose lamps cast incandescent pools in the witching shadows, I expected headless horsemen aplenty.

This was my somewhere to find myself, that grand academic notion. I overlooked the fact that I was attempting to major in something that lacked a department; I overlooked the fact that if I ventured into the surrounding towns I found hundreds of souls who wouldn't know Horkheimer from a hacksaw; I overlooked the fact that I was lucky to receive an education at all, let alone one at a place like this, even an expensive place. Most of all I overlooked the hordes of fellow students in their skinny jeans and plaid, their oversized sunglasses, their trucker hats, with their vinyl collections and amphetamines and cheap beer and carefully unkempt hair—trying so very hard not to care, teach us to care and not to care.

I wasn't like them, of course. I had serious business here. I would make a difference. I would effect, not merely affect. Only good could come of my experience here. After all, teacher after teacher after teacher, singing my praises in childhood, the repeated recognitions of my singular and unique intelligence— they had led me to a room with a lovely view. They led me to a summer spent in St. Petersburg. My self-actualization would inevitably continue. I would brave a billion Bushwick brats, because despite them and the shell we all hermited within, I would emerge triumphant. Amongst the members of something important. Somewhere.

There's kind of a... it's not a party, but some of us are going to watch some movies tonight, you want to join us? Ruth asked. We don't hang out enough.

That tone wasn't a guilt-inducing we don't hang out enough and also not the flirty we don't hang out enough. Only an honest lament. And yet: I've just been so involved with— I began in hasty apology, but then I shrugged, as if that mattered over the phone. Yeah, I miss people.

I could almost hear Ruth's triumphant grin. We'll be in Magda's room, she's got a tiny TV, if you've never been there before. Snacks too.

The call ended more or less at this point and I looked at my desk, at the multiple windows and applications open on my laptop screen, at the small stack of library loans in various bookmarked states on my right, at the notebook full of scribbled half-thoughts and citations and structural mapping on my left. I always wrote to the left of my person, because I was right-handed but I didn't like my arm to dangle off a table's edge; I would curl my form around in the other direction to rest my elbow in a position for maximum control. If anyone were to ask where my fine, swooping, calligraphic handwriting came from, I would almost certainly tell them it was because of control. Control of my body.

It was a weeknight, but this didn't affect the inherent collegiate desire to stay up until at least two am. Maybe it even contributed. I hadn't had dinner, and the dining hall was closed, but Ruth had mentioned snacks. So I tore myself away from the biography in mid-paragraph— I turned from shaping one man's life to shaping myself properly. Since waking up and staying indoors to exhaust my ramen supply, I'd been fucking around in my boxers and little else. I pulled on jeans that were dark and new and crisp, that fell upon my feet just so. I buttoned up a shirt that had black pinstripes running over the white polyester. It had large, extravagant cuffs; why shouldn't I have been a little bit fabulous, in my own way. Pretentious, too, but I hoped merely in the vein of self-importance rather than outright intellectual bankruptcy. Or maybe I didn't put much thought into my clothes at all, and I wore what I liked. In retrospect, I don't remember. Having tugged on a jacket (leather) and boots (not meant for snow, but durable), I filled my pockets with phone and wallet, clipped my keys to one belt loop and iPod to another. I had all the trappings for venturing across campus in the weather's wintery misery. So I went out.

My dormitory was a carefully climate-controlled, energy-efficient, and otherwise eco-friendly little box in a hallway of similar boxes, all housed in a much bigger box with an attractively large kitchen and lounge on the first floor. Outdoors, one could see why it was one of the most keenly desired at the college, if the clean and warm and calm interior weren't reason enough; the walls and roofing came in attractive shades of brown and red, designed like some hybrid Swiss chalet and Zen monastery. Perhaps it was a replica of some Olympic Village from several decades in the future. It was beautiful now, as the wet flakes drifted down in the black of night; all the little square windows were illuminated by soft gold. The world around me was candles, flames of promise flickering in the eerie quiet of dark and snowfall. No, the weather was not so bad. I had only to trudge through this post-Yuletide dream, cross the slushy dirt road beyond this dorm development itself, and walk a very short path to an older dorm that resembled a big red barn. It was called Freedman. Magda lived there.

I enjoyed the walk, and I enjoyed being myself during it. Feeling my own feet planting down, my legs striding like perhaps they were longer, more elegant. I liked making every promenade a cat's prowl. As long as I was walking alone—when I walked on paths that others shared, coming from the other direction, I always went quickly and kept my gaze to myself, because others had their own gazes and they would see me and maybe they would see the wrong things in the process. If I had the luck to be solitary, particularly at night, I wasn't scared in the least. I could finally look around me. I was not the creature whose instincts told him to keep to himself, write, stare glazedly at a computer screen, eschew socializing beyond what options could be found online. Now I was still private, but visibly so, and beautiful in that image. I was majestic and leonine, and this warmed me such that I didn't notice the real temperature.

Freedman welcomed me enthusiastically and brightly, or rather, the individuals within it did. Magda and Ruth let me in. They were both taller than me but I didn't let this get to me. Not from women, not from men, not from anyone. When you live under five feet, even just barely under, you rapidly learn not to pretend that you can derive authority from your stature. At least, I had learned this.

Friend-hugs were exchanged, first with Ruth, Ruth of the long curly hippie hair, velvet skirts, heavy-hanging silver bracelets and bangles, an enormous ankh tattooed between her smooth olive shoulders so that it rippled above the back of her tanktop when she pulled away from me to turn and stretch. I had come out to her before anyone else, months and months ago, not knowing why she seemed right until after she just turned up her lips in a quiet smile and said, Amazing. Before that, we had met at a poetry reading and talked writing. She was a budding horror novelist, I could tell. After I hugged her here, I hugged Magda, more awkwardly because she was more aloof, avoidant of contact, rather like me. We embraced out of duty, and the look we shared suggested that maybe next time we shouldn't bother. But this isn't to say that we disliked each other. If Ruth and I confided together, Magda and I laughed together. I met her at a midnight triple feature, introduced by Ruth, and evidently the fact that she'd traveled all the way from Nigeria to study in New York was no impediment to us making fun of the same things in every movie. Maybe it was that we were queer, maybe something else. I wasn't sure if she and Ruth were my best friends here at school, but they must have come close. They were friends who could drag me away from the biography.

We went upstairs to Magda's room to hang out, the three of us, plus a few other guys, some of whom drove me up the wall because they stank of unwashed basement-dweller, yelled rape threats at each other when playing video games, and always whined about how they couldn't get girlfriends. The remaining guys were fine. I prided myself on knowing a collection of people who, like me I suppose, were steeped in a certain stereotyped universe of so-called geekery but were in fact completely social and even decent individuals. Actually, I was probably less steeped in such things than many of my friends, but I grew up befriending nerds—when I had friends—because I seemed to be their kind of person and they were certainly closer to my kind of people than others. This had persisted into college. The basement-dwellers seemed to find us somehow, no matter what we tried, so after a certain point it was more difficult to spend effort escaping them, not that I didn't sometimes try.

In any case, apart from their presence, it was a good time. Clean fun, watching some movie, trading jokes, no booze, no weed. I would have welcomed either intoxicant, as would some of the others, but it wasn't that sort of gathering. I wish that I could remember what we really discussed for a while. Probably comic books, at some point. I didn't know very much about comic books. I went to meetings of the comic book club, but I only really attended to see people I knew. I grew up liking so many things called boy things, only not Superman.

But it is for a simple reason that I remember less details about what happened with the others as the night wore on. I met her there. I met a girl named Anne. Anne Pasquale. She wandered through the open door that evening, en route elsewhere but mistaking me for someone she knew and saying hello. She was taller than me, too. Her hair was fine, brittle, but dark and well-cut; it reached just nearly to her shoulders. Her eyes were mismatched, blue and brown. She was pale. She wore the same kind of plastic-rimmed glasses that I did, only with even thicker frames, in purple. She didn't have a build that society widely considered attractive, but then, no one does, and I was not society.

The room was so loud that it took me a minute to correct her erroneous greeting, and by then she was smiling and I was smiling, with the brightness that required me to learn why she was here, that required me to introduce myself. I said I was a philosophy student. I learned she was not a student here, but rather at this school's satellite program in western Massachusetts, a college designed for teenagers to start their undergraduate studies early. So Anne was a year younger than me but a year ahead in classes, thus merely sauntering through my campus for a visit with another gifted friend, who had migrated over to the Hudson Valley for a master's program. Anne herself was majoring in literature. We bonded over talk of the Moderns; her cup of dysfunctional tea was Pound, not Eliot, but it was still something. She already knew that Pound would make up the substance of her undergrad thesis. Talk of them led to talk of the Modernist movement's American roots and connections, of course. I had taken a course in William James as philosopher and psychologist, and she knew James, too. Brother to Henry, but he was a psychologist and did not dwell on hapless Americans in Paris—rather on the ever-churning river of human conscious experience, its practical realities, its spiritual mysteries. She knew the kind of loveliness and freedom that was his, and so I told her all about my conversion to Catholicism, how it was symbolic and not literal. I thought of myself as this poster child for pluralism between the religious and the atheist. It seemed she understood.

Our connections were cerebral. Our minds were on some other plane. We both knew there was something there, in how our eyes watched each other watching each other. I was all hair trigger, virginal, still unsettled hormones, right through the long awaited exchange of numbers. But when will you be back? I asked her, immune to the ever-increasing roar of my friends, who had put on a movie at some point, only to talk through it. Anne said she would return to campus pretty soon. She was visiting her friend again in March, for a few days, while she was on spring break. We could meet for dinner then. Or smoke a joint or something. Neither of us foresaw having the money for weed, though, so dinner it was. With this agreement, Anne had to leave for the evening.

After that long night, I remember going to the dining hall for breakfast before classes, and finding Father John there. He was my priest, although that feels odd to say now. I would not credit him with my conversion—I'd attended my first Mass without knowing that it would be led by an openly gay clergyman who may or may not have been excommunicated for performing marriages between queers, promoting non-celibate and female priests, and being generally a heretic. But I would certainly credit his homosexual heterodoxy as a reassuring factor; I would not have gone and gotten baptized by anyone else. Here, now, at the dining hall for breakfast, I didn't sit down with him, and our conversation remained fairly brief. But I had been remiss in going to Mass because on Sundays I tended to do no more than wake up and write, so I apologized to him for that. It wasn't as if he would care. Still, I liked to say sorry for anything, even when I didn't have to. Meanwhile, Lent began in a few weeks, and I also needed the reminder about what time during the day Father John would perform the imposition of ashes. He told me it would be at noon.

.  .  .  .

The waning crescent of a leering moon,

A footstep in the hall,

And voices speaking.

Did you hear—she's gone away—

.  .  .  .

The lecture has become an insectoid whirr in the back of Tom's consciousness. As he would with the summer cicadas when they sprout and begin their keening in a few months, he knows it is happening, he cannot not know it is happening, but he also knows it is no good trying to engage with it. Not in any meaningful way. For, also like a cicada, the lecture is the same sound over and over.

He shifts in a controlled idleness within his heavy wooden chair. This literature course is too small for his ennui to escape notice, so although he has nearly forgotten the guest speaker's name—or indeed the original topic upon which this human drone has chosen to expound—Tom must move with caution and preserve the attentive mask over his features.

Breathing quietly. A certain profound awareness of his body, svelte limbs and all, as a body. Staring at the middle distance, but sometimes growing distracted by the ginger-haired fellow in front of his seat, who is sketching obscene, hermaphroditic nudes instead of taking notes. Tom's own notes broke off some time ago and became a crude limerick or two, but now even that is too much effort. The term cannot be over soon enough. It is known that his mark in the course could be significantly higher, and yet his inscrutable gaze suggests he has other priorities, priorities belonging purely to himself. Likely metaphysical in nature.

.  .  .  .

The ashes were imposed faster than I could have imagined, and I continued to cloister myself until March, as I predicted I would. Despite attending the little party at Magda's, I knew it was futile to resist the biography's siren song, except where my classes and self-sustenance were concerned. I did wish to interact with others, but I was impulsively researching and fluidly writing, to a degree that I rarely achieved, and I thought it was better to serve those instincts while they lasted, even for a purely personal project. It could always be useful two years later, for my thesis.

Anne was, of course, the reason for the pause in March. The week of the equinox, I'd received a text from her to note she was on campus. And here I was in my room, a day later, preparing for the dinner we promised each other. She was not the first girl in whom I'd ever had an interest. But she was the first with whom I'd tried to pursue anything. I was nineteen, but other boys had caught my eye for a