Two figures approached me from a distance
whom I will call Mars and Venus.
Mars had large upper arms which caused
his hips to swivel in a military swagger;
Venus’ slightly slower pace
was rhythmically dictated by her protruding belly.
“When it comes to gender and sexuality,”
my lesbian mathematician friend
reminded me, “Nature has a better
sense of humor than we do.”
She loved to tell me of the man
who was effeminate—and lovelier
than any woman she had ever known—
yet he was an athlete and a heterosexual;
he did not even joke self-consciously
on his identity and humorless as he was,
he managed to be very unsuccessful
with the opposite sex, while nothing
moved him about his own.
“Men are infants,” she would say. “Every man
believes he belongs to the superior sex,
no matter what he says otherwise—
but this is not enough—-with wig or word
men thrill to mock the so-called inferior gender.”
She made me swear to never speak to her
personally of anything whatsoever.
I agreed, and therefore knew nothing of her,
but her abstract and scientific discourse
was charming enough that it hardly mattered.
I wanted to tell her that I, too, had been sensitive
and beautiful when I was young.
I was no longer young. So I didn’t mention it.
I could have showed her an old photograph,
but this would have violated her rule against the personal.
An old picture of myself? She would have none of that.
“Have you noticed the phenomenon,” she asked me one evening, “of those who look
far more attractive in their photos
than they do in person?”
“I have noticed that!” I shouted—“please tell me why that is.”
“It is because human beauty
requires the blending of too many things,”
she replied, adding, “Beauty in a person
is where superficiality and mystery meet.”
I was thinking of a particular acquaintance
whom I had no doubt was ugly—
but looked perfectly lovely in photographs.
I said to her, “I always thought beauty,
especially in persons, was superficial only
and this phenomenon you speak of has
more to do with the voice and the personality
added to what meets our eye.”
“You are close to the truth,” she said, “but even
if we confine ourselves to what lives in the eye
alone, I believe this phenomenon would still exist.
The photograph, like the sketch or drawing, lives
in two dimensions. All kinds of sacrifices
are made to the god of two dimensions
by those who are attractive to us in three.”
My mathematician friend continued:
“True beauty dwells in expansion,
in more options and choices,
than in contraction, where fewer
choices for the eye lead us into the beautiful
deception of the phenomenon of which we speak.
It is also because human beauty
involves micro-proportions of which we
are not consciously aware. The subject is deeper
than we realize—and no art can express it.”
Once she spoke on gay marriage. She
recalled the presidential candidate who
won the U.S. presidency in 2008 saying
marriage was meant as a sacred union
between a man and a woman,
and especially for him, since he was a Christian.
Coincidentally, this was the year I first met her.
As the years passed, we met less frequently.
She noted that just four years later
this same person said (publicly) he was in favor
of gay marriage. Since then, homosexuality
has been eclipsed by theories of the non-binary
and the trans movement, so that one
can hardly speak of homosexuality alone.
The topic of gender and sex is growing
in the public consciousness
almost to the point where it will soon diminish.
I had not seen her for a long time.
I was curious how her mathematical mind
would choose to analyze gender philosophy
as a whole. I remember little of what she said
on gay marriage. I mostly recall she took
a phone call, the only time she did so when we were together.
Her personality changed immediately.
She was agitated. It seemed there was
a variety of people on the other end.
On Christmas day last year my curiosity was at last satisfied.
We spoke on gender at some length. She began:
“I am trying to understand, mathematically,
the exclusion of a gender.
Is the homosexual, who, in terms of sexual desire,
excludes one of the genders,
doing the same thing as a trans person
who leaves the gender they were behind?”
Perhaps I should have reflected on this.
I replied immediately, warmed by holiday rum:
“It seems to me the heart of it all
is a non-binary embracing, not any exclusion.”
“You are correct—and yet it’s true that in
binary computer language, the action
builds on exclusion as part of the linear process.
The heterosexual, by desiring the opposite sex,
leaves behind his own. Is it this desire
which drives every scenario, finally?
This is how I was trained scientifically—
to seek, at all costs, the universal.”
I feared my friend was being too abstract.
A few months later, when she became
physically unwell, I asked too many questions;
it became too personal for her,
and we have not spoken since.
As Mars and Venus came closer—
today was a hot, sunny day in May—
I saw that “Mars” was a woman
wearing a sleeveless blouse.
“Venus” was a beer-bellied man. A couple in their
late 50s or early 60s, she had flabby
upper arms. As they passed, I politely smiled.