A Self-Made Woman
When my cousin Danny introduced me to his new wife, almost forty years ago, Laura was in her early thirties, a radiant beauty of Taíno heritage with a lithe figure and a model’s cheekbones. She wore her hair in a thick plait that swayed when she moved, and she emanated a sensuality that stirred anyone with a pulse. Without meaning to, she seduced my son’s puppy on the day we brought it home from the shelter, and whenever she came to visit, it went mad with joy. But Laura’s most striking feature was her voice, a smoky contralto, rich in irony, with an unplaceable accent, the product of self-invention.
Danny and Laura made an odd couple. His appearance was unprepossessing—frizzy red hair, a fleshy nose, a Teddy bear’s physique—and he effaced himself in her company, as if to deflect notice. (Divas often have such a husband, a recessive figure who pays the bills and basks in their charisma.) But then I hadn’t paid him much notice when we were growing up together in Queens, in garden apartments that bordered a cemetery. We were both members of the Meisner clan, a family of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, but Danny was six years my junior, and we weren’t close. When his parents moved away, our worlds diverged.
Over the years, I’d heard that Danny had studied acting and joined a theatre group. He might have succeeded on television, playing cops or hit men in procedurals, but he lacked the aura of menace those parts require. His looks destined him for comic roles, and the ones he landed couldn’t pay the rent, so he trained as a computer tech.
Laura entered my life at a fraught moment. My parents had just died, six months apart. My son, Will, was a baby with a distant father, and my maiden aunt Arkie was helping me raise him. I was living in a former pushcart stable in Yorkville, hidden behind a storefront and surrounded by an overgrown garden. Its bohemian décor struck Laura as romantic, and so did my life as a single mother who lived by her pen. “Not needing a man,” she sighed theatrically. “What a luxury.”
Later, Laura would visit me when Danny was at work. I’d set a pretty table for her, and she’d dress for the occasion. Along with a fondness for thrift-shop china, one of our bonds was a sense of imposture; we were both guarded women who seemed outgoing. I had just started work on a biography of Colette, whose title would be “Secrets of the Flesh,” and even before I knew Laura’s history she struck me as a character Colette might have imagined. An uncle of mine made the connection. He was an old rake who avoided family gatherings, though not after he met Laura. He flirted shamelessly with her, then told us approvingly, “There’s a woman with a past.”
The better I knew Laura, the more I puzzled at her pure-heartedness. Life had wounded yet somehow not embittered her. She believed in love, and her capacity for loving was like a boxer’s heavy bag, sturdy and inured to blows. You could confide your chagrins to her knowing she wouldn’t try to assuage them with pat reassurances. I did my best to reciprocate, and if she read my work she might have recognized herself as a recurrent figure in it: a woman warring with the myths about femininity that sabotage us. Laura once hoped to write her own story, with my help. But when she died suddenly, on a winter morning in 2003, she left me to tell it—a task I’ve evaded for too long.
Danny and Laura were still relative strangers to me when I invited them to dinner with an old friend, an intellectual of courtly manners and wry despair at human ignominy. His dandyism is a reproach to modernity, like Laura’s penchant for playing the coquette, and they appealed to each other. She listened raptly, or pretended to, as he lauded obscure diarists of the eighteenth century.
After dessert, I did my party trick: reading palms. I had learned the basics in my youth from the girlfriend of my drug dealer, Nikos, a former theatre director who liked to quote Sophocles. She received callers propped in bed, looking like Jane Seymour as the Bond girl Solitaire, languidly casting her tarot cards. “It’s always better to be cryptic,” she told me. “People take dark truths to heart.”
That evening, though, I didn’t censor myself. I told my fastidious friend that he had a murderer’s thumb and a bent for violent revolution. This seemed to please him. After some teasing, he admitted that he owned a gun safe, and that his only fond memories of his remote, mandarin father were from their hunting trips together. My friend was later almost killed reporting from a war zone.
Chiromancy is an ancient practice, long discredited, and just a game to me. Yet the way that a subject tenders her hand suggests a secret about her character; that “tell” is what you read. Laura hesitated, protesting that her nails weren’t manicured. When she finally relented, she cupped her palms like a begging bowl. The right one had a prominently crisscrossed Mount of Venus, but its most distinctive feature was the merging of the head and heart lines—a rarity I’d seen only in illustrations. Old palmists took it to predict madness or depravity, but, as I told Laura, it could also be the sign of a great soul wrestling with its demons for the world’s benefit. “Aha!” she said gaily. “Then there’s hope for the world.”
The next morning, Laura called to joke about her “demons”—the two toy poodles she doted on. She and Danny wanted to return my hospitality, so, a week later, I scaled the five flights to their new apartment, in a former tenement a block from the pushcart stable. “Come meet my girls,” she said, as she opened the door. Her girls, I saw to my surprise, were the trophies in a private doll museum.
The walls of the apartment were lined with display cases that Laura had built herself and filled with rotating exhibits, drawn from a vast collection in storage. There were poignant sackcloth dolls from the antebellum South, made for enslaved children; antique baby dolls with painted Meissen heads; Madame Alexanders like the ones I had played with in Queens; original Barbies. Many were rare; Laura was a discerning curator. She restored dolls for other collectors, and, with the benefit of sewing lessons from my aunt Arkie, she dressed her girls in New Look ensembles that might have been modelled by Suzy Parker.
I was stunned not only by the skill and passion that the dolls represented but also by the investment. As far as I knew, Laura and Danny lived on his middle-class salary from a consulting firm. Extravagance, however, is a quality I secretly admire. Neither of my parents knew how to live; they plodded through their days, my father at a job he hated, my mother tranquillized with Miltown. Arkie knew what joy was (ocean swimming, Italian opera), but she was a frugal socialist who had run a settlement house during the Depression.
Isak Dinesen, the subject of my first biography, considered improvidence a noble trait; her favorite phrase was “regardless of expense.” Laura had her own version of it: “You have to spend the wages of sin.” That was how she prefaced the confession she’d invited me to hear. The three of us were drinking sangria on the roof, and Laura was wearing a summer dress that bared her lovely shoulders. “The girls represent my life savings,” she began. “I earned them as a dominatrix. That’s how I met Danny. He was a regular at the dungeon.”
“It wasn’t regular that I fell madly in love,” he objected, with atypical vehemence. She patted his knee and ignored him. “False pretenses take a toll on true feelings,” she went on, “so we risked losing your respect to tell you.” But she also wanted me to know that bondage wasn’t prostitution. No intercourse took place. Her vocation was legal, and she described it as “role-play” on her tax returns. For a high-school dropout, it paid more than her dream job—classical dancing—ever would have. Grateful clients left lavish tips that financed champagne dinners, a ballet subscription with front-row seats, a honeymoon in Venice. They addressed her as “Mistress Erika” and knelt at her feet.
Not long afterward, I asked Laura for a favor on behalf of Will’s au pair, a Danish girl who lived in the studio that I used as an office. Liv had the face of a milkmaid and the body of a goddess. Men had treated her as a sex object since she was twelve, and she couldn’t walk down a street unmolested. After two months in New York, she had steeled her native bashfulness with a bravado—scanty outfits, goth makeup—that worried me. When I found a bondage magazine in our studio, I asked Laura what I should do. “Ask her about it,” she said. “My guess is that she has fantasies of revenge, but they scare her.”
When Liv admitted as much to me, Laura volunteered to give her some “job counselling,” and we decided to deliver it at a family dinner. On the evening it took place, Arkie made meat loaf. I warned her that what Laura had to say might upset her. “You underestimate me,” she said.
As the meal began, everyone but Laura seemed nervous. She admired the monogrammed napkins. Danny talked about the Mets, who were “in fifth place, despite Doc Gooden.” Liv chattered about Will’s new toy. Arkie, acting on her feminist principles, had made him an “anatomically correct” boy doll. It was adorably pudgy, like Will at three, with a button navel and a tiny penis. But something about it “freaked him out,” Liv said, and he’d thrown it across the room. Laura smiled like a cat: “Well, not to change the subject . . .” Then she spoke for an hour with a banked ferocity that enthralled us. I wondered if she’d used that tone with her clients.
Laura had impressed me with her knowledge of the S & M canon—Sade, Bataille, et al.—in which the slave is typically a woman who submits to a priapic master. Jessica Benjamin had recently published a psychoanalytic study of the subject, “The Bonds of Love,” and we talked about her theory that a masochist seeks recognition for her “hidden self” in surrender. “Good luck with that,” Laura said. She gave up on Foucault, though it amused her to learn that I had once served as his interpreter on a tour of the West Street leather bars. Her own clients were straight, at least outwardly—respectable citizens and family men. One was a Hasidic rabbi.
Danny later tried to explain his own need for domination. He’d been molested in junior high school by an older boy, and, despite his shame, the abuse had aroused him. It was, he came to feel, a form of attention—his parents were alcoholics, and he’d felt invisible to them. But, he said, there was also a “spiritual dimension” to masochism. The vision quests of shamans involve an ordeal, and so does a martyr’s penance. Their rationale is that pain wears down the ego, which blocks our access to the divine. Danny’s notion of mortification reminded me of St. Catherine, who dreamed of being nailed to the Cross with Jesus. Laura never bought it.
Her lecture at dinner gave a stark view of the workplace where she met her husband. “A dungeon is a theatre where morality plays are performed,” she said. “Badness is chastised and sinners atone. A dominatrix often poses as a mother figure, but instead of T.L.C. she metes out punishment. Your average sub”—submissive—“begs to be treated as a ‘naughty boy.’ You’d be surprised at how many masters of the universe want to be diapered and force-fed their own shit.”
Liv had been listening agog, and I began to worry that the intervention was backfiring. But Laura had a storyteller’s sense of timing. Rising from the table, she produced the bondage magazine. It was open to a spread in which two masked Amazons were flogging a naked fat man bound with handcuffs and a gag. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she told Liv, who was blushing violently. “When it comes to sex, we’re all Pavlov’s dogs. But here’s what I want you to know. Every day, a domme paddles butts until her arms ache, in a corset she can’t breathe in and stilettos that kill her back. She bloats her bladder so she can empty it into the mouth of some dentist from New Jersey. Then she cleans up his mess. Yes, you dominate them for an hour and they submit. And maybe for an hour, it’s a kick. But your power is an illusion. You’re a waitress, delivering the meal they ordered.”
At this point, Arkie began clearing the table. She patted Laura tenderly on her way to the kitchen. We sat in silence a while. Finally, Liv dared to ask my cousin how she got into the business. “I was angry, too,” Laura said, “and I needed to support my mother. She worked as a hotel maid.”
This winter, after a week of blizzards, Danny and I drove through a featureless white landscape to visit Laura’s mother, Aurea Vilar, who lives in rural Pennsylvania with her son James Moore III and his blended family—a wife and five children. He’s a social worker for an agency that serves disabled clients.
At eighty-six, Aurea is frail but still beautiful, with her daughter’s chiselled features. “I don’t remember things,” she warned me when we settled on a sofa with her electric blanket and my iPad. Her tiny frame and willful innocence made her seem childlike. James looked at her wearily. “It’s not just forgetfulness,” he told me. “A lot is denial.”
Aurea’s parents had abandoned her as a baby, and she was raised by her abuela in Caguas, Puerto Rico—an inland city, named for a Taíno cacique. After the Spaniards arrived in 1493, they expelled or enslaved most of the Taíno, turning the valley into a center for cultivating sugarcane and tobacco. They left a legacy of misery, but also a charming main plaza, and in Aurea’s youth teen-agers gathered there for the Sunday paseo. That’s where she met Efraín López Muñiz. He seemed “suave and sophisticated,” she told me. He had gone to college, until he quit to manage his father’s cement business. Aurea got pregnant and they married. She was nineteen.
Their romance was brief. Efraín supported his new family grudgingly, and he didn’t live with them. He took up with Aurea’s best friend, and then with a series of paramours, fathering several children. Aurea described him as “muy controlador.” He forbade her to work, and she was afraid to leave the house. Her first baby was a plaything and a solace to her. She had dreamed of having a daughter—a little Aurea—but the newborn was a boy, Efraín López-Vilar.
Efraín was followed by Ramón, known as Ray. Someone, perhaps their father, took a snapshot of the two siblings playing in their yard. They are bare-chested tykes of three and five, Ray in a diaper and Efraín in shorts, holding a hoe between his legs. It looks like a horse’s penis, and he is poking his brother with it. That’s the only known image of “him”—which is to say, of little Laura as the world saw her.
Danny told me later that the gender of Mistress Erika “was a subject of rumors in the B.D.S.M. community.” But almost no one outside the family guessed that Laura was a trans woman. “I wanted to tell you that day on the roof,” Laura said one afternoon at our tea table. “But it felt like too much for one conversation.” She had known since the age of three that she was female. “I identified with Princess Ozma,” she said. Ozma is a heroine of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels. Her father, King Pastoria, rules the Land of Oz before the wizard usurps his throne and gives his baby daughter to an evil witch, who changes her into a boy. The princess forgets her true sex until she’s restored to it by magic as a teen-ager and reclaims her birthright.
When I’d absorbed her revelation, which only deepened my admiration for her, Laura told me that she needed some advice. She was thinking of writing a memoir—living large was catching up with them. “If I wrote about my sex change, would it make more money?” she asked. I told her, “If you’re going to upend your life for the money, think hard about it.” She did, and shelved the project, though she joked about a movie version with Irene Cara. (Cara, a star of “Fame,” was exactly Laura’s age and half Puerto Rican.) But her real scruple was with Aurea: “My mother can’t take the truth.”
Aurea had a third baby with Efraín: Minerva, known as Mickey, who is now a mother of five. She told me over Zoom from her home, in North Carolina, that she suffers stress-triggered seizures, as Laura and Ray did: “He once nearly bit off his tongue.” Mickey had her first child as a teen-ager and then neglected him. “I ran amok early,” she said. “It was Laura who straightened me out. I needed her disappointment to become a good person.” Mickey described her sister with abiding gratitude, yet she also wanted me to know “something I shouldn’t say, because it complicates your story. From the time she was a baby, Aurea feminized Laura. She dressed her as a girl and painted her nails. They played with makeup and Barbies.” (Aurea denies this.) “Once she started school, or family came to visit, my sister had to act like a boy. And, when I was born, Aurea got the daughter she always wanted. Laura mothered and protected me, but she must have been jealous.”
Perhaps Aurea’s doll play with Laura affirmed her identity, but it also endangered her life. Efraín was a brute, who boasted of killing five people in bar fights over women. Alcohol fuelled his rages. He punished Aurea for turning his son into a “maricón” by beating and raping her. He beat Ray for defending his mother and Laura for shaming him. Laura told Danny that her father had raped her, too. A neighbor overheard him threatening to burn the house down and urged Aurea to flee. “How could I?” she asked. “He’d find me.” A decade into this ordeal, Aurea’s own father reappeared—he’d been in the Navy. “When he found me black and blue he bought us tickets to New York.”
The family settled in the South Bronx, where Aurea had three more children with two partners. Carmen’s father, Pete, was a younger man whom she met working at a garment factory. James and Divina were fathered by James Moore II, a co-worker at her hotel job. Divi was supposed to join us at her brother’s house, but she was mourning the suicide of her son. He had shot himself, at twenty-one, after a savage beating by his father, provoked by the insult of being obese. The family saga makes you marvel at its survivors’ resilience. “I swore the cycle would stop here,” James said during my visit, gesturing toward his kids, who were eating pizza in the kitchen.
When Pete became the man of the house, they were living on Union Avenue, in a fifth-floor walkup. Mickey told me a story about a neighbor named Dulce: “One day, she didn’t hear what her husband told her, so she asked him to repeat it, and he cut her ear off. That’s what our world was like.” It was a treacherous milieu for a defiantly flamboyant youth. Laura, then going by the name Jay, was bullied at school. In the cafeteria, she told me, classmates squirted ketchup in her hair and pushed her face into her lunch tray.
Tensions and hostility were also high at home. “Laura embarrassed me,” Aurea admitted. “She stole my clothes and underwear.” Pete wouldn’t tolerate her cross-dressing, and it also troubled Ray, who was at an age when boys obsess about masculinity. He had other torments, too. He was in a gang, Mickey said, and Pete had “hooked him on speedballs at twelve.” Aurea gave him a choice: hit the street or join the Navy. She readily signed the consent for him to enlist as a minor—an admission, perhaps, of her helplessness to protect her children but also of her hope that some better angel could.
On weekends, Pete and his friends partied in the living room. Some of the men were relatives. “When they got drunk, they ran train on Laura,” Mickey said, meaning that they took turns sodomizing her. Aurea denied having witnessed these atrocities. “Maybe it happened in the basement,” she said coyly, though, when James prodded her, she admitted being too passive: “I didn’t know how to pick men.”
These violations made Laura’s body unlivable for her, and she was hospitalized for attempting suicide. The first time was with a razor that she’d used to shave her legs. Pete had threatened to kill her, so she locked herself in the bathroom to do it herself. The police broke the door down and took her to Bellevue.
Other attempts followed, with blades and pills, and she sometimes spent months on a psych ward. “That’s where she discovered books,” Mickey said. “The city had to school minors who couldn’t sit in a classroom, and most of the kids were so out of it that Laura had private tutors. They were amazed by how smart she was. I think she was, too.” The other upside of her breakdowns was that she was stowed in protective custody. No one could hurt her and she couldn’t hurt herself.
The chronology of Laura’s medical history is hard to establish, since records weren’t digitized fifty years ago. But Aurea recalled authorizing hormone therapy when Laura was thirteen, and said that “it calmed her down.” Mickey believes that she was treated at Mount Sinai, where Walter Futterweit, a Viennese-born endocrinologist, was an early practitioner of gender-affirming care.
In a photograph of the child who was still Jay, she’s a lissome waif in a demure cotton blouse. Her breasts are those of a girl her age—high and firm. Estrogen spurs breast growth, though Mickey told me that Laura “got implants to make them fuller. She also had her ears pinned back, and electrolysis on her body hair. Don’t ask where the money came from.” I did ask. “Well, she gave blow jobs to our landlord when he wanted to evict us, so you go figure.”
As my son got older, Danny took him to ballgames and gave him his first catcher’s mitt. His great ambition, besides acting, was fatherhood—he has always loved children. Laura had initially told me that she had a “fertility issue” but that she wanted to make Danny happy, so they were exploring adoption. The Catholic agency they applied to would approve them as a model couple: a happy homemaker married to a good provider who would welcome a baby of any color.
The subject of motherhood arose again when I knew the truth about Laura’s “fertility issue.” I’d had Will at forty-two, and I told her that I’d waited so long in part because I worried that I didn’t have enough reality of my own to nurture a child’s. “Tell me about it,” she said, feeding petits fours to the poodles. Danny, she was sure, would make a great parent, but she couldn’t trust herself in the role, since she’d always suffered from mood swings, and the depressions “annihilated” her. When I asked if she’d ever seen a shrink, she laughed. “I’m way too interesting to them,” she said. “They can’t help me.”
There was one shrink who might have: Dr. Leah Schaefer, an early champion of trans women. Schaefer objected fiercely to the predominant view that “transsexuals” suffered from a pathology and should be “normalized” for their own good. The real pathology, she argued, was society’s. In the late sixties, when she opened her practice, medical care for children who didn’t conform to the gender they were assigned at birth was just beginning. The first university-affiliated gender-identity clinic opened at Johns Hopkins in 1966. (Laura was then seven and being raped by her father.) It offered hormone treatment and surgery to patients who met strict criteria, one of which was later called gender dysphoria. Mickey told me that Laura received that diagnosis, supported by the evidence of her suicide attempts and hospitalizations.
Schaefer often worked with Futterweit, and with Dr. Harry Benjamin, a pioneer of transgender medicine who had an office on Park Avenue. The three shared the conviction that their patients deserved a smooth path to transition. Those patients tended to be well-to-do adults, or, more rarely, children with wealthy, supportive parents. But some cases were referred to a doctor in Queens who served a broader population. Roberto Granato, a urologist born in Argentina, had one of the largest gender-affirmation practices in New York. There is good reason to believe that he operated on Laura. Medicaid paid for her surgery. It took place on her eighteenth birthday. “I signed off on what they did to Laura,” Aurea said, “because I wanted to see her happy.”
Vaginoplasty has since evolved, but the standard procedure then involved seven steps: removing the testes; stripping the penis of its skin; creating a cavity between the rectum and the urethra; lining the cavity with the penile flap; modifying the urethra; constructing a clitoris and labia from the scrotal and erectile tissue; inserting a stent to preserve the new vagina’s shape. Laura would have gone home to bed with instructions to dilate her vagina regularly—for the rest of her life—to prevent its contraction and preserve its shape. Mickey vividly remembers that post-op period. Ray still shared a bedroom with Laura, “and she was in agony, so it was a nightmare for her.”
Her brother James grew up unaware of Laura’s past; he learned about it only in his twenties. “My sisters were just girls to me,” he said. “Like the girls I saw in eighties movies, and I watched them do their hair and get dolled up. And I remember walking in on Laura, in the Bronx, when she was taking a bath. She was the first naked woman I ever saw.”
The years that followed Laura’s surgery are sparsely documented. The family moved to LeFrak City, in Queens, not far from where Danny and I had grown up. There, Laura met a fourteen-year-old boy whom Mickey described as “a punk from a family of grifters.” Laura told me that she ran away with him because she was terrified of being rejected by an experienced lover. She did sex work to support them, and for a while they hid out in a fleabag motel in Harlem, partly to escape his parents, who tried to blackmail Laura for corrupting a minor. The relationship was stormy and roiled by drugs. The boy taunted Laura with his infidelities, and one day he abandoned her on a subway platform. She chased his train desperately until it left the station.
Laura’s beauty, in her twenties, was incandescent. A friend named Eva took her clubbing, and bouncers welcomed them. In the years before AIDS, the club scene was orgiastic. Laura met celebrities who can’t be named, and they flirted in V.I.P. rooms famous for the quantity of coke that flowed. In 1985, Bon Jovi hired Laura for a music video—“In and Out of Love.” She wears a bathing suit in one brief scene, a miniskirt and high heels in another, flaunting her dancer’s legs and regal bearing. Even before her surgery, she had taken pointe classes, cleaning the studio to pay for them, and she auditioned as a ballerina for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. “I won an apprenticeship,” she told me proudly. I couldn’t confirm her training there, and none of the alumni whom I spoke to remembered her, though a retired star described their routine: exercises and rehearsals from ten in the morning until eight at night and performances on weekends. Apprentices earned a token wage.
Poverty subverted Laura’s dreams. So, Danny said, did her “fear of exposure.” I had another relative who sacrificed her future outrunning her past. My first mother-in-law, Dorothy, was born to an unwed teen-ager who confided her to the care of two “aunts”—hoofers whom Dorothy called “the girls.” They performed in travelling burlesque shows (and turned tricks to make ends meet). Eventually they settled in Harlem, where an elderly neighbor taught Dorothy to dance. He sat on the stoop, miming routines with his arms, while she memorized the steps. The old man warned her that once she “became a woman,” her guardians would expect her to ply their trade. Not long after Dorothy first got her period, she sneaked into the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden and charmed one of the trainers. When the circus left town, she went with it. Later, she became a chorus girl, but every time a producer wanted to promote her, she bolted: “I was afraid that the girls would find me if I got famous.”
“Birds of a feather,” Laura said, when I told her the story. “Me minus the period.” Danny, however, blamed Aurea for pushing Laura into bondage. “They sat together at the kitchen table poring through the ads for ‘role play’ in Screw magazine,” he said bitterly. Aurea denies this, though she admits that she saw Laura as her agent of vengeance: “I was happy she dominated men. They did me wrong and I wanted them punished.”
Laura would advertise her services in back-page columns: “Psychodrama—Share your deepest needs. E. Crosse.” She also posed for stills in a B.D.S.M. magazine, and appeared in ads on behalf of an upscale dungeon mistress known as Belle de Jour. Laura worked for Belle as a sub before she graduated to domination. Some clients were sadists; a Romanian whom she called “the Nazi” appalled her with his fantasies of cannibalism. “She came home and bathed with bleach,” Mickey said.
By the early nineties, Laura had a fan base of slaves, and she was hired by a dominatrix famous outside the demimonde. Ava Taurel was an evangelist for sex education who gave B.D.S.M. workshops and appeared on talk shows. She also figures in “The FemDom Experience,” a history by Elise Sutton. Sutton interviewed one of Laura’s clients—an “International Investor”—who described losing his “S&M virginity” to her. “Mistress Erika looked amazing in her black leather outfit complete with thigh-high boots,” he said. “She had a commanding presence and a spellbinding voice. My first session was heavy on boot worship and corporal punishment.” It “didn’t disappoint.”
In the light of a perfect autumn day, nothing hopeful seems impossible—an illusion as ephemeral as the weather. On such a day, 9/11, some three hundred employees of Marsh & McLennan, the firm that Danny worked for, were incinerated in their branch office at 1 World Trade Center. Danny would have been among them—he’d been scheduled to lead an H.R. workshop on the hundredth floor—but at the last minute his class was reassigned, so he stayed at headquarters, in midtown. After the planes hit, he was tasked with identifying the missing. His first thought, however, was to call Laura. “I couldn’t process it,” she told me at the time, meaning Danny’s chance survival. Her initial relief didn’t last, since the fall of the towers inflamed an old terror: “I’d always known I could be sucked back into the slime I crawled out of.”
She and Danny had moved to Peekskill, to a house with a white picket fence set back from the street in a quiet neighborhood. Laura had done the decorating—not only the “soft” work, like gardening and upholstery, but also carpentry and painting. She was fearless on a ladder and with a drill. The dolls had their own shrine, and so did her wedding dress; she displayed it on a mannequin in the living room.
“That house fulfilled her Donna Reed fantasy,” Danny said, by which he meant the life of an ordinary woman. They’d invited Aurea to move in with them, and she’d left the South Bronx with no regrets. In some ways, she was their adopted child. Old female bodies stirred Laura’s compassion for frailty. She restored antique dolls for the Museum of the City of New York, and she gave Arkie massages because she “needed touching.” When my aunt died, at ninety-one, it was Laura who closed her eyes.
The dungeon was behind Laura by now. She had started a doll business with Doug James, a theatrical-costume designer. After their first meeting, at a trade fair, she told him a selective version of her biography, and that she loved dolls so much because she’d been forced to leave hers in Puerto Rico. He knew she’d been sexually abused, but not by whom. “I assumed she gravitated to gay men because of that experience; she didn’t trust straight ones,” he said. Until we spoke recently, he “never suspected she was trans. And I’m a gay man in the entertainment world.”
Like everyone else, Doug marvelled at Laura’s magnetism. He pronounced her “wildly talented.” As an autodidact, “she lacked certain skills as a couturier, like draping and pattern-making,” but she learned quickly. They collaborated with a major doll company, mostly on wardrobes, but then on marketing their own creations—elegant fashion dolls aimed at adult collectors, made in a Chinese factory. Laura was proudest of Constance, an Afro-Latina beauty with ingeniously jointed limbs and voluptuous measurements. “Growing up, I never had a doll that looked like me,” she said.
Laura styled the photographs for a definitive Barbie book; her essays reappraising vintage dolls appeared in a glossy magazine, Doll Reader. She had a following in the online doll world. But their company’s debts would outweigh its profits, and Doug’s other commitments—work on musicals like “Aladdin” and on the Muppets film franchise—piqued Laura’s rancor. She asked him to give them up, and he wouldn’t. After a series of “screaming voice mails,” he suggested that they go separate ways. “Her volatility was something new. She’d always been so easygoing.”
In retrospect, Laura’s blowup with Doug fit a pattern: he was, as she saw it, betraying her for a more compelling love. She was increasingly suspicious of Danny, too. In a journal entry from April, 2002, she wrote about a work trip: “I fly to China next Sunday. I am afraid. The last time, I returned to find my husband infatuated with another woman . . . my constant worry about his possible escapades rubs me raw.” Danny told me that he hadn’t been unfaithful, though they no longer had a sex life. She’d obliged him for years, and early on he’d threatened to leave if she refused. “I never would have, because I didn’t want to live without her,” he said. “But for all the worship she inspired—including mine—Laura couldn’t believe she was desirable.” How often did she despair to me about not being “a real woman”? “You’re more of a woman than I am,” I told her. But she got mad at my presumption: “It’s like a white person telling a Black person there’s no difference between us.”
Jealousy, Colette wrote, is “the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.” She wouldn’t have been surprised that Laura’s jealousy, with all the rage and yearning it bred, had a primal object: her mother. Aurea had jilted her for Mickey, then for Carmen, Divina, and James. As the siblings grew up, Mickey said, “my sister felt she was long overdue for some undivided attention. Why did her mother need more of us?”
Laura’s journals in the last year of her life document a period of disillusionment which coincided with one of my own: a delusory marriage was dissolving in litigation. Laura and I commiserated, mostly by phone, but she knew more about my travails than I knew about hers.
In her early forties, Laura gained about fifty pounds. She joked about being “a Botero,” but she hated the loss of her figure. I didn’t know that she’d been taking an antidepressant, which may have slowed her metabolism, though I did know she was seeing a doctor in Peekskill—a psychologist interviewing transgender patients for a study. “He’s young and handsome,” she gushed. “His mind is brilliant. Maybe he’ll write about me. I always wanted to be a great man’s muse.” I was surprised by the heedlessness of Laura’s passion, which she generally reserved for dolls and dogs.
I trusted her therapist to manage her fantasies, even when Laura told me about “dreaming we were paged at a country club as Dr. and Mrs.” But she also maxed out her credit cards to send him expensive presents and called his house, spooking his wife. Apparently feeling stalked, he ended their sessions.
The risks of withdrawal from an antidepressant are well known, particularly for patients with an underlying mood disorder who quit abruptly, as Laura did. Reading her journal from those months was like reading her palm: “Another string of sleepless nights. Anger consumes me like a cancer spreading wildly.” The entries also recall the depravity she had suffered as a child and enacted as “an S&M prostitute.” Danny’s “perversity” is a theme. “The more freakish sex is, the more he yearns for it,” she wrote. But she also affirmed her love for him—a love “based on his kindness and generosity and, frankly speaking, the fact that I am a better person with rather than without him.”
In the pages of a school notebook, a great soul was doing battle with her demons. “I want to love and be loved,” she wrote. “I want not to face pain and poverty again. I want to learn from the good. I want there to be a god but not a vengeful one. I want beauty. I want order. . . . My garden, my house, the concept of a home. These things comfort me. The moon on a clear night, the sweeping sound of strings in a classical composition, blues sung from the heart . . . dolls most of all. They represent what we can be—not what we are. Dolls speak to the divine in us.”
You, reader, may have seen this coming, but I didn’t.
The departure that she booked was almost seven months away—months I can’t account for in my own life, much less in Laura’s. Danny told me that she’d consulted a fortune-teller who couldn’t see a future for her—“Nothing will change”—and that this prediction had hardened her resolve to die. She confided her intentions to a friend from the doll world, in a letter that Mickey found recently. It isn’t dated, and may never have been sent, though it seems to have been written in her last days. She told the friend she was at peace with her decision. She also told her the secret that she “could not voice” until then. “I was born a boy,” she wrote, “a mistake I worked endlessly” to correct. But, after her surgery, she discovered that “my very being brings out homophobia in most men, and those who don’t feel homophobic want me for the very reason of my freakishness.” Her deepest need was for tenderness: “I want to be a woman in a man’s arms.” She ended her suicide note by asking the friend to be “happy that I am no longer on life support.”
When I got Danny’s anguished phone call, it was January 31st, a Friday, and Will was home from school. He’d fractured his collarbone in a sledding accident. “Why?” he asked me when I told him the news, as he had once asked why some people are mean.
I couldn’t leave Will until the next morning, when a friend came to cover for me. The friend was a glamorous Latina who loved my cousin. Laura had restored a doll that she’d cherished as a little girl in Cuba, growing up with a severe abuela.
All I knew, as I watched the ice floes on the Hudson from the window of the train, was that Laura had shot herself and that Aurea was a zombie. She had called Mickey and spoken one line before hanging up: “She has no head—Laura’s dead.” Danny was afraid to leave Aurea alone, so when I got to the house, he asked if I could bear to wait in the garage for the “trauma cleaners.”
Laura had kept the rifle hidden in a closet where she stored her craft supplies. My courtly friend with the gun safe owns a similar weapon, and when he showed it to me last winter, he checked the chamber before asking if I wanted to hold it. A wave of dread stopped me, though I had a technical question to resolve. Yes, you could prop it between your legs, with the barrel in your mouth, and still reach the trigger. But Danny believes she pulled it with the toe she danced on.
On the morning of her death, Laura had phoned him at work to say that she “still loved him.” She left Aurea a tender farewell note under her pillow—a small mercy. But she also staged her death carefully so that her mother would find the body. First, she sent Aurea to the mall on a phantom errand. Then she placed a chair at the center of the garage and lowered the door. By the time I arrived, it was open to the air and sunlight, though I thought I could smell gunpowder. It clings to flesh, and the cinder block was spattered with it.
It was frigid and silent in the garage. Inside the house, Laura’s little dogs yapped at a passing car. A train whistled on its way to Albany. I examined the lawnmower, larvae in a stack of firewood, an antique dresser that Laura had been restoring. Finally, a van drove up. Its passengers, men in hazmat suits, expressed condolences before going to work with a synchronized concentration that seemed to demonstrate respect for the remains they were hosing down. Because reporters take refuge in reporting, I made conversation with their chief. He told me that, like many of his comrades, he had volunteered for the job after losing a relative who blew his brains out. “It’s strange, though,” he said. “Women mostly jump or take pills. Your cousin died like a man.”
The funeral was held in Laura’s living room. Time has blurred my memory of that day, though two figures stand out. One was a tall patrician in a bespoke suit, who seemed incongruous in the motley crowd of neighbors, relatives, and friends from the doll world. I introduced myself as Laura’s cousin and asked how he knew her. He sized me up before replying, “We met on the dark side.”
The other was Ray, who has since died of drug and alcohol addiction. He’d once been “movie-star handsome,” Mickey told me, and he’d almost finished college in the Navy. Now he looked like one of those ravaged vets who beg outside churches in their fatigues. He slumped on a sofa as a succession of mourners gave eulogies, burying his face in his hands. But, when he spoke, an extinguished light switched on in him.
For ten minutes, Ray was back in Caguas. He recalled a playmate who “had his back.” They shared punishments when their mischief disrupted the household and euphoria when they escaped it. They raced bikes around the neighborhood, but their happiest moments were fishing by the river. “We imitated the tree frogs and the parrots,” he said. “Once, we shared a shoplifted cigar. Once, we chased a mongoose to capture as a pet and got lost in the underbrush. We both got lost in different ways, including from each other, though a bond like that—to such a unique person—makes you want to be a better one.” The heartache of those sentences touched everyone, but perhaps not everyone noticed the feat of Ray’s grammar. In evoking their childhood for a roomful of strangers, he never used a gendered pronoun.
After Laura’s death, Danny fell apart. She had talked to him about suicide in the weeks before she shot herself, and he blamed himself for not “doing something” other than to sympathize with her despair. “I should have put her in the hospital, but I knew how much she would have hated that,” he said. His unstinting candor about their life is a form of reparation: “She fought heroically to be herself.”
Living in their house was impossible for Danny. He sold it and her “girls.” I found a copy of the auction catalogue on eBay. Some six hundred mid-century dolls fetched nearly three hundred thousand dollars. The sale took place on the third anniversary of 9/11.
In time, Danny remarried. His new wife was also from the Caribbean, and she practiced Obeah. Laura came to her in dreams, she told me. When she gave birth to fraternal twins, she claimed that Laura had sent them to her: “West Africans believe the soul is both male and female, so she gave us a boy and a girl from the same womb.” She and Danny are now divorced. The twins live with him in a river town upstate, and to support them he drives a van.
One afternoon, Danny brought his daughter to lunch. She is twenty-one, elfin and vivacious, with a mane of black curls. Laura would have loved her. They came with a present—my cousin’s pointe shoes. Like Cinderella’s sisters, I tried them on in vain. They sit on my desk now. The pink satin has yellowed with time, and the toes are worn to the nub. ♦