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I was reading the letter so intently that Jeeves had to gently clear his throat thrice before I noticed and looked up at him. “Would you like a nightcap before bed, sir?”
“Oh, yes, thank you,” I muttered—or something like that, I was too distracted to take down a perfect transcription. Curled in my comfiest chair, I returned to the letter and continued reading. Knowing that I was too absorbed to notice his return, he tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention when he came back with the drink.
“Good news from Mrs. Scholfield, sir?”
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that a small smile had crept onto my face as I read. “Oh, you know, just the usual. No news in particular, I’m just happy to hear from her.”
“Sir, pardon my intrusion, but if I may ask, why has your sister never visited London?”
“My sister? Barb? Well, she, er…she doesn’t like it,” I said shortly.
Jeeves quirked an eyebrow at me. I sighed.
“If you must know, she has…disagreements with the larger Wooster family. There was a rift of sorts and, well, I don’t think there’s much hope of patching it up at this point.”
“That is most saddening to hear, sir.”
I shook my head ruefully. “Saddening is the right word, old fruit.”
“You maintain fairly regular correspondence with her, sir, do you not?”
“Fairly, yes, not as much as I’d like. She doesn’t reach out often. I think talking to me reminds her too much of what she’s missing.”
“Forgive my continued impertinence, sir, but it seems as though you are the only family member with whom she maintains contact. Why are you neutral in this family rift?”
I fidgeted in discomfort. “I don’t... This is ancient family history that I’d rather not get into, if you don’t mind, Jeeves.”
“Of course, sir, I apologize for my behavior.”
“No need. I know you only ask because you care.”
“Indeed, sir.” His tone was as measured as ever, but I caught a rummy look in his eye that betrayed some kind of significance, some sincerity. He really did care.
I felt myself coming around. Jeeves stayed in place, sensing that I was about to open up. “The truth is, you see…well…it’s a bit hard to explain. Although, it’s not complicated. It’s simple, but it’s not easy, if you follow me. Of course you don’t follow me, I haven’t explained anything yet. You see… Barbara hasn’t always been my sister.”
Jeeves tilted his head just slightly. “How so, sir?”
“That is to say, growing up, he was my brother, and at age 18, she followed her heart and became my sister.”
Jeeves—steady, poised, serene Jeeves—actually took a step back at my words. Shock flitted across his face. There was something else in there, something I couldn’t read. I assumed it must be deep horror or disgust.
This reaction was much worse than I had expected. I immediately regretted bringing up such a sensitive topic. “I say, Jeeves, I understand that what I’m implying is distasteful, even abhorrent, to most sensibilities. I can’t really blame you for being affronted. But this is my flesh and blood we’re talking about here. My sister. My only sibling. I would appreciate it if you tried to maintain your composure at least in front of me.”
Jeeves visibly steadied himself. “Please, sir, do not misinterpret my reaction. I am not offended, I am merely surprised. That…it…this thing you speak of, it’s a rare occurrence.”
“An unusual situation, perhaps, yes, but far from unprecedented. There have been well-documented reports of people changing genders throughout all of history and across many cultures,” I explained eagerly. “Did you know that some civilizations even recognize a third gender? The Greeks had Galli priests. The Navajo have nádleehi. In India, where Barb lives, Hijra are actually considered—”
I broke off abruptly, suddenly terribly embarrassed by my outburst. The increasingly stunned look on Jeeves’s face stopped me in my tracks. He actually seemed fearful; my guilt rose.
“I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about all this. It’s just some research I did back when Barbara…became my sister, in order to understand better what was going on. I still don’t fully understand, but no one else in our family even tried.” I looked down, my eyes suddenly prickling. “They just…pretended as though she had never existed. Eighteen years of memories, affection, love—all gone, just like that.” I sighed. “I couldn’t do that.”
I looked up at Jeeves once more. To my surprise, he seemed every bit as overwhelmed as I felt. His eyes shimmered and his mouth was set in a tense line.
“Are you okay, Jeeves?” I asked cautiously.
He heaved a shuddering breath in response. “Sir, I…” His voice broke and he shut his mouth again. He shook his head silently and held up a finger, then turned and marched away from me. Bewildered, I heard him turn the corner and disappear into his room. He rummaged about for a minute and then re-emerged. An old photograph was clutched tight in his trembling hand. He steeled himself, as though he were preparing to subject himself to some extreme pain, and then thrust it out to me wordlessly.
I examined the photograph. Two solemn, dark-haired children gazed obediently into the camera. One, about 13 or 14 years of age, I recognized immediately as Jeeves, and the other about 10, looking almost identical besides being smaller and female. The pair were too similar in appearance to be anything but siblings. I flipped the photo over and read the handwritten scrawl on the back: Sammy & Reggie, summer 1898. I never knew Jeeves had a sister. Then again, why should I? There was plenty I didn’t know about the man.
But why was he showing me this now? As I gazed at the writing, a lightbulb went off in my brain. The coincidence struck me. “Jeeves…are you saying…you’re in the same boat as me? Your sister, this little Sammy, grew up to be…different, like Barb?”
I was alarmed to see that Jeeves’s entire body was now shaking rather badly. He wasn’t crying; he looked somehow beyond tears. I had never seen him express a fraction of this level of emotion before and I felt as though I were standing before a stranger, an entirely unknown man.
He pointed to the older boy. “That’s Sammy,” he finally managed to croak. He took a deep breath and pointed to the younger girl. “And that’s me.”
_____
The story came out haltingly. Jeeves could barely speak, and he never stopped trembling. I had to steer him to the couch and sit him down in the fear that he might faint.
In steering him, I had seized his shoulders. He flinched a little when I touched him, and in that moment I began to truly realize the implications of what he had just told me. His shoulders felt like any man’s shoulders beneath my hands. But suddenly, with just a small shift in my mindset, a tiny alteration of perspective, I could imagine them as a woman’s shoulders. Jeeves has a medium sort of build, slight but at the same time solid. Although I’m taller than most men, he has an inch on me. In the past I have noticed what delicate wrists he has. All at once, I found my attention locked onto him in the strangest, most intrusive way, looking for signs of femaleness: his neck, his feet, his hips…
I tore my attention away, feeling guiltier than ever. I thought about people looking at Barbara this way, scanning her body for signs of masculinity, illegitimacy, for “proof” that she isn’t who she “says” she is. Reducing her down to a collection of body parts rather than a whole human being. I remember I had done the same to her when she first told us who she was. It had taken me a long time to get past that. The rest of our family, our friends, our entire community, never could. That was why she had moved to India, eventually finding a husband with whom she adopted three children: she had to move that far away, relinquishing her past life entirely, to escape this kind of policing, this test she was set up to fail.
Nor did the significance of Jeeves’s flinch elude me. I was horrified to think he might be afraid of me, of my reaction, that some part of him believed I might hurt him. Yet I could not blame him for being scared. He had, as I would learn later that night, spent decades living in fear of anyone discovering his secret, worst of all someone he was close to. Upon reflection, I couldn’t say I was even entirely sure what exactly he had just told me, but it was obviously momentous. I resolved immediately to do whatever I could to try to assuage his fear—to prove to him that he had, perhaps not my full understanding, but certainly my complete acceptance.
Eventually, Jeeves told me his story. He had run away from home at age 14, started dressing as a boy, and started going by Reginald rather than Regina. He explained that he took on a male identity in order to stay safer on the streets and to gain employment and opportunities that a girl could never have accessed. Luckily, he had always been taller and stronger than most other girls. Nature had happened to gift him with a deep voice and a prominent jaw that frequently got him mistaken for a male even before he switched to living as one. He told me, with bitter humor, that the teasing about his appearance and questioning of his gender had actually reduced, not increased, after becoming Reginald.
He confirmed that he had never told anyone else before, not one person in the last two decades. He said my emotional appeal concerning Barbara made him decide spontaneously, finally, to tell me.
“I still cannot believe I’ve done this, to be honest with you, sir. I don’t know what madness came over me. To think of the lines of propriety I’ve crossed…! I fully expect to regret this come the morning, sir.”
I took a steadying inhale, knowing how important it was to get this right. “I want to be entirely honest with you, just like you’ve been with me, which I appreciate more than I can say at the mo’. If you regret telling me, I understand and that is of course your right. But, at least from my point of view, you have no reason to regret it, as far as I’m concerned. Your secret is safe with me, in all senses of the word. Safe in that I won’t tell a soul, and safe in that you can trust me to value you just as I did before.”
This time, the tears fell, propriety be damned.
____
As it turned out, this promise I had made to Jeeves, though well-intentioned, was easier pledged than done. In the forthcoming days, my head was constantly swimming with all that I had heard. To think—my manservant wasn’t a man. My gentleman’s personal gentleman wasn’t a gentleman. What was I supposed to do with that information?
I cursed myself for thinking this way, although I found I could hardly help it. Even if it was only in my own head, I felt as though I were betraying him when I thought about him like this. After knowing this man for seven years, suddenly words like “she” and “her” began occasionally drifting through my thoughts. Involuntarily, I thought of all the times he’d attended me in the bath, and I squirmed with embarrassment.
But why on earth should I be embarrassed now? Nothing had changed. This was exactly the same old Jeeves I had known all along.
But something had changed: me. Now I was questioning things about Jeeves I had never questioned before, things that made me blush to even contemplate. There was the question of the bath, of assisting me with dressing and undressing. There was the question of us living in the same apartment, sleeping just down the hall from each other. When we visited country homes, he bunked with the male servants. It had all seemed so normal, and now it all seemed so intimate and improper.
I knew Jeeves had had “understandings” with a few different women; clearly none of them had known his secret. Were those engagements just a façade to provide evidence to his maleness? Or, was he actually attracted to women? If so, did that make him an invert? How can a man who has a pash for women be an invert? Was he a man?
Of course she was.
Of course he wasn’t.
I began to think about other men in the street, to look at them differently. I wondered what they might be hiding.
I wondered about myself.
And, Lord help me, against my own will and my better impulses, I began to wonder about Jeeves. In seven years I had given nary a thought to what lay beneath his clothing, but now the topic started to consume my waking hours—and, if I’m being fully transparent, my sleeping hours. My thoughts lingered on the planes of his body, noting presences and absences, the flat and the convex. My dreams conjured the details, the smooth that I would have assumed to be rough, had I assumed anything at all. My mind kept reevaluating that which I had never really considered, rewriting the story I had never written. This new habit of mine made me sick, and it made me stirred.
I mulled over this idea, that I might be stirred by Jeeves. I had only ever felt this way about women before, and very few of them, at that. What did it mean for me if I had new feelings for him? What did it mean if, for God’s sake, I loved him?
I knew I had to talk to him about this, but I couldn’t fathom how I would begin. In the meantime, he undoubtedly noticed my distraction, my confusion, my hesitancy when we were close, but he didn’t say anything, either. Perhaps he thought it was my place to bring it up, after all he had confessed to me.
No, it wasn’t a “confession” exactly. Confessions are for sins, crimes, misdeeds. Jeeves’s secret isn’t something that needs to be confessed—if it’s going to be shared, it deserves to be declared, proclaimed. He should be proud of what he managed to do to succeed, of what he had to do to survive, and of who he became in the process.
One night, I plucked up the courage to tell him all this; by the time I finished, he was in my arms.
____
The moment our lips met, I knew we had crossed a line for good. I felt the strength in his arms and back as he crushed me to him, and for a second I felt manhandled, dominated, wholly off-kilter. But then I felt the smoothness of his cheek, which I had always attributed to fastidious attention to shaving, if I had thought about it at all, and we evened out, holding tight to each other. One moment I was kissing a man. The next I was kissing a woman. Here I am kissing my valet. There I am kissing my darling. I felt as though I were embracing two different people at once, but it was just Jeeves, just like it always was, just like it always would be. We fumbled and stumbled, and soon enough tumbled right into my bed.
If he’s a man, there’s a man in my bed, which is wrong.
If she’s a woman, I’m impinging upon a lady’s virtue, which is wrong.
But as long as this is Jeeves, then this must be right.
I pinned him beneath me on the bed. Our legs entangled, bodies pressed together. Two pairs of trousers, two starched collars. Two tightly tied ties were swiftly untied. I panted into his open mouth. My chest felt constricted. I felt lightheaded. I felt so aroused that I couldn’t imagine how we’d ever stop.
But I needed a moment to breathe, to think. I sat up and gazed into his eyes, searching for what was inside. Jeeves stared back at me.
“Are you trying to figure out who I am, sir?”
I nodded, feeling weak.
“I’ll show you,” he said.
I helped him take off his jacket, his trousers, his shirt. He looked slender in his underwear and two or three layers of tight undershirts that I never would have guessed were there.
“Don’t you get hot in the summer?”
“Yes, sir.”
I kissed him, partly to swallow up that “sir,” which was starting to disturb me in this context, and partly because I was afraid of those undershirts coming off. I tried to comb my fingers into the glossy hair atop his head, but I was stopped by his sticky pomade. I tried to run my hands up and down his body, but I didn’t want to feel the texture of the cotton, I wanted to feel his skin.
I felt nearly too anxious to continue. But then I kissed his neck and inhaled his sweet scent, so distinctively Jeeves: that gave me all the reassurance I needed. I helped him peel off his tight shirts and then he was bare beneath me. I saw the parts of him that were kept bound so tight, his clothing never even hinted at them. They looked so natural and right on his long, slim frame. He looked terrified and vulnerable, defiant and beautiful. The magnitude of what we were doing hit me; I didn’t feel worthy of this. I felt that it should surely be handled by someone much more intelligent than myself, someone with much more experience in these matters. Or any experience at all.
Tentatively I reached out and stroked his chest. Capable, masterful, imperturbable Jeeves looked like he was on the verge of shattering just from one light touch. I gripped and groped and he moaned, a sound of surrender and unbelief. Following some seldom-heeded primal directives within me, I lowered my head and sucked on his nipple, pulling ecstatic exclamations from him. His gratifying response spurred me on. I kissed his sternum, his abdomen, his belly, and came to the silk waistband of his underwear. I hesitated for only a moment before pulling it down and pressing my lips to the dark, thick hair underneath. If I had any last doubts that this man was different from other men, now I knew for sure. And if I had any questions about whether this experience was something I wanted to pursue, those questions were answered, too, in the emphatic affirmative. I licked at him, moving lower, gently exploring, following the sound of his cries as they rose. I focused my attention on whatever spot made him loudest, whatever motion made him twitch and arch high off the bed. I drank him down like a delicious nectar. My universe narrowed down to this one small place for an immeasurable period of time and I lost myself in the rhythms of my efforts and his harmonious responses. I only came back to reality once he finally tugged me back up to lay face-to-face with him once more. His map was tear-streaked and dreamy.
He kissed me hard with great feeling, and then used those strong arms to roll me onto my back. Deeply moved, I had a fair bit of the teary and dreamy going on, myself. Even though he has undressed me thousands of times, somehow this one felt like the very first. Once I was entirely bare, he climbed on top of me and hovered above, straddling my hips, a magnificent sight in itself. He grasped my eager readiness. On some level I still couldn’t really believe that he doesn’t have one of his own. For a few clumsy moments, we tried patiently to fit together the pieces of this new puzzle. When the pieces finally moved into place and he sank down onto me, we both gasped. I groaned his name—Reggie. Reggie. Reggie—and it would be another long, miraculous, hypnotic stretch of time before I stopped.
____
When we finally talked about it, he said that, at the end of the day, he thought of himself as a woman. I said he didn’t need to pick one or the other, and added that I would love him no matter what. But she said that she was sure.
For a while, we talked about what could be different now, what possibilities would open to us. She could grow her hair out and get a whole new wardrobe. We could actually be normal, natural, boring. With my money and her homemaking skills, we could be perfectly intelligible to society, as long as no one knew about our past. We could get married and our union would be recognized or at least understood in every corner of the earth. We could dance in any music hall in Europe and no one would call us abominations. They’d call us Mr. and Mrs., Sir and Madam, gentleman and lady. I started getting quite excited about all the opportunities that would suddenly be available to us.
But the morning after that talk, she rolled over in bed to face me. Tentatively, she said she had thought a little more about living as female for the first time in decades, as an adult woman for the first time in her life, about giving up her friends, my family, our routine, our status quo. She wasn’t sure she wanted to make that change. She wasn't sure she wanted to be seen that way at all. It was all too much to contemplate at once. She apologized and said she was sorry for changing her mind, for dashing my dreams of normalcy, for choosing the more difficult path.
I kissed him and told him not to worry about trying to make any final decisions. Certainly not right now, and certainly not for my sake. I spoke firmly to be sure he heard me: “My dear, you have absolutely nothing to apologize for.”