I remember that when my parents told me the difference between boys and girls I felt so sorry for them that I barely listened. They seemed so worried; they sighed as they tried to go into the details, helping each other out as best they could, speaking softly, much as they did when my grandmother died. I thought it was best to nod sympathetically and look intelligent, and hope that it might all be over soon and we could go back to our normal lives. I had not a clue what they were talking about.
Unlike most guys I knew, I went through my teens without putting any thought into girls at all. I liked girls, some of them were funny, and I spoke to them freely when I met them. But I never went out of my way to do so. I knew the basics — I mean, it would be hard not to notice — but in my waking life and indeed in my dreams I had other more pressing things to consider.
It was really my friend Anne Enright, who is also a writer, who made things clear to me. Instead of taking me aside, as she must have been tempted to do, she wrote it all out for me in her novel called What Are You Like?
This book made me think seriously for the first time about women as a species or a climate of opinion all their own. Enright had her heroine work in a women's clothes shop; she made the changing rooms into sacred space, filled with strange dramas and much self-inventing, almost like a Greek amphitheatre. This was the place, she said, where women changed their minds. They changed their minds about colours and textures, about the back part of themselves and the front, about their hair and their husbands, about their future and their past. In 10 minutes they could invent or discard several new versions of themselves.
Men did this on football fields or in bars or in boardrooms, but mostly men did not do this at all. I wished, since I write novels about both men and women, that I could get to hang out in women's changing rooms and see women coming out and checking themselves in the mirror, front and back and sides. Looking at themselves as though they were someone else, and then saying no, not right, the colour is off or the length or the shape — or something. And then trying something else.
And the shop assistant overseeing all of this like a high priestess full of understanding, ready to comment and agree, knowing that inside the body is the soul and that women bought clothes to cover their body but to satisfy their soul.
Men, on the other hand, just bought clothes. It was like having your hair cut or getting gas for the car. You pulled in and you did it when you had to. If only my parents, instead of talking about erections and vaginas and ejaculations, could have told it to me plain. Girls love changing rooms, it is where they decide who they are, they buy clothes in ones, only after they have reached deep into their souls. Men just try the thing on, the suit or the jacket, looking sheepish, almost guilty, as though their minds are on other things, and they reach only into their pockets. And then they get out of there as quickly as they can.
In Dublin, I could never go into a men's clothes shop without terror. The guys working there could size me up instantly. I look like a spoiled priest. I know I do. And I dress like one. I have tried not to, but it is no use. As soon as they come toward me, I stammer and run.
In London, I look worse. I look like an Irish spoiled priest and there is nothing worse than that. The main job of any shop assistant in London is to get me out of their store before my very presence, shiftily moving among racks of suits and jackets and pants, causes a stampede of other customers toward the main exit.
In the 1990s I began to spend time in New York. There they have no shame. They want your money and their job is not to let you out of the store without you handing it over. They look at you as though they love you and want to measure you because they have something perfect for you. And they manage to imply that if you don't buy it, you will spoil their day.
And then there is Toronto — and Harry Rosen. I don't know why I found myself in there the first time. But I know I was ready to run out at a second's notice if a Canadian shop assistant said as much as boo to me. Soon, however, as I ventured deeper into the belly of the store, a few guys working there noticed me and nodded in a way which suggested that they were slightly busy. No one asked me fussily if I needed any help and stood over me like I was a either a thief or the light of their lives. I wondered if they minded spoiled priests as much in Canada as they do elsewhere.
As I looked at some pairs of jeans, a guy came over and, instead of looking at me, he looked at the jeans. He seemed to approve of them, and this by implication suggested that he approved of me. He wondered if it might be a good idea to fit them on, as he thought they looked good, but you never could judge, he said. I replied by saying that I was leaving Toronto that very night so if they needed alterations, it would be no use.
We can do the alterations for you here and now, he said. It will take 10 minutes. He would have to check, but he was sure it could be done. Thus I made my first purchase at Harry Rosen's. A year later when I came back, the guy remembered me. When I fitted on a suit, once more, instead of looking at me, he looked at the suit. Maybe it was a trick, but it worked. The alterations took a bit longer, just a few hours.
Almost everything I own that I wear comes from Harry Rosen. Some of the people who work there are young and look cool; others are middle-aged. Some are women. They don't approach you as though they will shortly become your best friend; nor do they look at you as though your very presence in their store will ruin their trade. They don't gaze down at your shoes and in one glance make it clear to you that you are all wrong. (You can always tell a spoiled priest by his shoes.) They make me feel slightly like women are made to feel in Anne Enright's novel, not loved or despised so much as filled with the idea that fitting on clothes and looking at them in the mirror in semi-public is a form of immense possible humiliation, and it were best done slowly and discreetly and with sympathy close by. But they manage also to make me feel that I am a bloke and in a hurry to get this over and to get out on to the street where I can become once more, with their help, a master of the universe.
Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James, The Master, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He lives in Ireland.
