The Illusionist

by Dinitia Smith

  “Huh, Brian? Good?” I prompted, wanting Brian, for no reason I understood, to like what Dean had given him, to like Dean.

  Brian closed his eyes a moment, savoring, then nodded.

  “You don’t need to roll this shit, too expensive,” Dean said. Talking like an expert, like he knew the streets. But we were the streets in Sparta.

  Brian looked at Dean and his eyes narrowed. “So what are you anyway?” Brian asked Dean, his voice suddenly thick.

  “Whaddya mean?” Dean said.

  “I mean—what are you? Queer or something?” The dope had loosened Brian’s tongue.

  Brian had asked the question I wanted to ask, but was afraid to. Dean was like this blurred image, an image I had pondered, but hadn’t let come into focus yet. I saw Dean’s high, red cheeks, his liquid green eyes, the full beautiful lips. The cowboy hat was parked rakishly on the back of his head. He wore loose jeans over his small frame.

  “What’re you talking about?” Dean asked Brian.

  “I’m talking about what you are,” Brian answered, not taking his eyes off Dean.

  Outside the hut, the wind breathed; dry leaves scuttled across the grass, and underneath our feet, we could hear the sound of the river water lapping at the pilings of the ice house.

  Brian watched Dean. “You look like a girl,” Brian said.

  “I’m a guy,” Dean said, relaxed, as if he wasn’t bothered by the question. “Of course.”

  Most guys would get excited now, puff up their chests, and raise their fists. But Dean’s eyes were on his pipe as he took a deep breath in.

  Yet I thought I could feel, in the air of the ice house, Dean’s fear.

  “Yep,” Brian said. He cocked his head back in a gesture of fake disbelief, a goofy look, ridden with the dope. “Could’ve fooled me. Don’t you think so?” Brian said to Jimmy. “Don’t you think it’s a fag?”

  Jimmy gaped at Dean. “Looks that way to me,” he said finally in his deep, phlegmy voice.

  “That’s your problem,” Dean said, still avoiding looking at them.

  “Yeah?” said Brian.

  I interrupted. “I’m cold. Let’s go.”

  But Brian wouldn’t be stopped. “You’re like a—pervert?” Brian asked Dean, his eyes wide with fake innocence.

  “Shut up,” said Dean. He emptied the ashes from the pipe. I could see Dean’s lips trembling as he poked at it. Then he tucked the pipe in his jacket.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  Next to me, Brian giggled. A stupid dope kind of giggle, loose and freaky, something that could easily go out of control. I shivered.

  “Fag is what I think,” said Brian, with a little giggle. “What about you, Jimmy?”

  “I think fag too,” Jimmy said.

  I grabbed Dean’s sleeve, pulled him away through the long grass. “He’s an asshole,” I said.

  We moved off, and I looked back and Brian and Jimmy were following us and in the darkness I could hear Brian’s laughter, silly and pointless, with no real object, it seemed, anymore.

  We hurried back through the long grass, and got in our cars. And Dean and I drove back to Wooden Nickel in his truck. As we drove, I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his large eyes shining, thin fingers on the steering wheel. I was too shy to ask him again what they had asked him. Because if I pressed him, he might run. And I knew I wanted him to stay.

  As we pulled into the parking lot of the Wooden Nickel again, he said, without looking at me, “Getting cold out. You know someplace I could crash? Just for the night?”

  “You can stay at my place, I guess, for the night,” I answered. I knew he wasn’t asking for sex or anything, really did need a place to go in the cold. I sensed I would be safe, even though he was the stranger. It was he who needed protecting. “Don’t mind Brian,” I said. “He’s just an asshole.”

  CHAPTER 3

  CHRISSIE

  So he came back with me that night to Washington Street. He slept in his sleeping bag on the futon in the living room, while I slept in the bed in the bedroom.

  I had lived in this apartment a year, after I’d had to move out of my mom’s house because I couldn’t take it with Mason, my stepfather, anymore. Mason was acting like he was my real father, and even after I got the job at the Nightingale Home, he wanted to know where I was all the time, when I was coming home at night, everything about me. I hated Mason’s thin, beige-gray face, his blunt beige hair, the way his clothes smelled of cigarette smoke even after they were laundered. Mason was a manager at City Shop. And my mom just went along with whatever Mason did, she let him scream at me because Mason was younger than she was, and she was so afraid he’d leave her. And she couldn’t bear Mason to leave her like my dad did for Liz.

  My dad and Liz didn’t have room for me because Liz had her own two boys, the brats Fletcher and Timmy. Liz and Dad never told me I couldn’t live with them, but it was obvious, when I looked around, there was no room for me in Liz’s house.

  This realization, that I had nowhere that was my real home, gave me an inner sadness. Because, though I was grown up now, maybe I was still a kid and I wanted to know there was a place I could still call home if I really needed it, if I lost my job or something.

  During the day I worked at the Home, and at night I took courses at Sparta Community toward my associate’s degree. Most evenings after class, or after work, I drove to the Wooden Nickel, which was about five miles out of town. The Wooden Nickel was where we had all hung out ever since high school. I would sit at the end of the bar, reading my book, doing my homework. Carl left me alone. He didn’t care. Carl was like a father to us. He didn’t card kids too closely. He knew all the troopers and the sheriff. But if a kid was drunk, Carl would find someone to drive him home. He watched over us. Carl wasn’t married, had no kids of his own. We were his family, except we had to pay for drinks.

  * * *

  Washington Street, where my apartment was, was the main street in Sparta. It was paved in cobblestone, lined with false-fronted buildings of red brick and frame. Like everything else in Sparta, the street sloped steeply down to the river. Indeed, sometimes it seemed as if the whole place was slowly sliding down into the river, and that one day the entire town would just disappear into the water.

  Long ago, Sparta was a thriving place, a whaling port, one of the most prosperous cities in the state, they said. The square riggers would sail upriver from New Amsterdam, their decks loaded with barrels of whale oil and bone. And when the ships reached the docks of Sparta, all the inhabitants of the town would gather to greet them, and the air would be filled with the boom of cannon fire. My dad said that the Pecks were an old Sparta family. There was even a Peck Street in town, named after us, he said, though it was only a little side street. But long ago, he said, we were probably rich people, though my dad worked at Sparta Utility now.

  Then, suddenly, all the whaling ceased, and Sparta went into a decline. And then, after the Civil War, the city came to life again for a generation or so, with manufacturing. But slowly, that industry died down too, until there were only the husks of old factory buildings down by the river, covered in ivy and bindweed.

  Over the years, the town fathers had tried periodically to revive the fortunes of the city. These days, Washington Street was mostly antique stores, run by gay people who’d moved up from New York City. The city government had gotten federal loans, put up fake gas lamps to attract tourists, but it seemed that every day another store closed. A group of weekenders, including the famous poet who lived on Courthouse Square, were trying to raise funds to restore the old Sparta Opera House, with its gargoyles representing comedy and tragedy above the entrance, which had been boarded up for years now, and turn it into a cultural center.

  But today as you walked through the streets of Sparta, you saw mostly the outline of the beautiful old buildings within the abandoned structures that stood there now, buildings with elaborate moldings and pilasters, and stained glass windows and fine,
thick front doors.

  These days, the thing that kept Sparta going was that it was the county seat. The main businesses were law offices, lawyers representing the indigent, the prison, doctors getting paid by Medicaid, title search firms, the unemployment office, and the Early Childhood Intervention Center, to keep the unemployed from beating up on their kids.

  And drugs. It was as if drugs had replaced whaling and manufacturing in Sparta’s economy. On Washington Street, there was a store called New York, New York, which was nothing but a front for drugs, just a few Knicks caps in the windows, a nod to making it look like a real store. Geography was destiny. It was somehow no accident that Dean turned up with his Humboldt. Sparta was a natural destination point for drugs. Because of its location, on the railroad line, and just off the Parkway, it was a convenient drop-off point. The drugs came up from the big city by train to the station down on Front Street, and the dealers met the carriers there, or the couriers brought up the drugs by car on the Parkway. But these days they said the train was better for bringing drugs up from the city, because the state troopers staked out the Parkway on the lookout for rental car plates—the dealers usually drove rentals.

  My apartment was in a worn red brick building at the corner of Washington and Third. Third Street was kind of a dividing line in Sparta. Above Third, mainly white people lived. Below Third were black people, the descendants of freed slaves who had come after the Civil War to work in the manufacturing plants by the river. Around the boundary of Third Street, people’s skins were more varied, mulatto, as if the races had met and mingled here.

  I imagined that once, long ago, some nice little family had lived in my apartment. I imagined maybe the father was a foreman in the thread factory on Third Street, the mother dutifully taking care of the little children who went off to school each morning carrying their lunch pails. The apartment was still in good condition, smooth wainscoting on the walls, brass sconces. When I rented it, it was empty and clean, as if it were not really meant ever to be a permanent home but only a temporary shelter.

  All I had was my mattress on the bare wooden floor of the bedroom, and in the main room, a futon and the Formica table and the vinyl-covered chairs my mom had given me. I’d taped up a big poster of Mariah Carey on the wall. Mariah Carey was my ideal then, tiny and delicate, little-boned with long hair and big eyes. I am big, with broad shoulders. I wore my hair short in those days, and I always felt clumsy. It wasn’t even a question then that Dean might come onto me. Guys just never did. So I was one step ahead of them, made them my friends right away, and that way I could never get hurt.

  * * *

  In the morning, I woke up to the pearly light, the sound of voices outside on Washington muffled by the wavy glass in the windows. I went into the living room and I saw Dean there, curled up on his side in the sleeping bag, his head resting on his elbow, his mouth open, his long thin teeth gleaming on his lip, the lashes curling on his red cheeks. I saw that Dean was still wearing his two shirts, one on top of the other.

  He was like a child, I thought. The object of your love, but completely unaware of how much you adored him. Innocent, I thought. For the moment.

  And I wanted to lean down and touch his hair, all soft and shaggy and brown, put my lips to his cheek, inhale his skin. But I didn’t dare. Dean wasn’t the kind of person you touched without permission, I knew that instinctively, without his having told me.

  As I moved close to where he lay, I could hear the even sound of his breathing. Suddenly, as I stood there, his eyelids fluttered, and he shifted onto his back. His body jerked, as if he were fighting something, as if I had startled him, and I stepped away.

  I returned to my room and waited for him to wake up. Eventually, I heard the floorboards creaking in the other room, and then a burst of water from the shower. A few minutes later, Dean emerged from the bathroom, his hair damp, his skin clean, fully dressed, as usual.

  * * *

  He just stayed. He moved his stuff in, his magic books, Modern Magic, and Magic Secrets of the World, a duffel bag with some old clothes, his ditty bag. In the morning, he would go to work, chucking down Skittles for breakfast on his way out.

  We lived like two bachelors. The place was a mess, we never cleaned. But then we didn’t really have to clean, because there was almost no furniture.

  Those first few days, I rarely saw Dean. At night, sometimes he wouldn’t come home till late, till after I was in bed. Or else he’d sit at the table, practicing magic tricks, one eye on his book and the diagrams on the page, the other on his pile of cards, or his glass and quarter. I never saw Dean any other way but fully clothed, in his jeans and his two shirts, one on top of the other, though I saw his bare feet, the long, soft toes, the high, delicate arch.

  After a couple of days, when Dean got paid, he gave me $120 cash for half the rent—he didn’t have a checking account, he said. He was planning to get one, but he’d had some trouble upstate with an ATM and he had to wait.

  I didn’t ask more.

  What did I know then? Only what I wanted to know. That he was a strange and beautiful creature, living in my house. I didn’t pursue what Brian had said. Yes, he might have been a pervert—some in-between creature. But he was clean and intoxicating, and I was lonely. I was too young, or too stupid, to frame the question. I was only intrigued. And I was afraid that if I asked too many questions, he would flee, and I would be ordinary again, living alone, going at night to the Wooden Nickel, doing my homework at the end of the bar.

  * * *

  A few days after he moved in, I gave him an old denim shirt of mine that had shrunk in the wash. Dean was smaller than me, an inch or two shorter, and maybe ten pounds lighter. He was delicate next to me. “Try it on,” I told him.

  He went into the bathroom and shut the door tight. A couple minutes later, he reemerged, holding the shirt in his hand. “Too small,” he said, looking at me, a question of sorts, a little smile on his face. I allowed my eyes to focus on what I didn’t want to see, the two faint mounds on his chest, where his breasts would be.

  The imponderability of it all was too weird.

  “Dean,” I said, “what’s that?” I pointed to his chest. “Those breasts or something?”

  He was suddenly straight-faced. “No. It’s a deformity. I’ve always had them. Don’t worry. I’m all guy.”

  “So—how come you got—those?” I asked, nodding at the bumps.

  He was serious, his large eyes cool. “I got them on the top. Inside I’m a man.”

  I was confused. “So—you’re like a—lesbian?”

  “No,” he said, calmly. “I’m not a lesbian.”

  “So, what are you then?” I asked.

  “I’m not a lesbian. A lesbian is really a woman. I’m not. I’m a man,” he said. “I’m a real man.”

  CHAPTER 4

  CHRISSIE

  I waited. From down on the street below came the sound of Saturday morning business, cars driving by, voices, the clatter of footsteps on the concrete sidewalk. Dean was not smiling now. “It’s like another state of being,” he said. “If they did an operation, they’d see men’s things inside. They’d see I was a man.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know, because of the way I feel,” he said.

  “What’s your real name then?”

  “Dean.”

  “I mean your real name?”

  “They baptized me Lily. Lily Dean.” He looked up. “When I was born I had these—these little deformities. They were confused. I just changed it around. Cool, huh?” He grinned. “It worked for my ID and everything.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “You couldn’t tell about it when I was a kid. I just looked like a girl, so they just thought I was. It started happening later. Then the truth came out.”

  Dean told me he came from this little hamlet way upstate. His father was a purchasing agent for the county, his mother the town clerk. His father didn’t want to know the truth about it
, Dean said. But he thought his mother suspected from the start.

  Dean also had a brother, Raymond, two years older, whom he worshiped. Right from the beginning, Dean said, he wanted to do everything Raymond did, to tag along with all his friends. But his brother hated him. Raymond and his friends would tie Dean up and then beat him with sticks, anything to get rid of him. The mother would try to protect Dean. But no matter how much Raymond tormented him, Dean said, all he ever wanted was for Raymond to love him.

  And when Dean got hurt, he’d try desperately not to cry, because only girls cry. He would wear only boys’ clothes, refused to play with dolls. If his mother brought him a doll, he’d just leave it in the package to die. One time, when he went to his grandma’s house in Syracuse, he came home and his mother had redecorated his room. She’d painted the walls pink, hung pink curtains, ordered a canopy bed from a catalog, and put down a pink rug—as if to make Dean more a girl. But when Dean saw what his mother had done, he threw a fit and refused to sleep in his room until she’d changed it all back again.

  At first Dean didn’t really understand what he was, but he just knew somehow, though he couldn’t give it a name. He was a stranger in his own body. And as he got older, as he reached adolescence, he understood more clearly that he was a boy. His voice grew deeper, he started lifting weights. About that time, he became interested in magic, started ordering stuff from catalogs, magic tricks and books on the subject. Doing magic tricks was a way of getting other kids not to beat up on him, something to make them like him. He was good at the magic tricks, real fast, and soon the other kids began to tolerate him.

  He started selling a little dope here and there. He had this connection up near the border. Pretty soon his mom lost all control over him, and he was hitchhiking all over the place anyway. He brought this stuff down and kids loved it. Strangely enough, he really didn’t smoke that much himself. He used it kind of like bait, and to buy affection. And sometimes he used it as an aphrodisiac. The other kids still thought he was a weirdo, but they stopped beating up on him.