So he sat barechested in pantyhose and fishnet stockings at the vanity, sipped his glass of Campari, a tinkling red liquid with a spiral of lemon rind in it, and painted his face.
“If you don’t mind, I should like to begin,” said Marianne.
“Oh? No, I don’t mind at all,” he must have said.
As he leaned into the mirrors and worked on his face, he began to hear the mechanical snips of an aperture opening and shutting, opening and shutting. He glanced up in the mirror and saw the neat little woman hovering behind him, her face hidden by a big, black, expensive-looking camera—the most masculine object in the room.
• • •
Derek had already been photographed this way many times. All these photographers seemed to love shooting you as you were getting ready, capturing the transition from male to—not female, exactly, but whatever it was on the other side. Drag, for Derek, was not an imitation of the feminine, but its own third category. Derek had done so many of these in-transition shoots. Every photographer seemed proud of the idea, confident no one had done it before. Derek had begun to find them tiresome. Every goddamn fashion photographer he had met liked to think of himself as David Hemmings in Blow-Up, barking yes! and no! at you as you did your best Vanessa Redgrave, writhing around on the studio floor. He had begun to feel queasy about it. Something lurid or voyeuristic about how those photographers loved shooting you in half drag. There is a photograph of Ethyl this way, curled in a bathtub somewhere in the East Village. He’s wearing a kind of crenulated tutu, his fishnet stockings—the old-fashioned kind, you can tell by the line in the back of the leg—and an impractical pair of six-inch pumps Derek knew he cherished (and would years later remember him shuffling onto the stage in with tight little baby steps, a six-foot-three beanpole under his towering Marie Antoinette wig and polka-band accordion). He doesn’t have any trademark wig on, just his own nearly shaved bare head and wild wings of makeup around his eyes, the angel tattoo visible on his bare back, failing to look comfortable in that cramped bathtub, not smiling, but almost sneering. Derek’s favorite touches in that photo are the half-visible studio portrait of Ethyl hanging above him in the background, and the drink balanced on the rim of the tub, probably likewise given him presession by the photographer. Every drag queen in the early eighties got photographed in a bathtub at some point.
But with Marianne, he didn’t mind. There was very little bluster about this quiet, tiny, middle-aged woman in slacks and slippers who floated around him as he applied his makeup, so quiet he nearly forgot she was there, concentrating, completely losing himself, as he always did, in the mirror. Coral lipstick, electric-blue eye shadow that more or less matched the color of his stockings, rouged cheeks, Cleopatra eyeliner that swept out in elegant strokes of black. When he finished with his face, he strapped on his open-toed silver stiletto sandals and his chandelier-drop earrings. They were real crystal teardrop beads from an old chandelier, mismatched (that was part of their charm), and so heavy they had to be kept on by a wire that curled around the back of the ear. (Ethyl had taught him that trick.) Derek stood to go fishing in his bag for his leather miniskirt, but Marianne lowered her camera and beckoned to him from the doorway.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to photograph you just as you are right now.”
Derek shrugged, took his drink, and followed.
The gray afternoon outside the windows suffused the palatial black-and-white rooms in soft pale light. Derek followed Marianne as she looked around the apartment for a good place to shoot him. The spikes of his stilettos made a racket on the parquet floors, echoing solemnly around the half-moved-into apartment.
“I would like it if you would just—just lie down. Right here.”
She gestured toward a smooth circular curve in the ivory-colored paneled hallway. It was just a little niche, an architectural hiccup of space between rooms. Derek guessed when the apartment was fully moved into they might put a marble table there with a vase on it or something. The curved wood was what Derek would remember. He’d heard somewhere about the process of making a curved piece of wood like that, how you warp it with steam. There was a round silk carpet on the floor, and he would remember the soft smooth coolness of it against his back and chest and arms as he lay down on it in a fetal position as Marianne instructed him to do, a position much like Ethyl in that bathtub. The royal-blue rug was as soft and silky as a kimono, with a pattern of vines or birds on it. Marianne stood over him, her face behind the camera.
“I love the way your body looks,” she said in a near whisper.
Derek writhed around on the floor in slow motion, conforming the contours of his body to the curved white wood.
“Please just move your head,” said Marianne.
Obeying her command, Derek quit his full-body squirming and just held still in the pose she wanted, moving his head around. Up, down, side to side, toward her, away from her. In the silence punctuated only by the camera clicks, Derek became acutely conscious of the sound of his own breathing. He looked around at the Escheresque intersection of rooms they were in, at the high ceilings and lighting fixtures, out the windows, which he could see were thinly streaked with the light rain that had broken and was softly pattering the Beresford. He moved his head and looked around at things, and the camera snipped and clacked, followed by the ratcheting sound of Marianne pulling back the lever that advanced the film, followed by a long pause—and then another snip and clack. She went out for a moment and wiggled a stepladder in from another room, climbed it a few steps, and shot downward at Derek as he looked up at her from the floor. The camera snipped and clacked.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Derek felt a head rush as he finally stood, a tingling of blood, a little sore from lying on the floor. He started off toward what he guessed was the direction of the dressing room, to go get en costume in his leather skirt and homemade Balenciaga knockoff. But a feeling made him turn back, to see Marianne putting away her camera equipment, and he realized that “Thank you” meant good-bye. That was all she wanted.
• • •
As a child, Derek had mistaken the black spiral in the opening sequence of James Bond movies for a camera aperture rather than a gun barrel. It was not such a far-flung mistake: What is more symbolic of espionage—a gun or a camera? There is a kinship between the two machines. For one, both are “shot.” There is a dialogue between them as symbols. The camera is a hidden eye, whereas a gun is an element of positive space, a protrusion, male. A camera is negative, a hole, a trap. The silhouette of a man saunters into the viewfinder, stops, swivels, and fires directly into the camera, blinding us, the counterspies, the voyeurs, with our own blood.
• • •
A couple of weeks later Marianne invited him back to a party at her apartment.
“The apartment is finally done,” that quiet voice said through the honeycomb of holes in the plastic receiver. Derek was lying in bed in the early evening, very high on hashish, carefully dipping Chips Ahoy! in blueberry yogurt and trying to eat them without getting crumbs on his sheets. Derek was in a state of limbo: Tom would be out all night at his bartending job, and Derek was in want of company, but unfortunately he’d already made himself way too high to leave the apartment.
“Ken and I are having a few friends over,” the phone said. “It’s a housewarming of sorts, I suppose.”
“Mn?” he said. “Oh, sure. Why not?”
It could have been a paranoid note from the hash bubbling in his nerves, but he sensed a question lurking behind the invitation, possibly a sexual one. These were days of widespread experimentation; Derek had been on the balcony at Studio 54, and was well versed in threeways with straight couples. Which he didn’t mind, necessarily, but in any case, as a sort of buffer, he invited Scott along to the party. Tom knew Derek occasionally had sex with Scott. They weren’t “supposed to,” as they were both in relationships with other people, but again, these were days of widespread experimentation. He knew Tom had hi
s own dalliances. Sometimes Derek would feel a wave of guilt, and would say to Tom, “You know, um, I think we really ought to be monogamous.” To which Tom would say, “Yes, I think you’re right about that, yes, absolutely.” And two nights later Derek would be putting on his jacket with his hand on the doorknob, saying, “Oh, I’m just going over to Scott’s to watch Dallas.”
(Well, Scott actually did like Dallas. Derek didn’t. He never watched Dallas and never spent a second of his life wondering who shot J.R.)
• • •
Scott and Derek climbed out of the Eighty-First Street subway station and into the early summer night. It was the time of year when everyone is still joyfully surprised that the sun is setting so late in the evening, later every day, meaning only more summer to come. The sky was in what photographers call the golden hour; the faces of the buildings glowing like, well, ormolu, and the shadows of the skyscrapers were long across Central Park. Derek was wearing sandals, a faded black T-shirt with a neckline he’d roughly cut out to bare one shoulder, and red Zouave pants tied at the waist with a knotted sash. He loved wearing those pants, especially in warm weather, all that breezy fabric billowing around his legs. Minimal makeup that night—eyeliner, red nail polish, and a touch of glitter on his temple and on his exposed shoulder. He was wearing iridescent dragonfly-wing earrings, and his hair was pinned up but loosely falling about his face in a couple of well-placed tendrils that he’d coiled a few times with the curling iron. Altogether his outfit was a little genderfucky, but certainly not drag. He wasn’t trying to look like a girl. He never tried to look like a girl. He didn’t want to look like a girl, and he didn’t want to look like a boy—but simply something other. Not even something in between. Just something else.
Marianne was standing in the marble compass-rose foyer with her husband, Ken, greeting the guests, proper host and hostess. Ken was an attractive man—older than her, about forty, forty-five, maybe, and imposingly tall. So this was the architect. He wore a genuine smile and didn’t seem to talk much, was balding but well built, with eyebrows as white-blond as hoarfrost and kind but arresting blue eyes. He wore khakis and a blue blazer. He had that aura of worldliness architects often have—Derek wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Ken had a passion for sailing, or had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Marianne was in her usual elegant but restrained attire. Pearls, that night. Derek introduced Scott, shook Ken’s large hand, lowered himself to Marianne’s face for kisses on cheeks.
Scott was jittery for the bar, and hunting for a drink he quickly disappeared into the fabric of the party, thereafter abandoning Derek for most of the night. Derek would remember emerging into the living room without anyone to lean against socially, Scott already gone and Marianne occupied in the foyer with her husband: that initial lost feeling of walking into a party at which the other guests know one another well, but no one knows you. It wasn’t a big party—though granted, one would have to invite quite a lot of people to make that apartment feel crowded. There were maybe thirty people or so, most of them older than Derek, closer to Marianne’s and Ken’s ages. The apartment had been transformed. If it was impressive when Derek had seen it not quite finished a couple of weeks ago, now it was nothing short of majestic. Everything was in its place: pictures on the walls, furniture all in position. It was complete. The sky had begun to turn purple, and the windows were open to the warm summer night, as were tall French doors that led onto a terrace overlooking the park, and a magnificent breeze blew transparent voile curtains back into the rooms. Somehow a flute of champagne came to be in Derek’s hand. Truly, it was a lovely evening. That breeze blew the sheer curtains around, there was laughter here and there, cocktail glasses clinking and chiming, kisses on cheeks, soft conversation. Derek stood by an open window holding his glass of champagne, a line of golden bubbles as thin as a necklace chain ascending to its surface from the stem where he held it, and he looked out at night falling across Central Park from the twenty-third floor of the Beresford. Double Fantasy was playing, and he would remember that, too. Double Fantasy was playing at many cocktail parties in the summer of 1981, but this one was playing at a cocktail party on the Upper West Side, ten blocks away from where John Lennon had been shot six months before, at a stately, named apartment building similar to the one he was standing in. Lennon sang: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful . . . beautiful boy.” It was a disquieting feeling to be living now in a world in which a Beatle was dead. Derek had guessed Marianne was in her midthirties, which put the year of her birth sometime in the late forties, right in the generational crosshairs to be someone for whom the Beatles had truly changed the world: She could have been one of those shrieking teenage girls waiting on the runway at what used to be Idlewild Airport, but had then recently been renamed JFK in the shadow of his assassination (death beatifies). To Derek, the Beatles had never been anything new, but something that simply played in the background of his growing up, as it now played in the background at this party. He had not imagined it would be so soon that he would be listening to this particular dead man’s voice. He liked the album. But to listen to that album on the Upper West Side in the summer of 1981 was not just listening to music, but a table rapping, a séance. It was an album of love songs, unexpectedly sweet and guileless ones, without Lennon’s usual cast of irony, that drop of venom that made his songwriting so much darker and meaner than McCartney’s. And now these love songs had become haunted. The voice of a man who had recently been murdered sang: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful . . . beautiful boy.” Death beatifies.
• • •
It took Derek a little while to realize that many of the people at the party were very ordinary (some of them very large) men who were dressed in women’s clothing.
It wasn’t drag at all: They were simply wearing women’s clothing. They were en costume as women who had just come from their jobs at a law firm, or an advertising agency, or perhaps they had picked up their children from school that afternoon. They were wearing conservative, pedestrian outfits: navy-blue polyester skirts with little matching jackets, shoulder pads, salmon-pink pantsuits, ruffled silk blouses with bows on them, sensible, low-heeled pumps, pearl chokers, thick black tights. They wore wigs styled in pageboys and bob cuts and whatnot.
Marianne was at his elbow, introducing him to someone. Hands were stuck out to be shaken. He was introduced to a man named Bill in a mousey-brown curly wig. Bill wore an indigo dress with white polka dots, and a little gold woman’s watch on his thick, hairy wrist.
“This is my wife, Margaret,” said Bill, lightly putting a proprietary hand on the back of the woman who stood beside him, similarly attired. As they stood there in that opulent apartment with their drinks, Derek looked around at Bill and Margaret and Marianne, and at the other men around them, at their wigs and skirts and dresses, their makeup. Bill’s makeup was of a perfunctory sort, appropriate for the office: lipstick, a little powder and mascara, a hint of rouge on the cheeks. It was poorly applied—he could tell Bill really didn’t know anything about the craft of applying makeup. The lipstick spilled over the lines, and his foundation didn’t quite match his skin tone. He had probably borrowed his wife’s makeup. These men were not trying to be beautiful—they were only trying to be female. But not even that, exactly. There are drag queens who change completely when in drag—an inside-out mental, physical transformation. The voice changes, as do the mannerisms. You instinctively do things such as examine your nails by looking at the back of the hand, with fingers outstretched, instead of looking at the palm with the fingers curled in, the way a man does. Bill was en costume, but not in persona as a woman. The blue polka-dotted dress he wore had pockets, and the hand that didn’t hold his drink he kept casually sunk in one of them as they chatted. Men and women mingled together, couples, friends, some of the men in men’s clothing, but most of the men dressed in their pedestrian women’s clothing. No one did or said anything that indicated they even noticed anything unusual at all was happening.
He was intr
oduced to another guy, whom he wound up talking to for much of that evening. The man stuck out a hand in an elbow-length black satin glove and said in a deep voice, “Hi, I’m Cathy.”
He had a good, strong handshake. He was a tall, squarish man in a houndstooth skirt and a puffy silk blouse the faintly yellowish color of a white key on a very old piano. He wore black hose and white peep-toe slingbacks he must have thought matched the blouse, a quiet string of pearls, and a wig of waxy black hair in a China-chop style, chin length on the sides with straight, tight bangs, like Louise Brooks.
“Beautiful place, isn’t it,” said Cathy. Derek noticed that Cathy had missed a spot shaving that day; there was a line of tiny mustache hairs just under his nostrils.
“Oh, yes,” said Derek. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Ken did all this himself,” said Cathy. “Really dynamite work. Ken is a detail-oriented kind of guy. There’s a guy who sweats the details. I can imagine the hell he must have put the contractors through.”
It turned out that Cathy was also an architect, a friend of Ken’s from “way back,” as she put it, “way way back.”
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 22