Three levels down from the main walls were dozens of rooms—bedchambers, a communal kitchen, common rooms, and so forth—an area accessed by a double door painted white and bearing a carved emblem that appeared to represent a sheaf of plumes, this the source of the name given to those who dwelled within. Much of the space had the sterile decor of a franchise hotel: carpeted corridors with benches set into walls whose patterned discolorations brought to mind art nouveau flourishes. The common rooms were furnished with sofas and easy chairs and filled with soft music whose melodies were as unmemorable as an absent caress. No barred gates, just wooden doors. The lighting was dim, every fixture limned by a faint halation, giving the impression that the air was permeated by a fine mist. I felt giddy on entering the place, as if I had stood up too quickly. Nerves, I assumed, because I felt giddier yet when I caught sight of my first plume, a slim blond attired in a short gray dress with spaghetti straps. She had none of the telltale signs of a transvestite or a transsexual. Her hands and feet were small, her nose and mouth delicately shaped, her figure not at all angular. After she vanished around a corner, I remembered she was a man, and that recognition bred abhorrence and self-loathing in me. I turned, intending to leave, and bumped into another plume who had been about to walk past me from behind. A willowy brunette with enormous dark eyes, dressed in the same fashion as the blond, her mouth thinned in exasperation. Her expression softened as she stared at me. I suppose I gaped at her. The memory of how I behaved is impaired by the ardor with which I was studying her, stunned by the air of sweet intelligence generated when she smiled. Her face was almost unmarked by time—I imagined her to be in her late twenties—and reminded me of the faces of madonnas in Russian ikons: long and pale and solemn, wide at the cheekbones, with an exaggerated arch to the eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes. Her hair fell straight and shining onto her back. There was nothing sluttish or coarse about her; on the contrary, she might have been a graduate student out for an evening on the town, a young wife preparing to meet her husband’s employer, an ordinary beauty in her prime. I tried to picture her as a man but did not succeed in this, claimed instead by the moment.
“Are you trying to find someone?” she asked. “You look lost.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just walking…looking around.”
“Would you like me to give you the tour?” She put out her right hand to be shaken. “I’m Bianca.”
The way she extended her arm straight out, assertive yet graceful, hand angled down and inward a bit, it was so inimitably a female gesture, devoid of the frilliness peculiar to the gestures of men who pretend to be women, it convinced me on some core level of her femininity, and my inhibitions fell away. As we strolled, she pointed out the features of the place. A bar where the ambience of a night club was created by red and purple spotlights that swept over couples dancing together; a grotto hollowed out from the rock with a pool in which several people were splashing one another; a room where groups of men and plumes were playing cards and shooting pool. During our walk, I told Bianca my life story in brief, but when I asked about hers, she said, “I didn’t exist before I came to Diamond Bar.” Then, perhaps because she noticed disaffection in my face, she added, “That sounds overly dramatic, I know. But it’s more or less true. I’m very different from how I used to be.”
“That’s true of everyone here. The thinking you do about the past, it can’t help but change you.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said.
At length she ushered me into a living room cozily furnished in the manner of a bachelorette apartment and insisted I take a seat on the sofa, then went through a door into the next room, reappearing seconds later carrying a tray on which were glasses and a bottle of red wine. She sat beside me, and as she poured the wine I watched her breasts straining against the gray bodice, the soft definition of her arms, the precise articulation of the muscles at the corners of her mouth. The wine, though a touch bitter, put me at ease, but my sense of a heated presence so near at hand sparked conflicting feelings, and I was unable to relax completely. I told myself that I did not want intimacy, yet that was patently untrue. I had been without a woman for three years, and even had I been surrounded by women during that time, Bianca would have made a powerful impression. The more we talked, the more she revealed of herself, not the details of her past, but the particularity of her present; her quiet laugh, a symptom—it seemed—of ladylike restraint; the grave consideration she gave to things I said; the serene grace of her movements. There was an aristocratic quality to her personal style, a practiced, almost ritual caution. Only after learning that I was the one painting a mural in the new wing did she betray the least excitement, and even her excitement was colored with restraint. She leaned toward me, hands clasped in her lap, and her smile broadened, as if my achievement, such as it was, made her proud.
“I wish I could do something creative,” she said wistfully at one point. “I don’t think I’ve got it in me.”
“Creativity’s like skin color. Everyone’s got some.”
She made a sad moue. “Not me.”
“I’ll teach you to draw if you want. Next time I’ll bring a sketch pad, some pencils.”
She traced the stem of her wine glass with a forefinger. “That would be nice…if you come back.”
“I will,” I told her.
“I don’t know.” She said this distantly, then straightened, sitting primly on the edge of the sofa. “I can tell you don’t think it would be natural between us.”
I offered a reassurance, but she cut me off, saying, “It’s all right. I understand it’s strange for you. You can’t accept that I’m natural.” She let her eyes hold on my face for a second, then lowered her gaze to the wine glass. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to accept, but I am, you know.”
I thought she was saying that she was post-operative, yet because she spoke with such offhanded conviction and not the hysteria-tinged defiance of a prison bitch, I also wondered, against logic, if she might be telling the truth and was a woman in every meaning of the word. She came to her feet and stepped around the coffee table and stood facing me. “I want to show you,” she said. “Will you let me show you?”
The mixture of shyness and seductiveness she exhibited in slipping out of her dress was completely natural, redolent of a woman who knew she was beautiful yet was not certain she would be beautiful enough to please a new man, and when she stood naked before me, I could not call to mind a single doubt as to her femininity, all my questions answered by high, small breasts and long legs evolving from the milky curve of her belly. She seemed the white proof of a sensual absolute, and the one thought that separated itself out from the thoughtlessness of desire was that here might be the central figure in my mural.
During the night that followed, nothing Bianca did in any way engaged my critical faculties. I had no perch upon which a portion of my mind stood and observed. It was like all good nights passed with a new lover, replete with tenderness and awkwardness and intensity. I spent every night for the next five weeks with her, teaching her to draw, talking, making love, and when I was in her company, no skepticism concerning the rightness of the relationship entered in. The skepticism that afflicted me when we were apart was ameliorated by the changes that knowing her brought to my work. I came to understand that the mural should embody a dynamic vertical progression from darkness and solidity to brightness and evanescence. The lower figures would be, as I had envisioned, heavy and stylized, but those above demanded to be rendered impressionistically, gradually growing less and less defined, until at the dome, at the heart of the law, they became creatures of light. I reshaped the design accordingly and set to work with renewed vigor, though I did not put in so many hours as before, eager each night to return to Bianca. I cannot say I neglected the analytic side of my nature—I continued to speculate on how she had become a woman. In exploring her body I had found no surgical scars, nothing to suggest such an invasive procedure as would be necessary to effect the tr
ansformation, and in her personality I perceived no masculine defect. She was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what she appeared: a young woman who, albeit experienced with men, had retained a certain innocence that I believed she was yielding up to me.
When I mentioned Bianca to Causey, he said, “See, I told ya.”
“Yeah, you told me. So what’s up with them?”
“The plumes? There’s references to them in the archives, but they’re vague.”
I asked him to elaborate, and he said all he knew was that the criteria by which the plumes were judged worthy of Diamond Bar was different from that applied to the rest of the population. The process by which they entered the prison, too, was different—they referred to it as the Mystery, and there were suggestions in the archival material that it involved a magical transformation. None of the plumes would discuss the matter other than obliquely. This seemed suggestive of the pathological myths developed by prison queens to justify their femininity, but I refused to let it taint my thoughts concerning Bianca. Our lives had intertwined so effortlessly, I began to look upon her as my companion. I recognized that if my plans for escape matured I would have to leave her, but rather than using this as an excuse to hold back, I sought to know her more deeply. Every day brought to light some new feature of her personality. She had a quiet wit that she employed with such subtlety, I sometimes did not realize until after the fact that she had been teasing me; and she possessed a stubborn streak that, in combination with her gift for logic, made her a formidable opponent in any argument. She was especially fervent in her defense of the proposition that Diamond Bar manifested the principle from which the form of the human world had been struck, emergent now, she liked to claim, for a mysterious yet ultimately beneficent reason.
In the midst of one such argument, she became frustrated and said, “It’s not that you’re a non-conformist, it’s like you’re practicing non-conformity to annoy everyone. You’re being childish!”
“Am not!” I said.
“I’m serious! It’s like with your attitude toward Ernst.” A book of Max Ernst prints, one of many art books she had checked out of the library, was resting on the coffee table. She gave it an angry tap. “Of all the books I bring home, this is the one you like best. You leaf through it all the time. But when I tell you I think he’s great, you…”
“He’s a fucking poster artist.”
“Then why look at his work every single night?”
“He’s easy on the eyes. That doesn’t mean he’s worth a shit. It just means his stuff pacifies you.”
She gave her head a rueful shake.
“We’re not talking about Max Ernst, anyway,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter what we talk about. Any subject it’s the same. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you’re here. In prison. You say the reason you started doing crime was due to your problems with authority, but I don’t see that in you. It’s there, I guess, but it doesn’t seem that significant. I can’t imagine you did crime simply because you wanted to spit in the face of authority.”
“It wasn’t anything deep, okay? It’s not like I had an abusive childhood or my father ran off with his secretary. None of that shit. I’m a fuck-up. Crime was my way of fucking up.”
“There must be something else! What appealed to you about it?”
“The thing I liked best,” I said after giving the question a spin, “was sitting around a house I broke into at three in the morning, thinking how stupid the owners were for letting a mutt like me mess with their lives.”
“And here you are, in a truly strange house, thinking we’re all stupid.”
The topic was making me uncomfortable. “We’re always analyzing my problems. Let’s talk about you for a change. Why don’t you confide your big secrets so we can run ’em around the track a few times?”
A wounded expression came to her face. “The reason I haven’t told you about my life is because I don’t think you’re ready to handle it.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
She leaned back against the cushions and folded her arms, stared at the coffee table. “That’s not it…altogether.”
“So you don’t trust me and there’s more. Great.” I made a show of petulance, only partly acting it.
“I can’t tell you some things.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I can’t!” Her anger didn’t seem a show, but it faded quickly. “You crossed the river to come here. We have to cross our own river. It’s different from yours.”
“The Mystery.”
She looked surprised, and I told her what I had learned from Causey.
“He’s right,” she said. “I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”
“Why? It’s like a vow or something?”
“Or something.” She relaxed her stiff posture. “The rest of it…I’m ashamed. When I look back, I can’t believe I was so disreputable. Be patient, all right? Please?”
“You, too,” I said.
“I am patient. I just enjoy arguing too much.”
I put my hand beneath her chin, trying to jolly her. “If you want, we can argue some more.”
“I want to win,” she said, smiling despite herself.
“Everything’s like you say. Diamond Bar’s heaven on fucking earth. The board’s…”
“I don’t want you to give in!” She pushed me onto my back and lay atop me. “I want to break you down and smash your flimsy defenses!”
Her face, poised above me, bright-eyed and soft, lips parted, seemed oddly predatory, like that of a hungry dove. “What were we arguing about?” I asked.
“Everything,” she said, and kissed me. “You, me, life. Max Ernst.”
• • •
One day while drinking a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, taking a break from work, I entered into a casual conversation with a dour redheaded twig of a man named Phillip Stringer, an ex-arsonist who had recently moved from the eighth tier into the old wing. He mentioned that he had seen me with Bianca a few nights previously. “She’s a reg’lar wild woman!” he said. “You touch her titties, you better hold on, ’cause the next thing it’s like you busting out of chute number three on Mustang Sally!”
Though giving and enthusiastic in sex, Bianca’s disposition toward the act impressed me as being on the demure side of “reg’lar wild woman.” Nevertheless, I withheld comment.
“She was too wild for me,” Stringer went on. “It’s not like I don’t enjoy screwing chicks with dicks. Truth is, I got a thing for ’em. But when they got a bigger dick’n I got…guess I felt a tad intimidated.”
“Hell are you talking about?” I asked.
He gazed at me in bewilderment. “The plume I saw you with. Bianca.”
“You’re fucked up, man! She doesn’t have a dick.”
“You think that, you never seen a dick. Thing’s damn near wide around as a Coke can!”
“You got the wrong girl,” I told him, growing irritated.
Stringer glowered at me. “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know who the hell I’m screwing.”
“Then you’re a goddamn liar,” I said.
If it had been another time, another prison, we would have been rolling around on the floor, thumbing eyes and throwing knees, but the placid offices of Diamond Bar prevailed, and Stringer dialed back his anger, got to his feet. “I been with that bitch must be fifty times, and I’m telling you she gets hard enough to bang nails with that son-of-a-bitch. She goes to bouncing up and down, moaning, ‘Only for you…’ All kindsa sweet shit. You close your eyes, you’d swear you’s with a woman. But you grab a peek and see that horse cock waggling around, it’s just more’n I can handle.” He hitched up his trousers. “You better get yourself an adjustment, pal. You spending way too much time on that painting of yours.”
If it were not for the phrase “only for you,” I would have disregarded what Stringer said. Indeed, I did disregard most of it. But that phrase, wh
ich Bianca habitually breathed into my ear whenever she drew near her moment, seeded me with paranoia, and that night as we sat on the sofa, going over the charcoal sketches she had done of her friends, I repeated the essence of Stringer’s words, posing them as a joke. Bianca displayed no reaction, continuing to study one of the sketches.
“Hear what I said?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I guess I thought you’d say something, this guy going around telling everybody you got a dick.”
She set down the sketchpad and looked at me glumly. “I haven’t been with Phillip for nearly two years.”
It took me a moment to interpret this. “I guess it’s been such a long time he mixed you up with somebody.”
The vitality drained from her face. “No.”
“Then what the fuck are you saying?”
“When I was with Phillip, I was different from the way I am with you.”
Irritated by the obliqueness with which she was framing her responses, I said, “You telling me you had a dick when you were seeing him?”
“Yes.”
Hearing this did not thrill me, but I had long since dealt with it emotionally. “So after that you had the operation?”
“No.”
“No? What? You magically lost your dick?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do! Hell are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m not sure how it happens…it just does! Whatever the man wants, that’s how I am. It’s like that with all the plumes…until you find the right person. The one you can be who you really are with.”
I struggled to make sense of this. “So you’re claiming a guy comes along wanting you to have a dick, you grow one?”
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