She gave a nod of such minimal proportions, it could have been a twitch. “I’m sorry.”
“Gee,” I said with thick sarcasm. “It’s kinda like a fairy tale, isn’t it?”
“It’s true!” She put a hand to her forehead, collecting herself. “When I meet someone new, I change. It’s confusing. I hardly know it’s happening, but I’m different afterward.”
I do not know what upset me more, the implication, however improbable, that she was a shapeshifter, capable of switching her sexual characteristics to please a partner, or the idea that she believed this. Either way, I found the situation intolerable. This is not to say I had lost my feelings for her, but I could no longer ignore the perverse constituency of her personality. I pushed up from the couch and started for the door.
Bianca cried out, “Don’t go!”
I glanced back to find her gazing mournfully at me. She was beautiful, but I could not relate to her beauty, only to the neurotic falsity I believed had created it.
“Don’t you understand?” she said. “For you, I’m who I want to be. I’m a woman. I can prove it!”
“That’s okay,” I said coldly, finally. “I’ve had more than enough proof.”
• • •
Things did not go well for me after that evening. The mural went well. Though I no longer approached the work with the passion I had formerly brought to it, every brushstroke seemed a contrivance of passion, to be the product of an emotion that continued to act through me despite the fact that I had forgotten how to feel it. Otherwise, my life at Diamond Bar became fraught with unpleasantness. Harry Colangelo, who had more or less vanished during my relationship with Bianca, once again began to haunt me. He would appear in the doorway of the anteroom while I was painting and stare venomously until I shouted at him. Inarticulate shouts like those you might use to drive a dog away from a garbage can. I developed back problems for which I was forced to take pain medication, and this slowed the progress of my work. Yet the most painful of my problems was that I missed Bianca, and there was no medication for this ailment. I was tempted to seek her out, to apologize for my idiocy in rejecting her, but was persuaded not to do so by behavioral reflexes that, though I knew them to be outmoded, having no relation to my life at the moment, I could not help obeying. Whenever an image of our time together would flash through my mind, immediately thereafter would follow some grotesquely sexual mockery of the image that left me confused and mortified.
I retreated into my work. I slept on the scaffolding, roused by the mysterious cry that like the call of some grievous religion announced each dawn. I lived on candy bars, peanut butter, crackers, and soda that I obtained at the commissary, and I rarely left the anteroom, keeping the door locked most of the days, venturing out only for supplies. When I woke I would see the mural surrounding me on every side, men with thick arms and cold white eyes pupiled with black suns, masses of them, clad in prison gray, crowded together on iron stairs (the sole architectural component of the design), many-colored faces engraved with desperation, greed, lust, rage, longing, bitterness, fear, muscling each other out of the way so as to achieve a clearer view of the unpainted resolution that overarched their suffering and violence. At times I thought I glimpsed in the mural—or underlying it—a cohesive element I had not foreseen, something created from me and not by me, a truth the work was teaching me, and in my weaker moments I supposed it to be the true purpose of Diamond Bar, still fragmentary and thus inexpressible; but I did not seek to analyze or clarify it—if it was there, then its completion was not dependent upon my understanding. Yet having apprehended this unknown value in my work forced me to confront the reality that I was of two minds concerning the prison. I no longer perceived our lives as necessarily being under sinister control, and I had come to accept the possibility that the board was gifted with inscrutable wisdom, the prison itself an evolutionary platform, a crucible devised in order to invest its human ore with a fresh and potent mastery, and I glided between these two poles of thought with the same rapid pendulum swing that governed my contrary attitudes toward Bianca.
From time to time the board would venture into the anteroom to inspect the mural and offer their mumbling approbation, but apart from them and occasional sightings of Causey and Colangelo, I received no other visitors. Then one afternoon about six weeks after ending the relationship, while painting high on the scaffolding, I sensed someone watching me; Bianca was standing in the doorway thirty feet below, wearing a loose gray prison uniform that hid her figure. Our stares locked for an instant, then she gestured at the walls and said, “This is beautiful.” She moved deeper into the room, ducking to avoid a beam, and let her gaze drift across the closely packed images. “Your sketches weren’t…” She looked up at me, brushed strands of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t realize you were so accomplished.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, so overcome by emotion that I was unable to react to what she had said, only to what I was feeling.
She gave a brittle laugh. “Sorry that you’re good? Don’t be.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No…not really. I thought by coming here I would, but I don’t.” She struck a pose against the mural, standing with her back to it, her right knee drawn up, left arm extended above her head. “I suppose I’ll be portrayed like this.”
It was so quiet I could hear a faint humming, the engine of our tension.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“I’m glad you did.”
“If you’re so glad, why are you standing up there?”
“I’ll come down.”
“And yet,” she said after a beat, “still you stand there.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Do you want me to lie? The only reason I can think of for you to ask that is you want me to lie. You know how I’ve been. I’ve been heartbroken.” She ran a hand along one of the beams and examined her palm as if mindful of dust or a splinter. “I won’t ask the same question. I know how you’ve been. You’ve been conflicted. And now you look frightened.”
I felt encased in some cold unyielding substance, like a souvenir of life preserved in lucite.
“Why don’t you talk to me?” She let out a chillier laugh. “Explain yourself.”
“Jesus, Bianca. I just didn’t understand what was going on.”
“So it was an intellectual decision you made? A reaction to existential confusion?”
“Not entirely.”
“I was making a joke.” She strolled along the wall and stopped to peer at one of the faces.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “What you told me…How can you believe it?”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I think there’s drugs in the food…in the air. Or something. There has to be a mechanism involved. Some sort of reasonable explanation.”
“For what? My insanity?” She backed against the wall in order to see me better. “This is so dishonest of you.”
“How’s it dishonest?”
“You were happier thinking I was a post-operative transsexual? It’s my irrational beliefs that drove you away? Please!” She fiddled with the ends of her hair. “Suppose what I told you is true. Suppose who I am with you is who you want me to be. Who I want to be. Would that be more unpalatable than if my sex was the result of surgery?”
“But it’s not true.”
“Suppose it is.” She folded her arms, waiting.
“I don’t guess it would matter. But that’s not…”
“Now suppose just when we’re starting to establish something strong, you rip it apart?” A quaver crept into her voice. “What would that make you?”
“Bianca…”
“It’d make you a fool! But then of course I’m living in a drug-induced fantasy that causes you existential confusion.”
“Whatever the case,” I said, “I probably am a fool.”
It was impossible to read her face at that distance, but I knew her expression was shifting between
anger and despair.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“God! What’s wrong with you?” She stalked to the door, paused in the entrance; she stood without speaking for what seemed a very long time, looking down at the floor, then glanced sideways up at me. “I was going to prove something to you today, but I can see proving it would frighten you even more. You have to learn to accept things, Tommy, or else you won’t be able to do your time. You’re not deceiving anyone except yourself.”
“I’m deceiving myself? Now that’s a joke!”
She waved at the mural. “You think what you’re painting is a lie. Don’t deny it. You think it’s a con you’re running on us. But when I leave it’ll be the only thing in the room that’s still alive.” She stepped halfway through the door, hesitated and, in a voice that was barely audible, said, “Goodbye, Tommy.”
• • •
I experienced a certain relief after Bianca’s visit, an emotion bred by my feeling that now the relationship was irretrievably broken, and I could refocus my attention on escape; but my relief was short-lived. It was not simply that I was unable to get Bianca out of my thoughts, or even that I continued to condemn myself both for abandoning her and for having involved myself with her in the first place—it was as if I were engaged in a deeper struggle, one whose nature was beyond my power to discern, though I assumed my attitudes toward Bianca contributed to its force. Because I was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to face it, this irresolvable conflict began to take a toll. I slept poorly and turned to drink as a remedy. Many days I painted drunk, but drunkenness had no deleterious effect on the mural—if anything, it sharpened my comprehension of what I was about. I redid the faces on the lower portions of the walls, accentuating their beastliness, contrasting them with more human faces above, and I had several small technical breakthroughs that helped me create the luminous intensity I wanted for the upper walls. The nights, however, were not so good. I went to wandering again, armed against self-recrimination and the intermittent appearances of Harry Colangelo with a bottle of something, usually home brew of recent vintage. Frequently I became lost in the sub-basements and wound up passed out on the floor. During one of these wanders, I noticed I was a single corridor removed from the habitat of the plumes, and this time, not deceiving myself as to motive, I headed for the white door. I had no wish to find Bianca. I was so debased in spirit, the idea of staining my flesh to match enticed me, and when I pushed into the entryway and heard loud rock and roll and saw that the halation surrounding the light fixtures had thickened into an actual mist that caused men and plumes to look like fantastical creatures, gray demons and their gaudy, grotesque mistresses, I plunged happily into the life of the place, searching for the most degrading encounter available.
Her name was Joy, a Los Angeleno by birth, and when I saw her dancing in the club with several men under a spotlight that shined alternately purple and rose, she seemed the parody of a woman. Not that she was unfeminine, not in the least. She was Raphaelesque, like an old-fashioned Hollywood blond teetering on the cusp between beauty and slovenly middle-age, glossy curls falling past her shoulders, the milky loaves of her breasts swaying ponderously in gray silk, her motherly buttocks dimpling beneath a tight skirt, her scarlet lips reminiscent of those gelatin lips full of cherry syrup you buy at Halloween, her eyes tunnels of mascara pricked by glitters. Drunk, I saw her change as the light changed. Under the purple she whitened, grew soft as ice cream, ultimately malleable; she would melt around you. Under the rose, a she-devilish shape emerged; her touch would make you feverish, infect you with a genital heat. I moved in on her, and because I had achieved an elevated status due to my connection with the board, the men dancing with her moved aside. Her fingers locked in my hair, her swollen belly rolled against me with the sodden insistence of a sea thing pushed by a tide. Her mouth tasted of liqueur and I gagged on her perfume, a scent of candied flowers. She was in every regard overpowering, like a blond rhinoceros. “What’s the party for?” I shouted above the music. She laughed and cupped both hands beneath her breasts, offering them to me, and as I squeezed, manipulating their shapes, her eyelids drooped and her hips undulated. She pulled my head close and told me what she wanted me to do, what she would do.
Whereas sex with Bianca had been nuanced, passion cored with sensitivity, with Joy it was rutting, tumultuous, a jungle act, all sweat and insanity, pounding and meaty, and when I came I felt I was deflating, every pure thing spurting out of me, leaving a sack of bones and organic stink lying between her Amazon thighs. We fucked a second time with her on top. I twisted her nipples hard, like someone spinning radio dials, and throwing back her head she spat up great yells, then braced both hands on the pillow beside my head and hammered down onto me, her mouth slack, lips glistening with saliva poised an inch above mine, grunting and gasping. Then she straightened, arched her back, her entire body quaking, and let out a hideous groan followed by a string of profane syllables. Afterward she sat in a chair at her dressing table wearing a black bra and panties, legs crossed, attaching a stocking to her garter belt, posing an image that was to my eyes grossly sexual, repellently voluptuous, obscenely desirable. As she stretched out her leg, smoothing ripples in the silk, she said, “You used to be Bianca’s friend.”
I did not deny it.
“She’s crazy about you, y’know.”
“Is she here? At the party?”
“You don’t need her tonight,” Joy said. “You already got everything you needed.”
“Is she here?”
She shook her head. “You won’t be seeing her around for a while.”
I mulled over this inadequate answer and decided not to pursue it.
Joy put on her other stocking. “You’re still crazy about her. I’m a magnet for guys in love with other women.” She admired the look of her newly stockinged leg. “It’s not so bad. Sad guys fuck like they have something to prove.”
“Is that right?”
“You were trying to prove something, weren’t you?”
“Probably not what you think.”
She adjusted her breasts, settling them more cozily in the brassiere. “Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to prove.” She turned to the mirror, went to touching up her lipstick, her speech becoming halting as she wielded the applicator. “I am…expert in these matters…like all…ladies of the evening.”
“Is that how you see yourself?”
She made a kissy mouth at her reflection. “There’s something else in me, I think, but I haven’t found the man who can bring it out.” She adopted a thoughtful expression. “I could be very domestic with the right person. Very nurturing. Once the new wing’s finished…I’m sure I’ll find him then.”
“There’ll be real women living in the new wing. Lots of competition.”
“We’re the real women,” she said with more than a hint of irritation. “We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there. Some of us are there already. You should know. Bianca’s living proof.”
Unwilling to explore this or any facet of this consensus fantasy, I changed the subject. “So, what’s your story?” I asked.
“You mean my life story? Do you care?”
“I’m just making conversation.”
“We had our conversation, sweetie. We just didn’t talk all that much.”
“I wasn’t finished.”
She looked at me over her shoulder, arching an eyebrow. “My, my. You must really have something to prove.” She rested an elbow on the back of the chair. “Maybe you should go hunt up Bianca.” It was a thought, but one I had grown accustomed to rejecting. I reached down beside the bed, groping for my bottle. The liquor seemed to have an immediate effect, increasing my capacity for rejection. The colors of the room were smeary, as if made from different shades of lipstick. Joy looked slug-white and bloated, a sickly exuberance of flesh strangled by black lace, the monstrous ikon of a German Expressionist wet dream.
She gave what I took for a deprecating laugh. “Sure, we
can converse some more if you want.” She started to unhook her brassiere.
“Leave that shit on,” I said. “I’ll work around it.”
• • •
Not long after my night with Joy, a rumor began to circulate that one of the plumes had become pregnant, and when I discovered that the plume in question was Bianca, I tried to find her. I gave the rumor little credit. Yet she had claimed she could prove something to me, and thus I could not completely discredit it. I was unsure how I would react if the rumor reflected the truth, but what chance was there of that? My intention was to debunk the rumor. I would be doing her a favor by forcing her to face reality. That, at any rate, is what I told myself. When I was unable to track her down, informed that she was sequestered, I decided the rumor must be a ploy designed to win me back. I abandoned my search, and once again focused my energy upon the mural. Though a third of the walls remained unfinished, I now had a more coherent idea of the figures that would occupy the dome, and I was eager to finalize the conception. Despite this vitality of purpose, I felt bereft, dismally alone, and when Richard Causey came to visit, I greeted him effusively, offering him refreshment from my store of junk food. Unlike my other visitors, he had almost nothing to say about the mural, and as we ate on the lowest platform of the scaffolding, it became obvious that he was preoccupied. His eyes darted about; he cracked his knuckles and gave indifferent responses to everything I said. I asked what was on his mind and he told me he had stumbled upon an old tunnel beneath the lowest of the sub-basements. The door leading to it was wedged shut and would take two people to pry open. He believed there might be something significant at the end of the tunnel.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I ran across some papers in the archives. Letters, documents. They suggested the tunnel led to the heart of the law.” He appeared to expect me to speak, but I was chewing. “I figured you might want to have a look,” he went on. “Seeing that’s what you’re painting about.”
I worried that Causey might want to get me alone and finish what he had started years before; but my interest was piqued, and after listening for several minutes more, I grew convinced that his interest in the tunnel was purely academic. To be on the safe side, I brought along a couple of the chisels I used to scrape the walls—they would prove useful in unwedging the door as well. Though it was nearly three in the morning, we headed down into the sub-basements, joined briefly by Colangelo, who had been sleeping in the corridor outside the anteroom. I brandished a chisel and he retreated out of sight.
Eternity and Other Stories Page 33