The Illusionist (3 page)

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.”

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.

“So—I'm fifteen,” he continued, “and this girl calls the house. It's a wrong number—but she thinks I'm a guy. We start talking, and we make a date to go RollerBlading, and the whole time she thinks I'm a boy.

“I start shaving to make my beard grow in, so it'll be all bristly, and my mom sees this, but my dad's pretending nothing's happening. I tell my parents I want them to call me Dean. But it's like my dad just doesn't hear it. My mom starts trying to obey me, but she can't make herself do it. I can feel my mom watching me now, her eyes all full of sorrow. And meanwhile, my brother Raymond is dropping out of school, and he's hanging out and getting drunk and doesn't come home at night.

“One day, I'm in the bathroom shaving myself, and I look at myself in the mirror, and I'm still seeing traces of girl there from the deformity. I see this face, and I'm afraid that nothing can get rid of that girl stuff that doesn't belong there. Maybe it'll never go away, and it'll always be like this, this shadow of a girl there.

“And so I just start crying. And my mom hears me, and knocks on the bathroom door. She sees me standing there with the razor in my hand. ‘Honey, honey,' she says, and she just—holds me. ‘Oh God,' she says, ‘It's so hard.' And it's like she knows the truth now, and how I'm suffering, and she starts to cry too.

“She sits down next to me there on the hall floor, and she says, ‘If it's gonna cause you so much suffering, then maybe you should live as a boy,' and from then on, she tolerates me, and doesn't try to change me, and my dad continues to pretend there's nothing weird going on.”

He started dating a girl. He had had other girlfriends before, he said, but he and this girl were really in love. She was beautiful, he said, his ideal, a cheerleader. She loved him, but they didn't have sex like other people. One reason the girl loved him, Dean said, was that he didn't hit on her like every other guy.

But then one day this other girl he'd gone out with—before the cheerleader—she called his present girlfriend, and laid it on her,
told her that Dean was really a female. And the cheerleader just went crazy! She turned on Dean, called him a freak. “She said I disgusted her, and she never wanted to lay eyes on me again as long as she lived.”

Dean paused here in his story. I saw his eyes fill with tears. “You don't have to talk about it,” I said. I couldn't bear to see him cry, because then all his efforts to be a boy would come to nothing, and he would be naked in front of me.

Dean took a swallow, and continued. “
Then
I cried,” he said. “Like a fuckin' girl. I didn't even want to go on living anymore. Her name was Sharon. Fuckin' cheerleader—Princess Normal. Now she tells me I'm a sicko, a lesbo, and I tell her I'm not a lesbian!

“She breaks up with me, and I just want to die. I swallow a whole bottle of antibiotics and they put me in the state hospital for thirty days. I tell the doctor I'm not a girl!” Dean drew his head back, mimicked the doctor's pompous voice, “ ‘Miss Dean,' he says, ‘I think this is what we call a crisis of sexual identity.' ”

Here Dean spluttered with laughter. “Fuckin' A it is!” he cried. “It's a fuckin' crisis for him. But it ain't no crisis for
me!
”