The Illusionist (8 page)

Slowly, I slid my hand down to the place between his legs, but he grabbed my wrist, as he always did when I tried to touch him there, and he brought my hand up again.

Now I inched my head down, took each of his nipples in my mouth, flicking them with my tongue, licking him there til his skin was wet. There was a low, moaning sound in the back of his throat.

Abruptly, he sat up in the bed and jerked his body away from me. Then he lay down on his back again. He arched his hips above the mattress, and he thrust his own hand down and dug it between his legs.

*  *  *

Later, as I was drifting off to sleep, I felt him get out of bed, the mattress tilting down to my side, the breath of cold air, and I heard him go into the main room. I roused myself, forced myself to climb out of the bed and I followed him.

He was sitting in the middle of the room at the round oak table. It was warm here, warm inside the house from the woodstove, which was still burning. But outside, the wind was blowing, I felt the house rattling. In the other room, Bobby slept through.

Dean took a pack of cigars and a bag of reefer from his backpack. He sliced open one of the cigars with his nail and unrolled the skin from around it, emptied out the tobacco, and repacked the cigar skin with weed. He sealed the skin down with his tongue, then lit up and offered the thing to me.

“No, I don't do that.” Drugs always frightened me, losing control. And the evil it did to people in Sparta.

“As an experiment,” he said. “See what happens.”

He looked at me with those liquid eyes, the deep light shining within them. His cheeks were red, windburned from playing outside with Bobby. He had given Bobby a good run today. He smiled. “Good for fucking,” he said. “We're not going anywhere.”

Bobby in bed, safe, asleep. I took the blunt from him. I'd tried it once or twice, and as then, when I inhaled the smoke burned my throat, and I started choking and my chest hurt and my throat burned.

“Try again,” he said. “One more time. Once your throat's a little burned, you don't feel it as much the next time. Makes it like scar tissue.”

I inhaled again, and this time the smoke went right down into my lungs. I could feel the stuff begin to permeate my body, softening my limbs, and I let out a little laugh. I wasn't really high, but just the gesture of inhaling had giving me a new license.

“I want to see you naked,” I told him.

The smile disappeared from his face. He took another puff on the blunt. “Can't,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

“C'mon!”

“Sorry.”

“But why? You see
me!
I'm not afraid. It's not fair.”

I giggled, and I leaned over and pulled down at the top of his jeans, but he jerked his body away from me, as if he were irritated.

“I want to,” I said.

“Please,” he said. “Stop.”

“Just tell me why. I love everything about you.”

He hesitated, composing his words. He opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it.

“I want to understand,” I said. Besides, there might be something even better, sexually, something we hadn't done that we could do now. And now, because of the dope, I could ask him.

“Please,” I begged. “You can tell me.”

He paused, studied me a moment as if planning how he would
put it. “See,” he said, “I wasn't born like other people.” He stopped. “I was born different.”

“You told me that. It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter to me.”

He sighed, and suddenly he looked tired. “It's more complicated,” he said.

“So. Tell me.”

“Hard to explain.”

“Try me.” I stood up from the table, walked over to his side, knelt down on my knees in front of him, and took his hand in mine. “Nothing'll make me stop loving you,” I whispered.

He hesitated. “I was born with both things,” he said. “As a man
and
a woman. On the outside, I
did
look like a girl, but inside I've got male organs. I don't have a uterus or a cervix—or whatever . . .”

He looked away, as if embarrassed for the first time. But he had nothing to be embarrassed about around me.

“Don't be afraid,” I said.

“My grandparents, they gave me money to have an operation.”

“An operation?”

“Yeah.” He wouldn't meet my eyes. “They take your thing and they make a—” He didn't finish describing it.

The thought of what they had done to him made me dig my knuckles into my eyesockets. “It hurts me to think about it!” I cried. I looked up at him again, seeing white, blind from the pressure on my eyeballs. “It's all done?” I asked him.

“Yeah, sort of.” Still not looking at me.

“So, why can't you—I mean—why can't I see you now?”

“They don't do it all at once. It isn't finished yet. I gotta save up money for the second half. They still have to do one more operation. I got the hormones now. That helps.”

“Hormones?”

“I take pills.”

The ones with the name of the drug blacked out, the
pharmacist's error, the name back to front. “I don't mind seeing you, whichever way it looks.”

He shook his head.

“I told you,” I said, “nothing about you can upset me.”

His face was drawn, shadows etched under his eyes, around his mouth. “But you're happy?” he asked, as if for reassurance. “This is the happiest you've ever been—right?” He was eager for me to say yes.

“Yeah.”

“So—why change things?” he asked.

“But
you
don't get any pleasure?”

“I do,” he said. “I get off watching you.”

Dec. 1. Sometimes it is as if all the cells in my body are singing, I am all cleaned out. . . . I worry that all our lovemaking is just for me . . . but then I cannot think about it when he does it to me. . . . I go to work and I cannot concentrate I am a stranger just going through the motions. People have no idea though I guess that maybe Chrissie suspects. She keeps looking at me Dean if you are reading this it is okay because what I cannot tell you myself you will find here. . . . This is a message. . . .

During the day Dean and I went to work and, as usual, I left Bobby with my dad. All day long at the Nightingale Home, I moved through my tasks as if I were sleepwalking, thinking only of him, and I couldn't wait for four o'clock when I would return to him.

At night, after we'd had dinner, I'd hurry to put Bobby in bed, so we could be alone together, so we could make love.

I guess that during the day when I was at the Home, he wasn't showing up for work at the Laundercenter or something, because after he had been with me ten days or so, he got fired. They said he was late for work too much, and that sometimes he wasn't coming in at all.

So now Dean had no job, and I had to support him as well as
myself and Bobby, and that left almost nothing of my paycheck at the end of the week. But that was okay, I couldn't let him starve, I couldn't throw him out.

During the day, while I was working, he'd drive around in his truck looking for work. Sometimes he'd take Bobby with him, just to give my dad a break from baby-sitting.

And when I came home from work, he would be there waiting for me, and we could begin our secret life. As I made dinner, Dean would stare at me, wouldn't take his eyes off me, a faint smile on his lips, like he was sending me a message, teasing me.

But it was always for me, not him. He'd never let me touch him there. And after a while, I forgot to care because I was so lost in what he was doing to me.

He would prolong things, hold himself back, his hand, his tongue—stretch it out until I was in pain wanting it, until it was torture and I'd be begging him, please please and he'd laugh at me and my agony. Everything focused on this place, or that, my breasts, between my legs. Then he'd take pity on me, and it would all come together like a wild storm.

*  *  *

We were like a little family, he and I and Bobby. On Saturday, we'd go into town to Food Mart and do all our shopping, and then we'd go to Uncle Dom's Pizza for lunch—a little family of Saturday morning shoppers, walking along the street surrounded by the warmth from our love. And sometimes we were so heavy with love, from what we had done the night before, that we could hardly speak, could only smile.

On Sunday, Dean would study his magic books for hours, concentrating on them while Bobby played on the floor at his feet.

Dean held a piece of string in his hand, looking from his book to the string and back again. There was a knot in it. He cut a piece from the string, then wound it around his hand.

“Pull it,” he said to me. I pulled, and suddenly the string was miraculously in one piece again and the knot had disappeared.

He made me choose four crayons from the box. “Don't let me see—hand one to me under the table. Don't let me see which one you picked.”

I handed the crayon to him, under the table, and he felt it without looking down. “Green,” he said.

When he took it out, of course, the crayon was green.

At night, he would rouse me from sleep to make love. And I was so tired, I didn't think I could do it, but I could, I could . . . and we'd go at it, the warm, damp smell of sleep filling the air around us in the tiny room. And I'd whisper, “What about you? This is all for me.”

“Doesn't matter,” he said, his breath fluttering on my cheek.

Dean was a jealous lover, too. One evening, Bobby was having his last few minutes of play before bed. I could see him through the door in his own room, kneeling on the floor in his blue feet pajamas, in front of his toy box, methodically removing his toys, one by one, and placing them on the floor.

I started washing the dishes. I was waiting, waiting for Bobby to be in bed . . . for Dean's and my time alone together. It was as if everything in my life was directed toward that time. Here I wanted my own son to go away.

I moved around the kitchen sink, conscious of my own body, of Dean's body across the room, of the special silence and stillness before we were drawn together.

Dean was studying my figure with his eyes, as if I were an object, and I was glad, because I knew he was imagining tonight, picturing himself making love to me.

After I finished the dishes, I began folding the laundry from the bag into little piles on the couch, smoothing each piece out with my hand. Dean's T-shirts, his jockeys. Bobby's little clothes, my panties and bra. All our clothes mixed together like a little family.

Dean had been watching me. Suddenly, he asked, “Was sex good with Eddie?”

“It was hardly even sex,” I said. That was the truth. Didn't
know it then, of course. I had thought there was something wrong with me, that I was just frozen that way, that what counted was the love I felt for Eddie, the spiritual feeling, and that maybe the other side, the physical feeling that I had read about in books, would come later. Or maybe that stuff I read in books was just an exaggeration.

“You think about Eddie much?” Dean asked.

“Never.”

“Who else've you been with besides Eddie?”

“No one. He was the first.”

“I think you're shitting me,” Dean said suddenly.

“Don't be crazy.” I laughed. This was funny. He knew he was the only one that mattered.

He sat forward, tense, over the round table, his eyes fixed on me. “Is there anyone else you're attracted to
now?
”

I laughed. “You're crazy!”

He didn't smile. “I'm serious.”

“How can you worry? Can't you tell the truth about the way I feel about you from—the way I am with you?”

He stood up from the table, strode across the room to the sink, where the little window faced out to the fields and the ridge of trees beyond. He was angry—I didn't understand why.

I stood by the couch, my hands frozen in the gesture of folding his T-shirt. I put the garment down, walked over to him by the window. I touched his cheek. “How can you worry?” I asked.

He jerked his body away from me.

“What's the matter?”

“Thinking about you with somebody else just makes me crazy!”

“What started this? We were having a nice time. Who said anything about anybody else?”

I had no one else, wanted no one else. He knew that. Was he just pretending—acting the way he thought you were supposed to act when you were in love?

I stood next to him, smoothing his hair down with the palm of my hand. But it stuck up in the air like baby hair, the cold made static electricity in everything. So I carried Bobby's clean laundry into his room, opened the door to the bureau, and folded it away.

Bobby walked up to Dean. The ends of his thin dark hair were damp and curled from his bath, his skin was all shiny. He was wearing his blue feet pajamas, carrying his
Runaway Bunny
book, and he held the book up to Dean. “Read!” Bobby commanded. Bobby usually didn't even have to say hardly anything to Dean, Dean would just scoop him up and do what he wanted. But now Dean pushed the book aside.

Bobby stood there, staring up at him, his lip trembling. Dean had never pushed him away like that before.

“C'mon, Bobby,” I said. “Mommy read it. Dean doesn't feel good. Let Dean alone now, honey.”

*  *  *

A half hour later, after I had finally gotten Bobby to sleep, and Dean and I were in our own bed, I turned to Dean, but he rolled away from me to the other side of the mattress. “What's the matter?” I asked.

He mumbled into the pillow, “Jealous.”

“But why? I don't get it. I love you. You
know
there's no one else.”

“I can't help it. It's the thought of it. . . . Let me be. Let me try and work it out.”