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  “It might also help you to realize that transsexuals can be suicidal over a long timespan. Convinced they’re trapped in the wrong body, it’s not a problem they can resolve as easily as a job they dislike. They’re constantly at war with themselves, and with the perceptions of what their families and society expect them to be. Not all of them can shoulder that kind of burden for long.”

  Gary leaned against the window. “Lana didn’t much care what anybody on the outside thought. She had her friends in the same subculture, these people she hung out with at some under ground club called The Fringe. That seemed all the acceptance she needed.”

  “I know. She was very stable in that respect.”

  Gary turned from the window to glare “Lana wanted to have children with me. Does that sound very stable to you? The biggest miracle since the Immaculate Conception?” He shook his head, his voice hoarse. “How could you approve her final surgery under those conditions?”

  Dr. Thatcher smiled gently. She was good at that—years of practice, she reasoned. “Because it wasn’t a delusion. She wanted it desperately, but I never felt she for a moment believed it possible. Other than that, she was one of the most psychologically sound candidates for complete gender reassignment I’ve ever counseled.”

  Gary slid along the wall, idly stopping to tinker with the fronds of a fern. To straighten a Willem de Kooning print, level to begin with. Gradually easing back to the chair.

  “She had this dream of perfection. Once she was healed from the surgery, everything was going to be perfect. Kept saying, ‘We’ll be wonderful, everything’ll be perfect, as soon as I get my pussy everything’ll be perfect.’”

  “That’s another thing, Gary. Transsexuals often have an unattainable ideal of perfection. Just as an anorexic sees herself as continually too heavy. Transsexuals are sometimes never satisfied with the results, particularly with the male-to-female procedure. They can go through years of cosmetic operations trying to reach a pinnacle of femininity. That hope can be all that keeps them going.”

  “What happens if the hope runs out?”

  Thatcher flexed her fingers, rested composed hands atop her desk. “Sometimes they kill themselves then.” A pause. “You have to realize that Lana’s emotions would not necessarily have stabilized after the vaginoplasty. That perfection might’ve been one more operation away. Or another. Or the next. Your continued presence in her life would not have been her salvation … because it had no bearing on her self-image.”

  Gary rummaged his hands through his hair until it stuck out in mad winglets. Maybe he could shave it off, buzz it to stubble, the rudely bared head a sign of penance. He was finding absolution tough to come by here. This was like a hydra. Hack off the head of one source of guilt, and another one or two would sprout to take its place. Timing, maybe it had all been horrid timing

  Dr. Thatcher shifted in her chair, seeming to sense his reluctance to forgive himself. “Why don’t we go back, focus on the beginning of your relationship and see what it was founded on? Because you say you made no promises of permanence. How did you meet her?”

  Gary frowned. “I’d have thought she would’ve told you that.”

  “She did. I’m interested in seeing how you perceive it.”

  Gary settled back, absently scratching at his chest, stomach. Itchy under his shirt. Maybe a rash, guilt surfacing in somatic symptoms. His nipples ached. There, Dr. Thatcher, rethink your rejection of traditional Freudian symbolism in light of that.

  “I met her in a bar near the French Quarter, four months ago. A straight bar, not one of the places where the transvestites and the sex-changers usually hang out.” He wet his lips; drymouth was coming on, “Hell, how does anybody meet in a bar? We made eye contact, started talking. I thought she was gorgeous. Sure, there was something different about her, something exotic, but I never would’ve guessed. Later I found out she’d been on daily estrogen for over a year, had her breasts and the smooth skin. Her voice seemed natural enough. She’d been living totally inside her female identity all that time. Already gotten rid of facial and body hair with electrolysis. How could I have known?”

  Dr. Thatcher nodded. “She was extremely convincing.”

  We danced, and started fooling around. Pretty soon we went out back, into this alley doorway, and she, she performed oral sex on me.”

  For no more reaction than Thatcher showed, he might as well have been describing a trick knee. “And did you initiate sexual contact with her?”

  “I tried to. She said it was her period. We went our separate ways that night. But I … I went back the next night, same place, hoping she’d be there. And she was.” Gary smiled, bittersweet, “We got drunk, and she went home to my hotel with me. The sex was the same, though, she said it was still her period.”

  “When did you find out the truth?”

  “The next morning. We were taking a shower. See, she had this trick. She’d push each ball up into her pelvic cavity, then stretch her cock back between her legs and sort of keep it wedged between the bottom of her ass muscles. We were in bed, naked … and I didn’t know.”

  “Until the shower. The act of coming clean.”

  “The shower.” Only now did he start to flush. “Lana said she had a secret to share with me, and she thought I was ready. She squatted down and it all sort of popped out into place. I think she just wanted to see what I’d do.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I gagged. Dry heaved.”

  “And then?”

  “And then … ? I rinsed out my mouth, and I blew her.”

  Thatcher and her amazing clinical nod.

  “It wasn’t like I was thinking of her as a man, even though she told me her name was legally Alan, still, and she just scrambled the letters. To me she wasn’t a man, she was … was …

  “A woman with a penis?” Dr. Thatcher prompted.

  “Exactly. I’d never had a homosexual experience before, and I still didn’t think I had. I mean … look. I’ve spent the last six years living off a trust fund I got the day I turned twenty-one.”

  He backtracked for several moments, describing his earlier life, so vastly different from the path he had chosen. The son of a family of Massachusetts real estate barons. Where mother and father advocated a hands-off policy of parenting, turning over such domesticities to the hired help, while advocating stoicism and scandal-free civility for the good of the family name. Prep school uniforms were de rigueur, and polite conformity was the norm.

  “Twenty-one years was enough. I saw too many kids I’d grown up with turn into neurotic assholes. Sure, they’d end up in the highest tax brackets and still find the loopholes, but I just knew that none of them would really, truly … live. I had to do a one-eighty away from all of that. And so … I’ve spent the last six years trying everything I felt like I missed out on while growing up, no matter even if it was bad for me. And I’ve taken a special delight in things I know my family would hate. So, this, Lana … ? This was just so intriguing, I couldn’t leave it be.” Gary spread wide his hands. “I don’t mean this to sound callous but I went into my relationship with Lana like another new experience. Mostly decadent, but at the same time, there was something hallucinatory about it. Sometimes even spiritual.”

  “Is that why you wouldn’t have made any promises of something more permanent?”

  “It was a fantasy. Something forbidden. You can’t live a fantasy every day of your life, it loses power then.”

  “What about love? Did you love her?”

  The toughest question of all. The two souls/one flesh proposition. He wandered back to the window, forehead to glass.

  “I suppose I did, Yes … yes. I did love her.” He shook his head, sighed. Scratched that nagging itch. “That was the problem, wasn’t it’! Somewhere along the way I think I got scared of feeling too close to someone else.”

  Wasn’t it just the irony of human nature, he decided without voicing it. Mankind viewed monogamy as good and proper, yet so v
ery many went to great lengths to sneak around it. While those who decried it from the outset eventually succumbed to jealousies and that need to bond. Only to later betray.

  We never learn, he thought. That’s the only constant.

  Lana was buried the next day, ushered into the after life by a minister who looked more befuddled than grieved. The square peg; of the world are always more difficult to eulogize.

  The turnout was small, little more than a dozen who paid their respects under a sky which couldn’t make up its mind between bright and overcast. The sun played masquerades with clouds, and the air was gravidly thick with the damp of a southern spring.

  Beneath his shirt, the itch nagged merrily. Heat rash, maybe. Probably have to go to a doctor. He wasn’t used to this humid climate.

  He knew at a glance they were Lana’s nighttime friends, a peculiar trio in dark cloths who oversaw the sendoff with a melancholic brooding. Beneath overcoats worn against the unpredictably hostile sky, they were of indeterminate gender, somewhere between the poles of male and female. Straddlers of the gender fence.

  While circumstances may not have been the norm, the emotions of grief were universal. That longing to connect with others who had shared the now-dead.

  Once the service was concluded and the mourners began to straggle home, he paced toward them over moist ground. Their gazes ranged from guarded to inimical.

  “Oh look,” said one of the trio. Long blond hair, full red mouth, mascaraed eyes. A square law belied male origins. “I bet I know who this is.”

  The tallest of the three nodded. Dark hair cropped close, sparse stubble on the jaw. The hands were too delicate, though. This one was traveling the opposite road of change. “You’re Gary, aren’t you?” The voice fell between alto and tenor, a vocal netherland.

  He said he was, and while there was little warmth, the introductions were civil. The blond was Alexis, the short-haired one Gabriel. The third of their group—small and pale, hostile eyes red from weeping—was Megan.

  Ringlets of brown hair fell into a blotchy face, and were pushed back with incongruously large hands, veined and muscular.

  “Let me guess,” Gabriel said. He? She? He, Gary decided, conceding to their chosen gender identities. Gabriel appeared far less accusatory than analytical. “You’re feeling guilty because you dumped her, and think that’s why she did it.”

  Gary frowned. “How do you know what happened between us?” This was either scary insight or an unerringly accurate guess. “Lana did it … immediately.”

  Gabriel shrugged, stared at the dead sky a moment. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gary said. It sounded lame, but at least it was heartfelt. “I never meant to hurt her.”

  “No, no, of course not,” Megan snapped. She didn’t have feelings, did she? Just a new kind of kick, until the new wore off.”

  Gary stared her down until she closed her angry mouth. “Look, I’m not planning on standing here to trade arguments with you.” Then, to all three: “I can’t claim I was perfect. But I never, ever, intended anything like to this to happen. I did care for her.”

  Alexis nodded. “But you didn’t truly understand her world, did you?”

  “The best I could.”

  “No.” Gabriel shook his head. “If you did that, you would’ve already met us. We … didn’t see much of Lana the past four months. Those belonged to you. She subjugated herself for you. All so you wouldn’t be hit with too much at once, and go running.”

  Gary took a step back. This was too much to hear at once, too raw an implication he was ignorant of the real Lana, as opposed to the Lana she had chosen to reveal. He’d thought all along she simply preferred being alone with him.

  “I should go,” he whispered. Another step.

  “Why don’t you join us tonight?” Gabriel said. “At The Fringe. You know that much about Lana, don’t you! How much she liked that place?”

  He nodded, hesitant. “I know of it.”

  “Then join us. It’d be a far better tribute to Lana than watching her get lowered into some hole in the ground.” Gabriel looked distastefully toward the grave. “I’d think you owe her that much.”

  “At least,” he said softly, then thought for a moment, then told them he’d be there.

  He carried the memory of Lana’s spiritual brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the afternoon and into the night, along the gauntlet of French Quarter bars he ran. Smoothing down the rough edges of remorse and responsibility.

  Mardi Gras was over by two months, but revelers still choked the Quarter’s streets, furiously bent on good times. The South had always seemed so fundamentally more sensuous than New England. As passions ignited by a crueler sun, and allowed to boil out and flow and cool like sweat. Here the food was rich and spicy and full of delicious venoms that the body embraced. Here Dixieland rubbed uneasy shoulders with punk. Here an empty glass was intolerable.

  Gary had lied, of course. There had been precious little intention of meeting them at The Fringe. To say otherwise was simply the best way to save face for the moment, avoid conflict. But he felt low enough as it was. Sitting there baring his head and soul for them to whack on would do no one any good. He’d get along better on his own. Never been the type to crumble into a drunken crying jag and beg sympathetic strangers to listen to his woes. Let the drinks settle inside, then, and glaze him over with brooding silence.

  The French Quarter: strip shows and black jazz bands both modern and traditional. He watched from the shadows while numbness crept in. Absently scratching his chest, fighting that damned persistent itch. It took a deliberate effort to stop and realize just how long he’d been at it. Enough to make it second nature.

  He rubbed again, tenderly probing with his fingers.

  Swelling. There was swelling going on inside his shirt.

  Gary rose to tread the sea of drunkenness into the bathroom, which might have been clean back when Louis Armstrong played. He stopped before the cracked mirror and parted his shirt.

  And stared at the two very feminine nipples staring back from his chest. Protuberant and erect, the areolae as large as silver dollars.

  His reflection, staring. Cracked in the middle, two jagged halves, incongruent at their juncture.

  “She was contagious,” he muttered in cold shock. And quickly reconsidered the lie.

  Through a light spitting rain, he found it an hour later, twice stopping street-level locals to point him in the right direction. The Fringe, built within a renovated warehouse near the river, just off the beaten path of mainstream French Quarter. Night seemed deeper here, the air ageless. No one would ever come here by mistake.

  The Fringe. Though Lana had spoken of it several times, he had never accompanied her here. Somehow, he supposed she alone had been enough to sate his curiosity about her particular breed of counterculture. The Fringe, haven of acceptance for all species of gender benders, and those who sought them out of fetishistic impulse.

  Gary found within its dark and hallowed walls an alternative world. Alternative music, alternative clothing, alternative anatomy. A maze of multiple levels in architecture, just as Lana had described, each dimly lit and an enclave in its own right. There was supposed to be sonic sort of garden atop the roof, where ephemeral couples could retreat for whatever liaisons their bodies, lacerated or whole, would allow.

  Gary bought a bottle of wine at the main bar, weaved through the open center where dancers writhed beneath black light and strobes to music that sounded like the roar of a techno-industrial Armageddon. The volume could peel skin.

  Here he was groped endlessly, and let it happen, drunken enjoyment of sliding hands. All sensory delight despite the known world of his flesh falling about him. Here, pretensions were few, the common denominator libidinous. The real effort lay in pulling back from the brink, pushing on, remembering why he was here.

  Eventually he found them near the upper level, Gabriel and Alexis and Megan, tucked into a dim booth.
One noticed him, then all watched as he approached their table and slammed the wine bottle down.

  “You finally came.” Gabriel looked vaguely pleased.

  “We’re mourning the way Lana would have wanted us to,” said Alexis, the blonde, tipping a highball at the table. A forest of bottles and glasses, hours worth of bereavement. “Sit, sit.”

  He glared down at them while fumbling with shirt buttons.

  Megan perked up, brushed ringlets of hair from her face. “I don’t want this fucker sitting at our table.”

  “Megan,” Alexis chided. “Don’t be a bitch.”

  Gary sat beside Gabriel, tense as a coiled spring. Left the shirt unbuttoned but draped shut, feeling the steam build inside. He would wait a moment before boiling into this last of all confrontations.

  “After what he did to Lana?” Megan continued the squabble. “Are you that callous? Lana was fragile.”

  Alexis reached across the table, intimately touched Gary’s arm. “Lana was like a … a goddess to our little clique. She was the first to get the actual go-ahead for her final surgery.”

  Megan wiped her eyes, smeared mascara. “It should’ve been me. But my therapist? That asshole says I’m not stable enough yet.” She gulped her drink in desperation. “He’s not satisfied with my reasons for the change. Says I’m doing it because, as a boy, I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian asshole” critical mass.