The Best of Lucius Shepard (80 page)

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 and 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 mouth. “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 transformation, 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 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.”