The Best of Lucius Shepard (81 page)

“Don’t
you trust me?”

She
leaned back against the cushions and folded her arms, stared at the coffee
table. “That’s not it … altogether.”

“So
you don’t trust me, and there’s more. Great.” I made a show of petulance, only
partly acting it.

“I
can’t tell you some things.”

“What’s
that mean?”

“It
means I can’t!” Her anger didn’t seem a show, but it faded quickly. “You
crossed the river to come here. We have to cross our own river. It’s different
from yours.”

“The
Mystery.”

She
looked surprised, and I told her what I had learned from Causey.

“He’s
right,” she said. “I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”

“Why?
It’s like a vow or something?”

“Or
something.” She relaxed her stiff posture. “The rest of it … I’m ashamed. When
I look back, I can’t believe I was so disreputable. Be patient, all right?
Please?”

“You,
too,” I said.

“I
am patient. I just enjoy arguing too much.”

I
put my hand beneath her chin, trying to jolly her. “If you want, we can argue
some more.”

“I
want to win,” she said, smiling despite herself.

“Everything’s
like you say. Diamond Bar’s heaven on fucking earth. The board’s …”

“I
don’t want you to give in!” She pushed me onto my back and lay atop me. “I want
to break you down and smash your flimsy defenses!”

Her
face poised above me, bright-eyed and soft, lips parted, seemed oddly
predatory, like that of a hungry dove. “What were we arguing about?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said and kissed me. “You, me, life. Max Ernst.”

·
· · · ·

One day while drinking a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, taking a break from
work, I entered into a casual conversation with a dour red-headed twig of a man
named Phillip Stringer, an ex-arsonist who had recently moved from the eighth
tier into the old wing. He mentioned that he had seen me with Bianca a few
nights previously. “She’s a reg’lar wild woman!” he said. “You touch her
titties, you better hold on, ‘cause the next thing it’s like you busting out of
chute number three on Mustang Sally!”

Though
giving and enthusiastic in sex, Bianca’s disposition toward the act impressed
me as being on the demure side of “reg’lar wild woman.” Nevertheless, I
withheld comment.

“She
was too wild for me,” Stringer went on. “It’s not like I don’t enjoy screwing
chicks with dicks. Truth is, I got a thing for ‘em. But when they got a bigger
dick’n I got … guess I felt a tad intimidated.”

“Hell
are you talking about?” I asked.

He
gazed at me in bewilderment. “The plume I saw you with. Bianca.”

“You’re
fucked up, man! She doesn’t have a dick.”

“You
think that, you never seen a dick. Thing’s damn near wide around as a Coke
can!”

“You
got the wrong girl,” I told him, growing irritated.

Stringer
glowered at me. “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know who
the hell I’m screwing.”

“Then
you’re a goddamn liar,” I said.

If
it had been another time, another prison, we would been rolling around on the
floor, thumbing eyes and throwing knees, but the placid offices of Diamond Bar
prevailed, and Stringer dialed back his anger, got to his feet. “I been with
that bitch must be fifty times, and I’m telling you she gets hard enough to
bang nails with that son-of-a-bitch. She goes to bouncing up and down, moaning,
“Only for you …” All kindsa sweet shit. You close your eyes, you’d swear you’s
with a woman. But you grab a peek and see that horse cock waggling around, it’s
just more’n I can handle.” He hitched up his trousers. “You better get yourself
an adjustment, pal. You spending way too much time on that painting of yours.”

If
it were not for the phrase “only for you,” I would have disregarded what
Stringer said. Indeed, I did disregard most of it. But that phrase, which
Bianca habitually breathed into my ear whenever she drew near her moment,
seeded me with paranoia, and that night as we sat on the sofa, going over the
charcoal sketches she had done of her friends, I repeated the essence of
Stringer’s words, posing them as a joke. Bianca displayed no reaction,
continuing to study one of the sketches.

“Hear
what I said?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well?”

“What
do you want me to say?”

“I
guess I thought you’d say something, this guy going around telling everybody
you got a dick.”

She
set down the sketchpad and looked at me glumly. “I haven’t been with Phillip
for nearly two years.”

It
took me a moment to interpret this. “I guess it’s been such a long time, he
mixed you up with somebody.”

The
vitality drained from her face. “No.”

“Then
what the fuck are you saying?”

“When
I was with Phillip, I was different from the way I am with you.”

Irritated
by the obliqueness with which she was framing her responses, I said, “You
telling me you had a dick when you were seeing him?”

“Yes.”

Hearing
this did not thrill me, but I had long since dealt with it emotionally. “So
after that you had the operation?”

“No.”

“No?
What? You magically lost your dick?”

“I
don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well,
I do! Hell are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m
not sure how it happens … it just does! Whatever the man wants, that’s how I
am. It’s like that with all the plumes … until you find the right person. The
one you can be who you really are with.”

I
struggled to make sense of this. “So you’re claiming a guy comes along wanting
you to have a dick, you grow one?”

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-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.