The Girl From Nowhere (19 page)

“Go ahead. I love dirty little secrets. I imagine that’s the only kind you have.”

“But I’ve changed my mind,” Debereaux said. “There’s a right time for everything. I won’t be around when the dirty little secret is revealed, and I’m sorry for that, but maybe it’s better that way. It would be a crime to spoil the mise-en-scène.”

I had a mind to show him the picture of Sandy in the Elle et Lui program. There were a lot of questions I would have liked to ask. Was that the dirty little secret? Was it Yari, maybe, who had first spotted Sandy back when her passport still said male? But I didn’t want Debereaux telling Garofolo that I knew Sandy’s secret. Part of it anyway. I was pretty sure that, if that happened, it could only make things worse for her and for me.

A minute or two later, I heard a door to the street open somewhere above me, followed by a crescendo of traffic noise and an exchange of words I could not catch between Debereaux and Garofolo. The exchange concluded with a snort of laughter, and the door crunched shut. That’s when the mise-en-scène
kicked in, starting with a blast of organ music almost directly overhead. I had forgotten that Yari’s church came with an organ loft complete with a pretty Victorian instrument, its pipes painted green, red, and gold. I had never heard it played before and had assumed it served a purely decorative purpose.

After unleashing an initial burst of chords, the organist at the console launched into something contrapuntal written a couple of centuries before the completion of the Long Island Expressway. The building shook. Next came a transcription of
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring
,
a fruity rendition topped with a double scoop of legato gelato and a maraschino cherry. As it ended, and was replaced by the theme from
Doctor Zhivago
, Anthony collected me to take me upstairs. Ever amiable, he slapped me on the back and said, “Break a fuckin’ leg, pal.”

We arrived in sight of the organ loft just as the organist switched to “The Fool on the Hill.”
I thought for a moment that this had been cued by my arrival, but then I saw that the keyboardist—a dead ringer for Albert Schweitzer—was blindfolded, a nice von Stroheimish touch. Even more striking, Yari’s studio had been transformed.

His photographs—the sad fashionistas, the leggy girls in lingerie, the movie stars with their impeccable teeth, the slinky nudes with pubic hair trimmed to look like Hitler’s moustache—were gone. So was the Magritte, and the Dalí drawing, and the Warhol Brillo Box, and the Barcelona chairs, and the glass-topped coffee table scattered with copies of
Vogue
and
Paris Match
and
Oggi
and
Rolling Stone
, and the framed photos of Yari’s mother, and the framed letters to his father from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, and the Packard pedal car from FAO Schwarz that Yari had received on his third birthday, and the souvenir ashtrays from Elaine’s and The Ninth Circle. His furniture had all been removed from what had once been the nave of the church, and a dozen pews—like the ones in the cellar where I’d been held—had been installed. In place of the incense that was usually burning when Yari was around, there were scores of pristine white candles in a variety of sconces and candelabra, and these were complemented by vases filled with elaborate arrangements of white flowers. Don’t ask—I grew up in a railroad apartment. The raised area that used to be the sanctuary was awash in a tidal wave of white blossoms you could have surfed on, and in the midst of this efflorescent overkill was a large studio easel on which was displayed one of the Matthew Ripley paintings of Sandy I had seen at Lucas Konstantin’s gallery, a flashy and fleshy and especially explicit example that made my flesh creep. Other Ripley paintings of Sandy had been hung on the walls like so many stained glass windows.

So the place had been reconfigured back into a perverse approximation of a church, with Sandy as surrogate for the Virgin Mary, and it appeared to have been made ready for a wedding. Or possibly a funeral. Or maybe both. Now the significance of the tuxedo—not to mention
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring—
became apparent. I noticed too that a professional-looking sixteen millimeter camera—an Arriflex—had been set up on a tripod at the back of the hall, as if to make a record of a ceremony. As I took this in, Shirley Squilacci pinned a white-on-white boutonniere
to my lapel.

“Where’s Sandy?” I wanted to know.

“Getting ready for her big moment.”

“What the fuck’s going on?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“This big moment—there’s going to be a wedding?”

She just laughed and left me with Anthony and a depressed-looking kid with an Uzi.

So was that the story? Sandy had skipped out on some sucker she had promised to marry? She had more or less admitted as much back at the motel when she talked about hymenoplasty. The guy wanted a virgin. He liked to pretend, she said. Did pretending include sex reassignment? That was pretty heavy, but the fake hymen suggested that this mystery person had been in on the planning. Poor Sandy had had her ass fucked by a bunch of grunts in Kaiserslautern when she was a kid, and probably many times since, but that didn’t count with the would-be groom. As far as the sucker was concerned, when the sex change took place everything went back to zero. The slate was wiped clean. The newly created vagina had never been visited—until I stepped up to the plate. The newly minted hymen—probably laid-on by the surgeon who had performed the more radical surgery—stood as the symbol of Sandy’s pristine status, as if she had been swaddled in Saran Wrap and laid in a manger. Was this stipulated from the beginning as part and parcel of the contract? Was it just something the surgeon did as a matter of course—a bonus, like buy a dozen doughnuts get one free? Or could it have been requested by Sandy, whose desire to become the girl next door seemed real, if unsustainable, and whose fancy might have been tickled?

Or was it commissioned by someone playing God?

It was at that point that an unpleasant recollection popped into my head. Gender reassignment surgery wasn’t a frequent topic of conversation in the circles I moved in, but it had come up one evening, during dinner at the Grand Ticino. A visiting French photographer called Maurice something-or-other began to talk about a doctor who operated a clinic in Casablanca where he performed sex-change surgery, still a relatively novel and very costly procedure in those days. Some of what Maurice told us that evening was undoubtedly true, because he had visited the clinic to shoot photographs that illustrated a story for one of the trashier French magazines. Part of it, though, I had taken with a pinch of sea salt as an emerging urban legend. According to Maurice, some of these sex reassignment procedures were paid for by wealthy men who picked out beautiful boys from various drag reviews—Elle et Lui most likely included—and subsidized their treatment and surgery until reassignment was complete, at which point the freshly minted female was expected to repay the sponsorship by becoming the patron’s girlfriend. Boys who longed to be girls—who already lived as girls, believing they were trapped in the wrong body—accepted the arrangement, so said Maurice, because the operation and all its attendant treatments, wasn’t covered by Blue Shield. It was a chance to have the life they had dreamed of. One of these patrons, he assured us, was a certain ship owner then married to perhaps the most famous woman in the world.

At which point one of us said, “Bullshit,” and wives and girlfriends expressed shock and disbelief. A certain ex-wife asked, “Remember those boys we saw in Paris, darling? Remember how they turned you on. Would you lay out the bread to buy one if you had that kind of money?”

With what I had learned since that evening, I was more than ready to believe that there were plutocrats out there willing to pay for a beautiful boy’s surgery to gratify some kinky appetite. Hey, maybe it wasn’t even that kinky. What if Sandy had been the object of some billionaire’s twisted passion and the recipient of his largesse? And what if she had refused to go through with the bargain? It wasn’t difficult to imagine that the dude would be pretty pissed off, especially since the work he had commissioned had turned out so nicely.

Was that why the presumed betrothed had been tormenting Sandy—sicking maniacs on her to stalk her and scare her? People get passionate and irrational about these things. I had known a gender-reassigned woman named Toby. She was a one-time neighbor in the West Village who moved to Chicago to start over from scratch. She was strangled by her boyfriend when he discovered that she had begun life as a he. It was all too easy to imagine the rage of the sucker Sandy had backed out on, but if the mystery betrothed knew where Sandy was—which apparently he did—then why had he allowed her to continue stripping? And why had she continued to doff her clothes in public? That seemed like an invitation to unwanted kinds of attention.

And where did Garofolo and the mob fit into that scenario? Had Sandy dumped some warped Mafia Don? Knowing Sandy, it was just imaginable, but in that case the idea that she might have been allowed to continue as a stripper was utterly implausible—the code of honor wouldn’t allow anything like that. She would have been thrown to the piranha.

Any way you cut it, though, everything was beginning to point to the probability that she had given the finger to someone—someone who had sponsored her surgery and had the kind of resources that would make anyone think twice about crossing him. Yet Sandy had done just that, and now he was really pissed. The warnings I had been given about handling Sandy with kid gloves began to make a lot of sense.

I could understand at last why Sandy had been so coy and secretive with me. But did she really believe that I would feel differently toward her if I knew she had undergone a sex change? Probably, and possibly with good reason. These were the dark ages. Richard Nixon was in the White House, Billy Graham had his tongue in Tricky Dick’s ear, J. Edgar was blackmailing everybody, and the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
continued to classify homosexuality as a psychopathology.

The Silent Majority—never silent enough for my taste—believed that “perversions” could be fixed if you just applied a little Yankee know-how. Commonsense counseling from your pastor or rabbi was the first line of defense against galloping sodomy, but if that failed there was always prefrontal lobotomy, or castration with a Bowie knife in a parking lot behind a bowling alley. Hell, Freud himself had claimed it was possible to straighten out a bent nail with a hammer and a couple of sessions of hypnosis. Earlier that year, the Stonewall riot had shaken things up, but closets were still jammed like subway trains in rush hour, filled with tormented men in blazers nervous about rubbing up against the
taquitos
of the adjacent straphanger in the tight Levis.

Still, I was a little hurt that Sandy hadn’t trusted me. Did she think I was some kind of urban redneck? Was she afraid I couldn’t handle the facts, ma’am, just the facts? How would I have dealt with those facts if she had laid them on me at the Cheyenne Diner—before I had touched her, before I had wallowed in her scent, before I had penetrated her newly minted vagina? Would I have been so willing to let her hang out in my apartment? Maybe. But it didn’t matter anymore. Knowing Sandy had been an education, and the same went for making love to her. The backstory wasn’t worth a damn.

TWENTY-ONE

“Do you approve
of the decorations?”

The voice was Garofolo’s. It came from behind me. I didn’t bother to turn.

“Too many flowers,” I told him. “It smells like a whorehouse.”

“Maybe that’s appropriate,” he said.

I didn’t like that remark, or the way Garofolo was grinning as he stepped into my field of vision. He was got up in a tux modeled on something that might have been worn by Jay Gatsby, complete with a white silk vest and one of those dress shirts with a stand-up collar. He looked like some pretentious asshole who went to a prep school where the students have a coat of arms tattooed on their dick so that if they get fleeced they can be shipped back to the right county.

“Where are the guests?” I asked.

“They’ll be along,” he said. “Not too many. They’ve been hand-picked.”

“Who am I supposed to dance with at the reception?” I asked.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he told me with a smile that might have been carved with a switchblade.

“Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble,” I suggested, “for such a modest occasion.”

“Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble about many things, and so far he’s been very disappointed at the way things have panned out.”

“And will I get to meet this gentleman?”

“I’m sure he’s looking forward to it.”

“That’s nice. Is he a friend of Big Jack Debereaux’s?”

“They’re acquainted.”

“But Big Jack’s not hanging around for the fun?”

“It seems he has business in Albany.”

“I thought maybe his tux was at the cleaners.”

“More a matter of discretion, I believe.”

“I hope he’s at least catering the affair.”

“I believe his people supplied the champagne.”

“What about Yari?” I asked. “Where does he fit in?”

“Nowhere.”

“He seems to be supplying the venue.”

“He had no choice. Yari is like a kid who thinks the lifeguard’s flag doesn’t apply to him. He gets in over his head and then waits for somebody to rescue him.”

It occurred to me once again that Yari might well have been the person who had spotted Sandy in the first place. He had a talent for that kind of thing, though Langham was another candidate. But who would Yari have been spotting for? His mother’s boyfriend? That didn’t feel right, though Debereaux fit in somewhere, and it occurred to me that as an aspirant for the governorship Debereaux would always be on the lookout for people who could help line his coffers with the long green and who might be susceptible to the idea of exchanging cash for favors. And what about Garofolo’s role? Somebody had to run the show.

“Yari will be okay as long as he stays out of the way,” said Joey. “You could have been okay too, if you’d followed my advice.”

“I did. Until your thugs snatched us and drove us to the Connecticut wilderness. I figured all bets were off.”

Another shrug.

“Tell me,” I asked, “why did you let Sandy stay at my place? I don’t know what’s going down around here, but whatever it is,
that
can’t have been in anybody’s playbook.”

“Sandy knows which side her bread is buttered on,” he said. “She’s not stupid—though I guess I may have to reconsider that statement. I was pretty sure she’d come round in the end—that she wasn’t going to blow everything by letting someone like you screw things up. I guess I was mistaken.”

“You didn’t seem so sure when we talked at the Alibi.”

“God is in the details.”

“And I’m a detail . . .”

“One of many. A small one that got out of hand. It was all about keeping Sandy on the straight and narrow. That was something she hadn’t been accustomed to, and that’s why we had to make things unpleasant for her—to remind her about what her life would be like if she didn’t play ball.”

“That’s why you sicked those maniacs on her?”

“I didn’t count on Drexler breaking into her apartment. He developed an obsession. And I didn’t count on Sandy taking things so hard—not given the life she’s led till now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I thought she’d be safe at the woman’s studio till I was ready to snatch her back.”

“At Jilly’s?”

“Yeah. I was a bit more concerned about you, but then I checked you out and found you were a bit of a romantic. I figured she’d be okay with you till I needed her, as long as you understood she was about as safe to handle as Strontium-90. Then my boys who were watching your place told me she’d taken off on her own. We had a plan that was about to be activated, so I couldn’t put things off any longer. I gave orders to snatch her immediately—wherever she went. You managed to get in the way. Otherwise you could be home in bed.”

“So what now?” I asked.

“We’ll be getting this show on the road soon,” he said.

“And who’s the lucky guy?”

“I guess it’s time to let you in on one secret. I’ll be your best man.”

He felt in a vest pocket and brought out a Tiffany box containing a gold ring.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It fits.”

That was one scenario I hadn’t envisioned. Until then the worst I had presumed was that Sandy was going to be forced to go through with some kind of union—real or sham—with some rich creep she was running away from. If she and I were about to be compelled to submit to some preposterous fake ceremony, then the implications were dire. Nobody had a happy ending in mind for us—that much was for sure. I might find myself with Sandy till death us did part, but there was no way of knowing if the time lapse would be measured in hours or minutes. Why this farce, anyway? The mind behind this was even sicker than I had imagined. And how did I feel about Sandy now? Another sick mind? I had suspected she wasn’t being entirely straight with me, yet I’d managed to spend most of the past few days in a blissful state of denial that had culminated in a single bout of memorable sex that seemed likely to cost me my life.

Clearly, though, I was not alone in my sense that Sandy was something out of the ordinary. This might be a farce, but it was big-time farce and, as with all good farces, the author was taking it very seriously.

About then I heard Garofolo talking in hushed tones to someone who had just entered from the street. Turning to look, I caught a glimpse of a man in oversized dark glasses being escorted from the vestibule by Shirley Squilacci. The new arrival was wearing a cassock, a clerical collar, and a
cappello romano—
one of those black priest’s hats like an upside-down mixing bowl with a wide brim. Could some man of the cloth have been coerced into participating in this deadly fiasco? Blackmailed maybe by the mob, who had gained knowledge of some particularly juicy mortal sin—a peccadillo with an altar boy, or a moment of indiscretion with an attractive parishioner who had volunteered to bring a shine to the chalice? Or was this maybe an actor? Or just a mobster in holy drag? It didn’t make much difference, really. Sandy had said that her patron liked to pretend, and I was beginning to get a sense of just how much pretending was going on. My problem was that I found it difficult to get into the Halloween mood.

As the organist continued his Beatles medley with
“A Day in the Life,”
Anthony led me to a tiny, windowless room off the nave that had a lovingly hand-lettered sign on the door which read
FOR PRIVATE PRAYER
. I took it to heart.

“Okay—cool your chops in here,” said Anthony.

I asked what was holding things up.

“Waiting for the Big Guy.”

“And who is this Big Guy?”

Anthony did not bother to reply, just shut the door and locked it behind him. The room was furnished with a hassock, a lectern, and nothing else. The lectern had presumably once been home to a Bible or a prayer book, but someone had replaced it with a copy of the first issue of
Vamp
, open at Yari Mendelssohn’s provocative photograph of Sandy. I closed it and sat on the hassock, which wasn’t very comfortable. I hadn’t been there long when I heard voices on the far side of the door—not just the mobsters but female voices too, young-sounding women with a range of accents from broadest Brooklyn to Valley Girl to Hispanic, talking nervously as if they didn’t quite know what they were doing there. Wedding guests? Not from my side of the family.

After a few minutes of this, Anthony reappeared, snapped cuffs on my wrists—at least not behind my back this time—and told me to follow him. As I emerged from the prayer room, a dozen or so pairs of eyes turned toward me. Without exception, they were heavily indebted to Estée Lauder and Maybelline. There were cat eyes, and Egyptian eyes, and Brigitte Bardot eyes, and wide eyes straight out of Japanese manga comics—eyelids boldly painted with glistening turquoise and magenta pigments, eyeliner black as Texas crude, eyelashes loaded with mascara and long enough to use as feather dusters. They belonged to young women—and a few on the cusp—who knew how to dress, and probably undress, to be noticed. Skirts were short and tight, and bosoms—some showing signs of augmentation—were proudly acknowledged by décolleté necklines. Whether blonde or brunette, hair was predominantly of the long, slinky variety favored in commercials for shampoos and conditioners. Some manes were topped with wide-brimmed hats in pastel colors. Lips were carefully painted and parted in voyeuristic bewilderment. I was greeted with pitying silence.

Among this bevy of enameled beauties, I spotted the stripper who went by the name of Betty Boobs—she of the talcum-scented buttocks—and guessed that the others might well be of the same persuasion, but I didn’t have time to give the matter much thought since Anthony hurried me into a quiet corridor near the vestry.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Yo, it’s time to confess,” said Anthony. “Time to get your fuckin’ sins off your ass—say a few Hail Marys maybe before you fuckin’ meet the Holy Mother in person.”

And sure enough, there was a confessional, though I’d never seen one there before. It looked a bit like the old wooden telephone booths they used to have in New York post offices, except that instead of a window there was a grille made up of ornate metal latticework. I could hear someone breathing inside.

“You can leave us,” said a voice from behind the grille, dismissing Anthony.

I pressed my face up against the grille and tried to peer through the dense latticework. It was dark inside, but I could swear that the man in there had on one of those white Pierrot masks that people wear on Halloween—the kind with a painted tear dripping from one eye.

“Show some respect,” he said. “You are here on solemn business.”

His voice was muffled and gravelly, its tone self-consciously stilted. My guess was that underneath the bullshit was the kind of New York accent with an Ivy League veneer you heard in upmarket steakhouses around the Financial District.

“You are here to celebrate the Sacrament of Penance,” he continued, “to obey canon law by engaging in the ritual that leads to repentance and reconciliation with the Lord.”

I told him to fuck off.

“That’s not an acceptable attitude, my son. Impure language is a sin of considerable consequence.”

I decided to play along with this game, in the hope that I could learn something.

“Impurity in all of its forms,” said the man behind the grille, “is sinful.”

“Then I’m a sinner.”

“We are all sinners, my son. It is the degree of sin that defines the sinner. Are you, perhaps, a pimp or a pederast?”

“You’ve got a wrong number, schmuck.”

Are you guilty of sorcery, practicing the black arts, or idolatry?”

“Not this week.”

“Did you not idolize a woman?”

“Not the word I would have chosen.”

“And did you not attempt to steal her affection by the practice of sorcery?”

“Not my speed.”

“Did you ply her with potions to loosen her will?”

“I might have bought her a couple of drinks.”

“And are you guilty of the sins of jealousy or greed?”

“Probably.”

“Since surely you were envious of the woman’s true mate and greedy for her favors?”

The man’s tone had gone from stilted to hammy, and from hammy to acrimonious.

“That depends,” I replied. “Who is this ‘true mate’?”