“Then you’re a goddamn liar,” I said.
If it had been another time, another prison, we would have 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 it—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.