“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.”
“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 redheaded 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.