“It’s a Shaw play. I’ve always been partial to Shaw.” The doctor gave a self-conscious, meant-to-be-deprecating smile. “For the most superficial reasons, I admit.”
“Yes, I know all about his Pygmalion. The basis for My Fair Lady, unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately?”
“I don’t like musicals.”
His voice had been too vehement and the doctor pounced. He pounced on everything, without discrimination.
“You like plays but not musicals? Why?”
“Actually, I don’t like plays either. They’re phony: all that emoting, all those big gestures and voices. I like film. Once sound was developed, the idea of people standing on a stage, reciting lines, became ridiculous.”
“Sound was developed quite some time ago.”
“Theater has been ridiculous for quite some time.”
An uneasy silence fell. He knew he had punctured the doctor’s professional shell. The doctor probably liked theater. And opera too, of course, which he loathed to this day. Poor dumb bastard. How could this man ever help him, stupid as he was? He had done his research so carefully, looking for someone with the experience he needed. He wasn’t used to making mistakes.
“The theater has its moments, I suppose,” he said, trying to make amends. “I prefer film, however.”
“What kind of films? Are there certain genres or directors to your liking?”
“Bertolucci,” he said, and instantly regretted it, for the doctor seemed to sit at attention. Oh, everyone knew Last Tango, with its silly, obsessive sex. Nothing could have interested him less. He was thinking about 1900 and The Last Emperor. The latter was his all-time favorite, because it was about a boy born to greatness-and the world he lost. “I like all the Italians, for some reason. Fellini. Sergio Leone.”
“You have sophisticated tastes.”
“Sergio Leone? He made spaghetti Westerns.”
“Ah, Westerns. You like those? Classic tales of good and evil, a huge underpopulated landscape. And very few women.”
“Most people like Westerns.” He looked pointedly at the doctor. “I’d be skeptical of the man who didn’t.”
An awkward silence fell. He did this now and then, reminded the doctor that he knew all about him and what he liked. Who was the doctor to say who was a man and who wasn’t?
“Shaw,” the psychiatrist said, “was a vegetarian. And a friend of Harpo Marx.”
He shrugged. The doctor often produced such self-referential non sequiturs when at a loss.
“I’m sorry, we’ve wandered away, haven’t we. We were talking about…”
“Pygmalion. The myth, not the Shaw play.”
“Yes, I don’t know that so well. A man makes a woman-”
“A man sculpts a statue of the perfect woman.”
“And asks some goddess-”
He could not bear to hear the story told in such inept, unknowing words. “He makes the perfect woman, only she’s a statue. He prays to Aphrodite, who makes the statue real.”
“Aphrodite?”
“The only god on Olympus without parents. She rose from the sea, perfectly formed. You may know her better as Venus. But I’ve always been partial to the Greek names. They’re much prettier. Zeus, Poseidon, Hades-they’re a thousand times better than Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto.”
“Ah. So is he contented, Pygmalion, with his perfect woman?”
“What man wouldn’t be?”
“I mean, is that where the story ends?”
“Yes. They live”-he knows enough to take on the protective coloration of irony-“happily ever after.”
“Yet you haven’t had much luck with women.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“You seek an… extreme cure.”
“I know my limitations. All I ask is that I be allowed to live happily. Ever after.” His tone is arch, yet he has never been more sincere.
“It is up to me to decide if you should have what you want.”
“I understand the rules. I didn’t expect you to let me… plunge right in.”
“No? Well, we are used to even more extreme things in my field. There are people who want to remove their limbs. Did you know of this? Some see it as a natural continuation of what we call gender reassignment. To me, it lays bare the problem. We can alter our bodies only so much. But our real selves will reclaim us. We see that every day, with boys who were born with incomplete genitalia. They cannot be made into little girls. That’s a hard lesson, especially here. Johns Hopkins was once at the forefront of gender reassignment.”
“I’m not asking to become a girl.”
“No, but you’re asking to become something almost as odd-a eunuch. You want to thwart your own masculinity, but you need a chemical crutch to do it. It would be irresponsible of me to authorize this treatment without intensive counseling. Why are you adamant about this? You show no signs of being a sexual predator or of being sexually dysfunctional. A couple of failed relationships are not reason enough to give up. Everyone has failed relationships, you know. One needs to be right only once. Then you realize everything else was part of the journey.”
He had reached into his pocket, found his lanyard key chain, squeezed it. “Have you gotten it right, Doctor?”
He blushed. “I don’t talk about my personal life. Surely you know that.”
“But you’ve gotten it right, or so you think. For how long?”
“Well, it’s been two years-”
“My parents were married for twenty years. It would be forty now, if my father had lived.”
“Most admirable. That should bode well for you, assuming it was a loving marriage.”
Sharply, instantly. “It was.”
“So why are you here?”
“I know what I need.”
“That is still to be determined.”
In the end, they had to agree to disagree. Dr. Michael Shaw, who had heard so much but listened to so little, had become another loose end to be tied. As Billy waited in the rain that day, he imagined his mother, narrowing her eyes at a piece of thread, snipping it and licking it until she could force it through the needle. The Bible said it was easier for a camel to pass through such a hole than it was for a rich man to go to heaven. But Dr. Michael Shaw, in his brief ride on the hood of that borrowed car, had passed through this life without a whimper. He couldn’t guarantee that Dr. Shaw went to heaven, but wherever he went, he went easily, without a sound. There was only the rain and the quiet beneath it. No one heard a thing.
CHAPTER 36
“Michael Shaw was part of a program that treated rapists.”
Tess had begun babbling as soon as she found Carl, perched on the edge of one of the Adirondack chairs that were scattered about the grounds. He listened intently, managing to make sense of the jumbled details about Depo-Provera and chemical castration.
“That’s why he had a dormancy period,” she said. “He stopped.”
“Or tried to,” Carl said. “He must have understood enough about his own behavior to know there was a sexual component to what he was doing. He assumed the treatment would kill his sex drive and he would stop killing.”
“But the original program had been disbanded, so it’s possible he never received Depo-Provera at all, just traditional therapy.”
“You told me earlier that a psychiatrist has to tell authorities if he thinks his patient has committed a crime or is a genuine threat to someone. Why would Billy Windsor kill Shaw if Shaw didn’t know anything?”
Tess, who had been pacing back and forth, sank into the chair opposite Carl, leaning back in its broad arms until she was staring through the trees and the smoky blue sky overhead. It was a Code Red day, unseasonably warm, a harbinger of how horrible Baltimore’s summer might be. The air was thick, almost chunky.
“I have a theory,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“But I don’t want to have theories, I want facts. Theories are for shit.”