Myra Breckinridge

by Gore Vidal

  I find that lately I’ve been prone to the most sickening sentimental reveries, usually involving Mary-Ann though sometimes a faceless man is at my side and we live together in an enchanted cottage filled with the pitter-pat of little feet or I should say paws since I detest children but have lately come to adore dogs. First thing Monday, Mary-Ann and I are going to the kennel and buy two wire-haired terriers, “Hers” and “Hers”—in memory of Asta, that sweet dog who was in the Thin Man series with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

  Tonight our love took on a new dimension. Mary-Ann now undresses in front of me. She then lies on the bed, eyes tight shut, lovely breasts fallen back upon themselves; and as I trace their contours with a finger, causing them to tighten visibly, she sighs with pleasure which is the signal for me to begin with my hand the exploration of that pale dimpled belly which curves its secret way to the blonde silky thatch so often penetrated by Rusty but still forbidden to me. In fact, every time my hand approaches that secret and for me so beautifully enticing and central reality, the cave of origin, she turns away and whispers, “No.”

  But tonight she was subtly changed. I don’t know whether it was the snaps at Scandia or the cold bright charm of the powerful Letitia or the knowledge that Rusty would never be hers again but whatever it was, she allowed my hand to rest a long moment on the entrance to the last fantasy which is of course the first reality. Ecstatically, I fingered the lovely shape whose secret I must know or die, whose maze I must thread as best I can or go mad for if I am to prevail I must soon come face to face with the Minotaur of dreams and confound him in his charneled lair, and in our heroic coupling know the last mystery: total power achieved not over man, not over woman but over the heraldic beast, the devouring monster, the maw of creation itself that spews us forth and sucks us back into the black oblivion where stars are made and energy waits to be born in order to begin once more the cycle of destruction and creation at whose apex now I stand, once man, now woman, and soon to be privy to what lies beyond the uterine door, the mystery of creation that I mean to shatter with the fierce thrust of a will that alone separates me from the nothing of eternity; and as I have conquered the male, absorbed and been absorbed by the female, I am at last outside the human scale, and so may render impotent even familiar banal ubiquitous death whose mouth I see smiling at me with moist coral lips between the legs of my beloved girl who is the unwitting instrument of victory, and the beautiful fact of my life’s vision made all too perfect flesh.

  When at last she pulled away from me, she seemed almost reluctant, as though she wanted me to continue and achieve for her that orgasm which tonight I could sense was near. “Myra, don’t. It spoils it.”

  “Darling, whatever you want.” I have learned restraint, unlike Myron who could not be deterred from the object of his lust by even a teeth-rattling fist in his poor face. But Myron was tortured by having been attached to those male genitals which are linked to a power outside the man who sports them or, to be precise, they sport the man for they are peculiarly willful and separate and it is not for nothing that the simple boy so often says of his erection, partly as a joke but partly as a frightening fact, “He’s got a head of his own.” Indeed he has a head of his own and twice I have punished that head. Once by a literal decapitation, killing Myron so that Myra might be born and then, symbolically, by torturing and mocking Rusty’s sex in order to avenge Myron for the countless times that he had been made victim by that mitred one-eyed beast, forever battering blindly at any orifice, seeking to scatter wide the dreaded seed that has already so filled up the world with superfluous people that our end is now at hand: through war and famine and the physical decadence of a race whose extinction is not only inevitable but, to my mind, desirable . . . for after me what new turn can the human take? Once I have comprehended the last mystery I shall be free to go without protest, full of wisdom, into night, happy in the knowledge that, above all men, I existed totally. Let the dust take me when the adventure’s done and I shall make that dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury. Meanwhile, I must change the last generation of man. I must bring back Eden. And I can, I am certain, for if there is a god in the human scale, I am she.

  And so, unlike Myron, I am able to be loving and gentle. I am able to hold Mary-Ann in my arms as a mother cradles a child or as I hold a fox terrier puppy who has taken my fancy.

  “I love being with you—like this,” she said tonight, eyes shut, smiling.

  “I love it, too.” I was simple. “It’s all I want, making you happy.” I squeezed her bare shoulders; our breasts touched, teasingly. Mine are even larger than hers, filled with silicone, the result of a new process discovered in France and not always successful in its application (recently a French stripper died when the silicone was injected by mistake into an artery). I was fortunate, however, and no one, not even a trained physician, can tell that my beautiful firm breasts are not the real thing.

  Shyly, Mary-Ann once said, “They’re just super, Myra! I bet the boys were really after you in high school.” An amusing thought since, in those days, it was I who was after the boys. At fourteen Myron vowed that he would, in one way or another, extract the essence of every good-looking boy in school and he succeeded in one hundred and one cases over a three-year period, a time in his life which he used to refer to as the Scheherazade phase, the hundred and one nights—or possibly “flights” is the better word to describe what he did with those birdlike objects whose thrust so fascinated him but so disgusts me, for I have got past that crude obvious instrument of procreation to the deep center where all is veiled, and purest magic.

  But Mary-Ann is making progress; her admiration of my body is not entirely aesthetic . . . but then the body in question is, if I may say so, unusually lovely, the result of the most dedicated of plastic surgeons who allowed me, at my request, to remain conscious during all stages of my transformation, even though I was warned that I might be seriously traumatized in the process.

  But I was not. Quite the contrary. I was enthralled, delighted, fascinated (of course the anesthetic had a somewhat intoxicating effect). And when, with one swift movement of the scalpel, the surgeon freed me from the detested penis, I amazed everyone by beginning to sing, I don’t know why, “I’ll be seeing you” hardly a fitting song since the point to the exercise is that I would not be seeing it or any of its equivalents, except for that of the tortured Rusty, ever again; at least not in the way Myron saw such things.

  Nevertheless, I was elated, and have not for one moment regretted my decision to be unique. That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb. For instance, I had always believed that between the operation, on the one hand, and the rape of someone like Rusty on the other, I would become Woman Triumphant, exercising total power over men as men once exerted that same power over Myron and still do over the usual woman. But the very literalness of my victory deprived me of the anticipated glory. To my astonishment, I have now lost all interest in men. I have simply gone past them, as if I were a new creation, a mutant diverging from original stock to become something quite unlike its former self or any self known to the race. All that I want now in the way of human power is to make Mary-Ann love me so that I might continue to love her—even without possessing her—to the end of my days.

  Imagine my consternation when, once again, she said what she truly felt (and what I have known all along but refused to let myself admit even to myself): “If you were only a man, Myra, I would love you so!”

  Of course the shock of the anticipated is always more intense than that of the unexpected. I let her go, as though her cool body had turned suddenly to flame. “Love is not always a matter of sex,” I said weakly.

  “Oh, I know. And I do love you, as you are. I even like it when you touch me, up to a point,” she added judiciously, “but it’s really only with a boy I can let myself go. That’s the way I am.”

  “Rusty?”

  She shut her eyes, frown
ing with recollected pain. “No. That’s finished. But someone like him.” She sighed, “And there aren’t many.”

  “Not many!” I was tactless, and harsh. “The garages of America are crowded with Rustys.”

  She shook her head. “No. He is special. Most boys grab. He doesn’t. He’s so sweet in bed, and that’s what I like. I can’t stand the other. I never could. That first boy almost turned me off for good, in high school. He was like a maniac, all over me!” She shuddered at the memory. “In a funny way,” she said, “you remind me of Rusty, the way you touch me.”

  As I write these lines at the card table, facing the Château Marmont and the solemnly turning chorine, I feel the tears rising. What am I to do?

  Randolph has been useless. This morning I met him at Wil Wright’s on the Strip, near Larue’s. He was already halfway through a double chocolate burnt-almond and pistachio sundae, gaining the sort of oral gratification that, were he not a puritan Jew, a cock might have provided, with far fewer calories. But he is hopeless. His first and only marriage ended after one year and though he has not confided in me what went wrong, I suspect that he was inadequate if not impotent. Since then, as far as I know, only the theory of sex interests him; the real thing causes him a profound distress which he relieves with food.

  “You must tell her everything, if you love her,” was his profound advice, as he munched on three maraschino cherries.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? You wish to exert power over her . . .”

  “Only that she may exert it over me . . .”

  “So power is intransitive as well as transitive? Then you are clearly moving into a new phase.”

  “Whatever the phase, I don’t know what to do. If I tell her that I used to be Myron, I destroy Myra . . .”

  “Not a bad idea.”

  I was furious. “You always preferred Myron to me, didn’t you?” I let him have it. “And I know why. You were in love with him, you God-damned closet-queen!”

  But in my fury I had misplayed my hand for this is exactly the sort of scene Randolph delights in. Carefully he put down his spoon, licked his chops and said, “That’s very interesting, what you say. Now tell me exactly: why do you feel that friendship must invariably have an overt sexual connotation when your own experience . . .”

  “Darling Randolph, why don’t you go fuck yourself? It would be an act of some mercy, and therapeutic, too.”

  There is nothing more satisfactory than to be at last entirely free of one’s analyst, and I am rid of mine. The end occurred when I found myself deeply resenting having to pay him forty-two thousand five hundred dollars for perjuring himself when, as things turned out, I didn’t need his help at all.

  Unfortunately, Randolph chooses to interpret my harsh dismissal as a new symptom of neurosis. “We’re making splendid progress,” he exclaimed, pig’s eyes gleaming with excitement. “Now let’s go back a moment. The emotional trigger, as usual, is your fear that I preferred Myron to you . . .”

  “Look, I couldn’t care less who or what you prefer. Your feelings are your own problem. My only concern in this world is not you and your gluttony (a sex life must be ruled out), but Mary-Ann . . .”

  “Wonderful! This is the big breakthrough we’ve been waiting for! By saying that I have no sex life . . .”

  “. . . is apt to leave me if she knows that I used to be a man . . .”

  “. . . you must be able to visualize . . .”

  “. . . and I couldn’t bear that. Yet if I don’t tell her . . .”

  “ . . .me having sexual relations with Myron. Now then, how exactly do you see me in the act? Active or passive . . .”

  “. . . I’ll lose her to the first light-fingered stud who comes her way . . .”

  “. . . would I be oral in my desires or anal or . . .”

  “From the way you eat, oral! Randolph, you disgust me, you really do!” Like all analysts, Randolph is interested only in himself. In fact, I have often thought that the analyst should pay the patient for allowing himself to be used as a captive looking-glass. “I take it all back,” I said curtly. “I didn’t mean a word of it.”

  “Consciously this may be true, but to have made the accusation you did reveals . . .”

  I left him and crossed the street to where my car was parked, nearly getting myself run over by one of those maniac drivers who make walking so perilous in the Greater Las Angeles area. But then the pedestrian is not favored hereabouts. In fact, the police are quick to stop and question anyone found on foot in a residential district since it is a part of California folklore that only the queer or criminal walk; the good drive cars that fill the air with the foul odor of burning fossils, and so day by day our lungs fill up with the stuff of great ferns and dinosaurs who thus revenge themselves upon their successors, causing us to wither and die prematurely.

  As I watch the Las Vegas chorine turn and turn, I find myself thinking, not unnaturally, of Turnabout (1937), with Adolphe Menjou, Carole Landis and adorable John Hubbard; and I ponder that brilliant plot in which husband and wife exchange personalities through the magic of the talking film (he speaks with her voice, she with his) and, as Parker Tyler puts it so well, we have, as a result, “a realization of ancient magical belief in the guise of modern make-believe, and the same ambiguity and ambivalence of spiritual essences are revealed that modern psychology, especially psychoanalysis, has uncovered in present-day civilization.”

  My worn copy of Tyler’s Magic and Myth of the Movies is always open before me when I write, and I constantly search the familiar text for guidance. But tonight I can find nothing more comforting than Tyler’s suggestion (referring to Turnabout and the Warsaw Art Players’ film The Dybbuk, which also deals with the idea of possession) “that by imitating the female the male believes that he becomes the female, thus automatically and unconsciously practicing the imitative variety of sympathetic magic.” Of course magic was involved at the beginning of my quest. But I have since crossed the shadow line, made magic real, created myself. But to what end? For what true purpose have I smashed the male principle only to become entrapped by the female? Something must soon be done or I am no longer triumphant, no longer the all-conquering Myra Breckinridge . . . whisper her name! Sympathetic magic must be made. But how?

  38

  I must record my situation exactly. They say that I am under sedation. That means I have been drugged. They are holding me against my will. But I shall outwit them.

  The one who calls himself Dr. Mengers has already fallen into my trap. When I asked for this notebook, he granted my wish. “Excellent therapy,” he said, assuming a bedside manner that even a child could detect was false. He is with the CIA. They all are. He pretended to take my pulse. “Much better today. Very much better. It was touch and go for a while, you know. But you’ve pulled through with flying colors!”

  I played my part with magnificent cunning. I fell in with the game, pretended that I had been ill, made my voice even weaker than it is. “Tell me, Doctor,” I quavered, “how long have I been here, like this?”

  “Ten days. Out cold,” he said with all-too-obvious satisfaction.

  For ten days they have held me captive! But now for reasons of their own, they are bringing me around, and that is their mistake for when it comes to a contest of wills, I am bound to win, even in my present hallucinated condition.

  “When can I get up?” I whispered.

  “Not for a week at least. As you see, you are in a plaster cast from neck to ankles. But your arms are free.” He pinched me hard above the elbow. “Does that hurt?”

  He is a sadist, too. I refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out. “Certainly not,” I said, and he frowned and made a note in a little black code book. Obviously I am a tougher nut to crack than he thought. Yet what I fear is not torture but the various drugs and serums that they have obviously been giving me from the look of my arms, which are blue, black and yellow with bruises and punctures. Not even a woman as brave and un
ique as I can hope to withstand an all-out chemical assault upon the brain and nervous system.

  What have I told them? Did I reveal the secret of human destiny to the enemy? I pray not. But only a careful questioning of my captors will be able to set my mind at rest. If I have told all, then there is no hope for the coming breakthrough. They will do to me what they did to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala.

  We were then joined by the “nurse.” Even for the CIA she was a poor actress, obviously recruited at the last minute, assuming that she is not the mistress of some Pentagon bureaucrat. She approached me with a thermometer as though she were uncertain as to how to go about placing the object in question in my mouth. She was plainly nervous and ill at ease. But then the thermometer was drugged and it is possible that she was experiencing a momentary twinge of conscience, quickly dispelled by the “doctor,” who had been watching her with ill-disguised irritation.

  “Go on, take the temperature. Please,” he said in an irritable voice.

  “But he bit my finger last time,” she said plaintively, as I allowed the thermometer to be placed beneath my tongue.

  “But Mr. Breckinridge was delirious at the time. Now he’s quite normal.”

  “What do you mean Mr. Breckinridge?” I asked, suddenly aware of the shift in sex, and nearly swallowing the thermometer in the process. They exchanged a conspiratorial look, much like the one Oswald gave Ruby on television seconds before he was struck down by his supposed friend and accomplice.

  “Of course, Miss Breckinridge,” said the “doctor” soothingly, readjusting the thermometer. I made no further complaint although I prefer the honorific title of Mrs., to which my uniqueness entitles me.

  “I still have an ugly scar,” said the “nurse,” holding up a bandaged hand in an effort to engage the “doctor’s” sympathy. I was pleased with myself: apparently I had fought hard to retain my mind’s integrity so rudely violated by these drug-administering agents of imperialism.