Eye-shadow base, to hold the true color of the shadow.
Loose powder. Translucent. A dusting of it to set the makeup, the mink brush dancing around the eyes, the cheeks, the angles of the nose, the chin, tickling the corners of the mouth. It seemed like such a little thing, but it made a difference.
Powder blush. His favorite moment, returning blood to the new face, making the transformation breathe again, giving life. A delicate step, a real blush was what was wanted, not the harsh, feverish look of a whore. Too many women turned themselves into whores at this point. They think that if a little is good, a lot is better. No, it wanted a light touch.
Eye shadow. The subtleties of hue and tint and shade and tone. Again, what was wanted was pastel, the hazy effect of an old movie, a suggestion of something, not the thing itself. If an observer’s attention was attracted to the shadow first, it had been misapplied.
Eyeliner. He had shopped a long time before he found the right one, a tiny soft brush, a roundish thing that could be rotated in the fingers to a fine point. The bristles, so fine and delicate they moved as one, laying down a smooth umber line next to the eyeball.
Mascara. Nothing elaborate here either. Only a shallow, graceful curve to the lashes and one or two strokes with the cylindrical brush.
The woman was almost there; he had almost re-created her, and with every tiny movement came a sense of increasing well-being, a deep peacefulness that he no longer tried to understand. He simply welcomed it, was grateful for it, and accepted it as a peculiar gift of the psyche. It was no longer the curse that it had been for so many years. The emerging woman was some part of himself that lay in the deep regions of his anima. Once he had fought with her chaos. He had struggled and agonized; he had suffered trying to understand. But now the curse had turned.
He took a silver hair pick and touched up the bouffant blond hair, lightened it around the face. It was an especially fine job, he thought. He liked what he saw. He almost smiled at what he saw.
Standing slowly, he looked at the new point d’esprit stretch teddy with elaborate lace insets. He had gotten a small cup and his nipples showed through the dusky lace. It had been an experiment, this body-clinging spandex, a successful experiment, he told himself, as he turned sideways and regarded his buttocks, the way his beefy chest actually filled the tiny cups of the bra. He cocked one leg forward, bent the knee with a practiced coyness. Jesus, he was pleased. Watching himself, he bent down to the corner of the bed and picked up the garter belt, a mink-colored affair that he had looked for forever. He spread it open, flattening the lace, and, again watching himself in the mirror, stepped into it with pointed toes, his hair falling across the corner of his face with a springy, sexy bounce. He tossed it back with a flip of his head—a gesture he loved—and then stepped into the garter belt with the other leg. With his thumbs inside the elastic, he pulled the belt up over his stomach and flattened it around his waist.
Sitting in front of the dresser, he faced the mirror and watched himself slip the toe of one raised leg into the gathered stocking. He watched himself pull and smooth the stocking over his foot, over the ankle, tightening it from behind with a caressing gesture of his cupped hand, slowly stretching it up his calf, the dark silk playing out of his hand in a sheer envelope as sweet as liquid, over the knee and up to the dark top of the stocking. Never moving his eyes off the mirror, he used both hands to smooth and tighten the stocking one last time and then stretched down the elastic straps and hooked the stocking, first in front and then, reaching behind his thigh, in back.
The second leg followed quickly; after all, he had had years of experience. He had only taken his time with the first one because it pleased him so much to watch the natural grace of his fluid movements, and because he would never, never tire of the feel of fine silk embracing his straightened leg.
He got up quickly and went over to the side of the bed and took the dress off the padded hanger. For this evening he had chosen a Victor Costa straight skirt of rayon crepe and matching surplice jacket with slightly padded shoulders. It was a leaf print, tropical leaves, white on black with black trim on the surplice and hem of the jacket. He stepped into the skirt and slipped on the jacket, and while he was still fastening the jacket he walked over to the dresser mirror. He had already picked double-twisted strands of black and white pearls as a choker, which he quickly fastened. Tilting his head to one side and then to the other, he screwed on two large pearl earrings bordered with tiny chips of onyx. Finally, he stepped into black Amalfi low-heeled calfskin pumps. He snatched a soft kid purse off the edge of the dresser, struck a last pose for the mirror, and saw a woman who pleased him enormously. Feeling totally at ease, free of anxieties and tensions for the first time that day, Dr. Dominick Broussard allowed himself a smile for the mirror, and then turned and stepped out onto the mezzanine and started downstairs. He would take a drive, have a couple of cocktails in a dimly lit club somewhere, enjoy the incomparable pleasure of simply being himself. Then he would come home and have dinner.
He ate alone, of course, a dinner that Alice always prepared for him on Saturday mornings before she took off at noon for the rest of the weekend. He heated the meal in the microwave—it was always a complete dinner, tonight veal Basquaise with lightly sauteed vegetables—and put it on a table also set by Alice that morning. Tonight he felt very glamorous and opened the terrace doors and ate by candlelight, overlooking the lawn that sloped to the bayou and beyond which the lights of the city rose up on the other side above the black trees. The air was heavy after the rains, but not too hot, just warm enough to enhance the tropical mood of the evening. He put on several albums of Brazilian music, the varied feminine voices and favored rhythms of Alcione, Gal Costa, Elis Regina.
He had done more drinking than eating, but when he had finally had enough of the veal Basquaise, he took his glass and the bottle of Santa Sofia Valpolicella and drifted out on the terrace, where he placed the wine bottle on a marble-topped iron table and sat beside it in one of the chairs. Crossing his legs at the knee, he pulled the liquid hem of his dress up over his knee, and felt the warm air wash over his thighs, felt it touch his bare flesh between the top of the stocking and the bottom of his panties. He was heady with the wine, thrilled at the thought of himself sitting in the dark, but covered in the luxuriant white tendrils and small fingers of the tropical flora of his dress, the voices of the dusky Brazilian women purling and soaring, floating and sinking and wafting, maybe even reaching to the distant glitter on the far, black margin of the night.
“Dominick!”
His eyes popped open, and at the same time he almost lost consciousness, the effect of the woman’s voice calling his name stunning him as effectively as if he had been hit over the head with a mallet.
“Dominick?” It was a hoarse, questioning whisper.
He forced himself to come around. It was real. Jesus. The dress. The glass slipped from his hand and shattered on the terrace floor. He froze. The Brazilian voices had stopped and nothing was audible but his own heart and the sea of crickets that flowed in the bayou. Did she think he was Dominick? Or that he was there with Dominick, and Dominick was somewhere on the terrace?
“This is Mary,” she said. She was still out of his sight in the shrubbery next to the terrace. Why didn’t she come around? Did she think she was interrupting something? He was stone, not even turning his head her way, only knowing where she was because of her voice. Jesus God. Did he try to get out of this?
Broussard lowered his crossed leg and felt the glass grind under the Amalfi pump. He desperately wished he hadn’t drunk so much wine because the way he was he couldn’t be sure of any of his movements, if they were too slow, too brittle. He couldn’t even be sure if he was doing the right thing, whatever it was he was doing. Did he appear drunk to her from her vantage point in the shrubbery? What did he look like? What was she thinking?
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I knew Alice was gone…I saw the lights, and I just came around
by the wall, around to here. I thought I might see you from here…”
He simply couldn’t move. His thinking on this was…blank.
“I…I don’t care…if…you’re dressed up,” she said.
Christ Almighty! What a strange thing to say. He wondered how long she had been there.
“Not in the least,” she said.
And what a strange reaction to what she was seeing. He imagined what she was seeing; he got out of his body and walked down to where she was and looked back at himself, sitting there bolt upright, gripping the arms of the wrought-iron chair, his blond wig, perhaps, phosphorescing in the darkness.
“Is it all right if I come up?” she asked.
Not even Bernadine had seen him “in dress.” Not after all the years of kinky sex, not even after Bernadine came to him in a man’s suit with a dildo tied between her legs. Not even then, and not even after…
“I’m coming up,” she said tentatively. He couldn’t even get his throat to work to protest. Besides, he didn’t know what kind of voice to use. His heart was hammering so hard he thought his ears would explode and shoot out a stream of blood.
Then it was too late, and in the corner of his right eye he saw her move around the end of the steps below him. Ever so slightly, he adjusted his head and turned his eyes to meet hers. She was wearing a calf-length dress, light-colored, probably a summer beige, that buttoned down the front from neck to hem, allowing her to adjust the amount of bust and leg she wanted to show. Right now, with one foot on the bottom step, it seemed to him she was showing quite a bit of both. And then as he looked at her he became slowly aware of a vague air of disorientation about her and, even, he thought, an intimation of something uncanny. Her hair was in slight disarray, a definite feel of wild uncertainty about her.
“I don’t care…I don’t care about the dress,” she said, one lovely pale hand on the limestone banister of the terrace steps as she raised her other leg and mounted the first step. “I had to talk to you…a drastic, a drastic thing, I know. But this afternoon I wasn’t through…We had to stop…the interruption.”
If Broussard lived through all the lives of Tiresias, from sex to sex and back again, he would never forget this moment.
“I went to meet someone tonight,” she said, mounting another step. “I should have told…should have told you…more about the little girl, you know, me, and…even, now, how it is. I lied, or it was like a lie because it never came out…really came out.”
She was up another step now and moving with less hesitation and more quickly. He was still frozen in the chair beside the bottle of Valpolicella. He had yet to make a sound.
“But it’s nothing to me,” she said. “The lie. It’s all the same to me, all of it…all the same.”
She was only a step from the top, maybe fifteen feet away, close enough for Broussard to see her face clearly and the effort she was making to control it. The dress was most likely a cotton jersey, a beautiful thing, the sort of stylish garment that Mary Lowe possessed by the closets full.
She approached him across the small distance, and he saw her face more clearly in the weak light coming from behind him. She stopped in front of him, her legs slightly parted, and the sound of crickets came up from between them like a birthing of cunning music. Her cheeks quivered as she made an effort at smiling, and he tried to read her eyes, to decipher what she must be thinking as she looked at him, and he looked at her through a purple haze of wine and from behind the woman in white leaves.
“There are bound to be mistakes,” she said, for no reason that he could imagine. And for no reason, he nodded.
“How long do you think I should have let him come to my bed at nights?” she asked, and she slowly sank to her knees and walked on them until she touched him. She put a hand on either side of his skirt and began pushing it up. “All through my twelfth year? Until I was thirteen? Fourteen?” She was working the skirt past the top of the stockings, past the garter belt, above his fleur-de-lis panties, and finally, free and around his waist. “Fifteen?”
Broussard was going wild inside. How many times had he dreamed and yearned for this to happen to him, for these clothes—the satin surfaces of silk and nylon and lace, the tiny ribbing on the panties, the buckles and snaps, the colors of flesh through colors of lingerie—to be taken from him as she was now taking them. He felt the garter belt give way on each leg and he felt her fingers go into the tops of his stockings and peel them off, like a skin, the heavy air of the bayou night refreshing on the lengths of his newly naked legs.
His eyes closed, and his mind’s eye followed the removal of his garter belt and panties. He loved the way his face must have looked to her.
“Sixteen? Seventeen?”
And then there was nothing left below his waist but his excitement.
“But there was one more surprise,” she said, and Broussard heard her voice move and he opened his eyes. “There came the time—and I was twelve, still twelve—of the worst part. The worst part of it all.”
Standing before him, she began unbuttoning the cotton jersey from the top and when she reached the last button her eyes were riveted to him like Bernadine’s, the way he liked, wide open to the things that they would do. A small shrug of her white shoulders sent the jersey falling to her feet, and she stood in front of him as he had often imagined her with a body so remarkably perfect that it was a pure thing, as pure as death.
She stepped up to him, placed one hand on each of his shoulders to steady herself, and then raised one naked leg and slipped it through the inside of the arm of the chair and then swiftly raised the other one and placed it through the other arm, straddling him.
“The worst part of it was,” she said, taking him in her hand, slowly settling onto him, and leaning down until he felt her heavy breasts against his chest, until he felt her lips feathering his ear, until he felt the warmth of her breath, warmer than the bayou air. “The worst part of all…was the night my daddy came to me in my bed…and I enjoyed it.”
SEVENTH DAY
52
Sunday, June 4
Saturday night at Ben Taub General Hospital, the city’s largest charity hospital, located on the northern border of the Texas Medical Center, is like a war zone—every Saturday night. Janice Hardeman, a surgical nurse in one of the hospital’s emergency operating rooms, had been pulling the night shift at the hospital five nights a week for over five years, and during that time she had seen a lot of human damage. But the immediate satisfaction she received from helping trauma patients, stunned and bewildered by finding themselves suddenly in the red midst of a life-threatening tragedy, was more than enough compensation for the spent adrenaline and the constant visions of human slaughter that all too frequently approached the absurd.
By three o’clock this Sunday morning Janice Hardeman had assisted while surgeons removed an icepick embedded in a twenty-two-year-old woman’s left breast, its tip passing through her left lung and coming to rest one and a half centimeters from the exterior wall of her heart’s right ventricle. She had assisted in an unsuccessful effort to save the life of a woman who had received a single gunshot wound in the stomach, which had exploded her pancreas and celiac artery. She had run down the hospital’s long, shiny halls beside a stainless-steel gurney with her right thumb jammed into a man’s slashed throat, trying to stanch the hemorrhaging of his right carotid artery; she had delivered by cesarean section a cocaine-addicted baby from its mother, who was dying of crack-induced convulsions; she had assisted in the removal of a four-year-old boy’s left arm, which had been crushed in a car wreck; and now she was going home early because her period had started and the cramps that had begun plaguing her during her last four or five periods were making it impossible for her to stay on her feet any longer.
With her shoes squeaking on the polished floors, she left the nurses’ lounge thankful that she wasn’t the little boy’s mother and didn’t have to tell him about his arm when he woke up in the morning. And she was worried abou
t her cramps. Her periods always had been easy, even from the very beginning, but lately they had begun to be unusually painful. The cramps only lasted the first eighteen or twenty hours—she had made mental notes about the duration—but they were unusually sharp. Or so it seemed. She really had nothing to compare them with.
Walking out the back door of the hospital, the smell of hot asphalt and oil-stained parking lots replaced the hospital odors of alcohol and disinfectant. There was a faint waft of something rancid coming from the Dumpsters at the far end of the building, and Janice felt a sudden momentary queasiness. She recognized the irony and laughed to herself. Blood and vomit and urine and feces hadn’t fazed her for the past six hours, but the smell of rotten fruit was too much.
She hurried across the lot to her car and stood by the door, fishing her keys out of her purse. She usually remembered to have her keys ready when she left the building to avoid this delay in the deserted lot, but tonight she had forgotten, the little boy and the cramps taking their toll on her concentration. The predawn air was cool and Janice was thankful that every day she was able to experience these early-morning hours. You could almost understand the city when you saw it like this. With the millions of tiny glistening lights coming from the looming buildings of the surrounding complex, she saw the city at its best. It wasn’t always harsh and hectic and mean and hot It wasn’t always merciless.
Getting inside her new Toyota, Janice locked the doors and then pushed the buttons that rolled each of the windows down a few inches. She pulled out of the hospital parking lot and onto the loop that took her to the Outer Belt, the boulevard that separated the north side of the Texas Medical Center from the south side of Hermann Park and the Houston Zoo just through the trees. She took the Outer Belt to Main Street across from Rice University and turned left and followed along beside the campus until she got to University Boulevard, where she turned right and headed into the empty streets toward the quiet village of West University Place.
Mercy Page 52
