The Girl From Nowhere

by Christopher Finch

  “Debereaux’s the boyfriend of Yari Mendelssohn’s mother,” I told her.

  “I haven’t seen or heard any women,” she said, “and I don’t know squat about Yari’s mother.”

  “What about Shirley? Is she around?”

  “I haven’t seen her, but I’d be surprised if she wasn’t. She and Joey are very tight. They’re cousins of some kind. Maybe she’s taking care of Sandy.”

  There was a knock on the door, then Anthony’s voice.

  “You blowin’ him or somethin’, Darla? Get a fuckin’ move on. Put him in his fuckin’ party threads.”

  “Okay,” she called out. Then she yelled, “Come on, pretty boy—finish up and turn off the goddamn shower.”

  I wondered if I should tell her what I now knew about Sandy, but decided it would only complicate things. Instead I asked, “You got any backup? What about the Yul Bryner look-alike?”

  “There’s just me,” she said.

  “And how come you were with the muscle when he slugged me?”

  “I’d been sent to make sure Sandy was handled nicely.”

  “Any chance,” I asked, “that you can get out of here and raise the alarm?”

  “Not easy. There are lookouts posted everywhere. Something big is going down. All I can do is play things by ear.”

  Once dressed in my tux, I was handed over to Anthony—also now in a tux, looking like an overdeveloped undertaker—and taken back to the cellar. It was nice to know I had at least one friend in the place, but it didn’t reassure me much. If I had been a betting man, I’d have wagered that the odds of me getting out of there alive were about a million to one. To keep from shitting my bespoke pants, I started to thumb through the magazines piled on an old school desk. They were the kind of glossies you’d expect someone like Yari to subscribe to—fashion magazines, home-and-garden publications, fancy photography quarterlies—and mixed in with them were catalogues of art shows, Japanese manga comic books, Broadway playbills, pornographic magazines mostly of the tranny variety, and other assorted turn-ons.

  My attention was caught by a souvenir program from a Paris cabaret called Elle et Lui. Janice had taken me there on our honey moon. I didn’t realize until we got there that it was an upmarket drag show that cost the price of a kidney transplant. Janice insisted that it was the kind of thing that one did when one was in Paris. I had my misgivings, but it turned out to be one of the few successful outings we had while doing five countries in fourteen days. Sex back at the hotel was adventurous, but that’s none of your business.

  That had been a while ago. This program was dated “Printemps 1968.” It was full of elegant black-and-white photographs of the strippers—beautiful as movie starlets with long, shapely legs and delectable breasts. As I turned the pages, I had a premonition of what I was going to find—sure enough there she was, the most beautiful boy of all.

  Before I had a chance to take a shot at translating the accompanying text, there was a rap on the door and the hatch opened.

  “Someone to see you, Novalis.”

  The door opened and Jack Debereaux stepped into the cellar. Unlike everyone else around there, he was casually dressed in a sport coat and flannels.

  “I didn’t figure you for a fool,” he said.

  “Big mistake,” I said. “You get yourself elected governor of New York, and you make enough mistakes that dumb, you’ll find yourself kicked upstairs to the White House.”

  “You find this amusing?”

  “It’s a barrel of laughs.”

  “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “But you were kind of vague.”

  “I warned you that that girl was trouble.”

  “Which could have meant a lot of things.”

  “I think you understood me.”

  “So how come,” I asked, “you find yourself here tonight? Come to visit Yari?”

  “If Yari knows what’s good for him, he’s in Haiti.”

  “And he’s renting the place out to Garofolo and his mob while he’s out of town?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you’re here to spend some quality time with Joey?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “What is my business? Why did you come down here? You just wanted to take a last look at me so you can remember my mug when I’m kicking up thistles? Don’t worry about that. You’ll see me in your dreams—or your nightmares.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” he said.

  “Why should I? I’ve got no reason not to shoot my mouth off.”

  From his demeanor, I sensed he might be feeling out of his depth. I knew I was, but I thought maybe I could play him somehow.

  “You know they’re going to kill me, don’t you?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t make Thanksgiving plans.”

  He looked smug when he said that, which made me think that maybe he wasn’t so far out of his depth after all.

  “People ever get a sniff of this,” I said, “that’s your career down the toilet.”

  “Nobody will ever tie me to this mess,” he said, scornfully, “and there wouldn’t be a mess in the first place if you’d had the strength of character to keep your pants on.”

  “The strength of character routine? That’s what you came down here to tell me?”

  “No—I wanted to see your face when I let you in on a secret.”

  “Go ahead. I love dirty little secrets. I imagine that’s the only kind you have.”

  “But I’ve changed my mind,” Debereaux said. “There’s a right time for everything. I won’t be around when the dirty little secret is revealed, and I’m sorry for that, but maybe it’s better that way. It would be a crime to spoil the mise-en-scène.”

  I had a mind to show him the picture of Sandy in the Elle et Lui program. There were a lot of questions I would have liked to ask. Was that the dirty little secret? Was it Yari, maybe, who had first spotted Sandy back when her passport still said male? But I didn’t want Debereaux telling Garofolo that I knew Sandy’s secret. Part of it anyway. I was pretty sure that, if that happened, it could only make things worse for her and for me.

  A minute or two later, I heard a door to the street open somewhere above me, followed by a crescendo of traffic noise and an exchange of words I could not catch between Debereaux and Garofolo. The exchange concluded with a snort of laughter, and the door crunched shut. That’s when the mise-en-scène kicked in, starting with a blast of organ music almost directly overhead. I had forgotten that Yari’s church came with an organ loft complete with a pretty Victorian instrument, its pipes painted green, red, and gold. I had never heard it played before and had assumed it served a purely decorative purpose.

  After unleashing an initial burst of chords, the organist at the console launched into something contrapuntal written a couple of centuries before the completion of the Long Island Expressway. The building shook. Next came a transcription of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, a fruity rendition topped with a double scoop of legato gelato and a maraschino cherry. As it ended, and was replaced by the theme from Doctor Zhivago, Anthony collected me to take me upstairs. Ever amiable, he slapped me on the back and said, “Break a fuckin’ leg, pal.”

  We arrived in sight of the organ loft just as the organist switched to “The Fool on the Hill.” I thought for a moment that this had been cued by my arrival, but then I saw that the keyboardist—a dead ringer for Albert Schweitzer—was blindfolded, a nice von Stroheimish touch. Even more striking, Yari’s studio had been transformed.

  His photographs—the sad fashionistas, the leggy girls in lingerie, the movie stars with their impeccable teeth, the slinky nudes with pubic hair trimmed to look like Hitler’s moustache—were gone. So was the Magritte, and the Dalí drawing, and the Warhol Brillo Box, and the Barcelona chairs, and the glass-topped coffee table scatter
ed with copies of Vogue and Paris Match and Oggi and Rolling Stone, and the framed photos of Yari’s mother, and the framed letters to his father from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, and the Packard pedal car from FAO Schwarz that Yari had received on his third birthday, and the souvenir ashtrays from Elaine’s and The Ninth Circle. His furniture had all been removed from what had once been the nave of the church, and a dozen pews—like the ones in the cellar where I’d been held—had been installed. In place of the incense that was usually burning when Yari was around, there were scores of pristine white candles in a variety of sconces and candelabra, and these were complemented by vases filled with elaborate arrangements of white flowers. Don’t ask—I grew up in a railroad apartment. The raised area that used to be the sanctuary was awash in a tidal wave of white blossoms you could have surfed on, and in the midst of this efflorescent overkill was a large studio easel on which was displayed one of the Matthew Ripley paintings of Sandy I had seen at Lucas Konstantin’s gallery, a flashy and fleshy and especially explicit example that made my flesh creep. Other Ripley paintings of Sandy had been hung on the walls like so many stained glass windows.

  So the place had been reconfigured back into a perverse approximation of a church, with Sandy as surrogate for the Virgin Mary, and it appeared to have been made ready for a wedding. Or possibly a funeral. Or maybe both. Now the significance of the tuxedo—not to mention Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring—became apparent. I noticed too that a professional-looking sixteen millimeter camera—an Arriflex—had been set up on a tripod at the back of the hall, as if to make a record of a ceremony. As I took this in, Shirley Squilacci pinned a white-on-white boutonniere to my lapel.

  “Where’s Sandy?” I wanted to know.

  “Getting ready for her big moment.”

  “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  “This big moment—there’s going to be a wedding?”

  She just laughed and left me with Anthony and a depressed-looking kid with an Uzi.

  So was that the story? Sandy had skipped out on some sucker she had promised to marry? She had more or less admitted as much back at the motel when she talked about hymenoplasty. The guy wanted a virgin. He liked to pretend, she said. Did pretending include sex reassignment? That was pretty heavy, but the fake hymen suggested that this mystery person had been in on the planning. Poor Sandy had had her ass fucked by a bunch of grunts in Kaiserslautern when she was a kid, and probably many times since, but that didn’t count with the would-be groom. As far as the sucker was concerned, when the sex change took place everything went back to zero. The slate was wiped clean. The newly created vagina had never been visited—until I stepped up to the plate. The newly minted hymen—probably laid-on by the surgeon who had performed the more radical surgery—stood as the symbol of Sandy’s pristine status, as if she had been swaddled in Saran Wrap and laid in a manger. Was this stipulated from the beginning as part and parcel of the contract? Was it just something the surgeon did as a matter of course—a bonus, like buy a dozen doughnuts get one free? Or could it have been requested by Sandy, whose desire to become the girl next door seemed real, if unsustainable, and whose fancy might have been tickled?

  Or was it commissioned by someone playing God?

  It was at that point that an unpleasant recollection popped into my head. Gender reassignment surgery wasn’t a frequent topic of conversation in the circles I moved in, but it had come up one evening, during dinner at the Grand Ticino. A visiting French photographer called Maurice something-or-other began to talk about a doctor who operated a clinic in Casablanca where he performed sex-change surgery, still a relatively novel and very costly procedure in those days. Some of what Maurice told us that evening was undoubtedly true, because he had visited the clinic to shoot photographs that illustrated a story for one of the trashier French magazines. Part of it, though, I had taken with a pinch of sea salt as an emerging urban legend. According to Maurice, some of these sex reassignment procedures were paid for by wealthy men who picked out beautiful boys from various drag reviews—Elle et Lui most likely included—and subsidized their treatment and surgery until reassignment was complete, at which point the freshly minted female was expected to repay the sponsorship by becoming the patron’s girlfriend. Boys who longed to be girls—who already lived as girls, believing they were trapped in the wrong body—accepted the arrangement, so said Maurice, because the operation and all its attendant treatments, wasn’t covered by Blue Shield. It was a chance to have the life they had dreamed of. One of these patrons, he assured us, was a certain ship owner then married to perhaps the most famous woman in the world.

  At which point one of us said, “Bullshit,” and wives and girlfriends expressed shock and disbelief. A certain ex-wife asked, “Remember those boys we saw in Paris, darling? Remember how they turned you on. Would you lay out the bread to buy one if you had that kind of money?”

  With what I had learned since that evening, I was more than ready to believe that there were plutocrats out there willing to pay for a beautiful boy’s surgery to gratify some kinky appetite. Hey, maybe it wasn’t even that kinky. What if Sandy had been the object of some billionaire’s twisted passion and the recipient of his largesse? And what if she had refused to go through with the bargain? It wasn’t difficult to imagine that the dude would be pretty pissed off, especially since the work he had commissioned had turned out so nicely.

  Was that why the presumed betrothed had been tormenting Sandy—sicking maniacs on her to stalk her and scare her? People get passionate and irrational about these things. I had known a gender-reassigned woman named Toby. She was a one-time neighbor in the West Village who moved to Chicago to start over from scratch. She was strangled by her boyfriend when he discovered that she had begun life as a he. It was all too easy to imagine the rage of the sucker Sandy had backed out on, but if the mystery betrothed knew where Sandy was—which apparently he did—then why had he allowed her to continue stripping? And why had she continued to doff her clothes in public? That seemed like an invitation to unwanted kinds of attention.

  And where did Garofolo and the mob fit into that scenario? Had Sandy dumped some warped Mafia Don? Knowing Sandy, it was just imaginable, but in that case the idea that she might have been allowed to continue as a stripper was utterly implausible—the code of honor wouldn’t allow anything like that. She would have been thrown to the piranha.

  Any way you cut it, though, everything was beginning to point to the probability that she had given the finger to someone—someone who had sponsored her surgery and had the kind of resources that would make anyone think twice about crossing him. Yet Sandy had done just that, and now he was really pissed. The warnings I had been given about handling Sandy with kid gloves began to make a lot of sense.

  I could understand at last why Sandy had been so coy and secretive with me. But did she really believe that I would feel differently toward her if I knew she had undergone a sex change? Probably, and possibly with good reason. These were the dark ages. Richard Nixon was in the White House, Billy Graham had his tongue in Tricky Dick’s ear, J. Edgar was blackmailing everybody, and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders continued to classify homosexuality as a psychopathology.

  The Silent Majority—never silent enough for my taste—believed that “perversions” could be fixed if you just applied a little Yankee know-how. Commonsense counseling from your pastor or rabbi was the first line of defense against galloping sodomy, but if that failed there was always prefrontal lobotomy, or castration with a Bowie knife in a parking lot behind a bowling alley. Hell, Freud himself had claimed it was possible to straighten out a bent nail with a hammer and a couple of sessions of hypnosis. Earlier that year, the Stonewall riot had shaken things up, but closets were still jammed like subway trains in rush hour, filled with tormented men in blazers nervous about rubbing up against the t
aquitos of the adjacent straphanger in the tight Levis.

  Still, I was a little hurt that Sandy hadn’t trusted me. Did she think I was some kind of urban redneck? Was she afraid I couldn’t handle the facts, ma’am, just the facts? How would I have dealt with those facts if she had laid them on me at the Cheyenne Diner—before I had touched her, before I had wallowed in her scent, before I had penetrated her newly minted vagina? Would I have been so willing to let her hang out in my apartment? Maybe. But it didn’t matter anymore. Knowing Sandy had been an education, and the same went for making love to her. The backstory wasn’t worth a damn.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Do you approve of the decorations?”

  The voice was Garofolo’s. It came from behind me. I didn’t bother to turn.

  “Too many flowers,” I told him. “It smells like a whorehouse.”

  “Maybe that’s appropriate,” he said.

  I didn’t like that remark, or the way Garofolo was grinning as he stepped into my field of vision. He was got up in a tux modeled on something that might have been worn by Jay Gatsby, complete with a white silk vest and one of those dress shirts with a stand-up collar. He looked like some pretentious asshole who went to a prep school where the students have a coat of arms tattooed on their dick so that if they get fleeced they can be shipped back to the right county.

  “Where are the guests?” I asked.

  “They’ll be along,” he said. “Not too many. They’ve been hand-picked.”

  “Who am I supposed to dance with at the reception?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” he told me with a smile that might have been carved with a switchblade.