by Неизвестный
They were married in Tanglewood on June 21, 1964. They decided not to go away for their honeymoon, but to spend it at home in Lake House. By their own choice, also, they arrived there alone in the evening of that day. All seemed perfect. The weather had a gentle balm to it all day; the sun was warm, but a light wind sang in the trees keeping everything cool and clean. “Our house is clean, not pots-and-pans clean,” said Moira misquoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, “but windswept clean!”
In all the years of their friendship and engagement, they had never gone beyond a very occasional kiss of passion. Again, as with many other aspects of their relationship, each had assumed that the other wished it that way. Their first evening and night together as married people was something Richard had lived again and again in his dreams. It proved a total disaster, however, and not because they both were virgins, but on account of Richard's strange behavior and Moira's reactions.
They had taken hours in going to bed, strolling down by the water and through the trees, chatting on the porch, and gazing quietly at the night all around them.
Eventually they were side by side. Moira's mind and body, by that time, were totally attuned to Richard's movements, the warmth of his body, the smell of it, the urgency he felt. She glanced at his face, her eyes full of invitation, Richard was lying on his back, his face turned toward the open glass panels. He seemed to be listening to the night sounds outside around the pond—the wind in the trees, the ruffling of the water, the owls hooting.
Then he turned his head toward her: “Now, darling,” he said, strangely quiet, “now Lake House is full of them. I am all of me tonight.”
Moira did not understand. She didn't care. He was already kissing and caressing her, entering her. And, eyes closed, her hands all over him, she started for the first time to feel the urging climb of ecstasy in loving.
Then she heard his voice—this time with a note of stridency—saying: “Open your eyes! Look at me!”
The sight of his face froze every muscle in Moira's body. It was like a flat, featureless surface without a line. There was no expression on it.
His mouth was closed. His eyes were open, but, unblinking and still, they were mere sightless hollows glazed over with a dead patina.
“You're not seeing me, Richard,” she said weakly.
But his body had become enormously heavy; she could breathe only with difficulty. She felt a sudden shooting contraction in her belly and groin. A sweat of pain broke out all over her body like a thin film. “Richard!” she tried to call out.
Richard was not with her. From the moment he turned back from the window, he had seen no one but his female self. When he entered Moira, a storm was on him over which he had no control. It was carrying him, petrified by increasing longing and intensifying loathing at one and the same time, at a speed which ruled out any resistance on his part. Longing and loathing were becoming so intertwined that the more repulsion he felt, the more readily he gave in to longing. But this only brought on increased loathing, so that longing and loathing became one. And both were coming from inside himself. He was their source. The higher he went on that first level of ecstasy, the lower he went on that second level of disgust.
All Richard could see was that beautiful face of his female self flung back in an effort to match his passion. At the same time he began to feel her hands on him as claws scraping his back and buttocks, first lightly, then with increasing pressure and tearing his skin. When she opened her eyes, their deep blue was swimming with feeling. Then they narrowed and glinted with a beige glow that reminded him of pigs' eyes, but his fascination with all this only swelled.
“You're not seeing me, Richard!” he heard his female self saying. “Look at me! Look at me!”
He groped with his body for her inner mystery, trying to explore every curve and cranny of her vagina. And, as he did, he felt in himself the rocking motion of something hard and angular. He heard the voice: “Let me take you, secret and all, mystery and all, Richard”—he could not know if it was his own voice or another's—“I'm your fucker. . . your fucker. Let me!” The voice died away again to a heavy, labored breathing that rose and fell with increasing gusts. It seemed to be acquiring a voiced character, a sound produced in a spittle-filled throat, wheezing, grunting, blowing, inhaling.
Now his longing and loathing were reaching a climax. There was no ejaculation. Rather he swelled and grew bigger and swelled with desire until he felt his middle opening up; and, with a loathing that held him hypnotized, he knew that an alien body was pouring fluid through him, hot, sticky, scorching. Loving and disgust became one. He started to thrash and flail.
By this time, Moira was screaming with fear as his terrible weight pressed down on her. She began to choke on the scream. Suddenly, he was off her. Her voice trailed away.
Richard was over by the far wall, a letter opener in his hand. He was standing with his back to her, tearing and gouging at the wall with wide sweeps of his hand, scraping paper and plaster on to the floor, while he hammered the wall with a clenched fist. A muffled groan rising and falling was all she heard from him.
His back, buttocks, and legs were a field of criss-crossing welts, scrapes, and lesions oozing with little pinpoints of blood at various places.
By now, Moira was afraid for her life. Without hesitation, she was out of bed and running through the door. She grabbed her coat and the car keys, flung the hall door open, and made for the car. “Moira!” she heard him shout brokenly. “Come back! Moira, don't go. Help me! Come back!” But by then she was halfway down the drive. She found her parents asleep in their hotel room. She never returned to Lake House or to Richard. Two years later she obtained a divorce from him.
Richard's dream was shattered. But there was something else in its place. He knew now that he had something new in him, something alive, something alien to him, but now his familiar and cohabitant.
He spent the two weeks of what would have been his honeymoon inside Lake House, rarely eating, refusing all callers, never answering the telephone. Gradually he returned to normal life. He was back at work in the office on the appointed day.
Outside office hours and activity, unless he was traveling, Richard stayed at Lake House. He never received visitors. Even when his family came to see him, they stayed in one of Tanglewood's hotels. Lake House was his refuge and his castle. On weekends he lay in bed in the morning waiting for sunrise. Regularly, as the first streaks of gray light appeared, the birds started to sing in the trees. First one here and there, then another one or two, then two or three together, until the house and garden were filled with the dawn chorus of thrushes, finches, robins, wrens, starlings.
At night and at any time possible he listened to the wind singing in the trees. It still brought tears to his eyes. And always he strained to remember the voice behind the wind and to capture its message and the identity of the messenger. His outlook was still filled with the mystery and power of femaleness. And, he was sure, the wind spoke of this and the birds sang of it.
Richard was now in the second stage of his development. His old idea of an androgynous self had melted. On his trips for the company business, he spent time regularly with prostitutes, and occasionally had relations with female clients and office personnel. He repelled any homosexual advances.
He admitted to himself after a while that in all these sexual encounters it was not a genuinely male sexual desire that impelled him. It was rather a jealous curiosity about the female and the feminine. He was always watching on the sidelines. No woman ever came back to him a second time. And more than one prostitute remarked as she left him: “You're freaky.”
He once invited a woman to Lake House because he wished to have relations with her while listening to the wind. Everything went well for a while, but something frightened her, and she fled from him as precipitately as Moira had.
It was frustrating for him. He could only speculate about the female ecstasy and experience. He noticed that some women, in having intercourse, moaned in
a dying fashion, turning their heads as if to avoid blows or to catch a mouthful of air. And he wondered what sort of lovely death that could be under the knife of female pleasure and secret power, and what sort of enshrined mystery a woman possessed that enabled her to live and die all over again the next time. For that was how he thought of it.
But, in the meantime, his own identity—sexual and otherwise—underwent an eclipse. For three years he never listened to or looked at another human being. He merely heard and saw them. He lost, therefore, any grasp on his own identity. He had no clear perception of who he was, what he was about, where he was going, where he came from. The pattern of his identity was in disarray: an essential piece had been withdrawn invisibly but with shocking results. All the earlier personal lines, geometrically clear and personally pleasing, had melted into a criss-crossed haze. The fine tones and delicate shades of taste and distaste, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion lost stability and definition. All were now clouds and swirls of the unknown and the unpredictable. The various gears of his inner mechanism in mind, will, memory, brain, heart, gut feelings were working at cross-purposes.
He stood helplessly hip deep in the running streams of impulses where before a sharp instinct or a brilliant perception had teamed with a never-failing voice in his heart. The self he originally proposed to free and ennoble had become indeterminate; it was colored by any element injected into him. He was a cracked bell jangling to the blow of any hammer. He was a bag of emptiness blowing and puffing on insubstantial air. Living now in an inner uncertainty of selfhood that nothing could dispel, he had become the reality of his former nightmare: a nonperson for himself. What he had cherished as a dream of happiness had become in reality an empty void.
And this was not all. He found out on one particular occasion that already within him there were impulses he could no longer govern, and that these impulses seemed to arise from his original ambition to enjoy both masculine and feminine qualities. On that occasion he recognized the big change in himself. It was around the middle of December 1968. He was on the road for his company. The weather was very bad: snow, sleet, strong winds, gale warnings. On his last evening in the city he was visiting, he was walking home from a late meeting with a client. It was around midnight. No one was out at that hour in such wintry weather. Richard walked because the wind, his wind, was blowing with a high-pitched sound-almost a warning, but still enticing.
The way to his hotel led him past rows of detached houses. About half a mile from the hotel, he heard a moaning sound from some bushes and trees that stood in a deserted area between two houses. He stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. Most of the nearby houses were dark, their owners probably asleep or absent. Richard followed the direction of the moaning. Behind the bushes he came across a spread-eagled form. It was a young black girl. She had been raped and stabbed. She was practically naked; her clothes had been torn off her. Between her legs and at her shoulder blood stained the snow in small, dark patches.
Richard was fascinated. He watched her for a while. Then he lifted his head and listened to the wind, feeling its fingers brushing and striking his face. He crept forward, keeping his head down against the wind, then stopped and watched her more closely. The girl was still moaning; her head twitched now and then.
Richard remembers very little else. He recalls tearing off his own clothes feverishly (he was afraid she might die before he finished what he wished to do). He talks almost tearfully now of feeling an irresistible desire to have relations with her then and there. He recalls the wind whistling music in his ears and then, marvelously, changing that music to words. He remembers catching the last glance of the girl who stared at him for one instant before her eyes went completely dead. He felt her body shudder.
Then apparently he stood up in a frenzy of triumph—he had achieved the ultimate watch on woman, he felt. He was seized by a great giddiness as the wind whipped around him. And now, for the first time, he sensed clearly that all his thinking and willing and feeling and imagining led like so many strings back to some central point in him where they lay in the hand of another, who controlled them and him. He felt the security of being controlled and the promise of success: “You shall be as woman!”
Afterward, when he reflected coolly on the incident, he realized that even in her death throes that woman had shown him the power of the feminine; his sexual relations with her had been a revelation for him. He knew that a decision had been made for him. He did not, as yet, guess from where that decision had come. But he did know what he had to do.
In the new year Richard went to New York. In previous years he had read extensively about transsexuals and the new transsexualizing operation. He now put himself under the care and supervision of a doctor who assured him that within 16 to 20 months, if all went well with the tests and preparations, he could have the operation, remove all trace of his male inadequacy—this was how Richard looked at his genitals—and acquire the organs of a woman. In late 1970, after passing successfully through the psychiatric examinations, and the necessary changes in the chemistry of his body having been produced by repeated treatments, Richard underwent surgery and emerged successfully from his convalescence in a new state of almost delirious happiness. He returned to Lake House. His mother and father came to see him, as did his brothers and sisters. They had become reconciled to his new status as well as its his newly adopted name of Rita. His boss at the insurance office was persuaded by his father that Richard could do the same work even better than before. So two months later, Richard was back to a normal life of daily work. As Rita.
The tempo of Richard/Rita's inner existence now changed. He found his outlook running in two main streams. One was the expected femaleness resulting from the operation. He found greater delight in little details—of cloth, of a story, of colors, of people's voices, in architecture. No longer did he look for large, sweeping lines in the world around him, nor did he feel inclined to argue logically or to engage in verbal polemics. He felt himself more vulnerable, more susceptible to praise and flattery, on the watch for compliments from men. He had a varied sexual life: he did not discriminate between old and young, ugly and beautiful. It was enough for him that he was desired and that they all found in him something that mystified them while holding them.
The other stream in his outlook was pockmarked with some stinging deficiencies that distressed him continually. When he had intercourse, for instance, he felt a great deadness in himself: there was no after-feeling of warmth and togetherness and perpetuity. And often this lack was accompanied by an inner bitterness that drove him into rages. It became an obsession with him “to make love and feel life” in himself after he had done so, and to hear his partner express himself in similar terms. But nothing he did ever produced a ray of hope in this direction, until he met Paul.
Paul, a Chicagoan, a former minister who had turned to banking and brokerage and become a millionaire in the process, was a very impressive character. Tall, good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair, suave, well dressed, educated, a very good conversationalist, Paul had a brilliant smile. He and Richard/Rita liked each other from the first moment they met at a cocktail party. Richard eventually told Paul his life history. He was surprised by Paul's matter-of-fact reaction. What amazed Richard/Rita more than that was Paul's understanding of his difficulty in having intercourse and in its aftermath.
“I think something can be done about all that, Rita,” he said. “But you will have to consummate a carefully arranged marriage.”
“Marriage? But marriage is impossible-at least very difficult,” answered Richard.
“Not the marriage I have in mind. You just need the right partner under the right circumstances. You don't realize it, but you have been preparing for quite a while for this marriage. Leave it all to me.”
Richard/Rita did not understand what Paul meant, until he participated in the Black Mass on June 21, 1971.
The invitation he received from Paul was ostensibly for a midnig
ht party. It was a sultry night without a patch of wind. When Richard/Rita arrived around 10:00 P.M., he was struck by the lavish surroundings. The house, dating from the previous century, stood in its own grounds. About 80 guests were drinking and eating a cold buffet around an open-air pool illuminated by tall, thick candles. Another 40 guests were dancing inside in the ballroom. The air was full of chattering, laughter, music, and celebrations. Paul immediately introduced Richard/Rita to a table at which two young women and their escorts sat. Merriment pervaded the group. Everybody was excited and happy.
From his position, Richard/Rita could see both ends of the pool. At each end there was a long table covered with food, drinks, ice buckets, and flowers. Behind each table, a long, wall-high, embroidered red curtain hung from a pole. A butler in black evening clothes stood motionless by each curtain.
Richard/Rita felt surprisingly at home. He joined in the laughter and talk around the table, and cheered as some of the more mellowed guests shoved each other fully clothed into the water.
At 12:45 P.M., Richard/Rita suddenly noticed a hush. Nobody was speaking any longer. The stereo music had gone silent. Without his realizing it, about three-quarters of the guests had departed. The two couples who had been at his table had excused themselves shortly before, saying that they wanted to dance.
The guests who remained had fallen silent. They stood in two groups at either end of the pool, facing each other across the water. Then, Richard/Rita noticed his tall host signaling to the two butlers. With a solemn movement, they pulled aside the curtains.
When the curtains parted, Richard/Rita could see a low altar table at either end of the pool. Above each altar there hung an ornament in the shape of an inverted triangle. At its center there was an inverted crucifix, the head of the crucified resting on the angle of the apex of the triangle. From the interior of the house he now heard the low peals of an organ. And someone was burning incense there, so that the fumes drifted out lazily and lay across the air like slowly twisting blue serpents. Then the guests started to undress in an unconcerned fashion, each one dropping his or her clothes where they stood.
