“You got that right.”
“How the heck did I know?”
“Keep your shirt on,” she said in a softer voice. “I appreciate what you did. Thank you. OK?”
He was leaning over, looking down at her.
“OK,” he said.
He reached across and helped her shut the door. He waited while she walked, only a slight stagger.
He headed off Old Stone Highway onto Neck Path, shaking his head, knowing he’d never forget that night. Never forget her. Him. Herhim.
He was remembering it all yet again when he heard the Mister.
“Water, please!” (wa wa eese!)
“I’m coming, sir.”
“Where’s Mrs. Lasher?” (issus ash?)
“Shopping, sir. She’ll be back by five.”
“Read to me?” (eed ew ee?)
“Yes, sir,” said Delroy.
Delroy was a Patricia Highsmith fan. He even had two old letters from her, sent from Switzerland. When he’d read her obituary in the New York Times he had wept, cut it out, and put it inside his Bible with a single rose he’d bought at Wittendale Florist.
Lasher used to call Highsmith “Lowsmith.” He would say, “Let’s see what kind of weirdo Lowsmith’s got up her sleeve for us this time!”
The Mister probably enjoyed her books because they took his mind off his troubles. But Delroy liked them because of all the characters who did unexpected things and were out of step. They comforted him. He felt out of step himself, but not that far out. Not as far out as Edward Candle, who looked and talked like a mild-mannered college professor, all the while hiring thugs to kill horses for die insurance. Highsmith would have understood Candle. Delroy wasn’t sure she would have understood Scotti.
He propped the Mister up against the pillows and sat beside him.
“Aceyar ooday?”
Mr. Lasher was asking if Delroy had gone to the graveyard that day, to make the secret arrangements. It was easier when he used his machine to talk for him, but it took too long. Anyway, Delroy already knew what had to be done at the cemetery.
“I’m taking care of it, sir,” he said.
Delroy had been up at Green River several times, not just to be sure everything was shaping up as the Mister wanted it. Delroy knew Scotti lived somewhere near there, but he didn’t know where yet. He was always hoping for some sort of serendipity- that would bring them together.
SIX
The moment Scotti walked in die door, her mother said, “Someone very rich is going to die soon. You should see what’s going on at the graveyard.” “Uh-huh. Did anyone call named Mario Rome?”
“Is he the one you met in your writers’ workshop?”
“Yes, Mother.” She was forty-eight, back living at home since she had begun dressing as a female full-time. She regretted that she lived there every time she walked through the front door. Immediately she was blasted with the latest news from the Green River Cemetery next door. Her mother walked Baba, the bulldog, there daily, and she had become the graveyard’s Liz Smith, filled with gossip about the Hamp-tonites people joked were “dying” to get into the prestigious cemetery on Accabonac. “Mario Rome said he’ll come for you at eight o’clock,” Mrs. House said. “Did you hear what I said about someone rich dying?”
“Who?”
“I said someone. If I knew I’d tell you. This lovely young man was there with some gardeners from Hrens, making very elaborate arrangements.” Scotti put her Dana Buchman coat on a hanger and stuck some Christmas-wrapped packages up on the closet shelf. Then off with her boots.
Her mother said, “I heard whoever’s dying bought a lot of land behind Jackson Pollock’s grave. He’s going to landscape the whole area. Pine trees, bushes. This young man was asking Hrens if they could put in flowering plants with little notice.”
Myrna House took a drag on her cigarette and continued, “I heard him say whoever he works for could hang on until spring or die at any moment.” She blew a smoke ring straight at Scotti. Three years ago Scotti had given up smoking when she was having her beard removed, each hair blasted with electricity over the dozens of hours it took, after the year of electrology on the arms, hands, back, and stomach.
“I know this young man and Mr. X are very rich for another reason and that is that Baba didn’t bark at him,” her mother said. “You know' what a snob Baba is. He barks his head off at the colored, the poor, and anyone speaking any language but English. We went by a funeral for this major artist last month and Baba was like a little lamb.”
Baba looked up from the rug when he heard his name, opened his eyes, closed them, heaved a rapturous sigh, and let his head collapse back on the doggie bed.
“I have to take a bath and get ready for my date,” Scotti said.
“You have an hour and a half but no time for me.”
“I don’t want to hear cemetery gossip tonight, Mother. Tell me something else.”
“What happens around here? Nothing. Every single friend of mine is in Florida now.”
“You can go to Florida.”
“And leave you at Christmas? It was bad enough when I left you at Thanksgiving. You had a hangover when I called the next day. You said so yourself. Drinking with Max Bernstein. No wonder! You sounded like death warmed over.”
Death warmed over wasn’t even close, Scotti thought. Her mother slid her eyeglasses back on her white-haired head and snapped off the six o’clock TV news using the remote. Her feet were propped up on the footstool, in the red booties similar to the ones she was knitting for Scotti’s daughter.
Scotti said, “I’d like you to go to Florida, Mother. I’ll be just fine.” “Who is this Mario Rome?”
“I hardly know him. I told you: he’s in my writers’ workshop. He seems like a nice fellow . . . You could go to Sarasota. You loved it there last year.”
“Last year Ellie Foxworth was alive. I’m not going to Florida by myself.”
“You have other friends there.”
“They’re with their families. People spend holidays with their families. That’s why I spend Thanksgiving with Emma and Jessica.”
Mrs. House was not fond of her daughter-in-law. She had never been able to understand why her handsome son had waited so long to get married and then chosen this fat female fifteen years younger. Emma was the only reason she continued to see Jessica.
Scotti said, “Okay. We’ll have a nice Christmas. Then, if you’d like to go to Florida, go.” Scotti picked her bag up and started upstairs.
“Is this Mario Rome an Eyetalian?”
“I guess he is.”
“Watch it! Eyetalian men are all over you, right off the bat.”
“Are you speaking from experience?”
“I’ve been told that in Italy they walk down the street grabbing their crotches.”
“I’ll have to take my chances.”
“It could turn ugly, Scott, if he finds out.”
“He’s not going to find out!” What happened at Thanksgiving was never going to happen again. Even though Scotti could not remember all of it, she remembered the tall red-headed man coming around the side of the Jeep, then exclaiming “My God!”
Mrs. House said, “This Mario Rome said to dress for bowling.” “What?”
“That’s what he said. You seem to drift toward lowlifes, never mind how you try to change yourself.”
“There’s not that much to do out here in winter, I guess.”
“What happened to a good movie and dinner?”
“That sounds fine with me, but I didn’t ask him out, he asked me out. He gets to choose.”
“What happened to inviting a man home to dinner?”
“Someday I might.”
“If a man meets me at least he’ll know you’re from an ordinary family, much like anyone else’s.”
“Instead of from another planet?’
“Well? People don’t think of your kind coming from just folks. I’m only trying to help you out, Scott.”
&nbs
p; “I appreciate it.”
Scotti did, too, never mind the slings and arrows that accompanied the concern. Few members of Metamorphs, her support group, got help of any kind from a parent. Hysterics, threats, banishment was the usual treatment, and it rarely changed with time.
When Scotti went into Manhattan for Metamorph sessions she heard all the horror stories. Her own father’s farewell letter seemed mild by comparison, although his adamant rejection of her new identity had crushed her as well as shocked her. As brilliant as he was, Bolton House could not understand transsexuality. He felt somehow insulted that she was giving up her male identity. The anger he felt she had expected from her mother, not him.
In the beginning Mrs. House was more bewildered than belligerent. She said she should never have let Scott dress up when he was little, try on her hats, shoes, carry around her handbags. She said she should have made him play sports more, get his nose out of those books. He was too much like his father, Myrna House had thought. Then, when the truth was out, she blamed Jessica. It never would have happened if Jessica had gone on a diet and made herself more attractive. Jessica, she said, was the one who made Scott queer first, and next this hybrid.
She shouted after Scotti, “You could watch the news with me, you know. Why do you always go up to your bedroom?”
“Because I have so little time to read, Mother. And I don’t want to die of secondary smoke inhalation. ” Max had recommended a book called The Master Key, but Scotti couldn’t get past a scene in the middle where a child was kidnapped. It was too graphic and grievous. She usually liked the same au thors Max did. Thea Astley, Barbara Vine, Elizabeth Jolley.
Her mother’s clock cuckooed seven times.
Bowling! Even when she was Scott she had always avoided bowling and bowling alleys!
Mario had told everyone in the Ashawagh Hall Writers’ Workshop that he was working on a murder mystery. It was set in the late nineties, when he’d owned The Magic C in New York City. The title of his book was Recovering from Cynthia-. It was about an ex-girlfriend who had swindled him.
In the late ’70s Scott had sneaked off to discos and gay clubs, looking for himself. At the same time he was reading everything he could find about transsexuals, beginning with Christine Jorgensen’s sex change. Jorgensen’s surgeon had become so swamped with applications for operations once the news broke in 1952, the Danish government finally restricted the procedure to Danish applicants.
For many years Scott could not admit to himself that it was the only solution to his own plight.
Scotti had been surprised when Mario Rome came into the library a few afternoons ago, said something about tickets, a “charity thing,” ending with, “No big deal. We’ll just be a pair of writers out looking at life together.”
She could handle that.
He’d told her he was returning books for a friend: Len Lasher.
That was a name everyone at the East Hampton Library knew. Mr. Lasher was a big contributor to the library. An honorary building patron, although he never attended planning meetings. But his checks arrived in the mail regularly. Every now and then someone would point out a writeup about him in Fortune, or Barron’s, Time, New Tork magazine, Newsweek. It was always passed around to the employees.
Len Lasher, who pronounced Rockefeller c‘Wockefeller” and claimed he wasn’t “wealy wich,disarmed you with his baby speech and tycoon ambitions.
Le Reve, the huge brick Tudor house on The Highway Behind The Pond, was often pointed out to tourists fascinated by celebrity.
Scotti’s interest in Lasher stemmed from the Candle case. The actual horse killer had plea-bargained, told all, and Candle was forced to plead guilty. His sentencing was still pending.
Many of the cases Jessica worked on, and a few Scotti had helped her with, were never really over for Scotti when they ended. She was always intrigued with any follow-ups, even if it meant little more than keeping track of the principals in newspapers, on the Internet, and on TV.
Candle’s little girl, Candace, often came to the library’s story hour, as the Lasher child did.
If Scotti actually did end up at the East Hampton Bowl that night, the idea that Mario had some connection with the Lashers would be part of the draw. She was still curious about Edward Candle, whom she’d first seen last summer at the Hampton Classic.
Scotti was her mother’s child, too, despite the family consensus that it was Bolton House she was most like. From him she’d acquired her love of reading, her appreciation of wine, a quieter, more WASP-y feel for life than Myrna House’s, but people, and people’s secrets, held Scotti in thrall the same way her mother was captivated by the inhabitants of the Green River Cemetery.
SEVEN
When Mario handed over the tickets at the door, he was given two wicker baskets with red and green ribbons tied to the handles. Inside, nestled atop a white linen napkin, was a box lunch of crustless turkey sandwiches, pate and crackers, fruit, cheese, and cookies, and a throwaway camera that took twenty-seven pictures. There was also a white, cone-shaped paper hat with HAMPTON home benefit written down the side in red.
“We don’t have to bowl,” Mario said. “I thought it might be fun here tonight.”
“It looks like it will be.”
Scotti was relieved, delighted, sorry she hadn’t worn her good gabardine pants and a cashmere sweater instead of the jeans she had on with a cotton pullover from the Gap.
She wished she’d worn more makeup, too. She was careful to be conservative in East Hampton. MTF transsexuals often overdid it in the beginning. Scotti saved the impulse to let herself go for visits with Max Bernstein and his wife, or nights alone at the opera with Max.
The bowling alley was decorated with balloons and streamers, several Christmas trees with tiny gold lights, and many evergreen wreaths with red bows.
Mario had on an old tweed jacket with gray flannel pants. He’d said, “I got these tickets from a friend.” He checked her coat and led her into the alleys.
She liked his looks. She liked men who had handsome, weathered faces and bodies no longer that slender but not heavy, either. Dr. Bolton House had been rail thin and pale-faced, his rimless glasses always slipping down his nose. Scott had been this beanpole kid who later joined a gym in his teens. He’d done everything to look and act like a male. He never felt like one, though. At first, Jessica was the only one he told that to. She claimed it was all in his head, and he’d answered, “That’s the problem.”
While Mario went to get their drinks, Scotti looked the crowd over. She doubted even one of them had ever been in the Hampton Bowl before this evening. Some of them were actually bowling. A few women giggled as they slid partway down the alleys with the balls still stuck to their fingers.
The men were more intense, but no less amateurish.
Mario waited about an hour before he let it drop that it was Len Lasher who’d passed on the tickets.
“He’s not a friend. I shouldn’t have said he was. I work for him, chauffeuring. Part-time.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s pleasant enough. Self-absorbed, like the rich are. But now he’s got MS. It’s slowed him down. Still, over at Le Reve they say he just swung the biggest deal of his life, with Standard Broadcasting. He always comes out on top.”
Scotti bowled a bit, badly, and so did Mario. They ate the supper in their baskets while he blamed himself for ending up alone in life. She liked his honesty.
He said, “There was a time when I thought I was the car I drove, the clothes I wore, and the women I took out. It was all surface. So were the women I was attracted to. Except one. Cynthia. She was deeper. She took off with my entire savings. I went to pieces. There weren’t that many pieces, either. I was on the shallow side.”
Then he waited. It was Scotti’s turn. She told him as much as she dared: that she’d married someone the opposite of her, an insurance investigator who didn’t smoke or drink (except on special occasions) or dance . . . someone who’d neve
r liked discos, someone always setded, while she’d been wild and immature for far too long.
“It’s hard for me to imagine you wild and immature,” Mario said. “What’s your book about?”
“I just finished an article on the wines of the Languedoc, in France. I have to get back to the book. But talking about it sabotages it for me.”
“I know what you mean.”
How could she talk about it? It was mostly about Scott: how he always knew he was in the wrong body, how he always felt a stranger looked back at him in the mirror, and how he was attracted to other males, but unable to be excited by two male bodies together. Gay men Scott knew had called him “homophobic.” That was a favorite accusation for anyone with gender conflict.
“Let me know when you read in class. I don’t want to miss it,” Mario said. “I don’t know if I can read aloud.”
“You don’t have to, but it helps. I was in the class last year and after I began to read aloud I began to really work.”
The woman who ran the workshop wrote a brief comment after she read four chapters of Scotti’s memoir.
Your conundrum (of course you’ve read the Jan Morris memoir called that?) almost works but we need more show and less tell.
Out of the Night is not a good title for this, either . . . Rose Tremain wrote a novel some years back about a female to male switch, Sacred Country. Worth reading. And you should read aloud in class, Scotti. Don’t worry about subject matter. It’s not a judgmental group. But if you’re shy in that way, you can always say it’s fiction and not a memoir.
They talked over the noise of the crowd, standing by themselves, leaning against a wooden railing overlooking the alleys.
Suddenly a woman called out “Mario?” and then snapped his picture with one of the cameras they all had.
She had practically no hair, but she had great bones and style. The haircut seemed deliberate, not the result of chemotherapy. She had on jeans, pointy-toed cowboy boots, and a lacy peasant blouse. Large gold hoops in pierced ears. A fat leadier belt cinching her waist.
Mario introduced Scotti to Nell Slack.
He seemed amazed to see her there.
“But you gave me a ticket,” she protested.
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