Fabian felt he should no longer withhold what he knew. “Diana is an extravagant character,” he volunteered.
Gordon-Smith smiled indulgently. “She loves to go places, to travel. Last week she took me all the way to Miami so she could get a tan to show off, and I guess I’ve been to about every disco there is.” Laughing, he raised his eyes and saw Fabian’s expression. “Is there something you know about Diana that you’re keeping from me, Fabian?” he asked, suddenly sharp.
“She’s a transsexual, a man,” Fabian said calmly.
Gordon-Smith wrapped both his hands around Fabian’s wrists.
“She’s what?” he shouted hoarsely, the familiar resonance of his voice spilling round the restaurant. “What did you just say?”
“Diana is a transsexual—a man who became a woman,” Fabian said. He kept his voice steady as he released his wrists from Gordon-Smith’s grip.
Gordon-Smith had turned sallow. “You’re making that up,” he muttered sullenly. “You’ve got to be. I know Diana. I’ve had sex with her. I ought to know a woman when I’m inside one.”
“Diana was operated on some time ago,” Fabian said, “and the operation altered her appearance and her sexual organs. She can perform sexually as a woman.”
“Why do you know what I don’t?”
“Where I met her, most of her friends didn’t bother to hide what she was,” Fabian retorted, “and that’s a place I don’t think you’d like to find yourself.”
Gordon-Smith’s movements were slack, tired. He suddenly looked his age. “Why didn’t you tell me this when you introduced me to her?” he asked resentfully.
Fabian softened his tone. “It wouldn’t have been fair. When you met her, she had been a woman, psychologically as well as physically, for years—convincing to herself, to people like me and apparently to you.”
“Then what makes you think it’s fair to tell me now?”
Fabian wished he could pinpoint his motive as accurately as he could strike a polo ball. “Perhaps it isn’t. But most of those who enforce our sex laws run you down by snooping and denouncing, by informing on you. You’re linked to a woman who, under some of the vagrancy statutes in this country, could be arrested, fined, even jailed as a TV, a transvestite, though she’s not. I thought you should know that.”
Gordon-Smith broke the long silence. “I can just see the headlines: ‘TV Anchorman Anchored to a TV.’” He thought for a moment. “Tell me, Fabian,” he questioned, “because I enjoyed myself so much with Diana—does that mean I’m queer?” He asked the question with almost a professional detachment.
Fabian looked at his friend across the table. “I doubt there’s ever been a judicial decision about what is meant by the concepts ‘male’ and ‘female,’” he said gently. “When not even the law has defined the sexes, why should you?”
Some transsexuals—those men irreversibly altered into often beautiful women—knew the intimacy of Fabian’s VanHome: one eager to test on him her newly acquired womanhood; one to reinforce her exaggerated femininity by offering to share it in lovemaking with both Fabian and another man; one testing herself by arranging to share Fabian in her encounter with a biological woman.
Manuela was among them. Whenever Fabian saw her, beguiled by her beauty and his own reaction to it, he experienced a sense of tumult, not unlike what he imagined Gordon-Smith must have felt when the truth about Diana’s life forced him to question his own.
Manuela had come into Fabian’s life within the orbit of the transsexual world—she was the friend of another transsexual, who had already gone the road of full conversion and who asked Fabian to accompany her while she received her regular hormone injection. Introducing Manuela to Fabian, his friend told him that, unlike herself, Manuela was only a half-change; her breasts enlarged by hormone treatment and surgery, the protruding Adam’s apple elided, skin depilated to smoothness. Yet, she was still unwilling or unready to undergo the final passage to full conversion. Manuela blushed, stammered her name and, shifting uneasily, silently permitted Fabian’s assessment of her sensual face and smooth neck, girlish breasts, and a waist, hips and legs of consummate shapeliness.
She was in her mid-twenties and worked in a large pharmacy owned by her father and mother. Since adolescence, she had lived as a female, an arrangement to which her parents consented; it was for her sake, to preserve her secret, that they moved to another city, where Manuela would be known only as a young woman. There were long intervals in her life, Manuela told Fabian, when her anatomy tormented her, its maleness a fraud; then she considered the prospect of total surgical conversion. Yet, though she existed as a woman and desired sexual relations solely with heterosexual men, Manuela insisted that only by retaining her male organ would she be able to experience desire and orgasm. She felt that most of the fully converted transsexuals she knew suffered weakened sex drives; seldom, if ever, able to achieve orgasm, they became sexually dormant.
Manuela told Fabian how, with a man who, not aware of her duality, was captivated by her as a woman or who captivated her, she was compelled to maintain a maze of deceptions and theatrical ingenuities to conceal her true identity. With the help of adhesives and tapes, even with corsets, she constricted her organ, folding and pressing it tightly against her body; during lovemaking, the affirmation of her femininity and beauty, she invented elaborate strategies and ruses, menstrual cramps as an instance, to prevent herself from having to undress fully before her partner; then, when he was drunk or high on pot, she might offer him her breasts, her mouth, any other mode of love, so that he would be led to think he had possessed her entirely.
She admitted that such exchanges were exciting, flattering, and reinforced her sense of herself as female but she also acknowledged that, sexually, they often left her unfulfilled, feverish with barren stimulation.
Manuela’s predicament rang true to Fabian in mirroring the ambivalence he recognized in any relationship, however brief, that he entered into with a transsexual woman. He vacillated between having a lover who had undergone the final transformation, though at the cost of diminished desire, or having one who, like Manuela, retained the force of desire, at the price of forgoing the reality of the other gender she desperately lay claim to.
Fabian probed his fascination with Manuela. What seemed to him its source was a fuse and musk of charged femininity: her features and the shape of her body, her voice, her makeup and dress—all her being strove to enhance her reality as a woman. He was riveted by a youthful sensuality, always flagrant, in alliance with an expression of that sensuality, always studied—femininity on the make. Hinting at a revelation of what was vulnerable and soft in him, Manuela promised a discovery of sensation that was unexposed, untapped and all the more ripe for exploration. But at no time did her assumed womanhood, the authority of her femininity, obscure for him the physical fact of her maleness, and at no time did he find her duality troubling. In his VanHome, in a private chamber of his private fort, he was free to pursue, to assess and to meditate on the enigma of his own being—an outlaw from the league of crusaders, inquisitors and censors of sexual conduct.
On his way to the city, Fabian would call Manuela, and she would arrange to take time off from the pharmacy. When he arrived, he would leave his VanHome close to a park; the next day, Manuela, who enjoyed riding, would join him when he exercised his ponies there.
That evening, carrying an overnight case, she would visit him. Her appearance in the VanHome’s narrow doorway was always an event: a rustle and slip of grace, accomplished and knowing, like a ballerina entering from the wings or a model poised at a fashion show. It became their habit, before going up to the alcove, to linger over drinks in the VanHome’s living room. Manuela was unquiet, even fretful during those interludes, wandering about as they spoke, flipping through one of the horse and rider magazines on his bookshelves, then discarding it. Occasionally, the brass fixtures in the room or the mirror on the wall would give her back her reflection: instantly, one hand would rise
to the arrangement of her hair; she would examine her makeup, adjust the flow of the blouse draping her neck and shoulders. She always wanted to impress Fabian with the progress she had made as a woman, the perfecting of her beauty and femininity. Her presence was a ferment in the room: a sultry spirit, she would toss back and forth, as if bothered by the loosened knot of her lush hair, her shoulders and hips seething beneath her clothes. Outside, all was still, the city, the trees, his VanHome abolished in the tide of darkness. At its farthest fringe, a thread of burning orange, the lights of the city, held the park in its taut noose.
Soon Fabian would ask Manuela to go with him to the alcove. She would get up and prepare another drink, reassure herself for the last time in the mirror, and take the lead. Behind her on the stairs, watching the faultless line of her leg, the polished curving of a hip ascending before him, he would grasp in himself, once again, the inescapable knot of his need, the raveled mesh of what it was that he wanted from her.
In the alcove, Manuela would sit on the bed’s edge, preening her legs, monitoring his scrutiny of their uncommon length in proportion to her rib cage. She would unleash her thick hair, to fan about her neck; when he reached out to touch it, some recognition in the circuit of his thought would affirm that hair, like skin or tooth or nail, knew no sex; it lent its beauty of texture, shape and color to female and male equally.
Now, as in the past, she would prolong this phase of their meeting, making the beauty of her face accessible, obedient in her will to please him, while the rest of her would remain concealed within her clothes, teasing, insinuating, conscious that he could not know whether the excitement that grew on her face was matched by her body’s own response.
He could have her, he would tell himself, in this fashion, on terms that were arranged, by her, to satisfy and to please him—a man, one of those beings from whom she now saw herself estranged by her femininity, the spirit of her own world. He was aware that for her to offer him more of herself, to lay open to him her entire body, would be to give him less of what she perceived as her essential self, would make her betray what in herself she loved most.
Yet if he was aroused by her beauty, the texture, shape and fragrance of her womanhood, it was because he longed for a signal that she wanted to be taken, to give herself to him, and finally, no longer passive, spurred by his excitement, she wanted to take him.
Consciously, then, he would make known his yearning for that stirring in her, a signal that the narrow slip of cloth, now a mere leaf against the promise of her body, was the only frontier that separated her from him, the tape binding her flesh, the last prison of her being. She would respond with a request that he dim the lights in the alcove, denying the mirror there the power to bear witness to her nakedness, and, hesitantly, she would remove the narrow band of cloth and peel off the tape. She was naked before Fabian now, but still reluctant to permit herself to become aroused, the check on her body taut, in thrall to that image of herself that, even though she was naked, impelled her to keep herself clothed, hidden from herself. She still refused to let even her hand, the hand of the woman, scout the realm of what was man in her, still feared that the wakening of her own excitement would banish the woman in her. Instead, she volunteered to enhance Fabian’s pleasure with her touch, to post herself in sensuous mediation between him and his own desire, even as she still declined to obtain it from her own flesh.
Slowly, in her contemplation of Fabian and of his pleasure in being with her, Manuela succumbed to a realization that if he was not threatened by the form and shape of her pleasure, it need not pose a barrier to her. She came to see that she was, in her need of feeling and of arousal, no less a woman than, in his answering need, he was a man; that, by reaching with him the shores that confined the body’s pleasure, she would only affirm her condition as a woman, consolidate her reality.
In this joint traffic of pleasure, a cycle of what was given, what taken, Fabian’s passion her only guide, Manuela would rise to the satiety of her own pleasure. Fabian was made conscious of possessing her, was free to stake claim to her body, free to impel her to her own revelation. He hovered over her, in awe of a body that had no fault, that seemed to incarnate the secret of who he was: at her mouth and breast, he was a boy necking with a girl; entwined with her, entering her, he was a man taking his woman; arousing her with his hand, he was a boy at play with a man; straddling her as she lay helpless beneath him, he was a man toying with a boy; inert, pinioned by her, he was a man at the mercy of a boy.
Now they lay together, the shudder of flesh waking them to its meaning, desire a fluent stream between them, a chasm that only flesh could bridge. Neither lost to the pleasure of the other, they seemed two instruments shaped from one mold, to one end, each an embodiment of the other’s quest.
Just as Manuela was no longer the contrivance of their first encounter, an icon of cosmetics and dress, of shapes and gestures, so Fabian, submissive to his own desire, ceased to be a tissue of his memory, of circumstance and the moment’s decor. Dancers passing beyond the dance, music abandoned, movement and the stage obliterated, the two of them were now equally lovers, a habitat of flesh, bound to the revelation of that flesh through each other, assenting to its mercy.
Afterward, Manuela would slip quickly from the bed and disappear into the bathroom. When she returned, moist and cool from the bath, her hair combed, her face freshly made up, her nightdress wrapping her body in a mist of gauze, she would ask Fabian to turn on all the lights and then sit beside him, gently guiding his gaze toward the alcove’s mirror, making the two of them twins of contemplation. He would watch her adoration of her reflected self, as if she were a man discreetly admiring a young girl, her eyes pausing on her face, brushing her mouth, descending to fondle her breasts, glide over her belly, avoiding the slight blur of the narrow slip of cloth, then slide along her legs, returning once more to her face, once more to her breasts. The canvas of her eyes readily prompted her hands to a new life; aroused again, her eyes caught at the mirror, she would reach out to Fabian, stroking his flesh. But when he sought to interrupt that rumination, to bring her mouth back to his, she would succumb to him reluctantly, unwilling to abandon the mirror’s seduction.
When bantering, he would ask her what was it that she saw; she would turn to him with a smile so artless that it restored him to the memory of the moment when he first surprised her in her engagement with the mirror. It was then, she said, that she had fallen in love with the beautiful woman in the mirror, a love, she went on dreamily, in which she was not alone. How could it be, she asked, that the woman arrested in the mirror, so sensuous and so complete, the woman now returning their gaze, should not be the object of their love, an artifact of their own devising, the murmur of her reflection rising from herself to enfold him, then passing on to something beyond the rapture of their dual fascination.
On occasion, Fabian would invite into his VanHome a new companion, one of the girls or young women whom he had met at a recent horse show and who was now to be alone with him for the first time. Earlier he would have arranged for Manuela to join them, and when she arrived, the flare of her seductive allure would be in full glow, the meld of her sexuality fired by the challenge of another woman.
She would wait while Fabian took the girl on a tour of the VanHome. In the intimate quarters of the tack room, in the stalls next to the horses, those animals for whom the girl had professed her tenderness and devotion when she had first met him, Fabian had a chance to put her at ease, to establish between the two of them their shared love for horses.
He would walk next to her through the narrow spaces, then let her take the lead, his shoulder or hip brushing hers as they navigated, sniffing the scent of leather drifting about the tack room, listening to the rustle of horses nuzzling alfalfa in the stalls.
Back in the living room, busying himself with drinks and food, he would ask Manuela to show their guest his sleeping alcove and the bath. When they came back some while later, flushed with laughter, the
ir glasses empty, he would observe, with some complacency, that the girl was already far more familiar with Manuela than with him. He would watch covertly how Manuela planted in their guest the conviction that, for their evening together to be transformed into an adventure, with something of the exhilaration of the chase, they must abandon themselves to the world much as they would to the wayward impulses of a horse on track or trail; for the three of them, the two women and Fabian, their friendship was now the stuff of that world, the swift laying hold of the moment, their private hunt.
Later, in a sensuous lull of the evening, when the initial reserves, defenses and barriers had been breached, the girl would confess to Manuela that, if she were ever to be intimate with another woman, beauty of face and promise of personality having exerted their magnetism, the breasts of that other woman would be the most alluring element. Avid to test her prowess still further, Manuela would now find a pretext to reveal the contours of her breasts, enticing under her thin blouse, the nonchalance of her movements masking the guile of the act.
Fabian would then leave the two of them in the room, withdraw to the alcove, change into a robe and wait. Soon, on a pretext of exchanging some mysteries of makeup or dress, Manuela would bring their guest to the alcove; absorbed in Manuela, the girl would barely notice that Fabian was wearing only a robe. The two women would proceed to mull over each other in the mirror, applying eye shadow, blusher, lip gloss, putting up their hair only to let it tumble in disarray over their shoulders, sharing that liberty of touch of those who share a common purpose. Manuela’s mood would change. Acknowledging Fabian’s presence with her eyes, she would become more openly seductive, permitting herself to fondle and kiss the girl, first on the cheek and then the neck; then, while dabbing perfume on the girl’s temples, she would lean forward and kiss her lips, the movement fleeting still, the intent disguised. Manuela might then suggest that, to enhance her freshly made-up face and to transform her appearance even more dramatically, the girl ought to try on some of the clothes Manuela had brought with her. Intoxicated by the spirit of the exchange, mesmerized by the possibilities of her face and body, and the impact she might have, the girl would assent greedily.