one more rung down that black ladder

After the period of lurching uncertainty concerning what had transpired between Henry and Bunny, even after the truth had been made clear to me, the possibility kept presenting itself. It merely assumed different aspects.

I found him lying on my bed one afternoon; I halted in the doorway, unsure of how to proceed. For a moment it seemed like he’d fallen asleep, sprawled out like a side of beef with his glasses on; the room was barren as ever and he did indeed look like a felled animal, wheezing slightly. Only when I leaned forward, shifted my weight from one foot to the other in a way that wrung an embarrassing squeak out of the floorboards, did he look up and acknowledge me. If he’d fallen asleep there, it was entirely by accident, not the deliberate affront my brain had straightaway leapt to; his jacket was thrown over the dresser, suggesting he’d been waylaid dozing off en route to some date, and his necktie still hung undone around his collar.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” he said, ridiculous in sleepiness and mad about it. His hair was still a little damp, trimly parted except for in the back where he’d mussed it on the flattened pillow. “I’ll clear out of here, just took a minute to rest my eyes, you know. Old lady’s got me running ragged.”

I could only assume he meant Marion and not a visit from his mother. And so I watched him do up his necktie, jostle through my nightstand for a comb, do practically everything at all but explain why he’d been in there.

He paused very near to me on his way out, practically shoulder to shoulder, and I felt him considering. I could smell him, boozy and raw, some kind of cologne or aftershave that hadn’t had time to burn off yet to something less nakedly gamy. Men of that physical type – Bunny and his ilk, his four Labrador-retriever brothers and his father and any meaty smiling children he might put forth into the world – were in every way alien to me. My ambivalence had a heavy dose of apprehension to go with it, even without his grating personal attributes. He might not have been too bright in other regards, but had he been so inclined he could hardly have failed to notice a few things about me that would have sent the whole ruse up in smoke. A handful of obvious particulars underneath my clothes, my thin wrists, my disappointing and disappointed high-tenor voice. One misplaced phone call or document unhidden. I had no reference points for how to play this role; I’d learned as I went the art of impersonation.

Even if something had happened to occur between him and Henry in Rome, it would have been confident, if misjudged, a hand resting too long on some burly chest or thickly-muscled thigh. An exchange of strangled intimacy between two men, more or less equals as far as Classical sex went. In Bunny’s eyes I ranked a little more than Camilla, yet somehow less than Francis. It wasn’t me he needled about fags, or even (in a colorful new addition in reference to Sappho 31, phainetai-moi,) dykes, not when the low-hanging fruit of botched class indicators and a more general kind of inadequate manhood still remained to pelt me with. Even if he were so inclined, I reasoned, by all logic I should be beneath his notice, sexually. But if one of us had to be the unlucky youth, and one of us the man–

“They pierce your ears?”, Bunny busted out with. He sounded transparently delighted with his own observational skills. His meaty thumb extended to swipe at my right earlobe, the pinprick scars there I had thought nothing of, having long ceased to wear jewelry, and that had healed to nothing. Or practically nothing, anyway. “Did they pierce your ears, back at Hollywood High?”

“My old girlfriend did it with a safety pin,” I managed, boldfaced, “I was fifteen. It was a really dumb idea,” feeling myself scramble to recover, but Bunny had seen me balk. He couldn’t have believed my story of rebellious heterosexual lovebirds for a second, not with that kind of delivery, even if he showed uncharacteristic discretion in not remarking on it just then. Somewhere he was cross-referencing the way I’d presented myself on our first solo meeting with what he saw now, and found it to be – what? Away went that little factoid, filed away in the coffee-ringed Corcoran catalogue of personal vulnerabilities.

He jostled me on his way out, not even maliciously. Either I’d passed the test, or he hadn’t yet decided on what to do with me. That night, I burnt the photograph of my mother, another flimsy leaf of paper torn from a multiple-choice past.

-*-

(In the hospital, I remember thin grey light and a needle in my arm that I hadn’t wanted there and doctors calling me “she” and “her”. In the hospital, Richard Papen couldn’t look Henry Winter in the eye. )

My clothing had been replaced, my sweaters upon sweaters and my coat and workman’s trousers; this was the first thing to register, how light I felt, no longer shuddering from cold. And so, it followed, the facts of my private existence were revealed; the cat had been out of the bag for hours, maybe even days. The gown on loan was roomy enough that I was swimming in it, but now, having been called what I was in a way that made the rest of my identity clear – a masquerader, an impostor – I felt like they’d cut me open in front of him. My breasts were celebrating their newfound freedom along with my pulverized lungs, by itching and bleeding everywhere. I wondered dimly what they’d done with my vest of bandages. Incinerated them, probably.

Henry was a black blot on my peripheral vision in his winter coat, broader than ever. I’d gotten used to carefully monitoring my own body language, adjusting the way I sat or stood or strode or held a pen. Here I sat hugging myself like a girl waiting outside an abortion clinic, folded up in shame and obscured. Only the awful feeling of the needle in my arm kept me from hunching over entirely and, maybe, groaning a little.

“Where did you take me?”

“You’re in Montpelier. I brought you to the hospital.”

“What’s this IV for?”

“They say you have pneumonia. Would you like something to read?”

He was stalling, I knew it. Apprehension came faster than gratitude; if he had taken me to the infirmary, all was still lost, but the damage would make itself widely-known a little more gradually from here. Here, in a warm hospital bed with a man I considered a friend and (at the moment) an unlikely savior, I felt no less close to death. I’d woken from a bad dream to a reality no less disordered and nightmarish. Everything had slipped out of joint and rearranged itself while I’d slept. The only reasonable conclusion was to assume the worst, that I had lost everything, and all that was left was the drawn-out reckoning of my loss, item by item. If Henry had ever trusted me, that trust was gone for ever. I hadn’t asked him to take me to the hospital, to have saved my life. I hadn’t wanted the tetanus shot, either.

My furrowed brow made the cut on my forehead pucker. “No, thank you. What time is it?”

“One in the morning.”

How long had he sat there, watching me? What name had he given them, what fabricated relation?

“I imagine you want some kind of explanation for this. For all this. Did the doctor say–”

Henry closed his book in his lap, in a tremendously expressive gesture.

“Axiothea studied under Plato, living as a man,” he said conversationally. “She left her home to study at the Academy.”

By choice, or by necessity?, I wanted to ask. My throat was bitterly sore, and the cracks in my voice could have been fatigue or emotion, either. Instead I said, “Oh. Well. What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’m not angry with you, Richard. It doesn’t even surprise me.”

Another bolt of awareness seized me. Worse, I didn’t know whether or not to believe him.

I swallowed and immediately regretted swallowing, mustering my reserves. My own voice did not sound frightened to me, or, ironically, feminine enough to betray me were I not prone in a hospital bed just then. It sounded flat, deadened. “My driver’s license says Richard Papen. I changed it at the DMV. You need to get it out of my coat, before someone finds it.”

Henry, with his watchmaker’s fingers, had palmed my wallet. He produced it and set it on the edge of my bed, like a sober-faced stage magician relinquishing a prop, and I had to look up at him then, his gaze hard and level.

“I’ve taken care of everything,” he said, softly. At the time it struck me as reassuring, not yet knowing what it meant for Henry to eliminate a problem. It reinforced that despite all of this he was still on my side. Then the rest of it came out, as if it were perfectly natural – the story of him fleeing Rome only to find me by accident, delivered quietly and comfortably with not another word.

I spent a little under a week there in the hospital, no longer an object of speculation by the staff, no longer a vagrant or a half-thawed bulldyke as long as I remained there under Henry’s bespectacled auspices. For that I can be grateful.

-*-