Every Woman in Whitestone #2
He has to be supernaturally discreet when experimenting with sex.
While (he) would probably be pleased if Dane fucked every woman in Whitestone, Dane’s curiosity in men would not be tolerated.
Plus he has a few quirks to explain, such as not wanting to take his shirt off.
Hell, he’d rather not leave his pants altogether, what with his one ball, small dick and pathetic patch of pubes.
It would be getting far, far behind a situation, which is against his law.
The few, furtive and fumbling encounters leave him with more questions than answers. He knows what feels good in general, but can’t specifically pin down from whom he wants what. Everything is framed in binary, this-or-that options.
I like getting with girls. But I like getting with guys, too.
Which do I choose?
With guys I like being a top.
With girls I’m a bottom.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
I want to look like a boy and feel like a girl.
I don’t know how to choose.
The concept of both simply doesn’t occur to him.
Once, at a party, Dane sees a man wearing a kilt.
He’s tall and built with tousled hair and a trim beard.
He wears a tight, white T-shirt over his broad chest. Work boots, thick socks, and a goddamn kilt.
A male adult in a (skirt) in public. It doesn’t swish around his knees, but hangs from his lean hips in (knife) sharp pleats. It’s (silky) soft, but it’s hard.
Three buttons drop from the kilt’s waistband, a row on either side of center.
A tantalizing trail, a chute, a funnel that pointed down—This way!
Hurry!—without going anywhere. The buttons will frame the man’s belly button, if he’d only take his shirt off.
Dane wants it off. Wants the shirt off, the boots off, everything off but that amazing kilt.
This is the most magnificent, sensational man Dane has ever laid eyes on. Dane wants him immediately and utterly.
I’m so hard for you, he thinks, staring.
I want to look like you.
I want to be handled by you.
I want to handle someone looking and feeling like you.
He grows dizzy, imagining the man unbuttoning the kilt, holding Dane’s eyes.
He’ll unwrap it and hold the ends open like a bath towel.
He’ll be erect and sublime, shy and arrogant, entitled and beseeching, humble and proud.
Rough and hairy in some places, soft and (silky) in others.
Dane will go to him, put arms around the thick shoulders, press his clothed body to that miraculous nudity.
The man will wrap the kilt around both their bodies and button them in safe.
“There,” he’ll say, and press big hands to Dane’s back.
Dane blinks, feeling their hip bones bump and their erections collide. He’s almost in tears.
The kilted man has a girlfriend with him.
He touches and caresses her, wraps her hair around his fist, rubs circles on her back, nuzzles her neck.
Watching them, Dane wants to die. As she leaves her kilted prince, the woman runs her hand down his arm and squeezes his fingers before exiting the kitchen.
Dane watches her go. He wants to be her leaving. He wants to be the kilted man staying.
Come back. Stay here. Come back and stay here. Be with him. Be with us.
He wants to squeeze between their bodies and be adored. Wants them to want him just as badly.
Can you want a them? Is them allowed?
Then the kilted man speaks. He actually says something to Dane. Dane blinks, dry-mouthed and uncomprehending. “I’m sorry, what?”
A gorgeous smile breaks the beard, top and bottom. A beautiful laugh in his awesome chest. “My man, how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Dane says, too stunned to lie.
The man shakes his head, the smile turning a touch wistful. “Bummer,” he says. He starts to leave the kitchen as well, and pauses to press his cold beer bottle against the side of Dane’s neck. “Hope I see you again in your twenties.”
Dane never sees him again, but he never forgets the sound of my man. He adopts it. “What’s up, my man,” he says. “My man, you look like hell. You are correct, my man.”
If ever he meets a man who uses my man, Dane feels an immediate affinity, remembering an ice-cold touch on his neck and a bearded smile.
Dane is in Marizabet’s room, dressed in his black dress and heels. He wears the long, blonde wig while sitting at the mirrored vanity, making up his face.
The doorknob turns.
Usually Dane locks it. Always he locks it. He hasn’t tonight and later he’ll wonder if it was on purpose. He thinks it’s (him) coming in. Good. Maybe it will all end tonight.
But it’s Paul who walks in. It’s out of hours: Usually Paul leaves for the day at six. He’s come back for some reason and he’s posted at the half-open door, staring into the mirror, where Dane stares back.
A long considering moment passes. Time enough for Dane to realize he simply doesn’t care anymore.
He has no practice feminizing his voice. He’s never had a need during these secret, silent dress-up sessions in Marizabet’s room. His throat is dry but he doesn’t clear it. Rather he uses the dryness to craft a low, husky Kathleen Turner drawl.
“Come in or stay out,” he says. “Either way, my man, close the door.”
Close the door while you decide what to do, he thinks. Whether it’s turning me in or turning this to blackmail. If the latter includes fucking me, well, it’ll be something new. I’m told I suck a mean dick. I bet I could make even a soulless Sphinx yell my name.
Paul walks closer, looking at Dane’s reflection the whole while. Dane can’t fathom anything in Paul’s expression. He has no idea how this is going to go down.
It’s kind of exciting.
Paul studies the young woman in the mirror. “Red isn’t the right lipstick,” he finally says. “Not with your coloring. It’s too stark.”
Dane rolls his lips in and out.
“Change it,” Paul says, in the same governing tone he always uses with Dane. Get dressed, get in the car, start your assignments, finish your breakfast, fix your tie, do fifty pushups, stand up straight, don’t use that fork, hang up your shirts properly.
And now, change your lipstick.
So Dane does, reapplying a more natural peachy-pink. Paul nods approval, then goes into Marizabet’s closet and finds a coat. He holds it out, like a gentleman. Dane puts it on, like a lady. They walk outside where Paul’s car is waiting. He opens the passenger door for Dane.
“Sit first,” he says. “Sideways. Then bring your legs in.”
Later, Dane will marvel that him being dressed as a woman made little to no change in Paul’s demeanor.
Other than opening doors and holding out Dane’s chair in the restaurant, Paul remains as impeccable and precise as always.
His social control is absolute and Dane feeds off it, drawing a cloak of good manners around the bizarre circumstances.
Once or twice, as they make polite conversation about books—one of the few subjects on which Paul will share a personal opinion—Paul’s expression morphs from cool observation to cool concern.
“Your father hired me to make a man out of you,” he says over coffee for Dane, cognac for himself. “His words.”
“You’re doing a bang-up job.” Dane longs for the days you could smoke in restaurants, just for the ritual of having Paul light it for him.
“What are you going to do when you’re eighteen?”
Dane doesn’t answer. Tucked in the back of his mind all this time is the idea this dinner could be a sting. He’s half-braced for (him) to appear at the table.
“What do you want?” Paul persists. “What would be your ideal life?”
“I don’t know.”
“Living as a woman?”
“No. This is… This is just part of me. Something I do. No. Something I feel. A way I like to feel. And sometimes like to look. But it’s private. It’s for me. Being out in the world with you, as Diane, is—”
“Diane?” Paul says. “Is that your name?”
“It’s a way I feel,” Dane says carefully.
“Out in public, dressed like this, maybe it should be a thrill or a dare or a big fuck you to society. All I feel is scared. If someone we know walks in and I’m seen like this, I’ll lose it.
I’ll lose her. I’ll lose myself. I’ve already lost so much.
My body is barely my own. You dictate what I do, where I go, what I eat, how I look. And you take your orders from him.”
Paul looks at him hard. He elegantly signals the server for another cognac. Then he says, “Tell me everything.”
It’s the same way he would tell Dane to stop fidgeting or wear the blue sport coat. A steely order inside velvet courtesy. Dane sits up straighter, his wounded chest pushing out the padded lingerie.
“No, you first,” he says. “Tell me why you work for him.”
Paul blinks so infrequently that when he does, it’s majestic. He finally answers, “Because I have to.”
“Or else?”
“Or…” And Paul Goldberg hesitates. Something Dane’s never seen. “Or he’ll hurt someone I care about.”
“I see. Thank you,” he adds to the server, who has delivered the second cognac and topped up Dane’s coffee cup.
“Now tell me,” Paul says.
Dane does. As much as he can of his childhood, his mother, his illness, the clinic, the surgery.
“Do you believe you’re as sick as they say?” Paul asks. “Is it even possible you’ve been walking around your entire life with chronic cancer?”
“How would I know?” Dane says through the wall of a toothy smile.
“I’m just a kid. I live in a prison upriver from a prison.
I don’t know who or what to believe anymore.
You give me those shots. You dole out the pills and stand over me until they’re swallowed.
Didn’t anyone tell you what they were for? Did you never wonder yourself?”
Paul is blinking a little more rapidly now. “If I were you, I’d get out.”
“How?”
“Just leave.”
“And go where? Do what? Live on what? Survive how? I’ve watched my father destroy people’s lives with one phone call, while he’s sitting on the john.
I don’t just run from him, I run from a machine.
You’re a cog in his machine. What, are you going to help me run away and make a new life?
More likely you’ll take me home after this lovely dinner—thanks awfully, by the way—and tell him what went down.
And speaking of which, is there a price for your silence?
Do I need to suck your dick or anything? You want me to do it as Diane or Dane?”
“No,” Paul says quietly.
Dane looks over Paul’s shoulders, blinking back tears. “Should never have been born.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.”
“It isn’t.” Paul folds his napkin and with a little jerk of his chin, indicates Dane should do the same.
One week later, Dane comes out the front doors of Hunter Academy into a blinding blue winter afternoon. Usually Paul is waiting with the car, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Another man approaches him, wearing aviators, carrying a thick folder and a small backpack. “Danelaw Strong?”
“Yeah?”
Christ, is he a Fed? Am I getting arrested?
Dane has an ounce of pot and five hundred in cash in his school bag. He considers dumping the lot and making a run for it. Then the man hands over the folder and pack, followed by a folded note.
“What’s going on?” Dane says, his arms full.
The man only indicates the note.
Dane, I no longer work for your father. You shouldn’t either.
Don’t ever go back to the house. What you need to know is in the folder.
What you need to live is in the pack. What I taught you is yours forever.
Use it wisely. Be careful. Hand this note back to Barry and don’t attempt to contact or look for me.
I will deny I know you or ever met you. Good luck. —PG
Dane hands the note to Barry, who passes over a separate envelope. Inside is a clipping from the New York Times about a recent art show at the Montresor Gallery in SoHo. Another note clipped to it in Paul’s handwriting.
The woman in the article, Maisie Montresor, is your sister. Go to her. Don’t hide your eyes. Hand this note back to Barry. Do not ask him questions.
Dane obeys instructions to the letter. Barry lowers his sunglasses a fraction to make eye contact.
“Good luck,” he says tersely, and walks away, leaving Dane clutching his school bag, a backpack, a file folder and a newspaper clipping.
For five minutes, he stands still in the cold, in shock and unsure what to do.
What you need to know is in the folder. What you need to live is in the pack. What I taught you is yours forever. Use it wisely.
First thing is to get to SoHo. No convenient task from Long Island but Paul taught him how to negotiate mass transit.
So he starts hoofing it to the nearest bus station.
Bus to the subway. Subway to Manhattan. Change for downtown.
On the way he examines the backpack: It has his shaving kit, a couple changes of clothes, his birth certificate and a drawstring bag with prescription bottles, vials and disposable syringes.
He takes a quick peek at the thick file folder, too.
Subject, Danelaw Strong, was a 3.46-kg infant delivered vaginally at term; he had a normal right testis and an undescended left testis, with otherwise normal male genitalia. At the age of six months, the left testis was palpable at the inguinal ring…
He absently touches his own left side. The scar where Dr. Porto took out a cancerous tumor.
He shuffles pages. Weird. In all the jargon, he can’t find the word cancer.
…abdominal surgical exploration revealed a hernial sac containing an abnormal gonad and vas deferens.
These structures were excised; they proved on histologic examination to be an ovary with a fallopian tube attached to a horn of uterus.
Karyotyping of peripheral-blood lymphocytes then revealed two cell lines, one 46,XX and the other 46,XY.
Ovary, Dane thinks, and it’s Diane’s voice in his mind, touching each word. Fallopian tube. Uterus.
She’s back. She’s here. She’s talking to him. After months and months of silence.
He whispers carefully into the collar of his jacket: “Is it you?”
His left eye twitches at the corner. Read it again, she says.
These structures were excised; they proved on histologic examination to be an ovary with a fallopian tube attached to a horn of uterus.
“Oh my God.” Dane’s mouth forms the words with no sound.
See, Diane says, reaching over his left shoulder to tap the page. See, I told you. I was always inside.