Mercy (78 page)

They drank more wine, and for a long time Mary was quiet, sitting across from him in her bra and panties, which looked pale blue in the dusk. As heartbreaking as her story had been, Broussard’s mind had often wandered. He had heard heartrending stories before. They did not leave him gasping with surprise. Nothing surprised him anymore. Nothing. And it was during this time that he began to wonder why Mary had not yet mentioned his cross-dressing. She had not even alluded to it. From the first moment when she had found him on the terrace until now, she had accepted his uncommon predilection as though it had been the ordinary practice of every man she knew. Certainly it had not perceptibly affected her sexual interaction with him. She did not seem to have found sexual intercourse with a man who was dressed as a woman as something to which she had needed to adjust. Nor had it appeared to have affected her ardor.

But this lack of surprise, or even curiosity on her part, made him uneasy, and at the same time he recognized the irony of his restiveness. All his life he had wished for a woman who would accept his cross-dressing with the complete nonchalance with which Mary had in fact accepted it, a woman whose erotic reciprocity would accommodate even his compulsion for the texture and the sound and the color of women’s clothing. No woman, at least none since his mother, had been able to accept this. None of them. And even in all the years he had been intimate with Bernadine, he had never had the courage to tell her about his fetish until near the very end, until after she had revealed her recent bisexual encounters. Even then, he had found her to be far less open-minded about his sexual heterodoxy than he had been about hers.

And now, this late, he had found Mary and, having gotten what he always had longed for, he was disappointed to discover that he could not escape a feeling of something being not quite right. That was the way it had been with his mother, too. Eventually there had arisen between them something disquieting, something he had never fully understood or resolved, that had brought their symbiotic relationship to an abrupt end. That same sense of vague uncertainty was what he was now feeling with Mary Lowe, and he thought it eerie that it had returned at the precise point at which he had found a woman who could have meant as much to him in regard to these things as his mother.

While they talked, dusk slipped into night, and the Mary who was disappearing in the twilight reappeared in the dark as the glow of the city lights flared off the black sky and came in through the tall windows, limning her in pale blue. The distance between them on the window seat was small and filled with the smell of wine and apples.

“I really never could bring myself to hate him,” Mary said. “I pitied him, felt repulsion and disgust for him, but,” she shook her bead, “I couldn’t hate him. Even though I was only a child I knew he was pathetic, that he didn’t deserve my hatred. Sometimes, in hashes of intuition, I sensed the real absurdity of what he was doing to me and felt as though we both were victims of some huge and awesome evil. The other face of God maybe, something that he didn’t understand any more than I did.”

Broussard watched her bend forward and pick up one of the wine bottles, and he heard it burbling into the shallow glass. Her movements were graceful; it was as natural to her as the raw sex that she enjoyed, as natural to her as the sweet scent of her veins, as natural as lying.

“He was the only one who offered me any kind of real relationship, even if it was a sick one,” she said. “What was I supposed to do, reject the only intimacy available to me, reject the only sign of affection that had ever been offered, however imperfect? At least there was a sense of tenderness there, evidence that to someone I was something of value.”

Mary looked at him. He could not see the arrangement of her features, whether she regarded him skeptically or scornfully or indifferently, but he was sure she didn’t give a damn about his explanations. He sensed it. He had to remind himself that she had not come to him voluntarily, as a grieving victim. Rather, she had come as an actress approaching one more role, denying the real Mary to play the Mary everyone wanted her to be, knowing that as long as she was acting, the real life offstage would not catch up with her. There was no time for reality; acting kept her alive. By agreeing to come to Broussard, she had been acquiescing to a condition of her husband’s ultimatum. She was not interested in reconstruction. She was not interested in emotional growth. She was not interested in wholeness. She was incorrigible. She was
sui generis
. It seemed to him that Mary had decided to be only a fragment of a woman, to be only some ragged piece of what she could have been, and should have been. Wholeness would have cost her too much. She did not long for it; she only feared it. Mary would never be whole. Her childhood had been torn into too many pieces, and when she had patched the pieces together she had done it imperfectly, as a child would do.

Broussard’s psychiatric platitudes and his half-baked explanation of the Persephone complex lost its meaning in the face of what he felt happening to him. If he had ever believed in the reconstruction of Mary’s psychological integrity, that belief gradually took a position of secondary importance as he looked at her sitting across from him in the hyacinth blue light of the city night. Though he could not truly distinguish the shade of her eyes, he saw them nonetheless, the never-closing blue-gray specula of her psyche through which he saw another, stranger universe, and through which, he knew, he could be sucked into the vast, haunted spaces of Mary’s world.

She was still looking at him, motionless, the fine asymmetry of her mouth communicating its own mute erotica. For all her silence, Mary’s body was one of extraordinary expressiveness. As with Bernadine, she understood everything through her sexuality, like the serpent that understands the world through its tongue. Incest had taught her child’s mind that relationships were inherently sexual. It was the most tragic lesson she had ever learned.

Broussard had seen this again and again with his clients, and he had never been able to deny himself the opportunity of taking advantage of this misfortune. He knew what was coursing through her unconscious, and he knew he could turn it to his own purposes. And why shouldn’t he? After all, they both were children of misfortune. If comfort was what they longed for, why should they deny themselves? Nothing could make up for what they already had lost, and how did it affect Mary anyway, if he understood what was about to happen on a higher plane? For Mary, the momentary escape from the unrelenting burden of her internal loneliness was all that mattered. If that was all he gave her, then fine. It was all she was looking for. If it ended here, then fine. It was as far as she wanted to go.

It had been dark a good while now, and the obscurity that followed close onto dusk had given way to night sight so that even in the vague illumination Broussard could see her, all but her finest features, all but the furrowed brow and the imagined shadings of her flesh that in normal lighting showed through the gauzy nylon.

She watched him without comment as he rose from his chair beside the window seat and began carefully to move the tablecloth away from them. Deftly she reached for the bottle of Valpolicella before he slid the cloth along the mahogany out of reach. She filled her glass, then put it on the windowsill with her right hand and watched him as he came and stood beside her, the linen of his trousers leg touching her long, bare thigh. He took off his shirt and tossed it away into the dark room, and then he unbuttoned his trousers and dropped them, kicking them out of the way. She was eye-level with his waist now, and as he took off his underpants she turned away and drank from her glass, her head tilted back and her long graceful throat making a fine white line in the hyacinth light. When she finally lowered the glass, he saw that she had spilled it. Dark purple lines streaked the sides of her mouth and glistened on the tops of her breasts and stained the front of her bra. She immediately refilled her glass.

He knelt beside her, her face slightly above his as he gently took her thighs in his hands and turned her around until she faced him. Her legs hung over the edge of the window seat, and she sat facing him, her shoulders squared, the full glass of wine in her right hand balanced on her thigh. He reached behind her and unhooked her bra, slowly pulling it until it fell away from her breasts. He was instantly erect at the touch of the lace in his fingers. He looked at the bra, at its filigreed borders, at the sheer film of its cups, and he turned it around and slipped his arms into the straps, stretched the elastic sides and reached around in back and hooked it.

Mary watched him. Her only reaction was to raise her long-stemmed glass and stop it halfway to her mouth, the blue light from the window reflecting on the surface of the dark wine. In her face, turned slightly toward the glittering city in the cobalt distance, Broussard imagined that he saw the taut-muscled expression of desire. Or was it yearning? Or, even, grief? Then she brought the glass to her mouth, and he thought, desire, and she drank all of the wine in the glass. It took her several swallows, and then she reached out and back a little and dropped the glass out the window. Broussard heard it fall with a swish into the hedges. It was a crystal wineglass, and he imagined it resting lightly, glinting in the tiny leaves of the boxwood.

Broussard could feel his body humming, tingling as he touched the sides of Mary’s hips and felt the place where her panties cut into her skin. Hooking his fingers into the nylon near the back, he began pulling them down, and when he got to the window seat she raised her hips, first on one side and then the other, to allow him to pull them off the rest of the way, peeling them down her thighs, her calves, and off her ankles. Then he stood and took his time unwadding the twisted panties, the feel of them delightful, enormously arousing, until finally he had them straight. Then he stepped into them and felt a magical transformation. This was the way it was meant to be. These were the clothes he was meant to wear. Though they were too small for him, he pulled them up tightly around his waist, the feel of the nylon, the tightness of the elastic around his groin, sending erotic jolts through his veins.

He disappeared into the darkness of the room and returned with a handful of makeup. Mary scooted back on the window seat, and he dumped the makeup between her parted legs. She understood everything, even this. There was no need to explain anything. It was too dark to see in detail, but he could adjust his work to the gloam in the room. Like actors on a stage, their features would be exaggerated, larger than life. This life, anyway.

Without having to be instructed, she leaned forward. His hands were unsteady with excitement as Broussard began painting their faces. There was no particular order of application this time. It was only ritual anyway—and she seemed to understand this, too, the symbolism of it, the rite of it—lipstick on her lips, the same on his, eyeshadow on her lids, the same on his, the fragrance of cosmetics winding him tighter with every inhaled breath. He felt the tender aureoles of her heavy breasts brushing against his forearm as he worked on her face, and their hyacinth world lifted and drifted, freeing him at last, bringing him to the familiarity of moments lived for and longed for, the time when Dr. Broussard no longer existed, and Margaret Boll was born.

Their faces were close enough for Broussard to feel her breath, thick and aromatic with wine. His own breathing was difficult to control and came in unpredictable shudders.

“I have rope,” he said, and he felt a fine mist of perspiration forming across his forehead.

Mary looked at him without any change in expression, no indication of how she was reacting.

“Do you want me to tie you?” he whispered.

“I’ve never done it,” she lied, and Broussard’s brain reeled with the memory of Dorothy Samenov standing over Mary with a laver of heated oil, dropping strings of it onto Mary’s naked body as she lay bound with saffron scarves; with the memory of Sandra Moser suddenly losing control over Mary’s outstretched body and an alarmed Mirel Fair rushing into the room to stop her; with the memory of…

“Do you want to tie me…first?” he asked.

“I’ve never done it,” she lied, and Broussard’s brain flashed up the memory of Mary straddling Louise Ackley, the most grevious masochist of them all, both of them glistening with sweat from the closeted heat in Farr’s shabby little dungeon as Mary skillfully skated a straight razor across Louise’s stomach, leaving thin carmine trails straight down into her pubis; the memory of Mary and the lanky, jet-haired Nancy Seiver, whose passion for needles and steel balls Mary had pushed to the outer limits of bizarre.

“I’ve got scarves,” Broussard coaxed. “Saffron…scarves…all of them silk.”

Mary lifted her face and kissed him, lightly, as light as a butterfly kiss, and then more vigorously until he could taste the lipstick on their tongues and breathed the wine of her breath.

“We’ll take turns,” she said, lips against his lips.

The feel of her and the feel of her nylon was making him light-headed.

“Turns…” He was almost incapable of speaking. “Yes, of course,” he said. “We’ll take turns,” and his mind once again played back the sweaty memories of the things he had seen Mary do at Mirel Farr’s.

It was unimaginable.

Rather, until now, it had been only imaginable. Years of fantasizing were turning into reality and, paradoxically, he felt as if he were dreaming. With their faces painted identically, Mary naked and him wearing the undergarments he had removed from her, he lay in the center of the stripped bed while Mary hovered over him, patiently combing and grooming his favorite wig so that it lay naturally around his face. They had thrown open all the tall windows along the side of the room that overlooked the bayou, and Broussard’s perfume hung thick in the heavy air. Through the windows, the dust of city lights lay scattered across the nightscape like a summer frost.

She tied his ankles first, jerking the saffron scarves into tight knots. But they were not uncomfortable. Silk, even constraining silk, was never unpleasant, and the idea of being splayed and bound with silk was a temptation he could not have resisted, even if he had been suspended over an abyss. Straddling his stomach, she leaned over him to tie his wrists, the nipples of her breasts brushing across his face. Like a Venetian courtesan, she had accommodated his every wish, nothing surprised her, nothing caused her to hesitate, nothing was taboo as she lavished her attentions upon him, indulged him as though he were a sultan.