'I want to help you. Tell me.'
She stood two feet in front of me. I was still on the sofa, my head at the level of her waist. She faced me and slid one shoulder free of the black dress. Then she pushed the other side away, the dress sliding over her breasts until she was naked to the waist. It was a flat, smooth waist. The breasts were small and pointed. She placed a hand on each of her nipples and stroked them erect. Softly, she spoke the lines, ''Her falser self slipt from her like a robe, and left her woman…''
She closed her eyes and moved closer to me, straddling my knees with her legs. She reached down and gently circled my hand with hers. ''Lovelier in her mood than in her mould that other, when she came from barren deeps to conquer all with love.''
She placed my hand underneath the hem of her dress and moved it slowly up her leg, guiding me.
Then she chanted it, as if in a trance:
'' But woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain: his clearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man. ''
My hand slid between her smooth thighs, higher and higher.
When it would go no farther, she held it there. And then I knew.
CHAPTER 38
She had been born Robert Simon, she said.
She laughed. 'Bob. Let's throw the ball, Bob. Do I seem like a Bob to you? I should have changed it to something more feminine. What do you think of Melissa?'
'Bobbie's just fine,' I said.
'I always wore dresses and jewelry and my hair was long and beautiful,' she said, running a hand through the layered shag. 'My mother used to brush my hair.'
'Your mother wanted you to be a girl.'
' I wanted to be a girl. As long as I could remember. She didn't object when I used her cosmetics or learned to sew or dressed in her underthings.'
'What's your earliest memory?'
'Sleeping with Mother. She would curl herself around me. I remember how warm she was, her bare breasts pressing into my back.
She would tuck her arms and legs around me, holding me tight. So womblike. Every night until my teens.'
'And your father?'
She had pulled the shoulders of the dress back up and was leaning on my kitchen counter. I was displaying my culinary skills by boiling a pot of water, two tea bags cleverly dangling inside waiting mugs.
'You expect me to say he wasn't there,' she said.
I shrugged.
'He was there but not there. He'd leave for work before I awoke and come home after I was asleep. On weekends he'd lock himself into his workshop and cut and hammer and saw, making all sorts of useless things. He had his hands on wood and sheet metal far more than on my mother.'
'You wanted to be like your mother.'
'So very much. But I'm not a fetishist, you know. I didn't just want to dress in women's clothing.'
I thought of Stephanie, the man-killing transsexual, mocking transvestites. No weekend cross-dressing here.
'I wanted breasts like Mother's,' Bobbie continued. 'I wanted to dress like her. I wanted to be rid of my penis. Do you know I never, never peed standing up. Not once. Not then, not now.'
The pot threatened to boil over. I poured the steaming water into the mugs. 'You have the breasts.'
'Hormones. Lovely breasts, don't you think, though not so large as I would like. And a beautifully pitched voice. But I still have the ugly thing.'
She pointed to her crotch. 'I didn't pass their tests, so they wouldn't cut me.' She imitated a supercilious doctor: ''Mr. Simon, you don't unequivocally believe yourself to be a woman.''
'Because you still have sex with women.'
'Partly, I suppose, though is that any worse than hooking, selling yourself to men? Many TS's do that to pay for the operation, you know. You'd be surprised how excited men get when they're with a woman who possesses both breasts and a penis. They don't know what to grab first.'
'Telling themselves it's not really a homosexual experience because she looks like a woman.'
She shrugged and sipped the tea. 'I could show you things, Jake, take you to heights-'
A little light bulb flashed. 'That's how you met Max, wasn't it? You were raising money for the operation that never came.'
'He loved me, took me out of a filthy room on South Beach. You don't know what I've been through.'
I thought I did. 'I'll bet if we ran the name Robert Simon, we'd come up with a few busts, wouldn't we? What you did for love. And money. Maybe rolling some johns who would never file charges. Maybe jail time for soliciting.'
'Is it a crime to fulfill my destiny, to be what I was meant to be?'
'What are you, Bobbie?'
She shook her head. 'Something. Nothing. Something stuck between here and there. I don't know anymore. I lust for you because I'm a woman. I lust for Pam and I hate myself for it.'
Little bells were ringing. What was it Stephanie had said? When I need a woman, it comes over me in waves. My passion inflamed a thousandfold. Then she had whispered something else. And hate her for it, for making me the male beast.
'Who do you hate, Bobbie?'
'I told you. Myself, for my weakness, my own lack of total identity with my femininity.'
'Maybe, but you also hate her…'
'Don't start playing shrink with me. That's what she does.'
'Do you hate Pam for that, too?'
'You're nuts!'
'Man is the hunter,' I said.
'Sure, sure. And woman is his game.'
' You're the hunter, Bobbie.'
'No! The game.'
'You want to be the game. Or part of you does. Part of you is shamed to be a woman and another part shamed to love a woman.'
She closed her eyes. 'I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.''
'Yes, that's it, isn't it?'
''Weakness to be wroth with weakness! Woman's pleasure, woman's pain. Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain.''
'You believe it, don't you, Bobbie?'
'No. Just words. Just a man's words. It isn't me.'
'You had sex with Mary Rosedahl the night she was killed.'
'Yes.'
'And you were the male, weren't you? You had vaginal intercourse. It's your blood we've been after.'
