Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [37]
I was thinking of this as I drove Miss Sloviak home to Bloomfield, as we headed east along Baum Boulevard and she turned herself into a man. She took a jar of cold cream and a bottle of nail polish remover from a black zipper bag in the suitcase on the seat between us, and set them on the lowered door of the glove compartment. With a succession of cotton balls she wiped the makeup from her face and stripped her nails of their pale pink armor. She reached up into her dress for the waistband of her panty hose and dragged them down along her smooth legs to her feet. Then she extracted a pair of pressed Levi’s from the suitcase, unfolded them, and, with some difficulty, slid them up under the skirt of her black dress, which she then tugged up over her head and off. Her brassiere was black Lycra, padded, with a pearled ribbon at the junction of the cups and a neat pair of small protuberances meant to simulate erect female nipples; the chest beneath it was small but muscular, and free from hair. She put on a striped pullover, white socks emblazoned with a polo pony, and a pair of white Stan Smiths. The cold cream and acetone went back into the zipper bag, and the black dress, black pumps, and the airy tangle of panty hose were folded and tucked into the pony-skin valise. I was sorry I had to concentrate on the road, because her performance was impressive. She had assembled her male self with the precision and speed of an assassin in the movies snapping together the parts of his rifle.
“My name is Tony,” said the former Miss Sloviak as we turned onto Liberty Avenue. “Now that I’m home.”
“How do you do,” I said.
“You don’t seem all that surprised.”
“I’ve been having some trouble with my surprise reflex lately,” I said.
“Did you know I was drag queen?”
I thought about the right answer to that one for a minute. I considered the nature of the response that I hoped for in the wake of the deceptions I practiced on the world.
“No,” I said. “I thought you were a beautiful woman. Tony.”
Tony smiled. “I’m getting there,” he said. “It’s this next street. Mathilda. Left here. And then another left onto Juniper.”
We pulled up in front of a small, brick two-story house, set close to but not quite touching its neighbors, with a light on in the upstairs dormer and a statue of the Blessed Virgin standing in the front lawn. Our Lady was sheltered under a kind of arching white band shell, painted on the inside with all the stars in the dome of heaven.
“I wish I had one of those in my front yard,” I said. “All we have is a Japanese beetle trap.”
“That’s an old bathtub she’s standing under,” said Tony. “The other half of it’s buried in the ground.”
“Neat,” I said. The engine dropped down into idle. A shadow drew aside the curtain in the dormer window and pressed itself against the glass. “Well.”
“Well.”
“Okay, then, Tony.”
“Okay, Grady.” He held out his hand to me, and we shook. “Good-bye. Thanks for the ride.”
“Sure,” I said. “Hey, uh, Tony, I’m sorry if it—if things didn’t—turn out so well. Tonight.”
“No biggie,” he said. “I just really should have known better. Your friend, Crabtree, he’s just looking for, I don’t know, novelty, or whatever. He’s into collec, like, collecting, you know, weird tricks. Mind?” He angled the rearview mirror toward himself and checked his bare face for makeup, for lingering traces of Miss Antonia Sloviak. Like many transvestites he was far more beautiful as a woman—as a man his nose was hawkish and his eyes were set too close together—and he gazed a moment wonderingly at the plainness of his face. He ran his fingers through his jarhead-short hair. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. “That’s kind of a problem I run into a lot.”
“He’s writing his name in water,” I said.
“What’s that?”
It was the half-regretful term—borrowed from the headstone of John Keats—that Crabtree used to describe his own and others’ failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper.