Luce couldn’t remember much after that. He was aware of being very hot inside his tuxedo. Of quite a few heads turning around to look at him, then only a few heads, then none. At the podium, Dr. Pappas-Kikuchi ran through her data, endlessly, endlessly. “Subject number seven changed to male gender but continues to dress as a woman. Subject number twelve has the affect and mannerisms of a man and engages in sexual activity with village women. Subject number twenty-five married a woman and works as a butcher, a traditionally male occupation. Subject number thirty-five was married to a man who left the marriage after a year, at which point the subject assumed a male gender identity. A year later, he married a woman.”
The awards ceremony went on as scheduled later that night. Luce, anesthetized on more scotch in the hotel bar and wearing an Aetna sales rep’s blue blazer that he’d mistaken for his tuxedo jacket, had walked to the podium to an absolute minimum of applause and accepted his lifetime achievement award—a crystal lingam and yoni, hot-glued onto a silver-plated base—which later looked quite beautiful catching the lights of the city as it fell twenty-two floors from his balcony to shatter in the hotel’s circular drive. Even then, he was looking west, out over the Pacific, toward Irian Jaya and the Dawat. It took him three years to get research grants from the NIH, the National Foundation, the March of Dimes, and Gulf and Western, but now he’s here, amid another isolated flowering of the 5αR mutation, where he can put Pappas-Kikuchi’s theory and his own to the test. He knows who’ll win. And when he does, the foundations will begin funding his clinic the way they used to. He can stop subcontracting the back rooms to dentists and that one chiropractor. It’s only a matter of time. Randy has persuaded the tribal elders to allow the examinations to go forward. As soon as dawn breaks, they’ll be led out to the separate camp where the “turnim-men” live. The mere existence of the local term shows that Luce is right and that cultural factors can affect gender identity. It’s the kind of thing Pappas-Kikuchi would gloss right over.
*
Luce’s hands and the kid’s are all tangled up. It’s like they’re playing a game. First Luce covered his belt buckle. Then the kid put his hand over Luce’s hand. Then Luce put his hand over the kid’s hand. And now the kid covers the whole stack. All these hands struggle, gently. Luce feels tired. The jungle is still quiet. He’d like to get another hour of sleep before the morning cry of the monkeys. He’s got a big day ahead.
The B-52 buzzes by his ear again, then circles back and goes up his left nostril. “Jesus!” He pulls his hands free and covers his face, but by then the mosquito has taken off again, brushing by his fingers. Luce is half sitting up on the pandanus mat now. He keeps his face covered, because it gives him some kind of comfort, and he just sits there in the dark, feeling suddenly exhausted and sick of the jungle and smelly and hot. Darwin had it easier on HMS Beagle. All he had to do was listen to sermons and play whist. Luce isn’t crying, but he feels like it. His nerves are shot. As if from far away, he feels the pressure of the boy’s hands again. Undoing his belt. Struggling with the technological puzzle of the zipper. Luce doesn’t move. He just keeps his face covered, there in total darkness. A few more days and he can go home. His swanky bachelor pad on West Thirteenth Street awaits him. Finally, the boy figures it out. And it’s very dark. And Dr. Peter Luce is open-minded. And there’s nothing you can do, after all, about local customs.
1999
CAPRICIOUS GARDENS
I was asking myself these questions, weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the singsong voice of a child … I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall.
—Saint Augustine
In Ireland, in summer, four people come out to a garden in search of food.
The back door of a large house opens and a man steps out. His name is Sean. He is forty-three years old. He moves away from the house, then glances behind him as two other figures materialize, Annie and Maria, American girls. There is a pause before the next person appears, a gap in the procession, but at last Malcolm arrives. He steps onto the grass tentatively, as if afraid he will sink.
But already they can all see what has happened.
Sean said: “It’s my wife’s fault, all of this. It’s a perfect expression of her inner character. To go to all the trouble of digging and planting and watering and then to forget about it completely in a few days’ time. It’s unforgivable.”
“I’ve never seen a garden quite so overrun,” said Malcolm. He addressed the remark to Sean, but Sean didn’t reply to it. He was busy looking at the American girls, who, in one identical motion, had put their hands on their hips. The precision of their movements, so perfectly synchronized and yet unintentional, unnerved him. It was a bad omen. Their movements seemed to say: “We are inseparable.”
That was unfortunate because one of the girls was beautiful and the other was not. Less than an hour before, on his way home from the airport (he had just returned from Rome), Sean had seen Annie walking by the side of the road, alone. The house he was returning to had been closed up for a month, ever since his wife, Meg, had gone off to France, or Peru. They had lived apart for years, each occupying the house only when the other was away, and Sean dreaded returning after long absences. The smell of his wife was everywhere, rose from armchairs when he sat in them, made him remember days of bright scarves and impeccable sheets.
When he saw Annie, however, he knew immediately how to brighten his homecoming. She wasn’t hitchhiking, but was wearing a backpack; she was a pretty traveler with unwashed hair, and he suspected his offer of a spare room would surpass the ditch or clammy bed-and-breakfast she would find to stay in that night. At once he stopped his car beside her and leaned across the seat to roll down the passenger’s window. As he leaned he took his eyes off her, but when he looked up again, already bestowing his capricious invitation, he saw not only Annie but another girl, a companion, who had appeared out of nowhere. The newcomer wasn’t attractive in the least. Her hair was short, revealing the squarish shape of her skull, and the thick lenses of her glasses glinted so that he couldn’t see her eyes.
In the end Sean was forced to invite the regrettable Maria along as well. The girls climbed into his car like affectionate sisters, having stowed their backpacks in the trunk, and Sean sped off down the road. When he arrived at his house, however, he encountered another surprise. There, on the front steps, with his head in his hands, was his old friend Malcolm.