The Vanishing Half(33)

Downstairs, the apartment was loud and hot, a new Thelma Houston record radiating out the windows. The girls had come over. The girls, Barry always said, when he meant the other men who performed alongside him at his drag nights. By spring, Jude had been to enough of Barry’s parties to know what everyone looked like without makeup: Luis, who sang Celia Cruz in pink fur, was an accountant; Jamie, who wore a Supremes wig and go-go boots, worked for the power company; Harley transformed himself into Bette Midler—he was a costume designer for a minor theater company and helped the others find their wigs. The girls took Jude in until she felt, almost, like one of them. She’d never belonged to a group of friends before. And they’d only accepted her because of Reese.

“What about you?” she said. “Who was your first kiss?”

He leaned against the railing, lighting up a joint. “It’s not that interesting.”

“So? It doesn’t have to be.”

“Just this girl from church,” he said. “She was friends with my sister. It was before.”

Before he was Reese, he meant. He never talked about Before. She didn’t even know that he had a sister.

“What was she like?” she asked. His sister, the girl he’d kissed. Therese. It didn’t matter, she just wanted to understand his old life. She wanted him to trust her with it.

“I don’t remember,” he said. “So what happened to the horse boy?” He smirked, offering her the joint. He sounded almost jealous, or maybe she just wanted him to.

“Nothing,” she said. “We kissed a few times but we didn’t talk after that.”

She was too ashamed to tell him the truth: that she’d spent weeks meeting Lonnie in the stables at night. In the dark corner, he’d spread a blanket, prop up a flashlight, call it their secret hideaway. It was too dangerous, meeting in the middle of the day. What if someone saw them? At night, nobody would catch them. They could be truly alone. Didn’t she want that?

He wasn’t her boyfriend. A boyfriend would hold her hand, ask about her day. But in the stables, he only touched her, palming her breasts, slipping his fingers up her shorts. In the stables, she swallowed him dripping into her mouth, breathing manure through her nose. But around town, he looked right past her. And yet, she would have kept meeting him each night if she hadn’t been caught by Early. Early hearing her creep out one night, tracking her through the woods, banging on the door until Lonnie, yanking frantically at his pants, shoved her outside. She was crying before she even stepped through the doorway. Early hooked a hand around her arm, unable to look at her.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You want a boyfriend, you tell him to come by the house. You don’t go off meetin no boy in the middle of the night.”

“He won’t talk to me nowhere else,” she said.

She started crying harder, her shoulders shaking, and Early pulled her into his chest. He hadn’t held her like that in years; she hadn’t wanted him to. He wasn’t her father and never would be, a man whose violence had not yet reached her, whose anger pointed everywhere but at her. Her father made her feel special, and she hadn’t felt that way until Lonnie kissed her behind the barn.

He wasn’t her boyfriend. She’d never been foolish enough to think that he might be. But she couldn’t imagine any boy loving her; it was enough that Lonnie noticed her at all.

A breeze drifted past and she shivered, hugging herself. Reese touched her elbow.

“You cold, baby?” he said.

She nodded, hoping that he might wrap his arm around her. But he offered his jacket instead.



* * *



—

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT,” Barry said. “It’s like a sexless marriage.”

Backstage at Mirage, he perched in front of the vanity mirror, swiping blush across his cheeks. It was an hour before the show, and soon, the dressing room would be crowded with queens jostling in front of the mirrors, swapping eyeshadow, the air clouded with hairspray. But now, Mirage was dark and quiet, and she sat on the floor watching Barry, a chemistry textbook balanced on her knees. They had an arrangement. He helped with her chemistry homework and she joined him at the Fox Hills Mall, where she pretended to buy the makeup he wanted. He guided her down the aisles, her arm looped through his; to strangers, they might have passed as lovers, a tall man in gray slacks, a young woman reaching for face powder. When he paid for everything at the counter, the clerks thought he was a gentleman. No one imagined his bathroom counter covered in tiny bottles of scented lotions, palettes of eye shadow, gold tubes of lipstick. Or that the girl at his side had no interest in any of this, despite his plea to teach her how to wear makeup. She doubted that she would find any shade to match her skin and besides, she knew what people called dark girls wearing red lipstick. Baboon ass.

No, she had no interest in sorting through Barry’s bottles and tubes, which seemed as mysterious to her as the test tubes in her chemistry lab. Weeks into the semester and she was already falling behind. Barry had only agreed to tutor her because Reese asked him to, and he could never tell Reese no. When they’d first met seven years ago at a disco, he thought that Reese was gorgeous and, after too many drinks, finally worked up the nerve to tell him so.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“What do you think?” he said. “I invited him home! And you know what he told me? ‘No thank you.’” Barry laughed. “Can you believe it? He said no thank you, like I was offering him a cup of coffee. Oh, I always like those country boys. Country and sweet, that’s exactly how I like ’em.”