---

 
Are all Government buildings beige inside? I only ask because so far I’ve seen a bunch of airports, the Massachusetts DMV, and the Boston offices of the Treasury Department. They were almost all the same shade of beige. Except McCarran, which is every color except beige, but I suspect they get a dispensation there for being Vegas.

I was at a conference with Dave Robicheaux, Tom, two guys from the local office of the FBI, a woman from the Secret Service, and Grieves, Hernandez and two other IRS agents. They were all wearing black or grey suits, except for Dave Robicheaux, who was in a cream suit that looked expensive, and me, in a pale blue wool cowl-neck Donna Karan jersey dress with a white silk scarf, dark blue pumps, and matching purse. I looked pretty good, even if I do say so myself, and I felt like I owned the room. Judging from the way some of the men watched me enter I think maybe I was justified. The poor woman from the Secret Service was in an unflattering gray pant suit that made her ass look huge. I felt guilty for thinking that, but kind of good that I came out so far ahead, too. What kind of lousy feminist was I? I could only imagine what Virginia would say if she heard me saying what I was thinking.

“The way we see it,” Grieves was saying, “the best way to get Arun to dip into reserve funds would be for you to lose.”

“That’s going to be hard,” I said. “I don’t count, any more. Right now I’m what they call a ‘wizard’. I’m one of the people who makes the really large bets. I just come and go when I’m signaled by the guys who are doing the actual counting. So I don’t actually have a lot of control. My only choices are the amounts I get to bet.”

“You just operate on someone else’s signal?” That was one of the FBI guys, I think the senior one. I couldn’t remember his name. No doubt Tom had it written down somewhere.

“Yes.”

“How hard would it be for you to be the person who was doing the counting?”

“That’s where I started off. I suppose I could ask Arun to send me back to doing that, but I don’t see how I could without arousing his suspicions. Being a wizard is fun, and easy. Being a smurf, a counter, requires concentration. It’s hard, and it’s not glamorous, and it’s not something people go back to.”

“You seem like a creative person, Alex,” Grieves said, with some sincerity. “Can’t you work out a way to do it?”

“And what? Go back to counting, and then deliberately be bad at it?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody would buy that.”

“Why not? How long since you were doing it? Maybe you’re just rusty.”

“In all the time I was counting,” I said, “Which was a couple of years, I never once made a mistake.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“One thing that's been puzzling me,” I said.

“Yes?” Grieves responded.

“All this evidence you have on Arun. All the stuff you showed me. If you already have all of that, why do you need me?”

“Because it’s not enough,“ Grieves said. “We could make a case against Mr. Kapoor right now, without any trouble. But it’s not enough for a solid conviction. And we want the people he works with.”

“You have photos of them.”

“We have photos of men exchanging bags. Not men exchanging cash.”

“Surely, with the evidence you have, you could get Arun to cooperate, the way you have with me?”

“Alex. There are reasons. Merely having his testimony might not be enough. We need to get him in an actual meeting taking actual cash. He hasn't been doing that recently, not the way you have been winning. Besides, there's the risk that – even if we approached Mr. Kapoor – he might say no, and just take the jail time.”

“You didn't think that about me.”

“No. You didn't seem like the type who would prefer money over jail.”

I guess Grieves was a good judge of character.

I sighed. “Alright. Can we at least think of something else. Something, you know, more plausible than me screwing up the count?”

“Well, help us out here.” Hernandez said. “What else could cost him a lot of money?”

I thought long and hard, and came up with an unpalatable answer. “Getting busted by Whitwell. That would cost a lot. More than losing. We’d lose the stake as well as our winnings.”

“That would expose all your identities to Whitwell, again.”

“Yes.” I thought about the implications of this. “Yes, it would.”

“And Arun would simply have to stop playing,” Grieves said.

“Pretty much … He’s tried the plastic surgery angle once. I don’t think it could be done again.”

“That’s not going to work for us,” the lead FBI guy said.

“Why not? I thought you wanted to stop him laundering money.”

“No, we want to catch him laundering money,” the FBI guy said. “In order for us to do that, he has to lose, and then need some more funds from the guys he launders for.”

“I don’t get it. If he’s laundering money, but he only needs the money when he loses, isn’t that a really inefficient way of laundering money?”

Grieves looked at the other agents with an expression that suggested ‘I told you so’. “Yes, it would be,” he said. “Although there is the issue of volume. Arun does a lot of volume, and that’s worth something. Bank robbers launder money. It’s small time, a hundred thousand a pop. Arun really launders money. But the only way we can prove he’s laundering money is if we track him getting the payments, and then track him spending that money at a casino. The only way we can be sure he’ll receive a payment is if he needs money.”

I thought about this for a few moments. “Don’t you guys have, like, wiretaps and such like? Can’t you track his deals that way?”

“Alex,” Grieves said, with the air of a father talking to his teenage daughter. “We have lots of methods for doing things. If you don’t mind, it will be better for you, as well as us, if we don’t tell you too much about how we plan to do things.”

Tom nodded at me.

“So you want him to lose, but keep playing,” I said, trying to work out what I could do with all this information.

“That’s about it,” said Grieves.

I thought for at least a minute. To my surprise, nobody interrupted me. Nobody said anything. They were all looking at me like I was the answer to their prayers.

“I think,” I said, “I can see a way. But I need to talk to my lawyer here about what it involves.” I looked at Tom and he gave me that ‘smart move’ slight grin he’d given me that first day in his office.

 

~o~O~o~
 

After the meeting I went home. Tom had appointments for the remainder of the afternoon, but he promised me he would see me at Susan's for dinner.

Nobody mentioned the investigation at all over dinner. Instead we discussed Susan's work on a Magritte than had been damaged, and I mentioned Pete's invitation to accompany him on his trip to Virginia. And then the usual discussions and disagreements about movies, and whether or not Titanic was a terrible movie.

After dinner Tom volunteered to clean up and I helped him in the kitchen while Susan watched TV.

“You acquitted yourself pretty well today,” Tom said to me as he was scraping plates. “Those federal guys, no matter how nice they seem, they’re not your friends.”

“Okay.”

“So, this plan of yours. You think you have a way for Arun to lose?”

“Yes.” I took a few moments to think through where I’d been going during the meeting. “I’m not sure I have a way to do it that doesn’t involve trouble for me, but I think that the trouble on that end is probably less significant than the trouble from the Government.”

“So, you want to tell me what it is?”

“I shouldn’t tell you about something if I’m planning on doing something illegal, should I?”

“You can, but it’s not a good idea. I can’t tell anyone about it, but it could make me an accessory. I could get disbarred …” His brows furrowed. “I don’t understand – in the meeting you said you thought you had a way to make Arun lose. How could that be illegal?”

“It’s not the Arun losing part that’s illegal,” I said. “It’s everyone else not losing that might involve cutting some corners.”

“Alex. You have to look after yourself.”

“I am,” I said. “I couldn’t live with myself if I put everyone else in danger. Alice, Lucy, Emily, Sally, Brian – none of those guys have done anything to warrant going to prison for.”

“Alex, I have to warn you of something,” Tom said. “You might not be the only person the Government is trying to do a deal with.”

“We wouldn’t know?”

“Not necessarily.” He said. “It wouldn’t be incredibly smart of them to have two of you trying to bring Arun down at the same time, but it wouldn’t be unheard of.”

“It sounds incredibly stupid.”

“Well,” he shrugged. “I’m just saying …”

“Well, I can’t do the wrong thing, the thing to hurt them. At least not deliberately.”

“You and your sister, you’re like that,” Tom said. “Jones family values.”

 

~o~O~o~
 

I went shopping with Lucy at Cambridgeside Galleria, just a girls' morning out. I don’t think either of us was really into mall culture, or even shopping, but Lucy had wanted to get something from Best Buy there, and I usually enjoyed just hanging out with her. We didn't buy very much else. I had the conversations with the Feds on my mind, and I desperately wanted to discuss them with her, but I didn't know whether I could trust her. Instead I told her a bit about the trip to Virginia with Pete. After Alice's 'huh' comments about us I didn't feel like talking about those kinds of issues with Alice any more, so Lucy made a good sounding board, even if she did say the same thing as Alice, “Sleeping with a housemate isn’t unprecedented.”

“Do women have a handbook of these sayings that I haven't found yet?”

“What?”

“That's exactly what Alice said.”

“Well, you know, it doesn't mean it’s a good idea. Unless, like, you love him or something. Do you?”

I told Lucy about Susan's theory that it was a crush, and she agreed. Then I mentioned meeting Will, which she found intriguing, mostly I guess because the idea of meeting a guy at a gambling table had never appealed at all to Lucy, the consummate professional.

Then we talked a bit about Lucy's love life, or lack of it. “I think I've given my life to the team, Alex. I need to get it back,” she said. It sounded reminiscent of the discussions I'd had with Alice, and one time with Dan. We all had this life that seemed like it should be great, but at a severe cost to our personal relationships.

Eventually I saw a blouse that was similar to one of the ones Yana had tried on during our visit to Virginia, and that reminded me of Deuchar's warning about Pete. I mentioned it to Lucy.

“You sound like this is more than a crush, Alex,” Lucy said.

“Maybe it is. Maybe I should leave Pete alone, for his own good.”

“Or maybe you should follow your heart.”

“What does it say about my feelings for Pete that I thought Will was cute?”

“Alex. You're allowed to be in love with a guy and still find other guys attractive.”

“It still seems like it’s not quite right.”

“You are seriously hard on yourself, Alex. Lighten up.”

Lighten up, indeed.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Instead of lightening up, I took Pete with me to Vegas on our next trip. It went against everything Deuchar had warned me about, and it was mixing business with pleasure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I had decided to take Pete at his word. The plan I had begun to develop in my head involved getting into Whitwell's records. I wasn't sure how to do that, but as soon as I mentioned it to Pete he told me that he needed to come to Vegas with me, because he could figure out a way to make that happen.

Pete and I flew out to Vegas a day earlier than the rest of the team. I didn't want them to know he was with me.

The flight, so routine for me now, amused Pete. “First class,” he said, as we settled into our seats on the plane. “You sure you want to stop doing this? I could get used to it.”

We were going to stay at the Bellagio. I was booked as Alexandra Leung. Because I'd played there under that ID before, they had me down as a high-roller, so were met at the airport by one of their handlers, and a limo. Pete remained hugely amused by the spectacle. I introduced him to Drew, the handler, as my boyfriend, which was our agreed cover story. As I held Pete's hand in the limo I wished it was really true. He was a boy, he was my friend, but he was there to help me, not to romance me.

The Bellagio put me in a two bedroom suite, which actually suited both of us. Pete was still amused by the spectacle, but I got the sense he was slightly disturbed by the fact that I had this ostentatious lifestyle when I was 'in role,’ and I could sense that, although he was amused, he was not impressed.

That night we went to an early show over at the Grand, which was terrible, and then we went back to the Bellagio for dinner. Drew was expecting me to play, so to sustain the illusion I sat in for a few hours, with Pete playing alongside me for smaller stakes. Of course, we lost about $4,000, since I didn't have any resources behind me and wasn't bothering to count. We were lucky we only lost that much, since I had to still pretend I was the reckless Japanese princess type. But after a while I got tired of cards, so then we moved over to the craps tables, and Pete played a few rounds, for a few hundred dollars a round. Mostly, he lost.

Eventually Pete steered me back up to the suite, where he phoned down for a rental car. Drew was on it right away, but seemed confused that we weren't just availing ourselves of one of the hotel limos, especially at 2am. It was my turn to be amused as I heard Pete get a slightly dismissive tone to his voice, as though it was beneath him to have to explain himself to Drew. Just organize the car, please,” He said. “You have Ms. Leung's license details and credit card, right?”

We sat in the suite for another twenty minutes before Drew phoned back to say the car was ready. Then Pete picked up a backpack and guided me back downstairs.

“So, what are we doing?” I asked Pete, as he flipped the valet a tip. He slung his bag into the back seat.

“Research,” Pete said, starting the car. We drove out onto the strip, then did a right turn, and another right turn, until we were coming back up an alley behind another casino. Pete stopped just next to a bunch of dumpsters.

I looked around. There wasn’t anything nearby, except the dumpsters and a loading dock about fifty yards away. Pete was ferreting through his bag until he pulled out a laptop. It wasn’t his laptop — I didn’t recognize it. I had no idea where it came from.

“I don’t want to seem like the prying bitch type,” I said, “but do you think you could give me some idea of what’s going on? Whose laptop is that?”

“It’s ours, for the next few hours. Then it will go to Goodwill.”

“Because?”

“Because I don’t know whether they’ll be able to log our MAC address when I access the account. I don’t know if I’ll have time to edit access logs later.”

“We’re accessing an account?”

“We’re warchalking. I’m breaking into the hotel wifi network,” Pete said.

“We couldn’t do that from inside the hotel?”

“This isn’t our hotel.”

“And we’re breaking into this hotel's network because?”

“Because if we can get into this network, then we can get into the ethernet network inside the hotel, and …”

I was getting it. “Pete, you’re no cracker.”

“No, but I’m no card player, either. And the way I figure it, getting into Whitwell’s system is your best bet.”

“I’m not sure how you’re going to do it.”

“Neither am I,” Pete said. “The first step is just figuring out whether or not I can do the second step.”

“What are the chances the hotel’s wifi network will even be on the same physical network?”

“Pretty slim. But I’m betting the firewall isn’t going to be as secure as it should be. And the security network and the wifi network will probably both be accessing the same gateway.”

“And why didn't we try to break into the network at our own hotel, where we actually had wifi access?“

“Too easy to trace us,“ Pete said. “Besides, those networks for guests are definitely on different networks. We're trying to get into the wifi network the hotel uses for its own employees.“

As much as I appreciated Pete’s concern for me, hacking away on a laptop at 3am wasn’t my idea of a super-exciting time, and after the drinks earlier I was feeling sleepy. Eventually I drifted off in the passenger seat. It was several hours later, as dawn was breaking, that we pulled up at the valet again.

“Hey there,” Pete said.

“We’re back?” I said sleepily.

“We’re back.” He was smiling.

Instead of going up to our room Pete dragged me to breakfast. “I don’t know about you, Alex, but I’m still super-hungry.”

“So what’s next?” I asked, after we’d scoured enough food from the buffet to feed a small village.

“What’s next I will need some help with.” Pete said. “I got access to a Whitwell account, but it doesn’t have a lot of privileges.”

“Great. What can I do?”

“Nothing.” Pete said. “You have to be completely out of this.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“But –”

“Two things wrong with you doing anything that has to do with Whitwell,” Pete interrupted. “One, it might compromise any deal you have with Los Federales. And two, we need more skill than either you or I have, to go any further than this.”

“I don’t really trust anyone else to get involved.”

“I’m not sure I do, either, but we are going to need some help.” He hesitated. “How would you feel if I asked Vassily for help?”

“Vassily?”

“I mean, not asked him to get involved directly. That would be, uh, bad. Bad for him, bad for me, bad for all of us. But you know, back in Russia, he went to college with some guys … let’s just say they make their living in an interesting way.”

“You trust him enough?”

“I trust him enough to be the other major stockholder in my business.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Yes.”

“How much does he know about me?”

“Some. He doesn’t know everything. You remember the night we went out, when you first met Yana? He thought you were a chick, then. They both did. Yana thought you were a lesbian.”

“I should be thankful for small mercies.”

“I didn't try to correct the impression, by the way.“

“Thanks, I guess.“

“Of course, if we ask him to help, he’s going to know everything.”

“You think?”

“Well, whoever he brings in to help is going to end up knowing everything. If they get access to the things we want them to have access to, that is.”

“I guess.” I thought back to the time we’d been busted, by Whitwell, and the thing that John Mantonelli had said to me – ‘You seem like a nice girl.’ Mantonelli hadn’t been trying to be clever when he said that.

I wondered, with a burning curiosity, what was in Whitwell’s database.

Then I couldn’t help myself, and I told Pete about Deuchar’s warning to me. I had withheld the conversation from him because I didn’t want to concern him, but since I had dragged him to Vegas I wasn’t exactly being consistent. “I think you and Vassily should keep out of this, Pete,” I said. “You guys have too much at stake.”

“Alex, I’m not just doing this for you. Okay, most of it is for you. But don’t you see? I’m already tainted in Command’s eyes. The only chance Vassily and I have is if we help you to get back at Arun, so that he’s not a threat to any of us. If you go down for this, my career is finished.

“Anyway,” he continued. “As I said, I’m already tainted. The best thing we could possibly do right now is win. It’s not just about beating Arun, we have to secure everything, keep you safe from Treasury, keep all of us safe from all the threats. If we can do that, then neither of us is a liability — we’re an asset.”

Back up in our suite, I took a shower. I left the door to my bedroom open, because I wanted to stay awake to talk to Pete, but by the time he was done having his own shower I was fast asleep again.

 

~o~O~o~
 

John Ostermeyer had sent me roses on the first of the month for both months since I had last seen him. I wrote a short thank you after the first bunch. It seemed like it was an appropriate follow up to our brief time together in Lincoln. The second bunch made me start thinking about him again, in a more serious way. I didn't think there was any future for John and I, but I was touched. Maybe I was getting soft in the head.

If Pete was at all curious about the roses he seemed to play it cool. I think I was a little bit upset by that. A part of me wanted to make him jealous. Of course, Pete was much too practical to be the flower-buying type. I think he'd only ever bought flowers for a girl as an apology: he'd never have done it as a simple romantic gesture.

A few days after I had sent the thank you note I received an invitation in the mail from Jim Brauch. Jim had been in my year at LHS. We hadn't exactly been close, and as a friend of John Ostermeyer's he hadn't been among my tormentors, but we hadn't kept in touch. I wondered why, out of the blue, I would merit an invitation. He was marrying a young woman named Alison Weinberg, daughter of Robert and Mia. I didn't know the family. The wedding was in Marin, in California. It was addressed to Miss Alex Jones, which was odd in itself since I had no idea how Jim Brauch might have known about the recent changes in my life and, unlike the other invitations I'd received for such things, there was no indication on it of whether or not I was expected to bring a partner. I thought that was odd, too, but, as I wasn't sure I even wanted to go, I filed it with some utilities and credit card bills I planned to pay later in the month, and forgot about it for a few days.

The following week John Ostermeyer phoned me. I was glad to hear from him. The events in Lincoln were still playing through my mind and I had wondered whether or not there was anything more to them. I wasn't looking for anything — I was still too conflicted about Pete to be looking for anything — but there was definitely a small frisson, and the roses kept reminding me.

John had an invite to Jim and Alison's wedding, too. “Who is she?” I asked. “Do you know her? When was the last time you saw Jim?”

It turned out John played squash with Jim once a fortnight. Jim worked for a shipping company in Oakland, something to do with managing logistics. It didn't seem very interesting. “So, um,” John said to me, “I know it’s a long way to come, and everything, but I thought maybe you might like to be my date for the wedding.”

“Did you get one of those solo invitations, too?” I asked. “What's with that?”

“Catering is expensive, I guess. And, um …”

“Yes?”

“You know, I mentioned to Jim that I had seen you at Thanksgiving. And I think maybe he meant me to ask you, anyway. But I think he really wanted you to come. So maybe he thought if he just invited me plus a partner, and I asked you, you wouldn't go to all the trouble to come out here.”

It made a twisted kind of sense.

“You know,” John said, “I can pay for your airfare.”

“Don’t be stupid, John. I can certainly pay for my own airfare.”

“So you're coming then,” he said, his voice brightening. I could practically feel his smile through the telephone. “Awesome!”

It seemed I had committed myself to going.

 

~o~O~o~
 

I caught the plane to San Francisco with mixed feelings. On the one hand I was pleased to be seeing John again. On the other hand, there were bound to be people at the wedding that I hadn't seen for a long time. I wasn't worried about what they would think of me. Strangely, what worried me most was that I might upstage Alison, the bride. I thought that would be poor form. It was her day, and she deserved to have all he focus on her. It seemed to me that if people spent more time focused on me, the weird transsexual, I would somehow be ruining it for her.

I had mentioned this briefly to Lucy, who had kindly driven me to Logan. She had even brought along coffee for the ride, since it was so early. “Alex,“ she had said. “That's really sweet of you. But you know, it’s not going to be all about you. Most people will be focused on her. Most people — am I right? — won’t even know who you are. It’s just going to be a handful, right?”

She was probably right, but I was still nervous.

I had to transit through Chicago but everything was on time, and John was waiting at the gate at Oakland when I arrived a little after 2pm. I hugged him as a hello, and he held me a little longer than I expected.

I stepped back to look at him. He seemed more relaxed than the time I had seen him in Lincoln. In fact he was smiling like he had just won the lottery. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered that he was so pleased to see me, or alarmed.

The plan we had made was that we would both go to John's apartment in Berkeley to get changed, and then John would drive us both to the wedding. I had only consented on the proviso that he promised not to get toasted at the wedding. “I'm not going to get a cab back from Marin,” I had said. “You have to stay sober enough to drive.” I had booked a room at the St Francis, downtown in San Francisco, so I could get a flight back easily the next day. So John was in for a long drive home that night.

At the apartment he was a perfect gentleman, and he gave me privacy in the bathroom to do my hair and makeup. It didn't actually take all that long. I had chosen to wear a simple sleeveless red tea-length dress, with a high neckline. Alison wasn't Chinese, so she'd be wearing white, and red usually looked good against my skin and hair. Plus I wouldn't need to worry about any of my padding showing.

I didn't need as much padding as I used to. My body seemed to love estrogen. Most of its effects seemed to be evident in my butt and hips, which had rounded out considerably. My breasts were definitely getting bigger too, if not quite as enthusiastically. I was still wearing the chicken filets, but now I had graduated to a B-cup bra when I wore them, instead of the A-cups I had been wearing for the previous two years.

I came out of the bathroom and both John and I did a kind of double-take at one another. He had gotten changed in his room while I had been in the bathroom, and he was now dressed for the wedding, in a black suit that fitted poorly enough to scream “I'm an academic with no money.” I felt momentarily guilty about having such thoughts, but I had never seen John in a suit before, and I realized just from the way he was standing that it wasn't something he did a lot.

“You need to lose the tie,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s a late afternoon wedding. Outdoors. In a garden. Trust me.” I walked over to him and undid the knot in the tie. “You don’t want to look like an undertaker.”

“That bad?”

“Not bad at all. You just need to loosen the look up.” I undid his top button. There was just a hint of his chest hair visible above the open neck of his shirt.

I could tell he liked the way I looked. I was flattered, again, but at the same time his attention was a little too intense.

We drove up to Mill Valley, which seemed much further than I had imagined, but we just made it on time at 5.00pm. The ceremony and reception were being held at a restaurant with some beautiful gardens which were at their best in the late afternoon light. As we got out of the car I wrapped myself up in my pashmina against the typical Bay area chill. Remember the late 90s, when pashminas were ubiquitous?

We darted into the back row of the seats in the garden, just before Lohengrin struck up from an invisible organ.

Alison looked beautiful. She'd chosen a very simple long silk dress that suited the casual garden setting – no frou frou at all. Jim Looked pretty good, too. And I'd made the right call by removing John's tie. Most of the younger men were without them.

Once the ceremony was done, the bride and groom posed for shots in the magic light of dusk, while we guests retired to the terrace, champagne and beer in hand. There were only three faces I knew: Hal Donovan, Carl Choi, and Marie Chaney. Marie and Carl were talking to one another and weren't looking at me at all, but Hal came over to talk to John and me as soon as I made eye contact with him.

“Susan?” he said, but I knew, even as he said it, that John must have passed on the news of my transition before the day.

“Hi Hal. John told me he was putting the band back together,” I joked weakly. “It’s Alex. Susan is back in Boston.”

It was clear Hal was more than a little wigged out. He shuffled nervously from side to side, as he looked me up and down. I tried to lighten the mood by telling him he looked good, and that it was good to see him, but he kept staring. I felt like an exotic animal in a game park. Nervously, I reached for John's hand.

“So Hal,” I finally said, when he hadn't said anything for perhaps a full ten seconds, which is an eternity in a social setting like a wedding. “What are you doing these days?”

Hal opened his mouth like he was a goldfish, then closed it again, then said, almost exactly like Jeff Spicoli said it in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, like he was stoned. “I don’t know.”

“Dude,” John said, and I loved him, then, for that, because we were clearly on the same wavelength. “You don’t know?”

“Um.” This was getting embarrassing for all of us. But at that moment Marie Chaney walked over.

“Hey, Hal,” she said, and went to kiss him on the cheek. “Great to see you again.” Then she turned to John, and said hello and kissed him. Then she turned to me. “Hi. Are you …?”

“Alex is with me,” John said. “Alex, this is Marie.”

“Alex,” Marie said. “How are you?” It was clear she hadn't made the connection to our high school days.

“Hi Marie,” I said. I realized there was no point in not being upfront with her. For one thing, Hal was still staring at me like I'd grown a pair of antennae from my forehead. “How are you?”

“Good,” she said enthusiastically. “Didn't Alison look gorgeous?”

“She did. And it was a beautiful ceremony. You're looking pretty good, yourself.” I couldn't help myself. “Who would have though Jim had it in him?”

She laughed. “Too true. Who would have thought? How do you know Jim?” She turned to John. “How long have you guys been dating? Oh. Sorry, that was out of line.” She indicated our entwined hands. “Are you dating? John Ostermeyer, where did you manage to find such a gorgeous girlfriend?” As ever, Marie had a thousand questions.

“Marie,” I said. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Should I?”

Hal finally got some words to come out. “This is Alex Jones, Marie. From Lincoln?”

John squeezed my hand back. I wondered why he hadn't run away already.

I watched the penny drop. It was like a swinging arm in an old carnival coin-in-the-slot. And then Marie laughed.

“Alex. God, you look fantastic. Fantastic! Doesn't she, Hal?”

Marie laughed and practically dragged me over to meet Carl Choi. I still held John's hand, so he came too. Hal trailed behind. “Carl!” Marie cried. “Carl! Look who's here!”

All of a sudden I wasn't enjoying the wedding much any more. Carl gave me the same goldfish treatment Hal had. Marie talked enough for all of us and there were no awkward gaps in the conversation as there had been when it was just Hal, John and me, but I was beginning to wilt under the combined detailed scrutiny of both Hal and Carl. I had known them both since they were about four years old.

The straw that broke the camel's back, or maybe broke my spirit, was when a woman I didn't know walked over to talk to Marie, and she introduced us all. When she got to me, she somehow felt the need to add that we all went to school together, but some of us had been through some big changes since then.

The woman, who seemed pleasant enough, ventured that everyone says that about everyone at weddings, and the conversation drifted on from there. But my mind was on Marie's comment. I was a figure of curiosity. Marie was being friendly, but I knew — I knew as soon as she said those words to that woman — that she would spend the rest of the evening telling people at the wedding about the transsexual she had gone to school with and didn't she look fantastic. And I didn't want to be 'fantastic.' I just wanted to be with people who took me at face value. My phobia about coming to the wedding had been validated: people were going to talk about me.

After a few minutes of conversation I excused myself to go to the ladies room. I sat in the stall for quite a while, thinking. I realized after a moment or so that I was actually shaking slightly. Coming to the wedding had been a mistake. However much I wanted to see John again, I realized that being around people who knew me from my childhood was stupid. I had almost nothing in common with them any more, and they were going to struggle to get past the things that had happened in my life. Even with John, who seemed comfortable with me, I had not been honest: he thought I worked for a startup developing financial algorithms. Once again, that feeling of being false washed over me.

As I washed my hands at the basin and fixed my lipstick, I looked at myself and tried to be objective about it. I certainly looked like a woman. The estrogen in my system was seeing to it that I was becoming more and more like a woman every day. And there was no way I would ever be a man again. What was false? Aside from lying to John, about my job, I was a woman, and usually a truthful person.

And yet …

I knew if I left the restroom I was going back into what was, almost literally, no-man's land.

Out of deference to John, I stayed. As I left the ladies room I had the impulse to rush to the front door of the restaurant and begin walking. But I felt I owed it to John to stay. My mother raised me to be polite and to bear up under pressure.

So I sat next to John and said almost nothing for the entire night to anyone else. The guy seated next to me at our table tried to make some small talk with me, but I was so conscious of Hal and his date staring at me from across the table that I could barely talk. Once the speeches were finished I turned to John, who had been holding my hand almost the entire time, and said. “Would you mind if we left soon? I have a tremendous headache.”

It wasn't a lie. I was wound tight enough to snap.

We said our brief farewells, awkwardly, and John drove me down to the St. Francis. When we got to the hotel I think he was hoping I was going to ask him to come in with me, but I was emotionally drained.

“Your flight is at noon, right?” John asked.

I nodded.

“Breakfast? I know this little place in Potrero Hill. It’s on the way to the airport.”

For some reason — all the hand holding? — I thought I owed him that.

The next morning I woke early, still on East Coast time. I went for a walk through Union Square, which was beginning to fill up with its requisite beggars, even at that early hour. I continued on down toward Market Street. The morning light was uncommonly clear for a winter's day in San Francisco, and the light bounced pleasingly off some of the glass skyscrapers down near State Street.

As I walked I thought of the events of the previous evening. Here I was, in what was practically the transgender capital of America, San Francisco, and I had never felt more uncomfortable in my own skin. In Boston my friends, few that they were, had adjusted to the 'new' me, but people who knew me from my past and hadn't witnessed the changes over time viewed me as a curiosity.

I thought back to my childhood comment to Hal Donovan. “Why should I mind if someone else is an idiot?” I had said to him. “If I was the one who made a mistake …”

Back at the hotel I packed and was downstairs when John came by to take me to the airport. He drove me to a small cafe south of the city. It was pleasant, and busy. The dot com boom was in full swing and the neighborhood on Potrero Hill was prosperous. We were lucky to get a small table near the window.

We ordered food and I pondered, as John was making small talk, whether or not I should tell him what I really did for a living. But as I listened to him talking I began to have a deeper concern. Mostly, he seemed to be talking about how beautiful I was, and how amazing my transition had been.

“John,“ I said gently. “Can we talk about something other than me changing sex?”

He seemed a little offended. “Sure.”

“How's your work?”

We discussed his research in more detail than we had in Lincoln a few months earlier. I was surprised to discover that I could follow some of the things he was talking about: estrogen hadn't ruined my head for physics. Some of the more esoteric elements were beyond my grasp, but I guess that was why John was a senior T.A. in astrophysics and I wasn't.

We finished breakfast and he drove me down to SFO. When we got to the drop off zone he got out of his car and retrieved my bag from the trunk, then set it on the sidewalk. We both stood there awkwardly for a few moments, me on the curb, him on the roadway, which at least made our differences in height slightly less awkward. Then he swept me up in his arms, and held me tightly. I liked the feeling. I liked the smell of him. I liked the sensation of being wrapped up.

“Alex, I know you might think this is coming on strong, but I'd really like to see a lot more of you.”

“Me too, John. But —“ I stepped back slightly so I could look into his face, “— we live on opposite sides of the country.”

“A trifle. I could fly out to see you next weekend.”

I remembered we were supposed to be playing in Vegas next weekend. Maybe I could fly to San Francisco from Vegas? How could I explain being able to do that to John?

It didn't matter, because then he said the one thing that ruined everything. Everything.

“Alex, I know we've known each other for a really long time. I think this — you — is kind of a destiny thing.”

“Destiny?”

“I've, um …”

“Yes?”

He blushed. “I've always had a kind of thing for girls like you.”

“Girls like me,” I repeated, the words sinking in.

“Um, yeah. So this … you … it’s like, perfect.”

“John, I really don’t know what to say to that.”

“Promise me you’ll call me.”

“I’ll call you.” I think I meant it when I said it, but truly, as soon as John had said, 'girls like you,' I had felt a deep, overwhelming sense of sadness. John didn't love me, for me. I mean, maybe he did. But I was a fetish.

I released myself from his grasp. “Bye, John. Thanks for the lift.”

“Any time, Alex. Let me know if it’s okay for me to fly out. Destiny.”

As I entered the terminal I knew it would never be okay.

 

~o~O~o~
 

On the flight back I turned my feelings over and over in my head. What was so wrong about accepting that John loved me and he was attracted to me? His feelings were, at least, honest, whereas mine were honestly confusing. Was I channeling Groucho Marx, who once said, 'I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member'? How could I ever expect a relationship with any man unless I was willing to admit that any man who was interested in me would have to accept my fucked-up gender? Who was I, to be so high and mighty?

And yet I knew as soon as he had uttered those words that it was over between us. Something in the way he said it, something in the connection between us, made me feel like an object rather than a person. I didn't know whether I could ever let him hold me in his arms again. I remembered the conversation we had had in my parents' living room in Lincoln, where I had foolishly, drunkenly told him I wanted to jump his bones. I didn't want to do that now, and I wondered why I had ever considered it.

Love and lust seem to me like good, honest, wholesome feelings, but there's something truly disturbing about being someone's fetish object.

The only real love of my life was Pete, and that was out of the question.

Goddamned hormones.

 

~o~O~o~