Shame

Orleans, where I was the headliner in a show. He was on leave. My sailor boy wooed me here by sending a steady stream of roses and love letters. He said we could make it work.”
    “What happened?”
    “He fell in love with someone else.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “So am I. She’ll never love him like I did.”
    “She?”
    “You sound surprised.”
    “I am. I just assumed it was another man.”
    “As a rule, my lovers haven’t been gay.”
    “But you’re still—male—aren’t you?”
    “I’m not transsexual, if that’s what you mean. And yes, my male parts are intact.”
    “Doesn’t that make you and your lover homosexual?”
    “Not to my thinking. I don’t consider myself a male. And my lovers, almost to a man, have been heterosexual. I know it’s a bit of a gender-bender, but it’s all perception. How do you see me now, as female or male?”
    “Both. What’s that word...?”
    “Androgynous. On the street we’re known as ‘chicks with dicks.’”
    “Do you want the operation?”
    “No. I am a berdache, a winkte with two spirits, male and female, combined into one. I don’t need an operation. I already am what I should be.”
    “Then why did you enhance your breasts?”
    “What you see is a result of estrogen and hormones. I never had an operation.”
    “What about your facial hair?”
    With a laugh, Lola said, “‘My, what big teeth you have,’ said Little Red Riding Hood.” She shook her head. “My face is much as it always was. My beard was almost nonexistent, so very little depilation was needed. Most of my changes were internal, not external. The way I see it, gender is found between your ears, not your legs.”
    “Do you think of yourself as a woman?”
    “I think of myself as a Two-Spirit, neither man nor woman, but something feminine, something in between.”
    “You’ve taken a woman’s name.”
    “Yes. Taking another name is nothing unusual. Lakota winkte used to do naming ceremonies, offering boys sacrednames. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were given winkte names as boys. As men, it is said, they even took winkte wives. I gave myself the name of Lola. Most people think it comes from the Kinks’ song about a transvestite named Lola, but it doesn’t. I took the name from Lola Falana. I wanted to be a stage performer just like her.”
    “So you stayed in San Diego just because of this feeling?”
    “Yes. And I suppose there was a little part of me that kept hoping, without any real hope, that my sailor boy would come back to me. There was another Lakota winkte who fell in love with a military man and lived with him for almost twenty years as his wife. The couple even adopted two children. No one ever suspected the winkte was biologically a male.”
    “Didn’t that winkte live a lie?”
    “The world didn’t, and doesn’t, understand.”
    “That sounds hypocritical. You lectured me that keeping my secrets was all wrong, and yet you sound proud that this winkte fooled the world. Is that what you would have done with your sailor, tried to pass for a woman?”
    “I don’t know. I only know there’s a difference between making choices out of love and out of fear.”
    “That’s a convenient distinction.”
    “No, it’s not. I came to terms with what I am. I was willing to go through that pain to come out on the other side. You still haven’t done that.”

20

    F ROM HER HOTEL room Elizabeth had called her service. What she had imagined would be no more than five minutes of messages had turned into an hour’s worth and counting. She was the media’s flavor of the day. Everyone wanted her comments on the new Shame murders, or if not everyone, at least forty-six of her first forty-nine callers. She wrote down yet another name and number on a page filled with people to call back and imagined her publicist probably had a list twice as long.
    “...Jeremy Levett. You might remember we had you on our show,
Good Morning, Omaha,
when you were promoting your last book....”
    The unspoken message was, “We scratched your back, now it’s time for you to scratch ours.” They had publicized her books in the past and would in the future, but for that they expected their piece of her now.
    “We’d like to do an on-air spot tomorrow. Call me at my home number, would you? Look forward to talking....”
    She wasn’t listening closely. Virtually all the messages were the same. She probably should have been working and listening at the same time, but she hadn’t