“Now, wait a minute. Now wait just one darn minute, here,” I heard myself saying. I cleared my throat. What was it I was going to say? I unbent the rest of the way to a standing position, and tried to fix my hair with my hand. Mr. Accountant was going to put this all together now, was going to enter this all in the computer and see how the figures came out. I cleared my throat again. They were both staring at me. I bought a little more time by righting the other chairs; three of the four had been knocked over – it looked like the aftermath of a barroom brawl. Mother and dad would have been scandalized, and that thought helped me get real.
“Okay, now. What have we got here. Maggie -” I turned to her. I felt like a prosecuting attorney. “You heard Mack’s story. You believe it?”
She nodded, never taking her eyes off me. “Uh huh.”
“Maggie, doesn’t this whole story strike you as completely and utterly bizarre? As totally physically impossible? As preposterous?”
Maggie pursed her lips thoughtfully, and then shook her head. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Listen, Doug – you said you had some scotch or something, right? Well get it. We could all use a shot.”
“Amen,” said Mack fervently from his position on the floor. He, too rose and took a seat, and looked at me expectantly.
I have to admit that liquor sounded good, though it was only late morning. I thought we could all use something to steady our nerves; I know I did. But should Mack be allowed? I glanced at Maggie questioningly, and gestured to Mack with my eyes, then raised my eyebrows. She caught my drift, but just shrugged and said, “Why not?”
What the heck. I went and got what was left of the bottle out of the parlor. When I got back, waitress Maggie had found glasses and was setting them out. Mack looked so eager for his that I had some misgivings, but I sloshed the bottle – there was so little left after my foray last night, and there wasn’t any more in the house, and I concluded it would be safe. I poured us each a couple finger-fulls – that’s all there was. Mack was already sipping his when I took my seat. I picked up where I’d left off.
“So Maggie, this bizarre explanation of Mack’s doesn’t bother you?”
“No.”
I took a tentative sip, too. Geez, the stuff was strong, it burned my throat. It felt so strange to be drinking at the kitchen table, in the daytime, with it all sunny outside. “Why not?”
Maggie shook her head, and her pony tail bounced from side to side. I suddenly wondered why she wore her hair in such a little girl style.
“Because. Because I knew all along that something was up. Why did I have the hots for him so hard, so fast? I knew there had to be some reason – he’s not my type at all.”
I nodded.
“And why did all the other women at the bar act the same way? And you. You want him, too. But I don’t think you’re gay. What gives? I knew there was something strange about him all along.”
“And you accept this ridiculous story as a logical explanation?”
“Sure. It fits perfectly. What other explanation is there?”
I shifted in my seat. “But it’s so impossible, so – “
“Look, Doug – the world is full of strange things. Science doesn’t know everything. Besides, I don’t think it’s all that weird, personally. I mean, there’s other animals that change sex, aren’t there?”
I looked at her dubiously.
“Well, I think there are, I think it was on TV, (here she seemed to get irritated at my expression of extreme doubt) or something, but the point is, weird things happen all the time. Scientists are always discovering things that we thought were impossible.”
At this I nodded, conceding her a point, but this only served to make her madder.
“Look, I never finished high school, okay? And I’m not an accountant, a college grad like you, I’m just a waitress. But I’m not stupid. How else do you explain how we all feel about him? How we all act towards him? (She was getting more steamed up.) You think I burst into people’s kitchens every day of the week and throw myself at guys? Well, I don’t! I don’t act like this at all, ever. So why did I?” She shot Mack a fierce look, and he quickly upended his glass and swallowed the film left in the bottom. “Look at him – is this a guy I’d throw myself all over? No. Use your eyes, use your senses. He’s weird. He’s not (here she did a limp-wrist movement) – but he’s not masculine, either. He looks like both a man and a woman – kind of delicate, but not feminine; I think he looks exactly like a woman who changed into a man.”
Mack obviously wished he had more to drink – a lot more – or that the floor would open up and swallow him, or both – and Mandy lowered her eyebrows.
“You think you’re so smart, Doug. But you don’t have any sense about people, or you’d know this was right – you’d feel it was right. And you wouldn’t have to ask me about it, you’d just know.”
I did know. That was the funny thing. And I was grilling her about this mostly to get a confirmation, and some reasonable explanations, to bolster my own feelings. I wasn’t really trying to argue with her – because, regardless of what she thought, or what I made it seem like, I did feel that Mack’s story was true. I just wanted to have someone else believe it, too. And though Mandy obviously wasn’t an educated woman, she had always seemed to me to be shrewd, with her own brand of horse-sense that sometimes more well-educated people are lacking. So I nodded at her, like I accepted her explanation, like she had won me over with her logic.
And now both of us turned our eyes on Mack.
Mack was a mess, frankly. A pitiable object. He had already raised a completely empty glass to his lips about three times, trying to coax a drop out of it, and that was sad and disgusting.
I had some serious thoughts coming into my head. The most important one was that while I did accept Mack’s story and Maggie’s explanation, I had great reservations about Maggie’s plan concerning changing Mack back into a woman, and I’ll tell you why.
First of all, I found the whole thing very embarrassing to even mention. And equally arousing to contemplate.
You may as well know right now that I am a virgin. I’ve never even gotten to first base with a girl – I’m not even sure what first base is. So you can see how the idea of (I’ll use the correct terms, the dictionary terms, so I’ll be able to even talk about this) cunnilingus would really scare and fascinate me. It’s so exotic. So forbidden. How did one do it? What did it – um, taste like? Smell like? What did it feel like for the woman? For the man? The accountant in me wondered what percent of the adult population engages in, or has engaged in, this behavior?
Pertaining to Mack’s case, is the – uh – female vaginal secretion equivalent to semen, as far as having the ability to change Mack back into a woman? Did he believe it would work? Would he be willing to try to find out? And if he was, would he be able to do it enough times to accomplish his goal?
And (and here was the biggie that was hovering about in my brain) if Mack could do it, and if it did work – if so . . . then he’d be a woman again. Mack be a woman. The Mack that I love. And then – possibly, just possibly – I would have the chance of fulfilling the wish I have had for so long: I would be able to marry the woman I love. If it worked. And if she – Grace, that is – fell in love with me, too (which I had a hunch was a strong possibility), then I would be in heaven. I would be happy forever. I would have all my dreams come true. If. If.
BUT. If Mack spent a night with a woman, and had sex with her, would I die of jealousy? Would I be able to stand it, knowing he was in someone else’s arms, even for the express purpose of changing into a woman and becoming my wife? That was the only thing I really, for sure, knew the answer to – and the answer is: I couldn’t take it. I know that right now, without a doubt – I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle it at all. There was no way in hell that this was ever going to work.
That “you can start with me” attitude of Maggie’s shocked and repelled me. Sure, she was a self-confessed victim of Mack’s male/female attraction, but – knowing that he was really a woman, she still wanted to – to – wanted him to – give her sexual pleasure in the form of cunnilingus? I just couldn’t – this was just too too hard to contemplate. What would they do, just go upstairs and go to it up there, while I listened to Maggie’s moans and screams of pleasure? And then would they come back down, Maggie all frowzy, zipping up her skirt, and Mack wiping his mouth? God!! No! No way. No way. Not in my house. Not here, and not any where else, either. No. Not Mack – not Mack being – intimate – with any one but me. Mack with Maggie? Mack with other women? Over my dead body.
“It wouldn’t be hard to pimp for him, you know,” Maggie was saying. “All he’d have to do would be to show up at Dave’s – he’d have women falling all over him, and we could bring them over here, let them go to it, and after a while he’d be back to normal. Shit, we could even charge, make some money. I know this guy who’s got a van – “
“Maggie!”
She blithely disregarded my warning. ” – he wouldn’t mind us borrowing it, for a nominal fee, and there’s a mattress in the back and everything, it’s all set up, and we could bring the girls out – Mack, you wouldn’t even have to go back in the bar, we could bring them out to you, one after another, like an assembly line, and – “
“MAGGIE!”
“What?”
“Wha’d’you mean, ‘what’? My God, this is just – “
Maggie raised her chin at me and put a hand on her hip. “What’sa matter, Doug? You got problems with that? How did you think it was gonna work? He said he needed lots of guys, so he’ll need lots of women. Where do you think we’re going to get them? I mean, I’m happy to participate, but I’ve gotta work, I can’t be – “
“Maggie, for God’s sake! Have you no decency?!”
“Oh, don’t give me that, Doug, Mr. High and Mighty, Mr. Morals – look, he said he needed lots of guys – we have to be practical about all this, we’ll need – “
“Hundreds.” Mack spoke so quietly that we barely heard him, but there was something about his voice that made us both instantly shut up and look at him. “There were hundreds. Literally.”
My heart sunk to the floor. “Mack, you can’t mean – ” I pleaded. “Not literally hundreds, surely.” This was making me sick. The mental image of Mack, a beautiful woman with long blond hair, kneeling in front of hundreds – hundreds – of anonymous men, with their penises in her mouth – God, no. Please, no. This couldn’t be true. I tried to remember what exactly Mack had said when he told me the story in my car that morning – he’d said “millions”, an exaggeration that I pared down immediately in my mind to – I don’t know – some. Enough. Hundreds?? One would kill me!
“Hundreds?” Maggie was saying with interest. “Yeah, really? Hundreds? Okay, well, we could swing it. Not here in town – unless we get a good, steady clientele. If you’re good enough at it that we get a lot of regulars. Then we could – “
I shot out of my seat, rearing my full five feet six inches into the air. “That’s enough! That’s IT! There will be no more of this talk. There will be no ‘pimping’ – God, Maggie pimping?! – for Mack.”
Maggie, to my sorrow, wasn’t the least bit intimidated. She looked up at me coolly from her chair, then turned her head back to Mack and kept right on talking. “It probably wouldn’t really take all that long. If we had – let’s see – five girls a night, that would be a hundred and fifty in only a month. So a coupla months and you’d have it – (here she glanced back up at me) – if your tongue didn’t wear out first, I mean.”
I sat back down – hard.
“And if you could do ten a day, you’d have three hundred in only one month. And if we charged oh, let’s say twenty bucks a throw, we’d make some good money at the same time. I bet – “
It was at this point that Mack blew.
