Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

Wolf, once we part, I’ll be out, dead, for six or seven hours. So I’ll see you tomorrow, if you care to stay over. (The guest rooms have everything.) Meanwhile, I think Rose may be coming back, around midnight. She’s been very sweet to me, and I’d like to be really sweet to her, too. I’m not actually her grandma. You may have guessed. That’s a little—how shall I say?—joke. Did you like Rose, too? I hope you did. I’m sure you did. You have, I think, excellent taste. Yum. So, let me tell you what Rose really likes. Get ready:

Wolf read on. He raised an eyebrow, recalled he was not on camera, raised both eyebrows.

He laughed again. “Oh, boy.”

Then he sat down to consider.

Twenty minutes later, at ten fifty-one precisely, he strolled into the second dressing room that led from the closed bedroom of his sleeping hostess.

It was like stuff he had seen backstage and in the caravans of the movie lot. Only a good deal more generous, and expensive to the point of being fabulous, the essence of fables.

At least two hundred gowns. At least a hundred and fifty wigs. All of them beautiful, the most realistic, the most exclusive. And in drawers, when he opened them, smiling and already aware of something else, all the pure Indian and Chinese silk, and handworked lace, all the patterned and mist-sheer stockings, garter belts, waspies, buttoned gloves, that any woman of that turn of mind could have conjured. All the makeup, too, every lip-paint, blusher, mascara, shadow, tint, texture, contour, highlight… A Garden of Eden for any girl who liked these things.

Or any man who liked them, too.

It had been a revelation, the first time. The rich girl in Idaho who, in her long white house, had dressed them up together, saying, when she had finished painting him, lacing him, putting on his costume, “Well, just look at you.” “I’m way too tall,” Wolf had commented, staring at himself, or rather at this new herself in the mirror. “Sugar, I just don’t think,” said the rich girl, “that anyone’d mind that. The hell of it is, you’re prettier than me.”

Not since then. Not quite. Though now and then… just flirting with a pair of panties, hose, softly silicone-padded bra.

He liked women. The look and feel of them. He liked making love to them. He liked what they wore, their perfumes, and the unguents they stroked on to their faces and over the curves of their breasts. And the stockings they drew up their legs, and the lisping of the silky stuff over their bodies. Once or twice, just… once or twice. He dreamed of it. She, and he, also a she.

Apparently, it was just this very thing that turned Rose on. A slim, handsome man, disguised—as a woman.

He was erect again. He was thinking of Rose now. Rose all freely moving and warm and white and spilling over in her red dress, and the stocking-tops, and the garter, and he, Wolf, perhaps in that one, there, the black number. Because it was a fact, the garments that fitted Ryder’s big firm body, would fit him just as neatly.

He’d need that bathroom with its razor for guests and its creams and glosses. He’d need some more champagne, too. And it was already eleven. He would have to hurry.

But then, the actor is expert at changing costume fast, and everything else that goes with it.

Rose let herself into Ryder’s apartment at a quarter past midnight. The lights were low, and the softest music was playing. As she opened the two glass doors into the vast sitting room, Rose called quietly, “Ryder? It’s me, are you around?”

“I’m afraid she’s dead,” said a low, light, husky voice from the couch.

“What?” said Rose.

“Sorry. I mean she’s dead to the world. Herbal sleeping tablets.”

“Yeah,” said Rose. “And who are you?”

The tall, beautiful woman on the couch re-crossed, with an electric rasp, her sheerly-stockinged legs, revealing, as she did so, the long black tongue of a garter belt, under the black satin hem of her dress. Her hair was a mane of foaming black curls, just lit with a streak or two of silver. She was big, but slender, her stomach flat, her breasts, under the high-necked gown with its collar of black sequins, rather small. Her face was truly something, smooth as bone china, with a crimson mouth and somber velvet eyes.

“Who am I? You can call me—Nana.”