Acting Badly. Michael Scofield

“Don’t you have a business breakfast?”

      “I do—renegade CPA, newborn investment advisor to the rich. First I’m meeting Alexis to see what figures she’s come up with. Then Manny Barnes drops by to pick up a sign for tomorrow’s march. Helen? Let’s remember our anniversary early. Where’d you put those good-old-days clothes?”

      “Give me a moment.” She hoisted herself away from him, throwing her feet to the Navajo rug and pressing her eyelids. She rubbed fingertips across the washboard her forehead had become. “I want to go back full time, Charles. I don’t mean New York City, I mean to Montpelier. Us four. Not just summers. Peonies in June and mosquitoes in July, leaves in October and for Christmas a yard full of carrot-nosed snowmen. I’ve tried to make this palace here home. But we live thirty-five miles from five hundred drums of nuclear waste. We came four years ago to care for your mother and now she’s dead. My own parents are aging back in Hanover. I’d like to live less than two thousand miles away.”

      “It’s a bad time for good ideas, Helen. My five stock-and-bond clients’ portfolios fell eight percent the quarter ending in December; agreed, I’m just learning. But two major tax clients have left. They don’t know what to make of my antiwar goings-on.”

      His eyes swept the vast bedroom, the Kurdistan rugs soaking up heat from the neoprene loops embedded in the concrete slab, the black spirals and sawtooths of a Dan Namingha acrylic that dominated the east wall, the trumpet-vine pot fountaining ricegrass which Helen had fired in the garage last month. In the corner sat the sofa of pleated calfskin they never used. Streaked and smudged because she couldn’t find a workman with a ladder long enough for the slope outside, a picture window over the sofa showed the opera house and the piñon-green hills overlooking I-25.

      “Too much violence in Santa Fe, Charles. That stabbing at Desert Prep last month felt like a final blow for me.”

      “It’s no longer the town I grew up in, true. I’m also weary of this double life—” triple? he wondered, recalling how leafing though Alexis’s gay-and-lesbian newsweekly yesterday triggered a surprise erection. “Let’s talk later. Where are those new dress-ups you bought?”

      “With the rest, of course.”

      Flinging back the comforter, he squinted against the seven-thirty sun sparkling off the screen of his laptop on the credenza. Embedded heat warmed his bare feet as he padded to the south wall across the long crack—jagged as Namingha’s painted black lightning—that had separated the concrete slab.

      The chest’s scent of cedar greeted him. He peeled off his pajama top and tossed it onto the ottoman, then bent toward the paper-doll-like kachinas chiseled in the arched lid. He fumbled with the tumblers until he could pull the lock apart.

      Bleach prickled his nose as he hoisted the lid and hauled out purchases from the store Helen had found last Saturday, smoothing back the preteen extra-large frock and boy’s knickers he’d previously bought on-line that concealed more retro clothing.

      “Catch.” Over his shoulder he tossed a sheer, long-sleeved beige blouse with dahlia ruffles, a blue denim miniskirt, and a floppy hat whose brim flamed nasturtiums—all from the early 1980s. He rose and turned to Helen, who wasn’t there.

      “Anybody home?” he called, scratching the black stubble he’d decided to let grow—sideburns, no mustache, clipped horseshoe beard starting from the corners of his lips—better to ally himself with the City Different’s peace activists.

      Helen advanced from the bathroom in lime-green slippers and white terrycloth robe.

      She glanced at his dangling penis. “You think this is going to work?”

      “I do.” But he wished he’d tweezed out the hairs on the shaft first; squirming at the sting often jump-started an erection. He squeezed his right eye tight—pain from last night’s two hours in the den transferring figures from clients’ tax workbooks into his laptop was assaulting his temple.

      Moving to the bed, Helen plopped the felt hat onto her brown spikes of hair while he pushed his fists through the lawn-daisied sleeves of the man’s shirt.

      She had draped her robe over the hamper and was trying to snap the skirt tight when, right leg thrust into mustard-colored slacks, Chuck exclaimed, “No!”

      “No?”

      His penis swelled. “You wear the boy’s. I’ll wear the girl’s.” Though pain clawed its way down into his tongue, imaging the change unleashed a grin.

      “What are you saying?”

      “No one can see us—the kids’ llamas, maybe. Get me a bra. I’ll go find breasts.” Yanking the pant leg free by its belled bottom and stripping off the shirt, he trotted across the room through the door along the heated, yard-square flagstones, down the hall past his den and Mark and Melodie’s rooms and then into the kitchen, erection waving like a bowsprit.

      From the cutting-board island came the odor of mangoes ripening in a yellow bowl Helen had fired in December. Wait; yesterday she said she found beefsteak tomatoes at Whole Foods for hamburgers tonight and salsa later.

      He approached the refrigerator that dominated the maple-clad wall. A thousand dollars misspent to incise on it tiled macaws and halved papayas. Each tile bulged at a different slant; two looked about to tumble down. Hauling the door open, he spotted the tomatoes in their see-through bag. He reached in and rolled out two. What the hell was he about to do?

      By the time he’d returned to the bedroom, the blood slamming his right eye had retreated like the blood from his penis—though when he saw Helen, it rose again. She sat at the bottom of the comforter, straight-arming the mattress to brace herself, a white lace bra slung over one knee. A small-billed cap slanted across her forehead. Her breasts plumped the buttoned green polyester shirt; the bells of her slacks pooled against the rug. She’d left the snap undone.

      “Look,” he smiled.

      “Charles, those were for dinner. Do you really enjoy seeing me like this?”

      “It’s strange, but I do.”

      Advancing, goose bumps icing the back of his neck, he pushed the tomatoes against the black hairs on his nipples and turned. “See if they fit.” Facing her, he waited for her fingers to snake around and press the cotton against the red fruit. The stub end of one bit his flesh. Their chill made him flinch, but what had become a full erection took charge. He stroked it while his left hand squeezed his testicles. “Hook me up.”

      Her fingers pulled the tomatoes tight; the catch clicked behind him.

      He threw on the blouse and stepped into the miniskirt.

      “How do I look?” From behind her he snatched the felt hat with its appliquéd nasturtiums, set it on his head, and adjusted its slant. “You’re sexy. Why are you staring like you just swallowed a lizard?”

      “I’ve . . .” She clutched her throat where it wrinkled, just under her chin. “I’ve never seen you with an erection like that.”

      He grinned, milking the shaft. A pearl of lubricant perched atop the glans. “How do you want me to go in?”

      “I don’t think I do.” She faced him in the wool cap with a black button popping from its top while her left hand kept the men’s slacks from collapsing. Her tongue circled her chapped lips. “I think what I want is to get out of these clothes and make us some breakfast. Pancakes with blueberries, I think. Are you hungry, Charles?”

      “I am!” He lunged for her, knocking her cap sidewise, his own floppy hat sailing into her face as she pitched backward and he toppled onto her, smashing the tomatoes. Seeds and juice squished through the bra’s lace to stain his blouse and squirted red rivulets across the comforter’s jack-in-the-pulpits. Their hearts pummeled each other while the teeth along her undone zipper rasped the skin of his erection.

      She batted the hat from her face. Her breath seared his neck, making the stubble prickle. “Get off me,” she choked.

      Drenched