will not believe your eyes. You are very beautiful, Signore, you are that one I dream of when I ply my needle.”
Tonio gave a soft dry laugh.
He rose, unwinding his height before her, smiling down on her heavily wrinkled little brown face. Her eyes were like two small kernels in the flesh, kernels you’ve just taken out of your mouth so that they are still glistening and wet.
She took the frock coat from him and laid it almost lovingly aside, her hand stroking the fabric as though hinting of its value to one who would buy it. But she had saved her most adoring gesture for the clothes she would help him put on.
“The breeches, too, Signore. It is important.” She gestured, sensing his resistance. “You must think of me as your mamma in these matters. You see, to carry yourself as a woman, you must feel like a woman underneath it all.”
“Not a centaur, Signora?” he asked under his breath. “Ready at any moment to trample my ruffles underfoot and wreak havoc on the tender virgins of the front row?” He was trembling.
She laughed. “You have a clever tongue, Signore,” she said, taking his stockings and his slippers. He took a long slow breath, his eyes half closing.
And then he stood still, feeling his nakedness as if the air were cool when it was not. And when she drew near, she touched him as if he were as fine as the fabric, drawing the hooped petticoat with its wide paniers around him, and tying the ribbons in the back. He let it rock to and fro as she dropped the underskirts over it. Then came the voluminous violet silk, full of tiny pink flowers. Perfect, perfect. And then the full lace blouse, which she deftly buttoned down the front.
Now she slowed in her gestures; she seemed to sense this padded bodice, this armor, was a crucial step. It would fit over his shoulders, its darker violet sleeves coming down just to that spill of ruffle. And then she held it up, letting him pass his arms through it, and closing it first at the waist.
“Ah, but you are the answer to my prayers,” she said as she fastened the hook. For the first time he felt the whalebone stays sewn into it, he felt it confine him, and yet it was cool and smooth against his skin, and as she brought it tighter and tighter up to his chest, he felt the oddest sensation, almost of pleasure, as if this thing were supporting him, as if he were being propped by it as well as shaped by it.
Her little hands hovered for a moment on the bare skin of his throat, the smooth flesh descending to the low ruffle that went straight across his chest. And then she said, “Allow me, Signore,” in the most confidential whisper, and slipping these rough warm hands inside the fabric she had just tightened, she shaped the flesh there, lifting it, it seemed, until looking down he saw there the slightest flair, and the tight cleft of a woman’s breast.
A bitter water came up in his mouth. He did not look in the mirror. He was standing so still he might have been entranced, his eyes staring dully to one side, as she moved the full violet skirts all around, and smoothed the bodice, before bidding him to sit down. He stared at his hands.
“Your face needs no paint, Signore,” she said. “Ah, but there are women who would murder you for these eyelashes, and this hair, ah, this hair.” Yet she brushed it back, flattened it, and then he felt her lower the weight of the wig onto his head. It was not so very large, all of it snowy white and studded with tiny pearls, gathered at the nape of the neck from which soft curls hung down that he could feel against his naked back. She was clasping his neck just beneath the hair, and now she turned him so that his face nearly touched her own ample breasts.
“Just a little paint, Signore, black magic”—she grimaced—“to the eyes.”
“I can do that,” he whispered, trying to take her brush.
“Signore, you punish me, I want to do it,” she said and then laughed herself, a hoarse sexless laugh from old age. “No, don’t look in the mirror,” she said with her hands up as if he would try to run away. She bent down and touched his eyes with a sureness he