(Hermaphroditus and Salmacis)

“Now there is…a pool…Bethesda…whoever…stepped in…was made whole”
John 5:2-4

 

Coming out of The Ramble, across the lake, Tilton saw the bronze angel but did not yet know he was looking at “The Angel of the Waters.”

New to the city and his own body in this form, he wondered how he might get around the lake for a closer look at the immense statue in the center of Bethesda Fountain.

“Who is that extraordinary creature?” said the photographer looking through his lens across the lake at Tilton. “What a beauty!”

The photographer, who took fashion photographs that were collected as art, watched as Tilton picked his way through the woods, circled the boathouse and emerged by the rowboats. He did not want to lose sight. He was not certain if he was looking at a sylph-like young man or a very tall young woman, but the exquisite beauty was certain, and he knew beauty well.

He saw small breasts, he saw blondish hair to the shoulders, the curve of a waist, slim boy hips and features like those he photographed every day, crouching low, shooting way up. It was one of his fantasy women approaching– exceptionally tall with strong swimmer shoulders. With his attraction to the dark, the gloomy Berlinesque abnormal, he would transform any long pretty girl into a riding-crop wielding Amazon in fishnets and stilettos. Leather, chains, naked flesh, cyclone fences and satin, surgical corsets, monocles, large dogs– these were the things that sprang to his mind nudging up close to beauty.

He looked at the girl approaching, now he was sure it was a girl, seeing the eyes he envisioned rimmed with black, the lids greased, the hair gelled hard behind the ears. Then he was noting the throat, the front of the pants, the hands and feet.

Tilton saw the man with the cameras and the assistants looking at him so he turned his back and studied the angel and the four little cupids on lower basin of the fountain.

“Peace, Health, Temperance, Purity—that’s what they represent,” said the photographer sidling over in his espadrilles to Tilton. “I would like to photograph you.”

The assistants were circling around him, crowding him, handing the photographer his camera, then stepping back.

“I’m not ready yet,” said Tilton.

“Well of course not. We will do you up– everything.”

“No, you don’t understand. I have not quite become. I am in transition, not complete. I’m only half-way there.” Tilton felt this was the first time he had ever been so articulate about the process he was undergoing. For some reason he wanted the man to understand him, which the man immediately did.

“I am not quite a girl yet though I have always felt like a girl not the other.”

The photographer, who had just come from seeing the statues of the Pergamon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and lingered longest at one of the two statues of the god Hermaphroditus, could not believe his luck.

“I need money,” Tilton said.

“Of course we will pay you, my dear. Give her my card. Come with us a few blocks and we will show you something wonderful. We will show you yourself in marble.”

Tilton looked down at his jeans, ripped and dirty and his bad shoes and looked back at The Ramble and then up at the statue who was holding out a lily to him. She was winged to fly up and away.

“Let me tell you the story of this fountain. People think that because it was put up right after the Civil War it honors the dead. No, it celebrates bringing clean water to the city. We can help you have a clean start to what you will be and become.”

“I must become.”

A girl model was rushing towards them from the tunnel, followed by her team carrying makeup cases and bits of wardrobe. She was wearing a bathing suit that bared one entire breast. Tourists had their phones out now all around them.

“Sorry, we’re late.”

“Darling, I have another idea.”

“Who’s this?” the girl said.

“We are going to put you together and we are changing the location.”

“I’m Tilton. I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

The girl was looking him up and down with a professional eye. She did not dare challenge the photographer whom she had wanted to work with since she started in the business. It was an honor to be jealously guarded.

“She’s all like dirty, did you want that? I guess we’d look good together. Maybe.”

The photographer’s eye was never challenged. He never asked a second time for anyone to pose nude for him.

“I’m Susana.”

The stylist was handing her jeans and a black leather jacket to cover her for the walk through the park to the museum. The small procession of specialness set out, leaving the others behind in a pile of boots and black patent stilettos.

“You are very beautiful. I’ve always wanted to look just like you,” Tilton said.

“You are beautiful, too.”

“Yes, yes and Tilton is something special,” the photographer said. Others had woken up from some nightmare and seen briefly in the dark with such eyes as he had.

The two creatures walked together behind the photographer, sneaking looks at each other, unaware of the people who stepped aside for them and the runners who turned as they ran past.

It was a cool spring day, the apple and pear blossoms had already fallen and the dogwood were curling brown on the edges. Susana picked up Tilton’s large hand for balance on the slippery blossoms and held onto it as they left the park at 72^nd street and turned left onto the cobblestones.

“Where are you from?” Tilton asked.

“Cadmus Springs in Florida. It’s like a little town.”

“I’m from West Virginia, up in the hills where they strip mine.”

“’So dreadful, so desirable, so dear,’” murmured the photographer to himself quoting Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus.” It had long been an unfulfilled obsession of his to photograph a hermaphrodite nude and he wondered if Tilton was that or merely a transsexual. He already knew three or four transsexual models, none of whom interested him.

“Pardon?” they said together and laughed.

“I didn’t know you would be here,” said the girl.

“Neither did I. I just met him,” he gestured ahead to the stolid form of the photographer.

It was on this walk with the photographer pushing quickly forward to the statue he had to see again that Susana and Tilton began to merge. It began with frequent glances, then little shoves and punches at each other as they became increasingly giddy, their eyes drawn to each other. Her suspicion vanished and both became very young on a day prickled with cool sunlight filtered through the old trees.

Those who looked out at them from their limestone caves across Fifth Avenue knew they were seeing a pair of otherworld children and were taken in by the sight.

Already, the two were exchanging notes on the dreadful places they had come from to get here on the flattened cobblestones trailing after the famous man. It was the inevitable eternal flirtation of like for like that leaves all, even the photographer who saw them and placed them together, as The Other.

Neither Susana nor Tilton had ever been inside the Metropolitan Museum. The photographer hesitated at the side entrance for groups and then decided to bring them up the main steps, glad he had left his cameras with the assistants as they went past the guards.

Like children, Tilton and Susana were looking way up, wildly shooting their eyes around, suddenly grown somber. They stood quietly in line for their admission for which the photographer, whose work was in the museum’s permanent collection, paid full price.

“Tilton, you must see this,” Susana said in front of the gold myrtle wreath, of a size to crown them and very detailed. Each of them imagined wearing the wreath as did the photographer whose scenarios were by this time developing in all sorts of directions. He had found the perfect classical pair. Tilton was the fragmented Alexander the Great, the girl was the thirteen foot marble Athena.

The Hellenistic statues with their fat marble flesh seemed heavy to the pair who had spent many hours studying themselves and their friends. Making comparisons was what they did. That is why they had accepted each other so quickly though now the photographer saw that Susana was the more taken of the two. Tilton’s interest had already waned. As they walked through the galleries, he was drawn away from her outward to all he saw. She kept looking back and pulling at Tilton’s hand which was no longer there.

A small clot of people gathered at the figure of a sleeping nude stretched out on its marble bed.

“Here we are, come see,” said the photographer.

A father and his son were right in front of them.

“Surprise!” said the father circling round the statue. The boy looked embarrassed at the sight of the small erect penis on what he had presumed to be a naked woman.

Tilton went round the statue quickly, his hand raised to his mouth, then pulling back. Then he was turning and running out through the galleries to where he had come in. The photographer and Susana ran after him.

“You hurt him! He didn’t understand cause he’s not where he wants to be yet. He’s still like that freak back there.” She was gasping.

“We must find him. I have no contact information at all. We need him. Run catch her! Bring her back.”

Tilton was lost now, running hard, looking back for the others with tears whipping down and one sneaker flapping open. Tilton was looking for any exit, any stairs down and came to the great marble stairs and thought of flinging himself down. Then he was out, bursting through the people climbing up. He knew he could find his way back through the park to Bethesda fountain where he had left his backpack with the others as he had been told to do.

Tilton did not like the photographer. He hated Susana who had laughed at the statue even as she clutched at him. People were always pulling at him and asking questions he never could answer in the way he had told the photographer.

Help me, Jesus. Get me there, get me back to the fountain, to my room at the Y, my refuge. Even with the broken shoe, Tilton was swift and sure of his direction.

The museum had overwhelmed him and that terrible statue had mocked him. All of it, those dead old things, those old broken gods, those cracked, dirty incomplete things amidst all those ugly people.

He ran through the crowds, slipping on the blossoms that dotted the lawns and paths, looking like some half torn creature hunted by hounds, the sweat turning his hair to coppery curls and ringlets, ropey tendrils like those hard marble tresses on the statues.

How awful it was to be two and feel as one.

The team was waiting for him at the fountain. Tilton said nothing but took off his shoes and, though it was strictly forbidden, stood up in the waters of the fountain and cooled himself.

Then Susana was there, jumping into the fountain after him and holding him close as everyone took pictures, even the photographer’s crew. He knew she would not let go until the photographer appeared.

He pulled her off nonetheless and snatched at his backpack. Barefoot, he ran down to the rowboats and, with the last of his money thrown to the attendant, climbed in. He felt safe on the dirty city waters among the others heavy in their boats.

They were all there now in a line on the shore, the photographer crouching and signaling as was Susana waving him back.

He rowed across the lake to The Ramble and got out on the shore, letting the boat drift away as he walked quickly into the trees.

“My mistake,” said the photographer then, looking round to see what remained of Susana’s makeup and the natural light of the day.

(Hermaphroditus was the son of the Hermes and Aphrodite. The river nymph Salmacis, in love, seized him while he was bathing and merged herself with him. The waters were ever dangerous to those who bathed there.)

 

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