For as long as she could remember, her mother had told her in no uncertain terms that her birthday belonged to Salerno. It had been promised to him on the very day Jordan had entered the world as a babe, in exchange for his ongoing silence on an indelicate family matter only she, her mother, and he were privy to. Were this secret to get out, it would destroy all three of their carefully constructed lives in an instant.
“Bah, the creator of those other sketches was an incompetent,” said the artist, breaking into her thoughts. She turned to find him admiring his own work. “I apprenticed under a master before the French came. I enjoyed the patronage of the finest families in Venice and beyond.”
“So you said,” Jordan noted.
He clucked morosely and shook his head. “But Venice is poor these days. Patrician families are selling art, not commissioning it. I take such work as I can find. When Signore Salerno offered to hire me—”
His words drifted off as the sound of distant voices reached them. Both their heads swiveled toward the curtain, trying to hear beyond it to the seating area of the small theater.
The voices and accompanying footsteps grew louder.
Jordan’s eyes dilated. “They’re coming,” she whispered.
“Fretta! Affrettarsi! Up on the table,” Mondroli urged, fluttering both hands in distress. “I have one last sketch to complete.”
Ignoring him for the moment, Jordan went to the velvet curtains that separated the small stage where she and the artist were hidden from the rest of the dimly lit theater. She stroked a finger down the central slit where the two drapes met when closed as they were now. One of her dark eyes peered out.
As she watched, Salerno strode into the theater, looking important and successful in his white surgeon’s coat. It was an affectation. There would be no surgery today, only discussion. “A medical investigation” was the wording he had used on the notices he had distributed in order to advertise today’s event to barber-surgeons, hospitals, and other such establishments. The leaflets were effective, drawing learned men of science and medicine to see her, like flies to a carcass.
His coattails fluttered as he strutted down the corridor dividing the theater seats. His hair had thinned since she’d seen him last year. The dark shank of it that remained was slicked back from his head like oily feathers.
A V-shaped flock of medical men followed in his wake as if they were a formation of geese that had begun migrating now that September had come.
Salerno’s sharp gaze cut to the curtain as though sensing she watched. His small eyes were cold black pits, void of empathy.
Jordan’s head snapped back like a turtle’s and she twitched the drape shut.
“Per favore—on the table!” the artist urged.
Carefully, she folded the edges of the curtains one atop the other as though to seal Salerno out of her life. If only it were that easy.
With a sigh, she turned back to Mondroli. “How do you want me this time?”
“On your back! On the table, please!” He spread the square of satin he’d taken from the chair over the top of an elongated table. “Signore Salerno requested a series in all the same positions as in these other portraits of you. The only one I have not yet completed is…”
He thumbed through a stack of likenesses done of her last year, plucked one out, and set it upon another easel nearby. “This one.”
The portrait was only a partial view, she saw. Good. That meant it wouldn’t matter if she put her shirt back on. She looked around for it and then remembered Salerno had removed her clothing when he’d left her with Mondroli earlier that morning.
A cloak hanging on the peg in the corner caught her eye. Detouring on her way to the table, she snatched it up and draped it over her shoulders. It was rich and fine. No holes or other defects marred its velvet or its satin lining. It was Salerno’s.
Jordan turned her back to the table and sat, pulling herself up on it. Swiveling lengthwise, she lay on her back and snuggled the cloak around her shoulders and breasts. They wouldn’t be depicted in this particular sketch.
The legs of the artist’s chair scraped as he moved closer. She bent her knees high and wide, exactly as she’d been posed in the portrait from last year. Mondroli positioned himself like a midwife, his sketchpad resting on the table just between her ankles.
“Si, that’s it.” He flicked a glance at the other portrait. “And spread your, um—”
“Labia majora and minora,” Jordan supplied, reaching between her legs. Over the years, she’d learned all the medical terms for her body parts from Salerno and those he brought to examine her.
Mondroli was already sketching her outline. Once he filled it in, his final drawing would be a close-up of her genitalia. He’d cropped her body so the resulting shape of her belly, nether regions, and lifted thighs formed a sort of M on his page.
Forking two fingers, she unfurled the ruffles of her labia. They were plump and full. Unusually full. In fact, whenever she stood, they hung low on either side of her slit. Turning her head to the side, she glanced at the portrait from last year. It was an accurate, detailed depiction, and showed her labia had been far thinner and more feminine then. What had caused this strange thickening? It was worrisome.
Mondroli cleared his throat. Flicking two fingers up and down, he gestured toward her crotch. “Your, uh, thing. It’s in the way.”
With her hand, Jordan reached to adjust that part of her that had so complicated her life—the shaft of masculine flesh that had grown from her body where a clitoris would have been on any other woman. She lifted it to lie on her abdomen, pointing its tip toward her navel as it had been in the other portrait. Far too large an appendage for a woman, yet rather small for a man, the presence of this rod forever doomed her to hover in limbo somewhere between the sexes. Not quite a man; not quite a woman.
Yet at her birth, a choice in gender had been made for her. It had been decided by her mother and Salerno that this appendage would be deemed a phallus. And that she would live her life as a male. Of late she had begun to fear they had been more accurate in their choice than they knew.
Ever since her labia had first thickened some ten months ago, her phallus had begun troubling her. It sometimes awakened, thickened, pulsed, yearned in the pitch of night. When the dreams came to haunt her.
“Esteemed colleagues!” Beyond the curtains, Salerno’s voice boomed throughout the theater.
Jordan and the artist flinched simultaneously. She snatched her hand away from arranging her privates as though she’d been caught doing something naughty.
“Today you will witness a true marvel,” Salerno proclaimed. “One you’ll surely deem worthy of your travels here for this medical debate. For behind this very curtain, I have obtained for the purposes of medical study, a”—he paused here for dramatic effect—“person—of a nature you’ve likely not seen before, nor ever will again. Some may call such creatures monstrosities…”
He droned on, but Jordan tuned him out. She’d heard it all before. “If only he could locate conjoined twins and a goatboy as well, I do believe he’d have the makings of
