Free Trans-Sister Radio (2000) by Chris Bohjalian Page A

a wonderful spot. We went there on a Saturday, and Dana insisted upon preparing everything. The only contributions I was allowed were the plastic wineglasses he'd found in a kitchen cabinet, and the ratty cloth napkins I saved for exactly this sort of occasion.
    "So, you plan on bringing along a little wine?" I asked, half kidding, when I was turning the plastic goblets over to him that Saturday morning. I actually assumed we'd be drinking bottled water from them, and he simply wanted to add a little elegance to the event.
    "Nothing like getting a really good buzz at the edge of a cliff," he said, and he surprised me by pulling from the refrigerator a bottle of wine he'd hidden there the night before.
    We set off from my house in his car just after noon, and we were settled in at the ledge before one. Midway through lunch a young couple with a golden retriever wandered near our perch, but they hadn't brought a lunch and it was clear that they didn't plan on staying. And so we were, most of the time, completely alone.
    We had probably been at the cliff for close to an hour when he told me. I had never completely emptied my glass in the time we had been there, but I'd still consumed a good third of the bottle of wine: Dana had topped off the goblet almost every time I'd taken a sip.
    When he leaned over once more with the bottle in his hand, I blanketed the rim of my glass with my fingers and shook my head no.
    "You either think you're going to get lucky up here, or you have something on your mind," I said. I hadn't planned on adding the second part, it just came out. But he had been unusually quiet that morning, and I had the distinct sense that it was because there was something troubling him that he wanted to share.
    "Get lucky? No, I'd be afraid we'd roll off the cliff," he said.
    "And I don't think it would do my career any good if somebody saw us."
    "Probably not."
    "So you do have something to tell me, don't you?"
    "I do."
    "And it's the sort of bombshell that demands a little wine."
    "Oh, I wouldn't say that. Actually, I think it might be the sort that demands a lot of wine."
    I nodded, and a litany of possibilities crossed my mind. He was married. He had a child--no, he had children. He had teenage children, fathered when he himself was in high school or college.
    He'd been involved with a student, and there was going to be some legal problem.
    He had a criminal record.
    Perhaps--and Will's allegation in the car came back to me--he really was a transvestite, and he'd been caught in some public and embarrassing way.
    If that was the case, I wondered how much I would care. If I would care. No, I knew it would disturb me; I knew, on some level, it would frighten me.
    But would it lead me to push him away? I doubted it. I doubted it seriously. At that moment on that ledge, I doubted seriously that there was anything he could tell me that would lead me to break off our affair.
    And so I told him that. I realized how desperately I loved him, and I told him. I said that short of informing me that he wanted us to be merely friends--short of putting an end to our two-month romance--there was nothing he could possibly say that could upset me.
    "Maybe now is exactly the wrong time to tell you this," I heard myself murmuring, a quiver of need I wasn't sure I'd ever noticed before in my voice, "but I love you. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone except Carly."
    I had surprised myself with my frankness, and I found myself looking into the sun so I wouldn't have to look at him.
    And, ironically, it's clear now that I had surprised him, too. My sense is he would have led me to his confession with greater care if I hadn't told him how I was feeling. He would have told me a story about his childhood or his adolescence, he would have tried to describe for me the horrific longing for something he had thought for most of his life he couldn't have--but something he needed almost like air.
    Perhaps he would have gingerly worked his