She seldom saw Max smoke hashish. Instead she watched in fascination as he applied his makeup. He made a paste from cold cream and talcum powder and used this to cover the left side of his face; then carefully mixed cigarette ash, pulverized charcoal, and dried ink to make kohl and mascara, which he applied with tiny brushes and a blunt pencil to his left eye.

“Why don’t you just buy ladies’ stuff?” she wondered aloud.

Max laughed. “What do you think they’d say to me in Marshall Field’s, I went in and asked for some face paint and rouge?”

“The actors at Essanay use makeup. Charlie Chaplin uses makeup. And Wallace Beery.”

“Do I look like Charlie Chaplin?”

After he’d painted his cheeks and lips, he dabbed the edge of one eyelid with adhesive, then affixed a fringe of false lashes made of curled black paper. Last of all, he put on a wig of blond curls. It was only half a wig, like his face was only half a woman’s. The right side had Max’s own bristly stubble on his chin and neck, a web of broken capillaries across his cheek. Blond hair slicked back so you could see where the orange dye had seeped into his scalp. Outside his tent, a banner depicted an idealized version of the real thing: the She-Male’s face split down the middle and body divided lengthwise—natty black suit and shiny shoes, yellow shirtwaist and hobble skirt, the hem hiked up to display a trim ankle.

“Gimme a match,” Max ordered. He tapped a cigarette from a box of Helmars, its logo depicting an Egyptian pharaoh. Pin lit the cigarette for him, and he turned away, leaving her to stare at her own face in the mirror, a luxury she didn’t have in her own shack. Snub nose and pointed chin, dirt smudged across one cheek, uptilted soot-brown eyes, a chipped front tooth where she’d gotten into a fight. A scrawny boy’s face, you’d never think otherwise.

“Look sharp.” Without turning, Max tossed her a Helmar cigarette box, barely giving her time to catch it before he threw her a nickel. She snatched it from the air and he laughed. “Nice catch, kid.”

She grinned at the compliment, pocketed the nickel, and headed out on her run.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

THE TWO OF them always slept in the same bed, in the back room of a long, narrow apartment where you could hear people coming and going all day and all night, though they were forbidden to enter the room where the children lived. He was afraid of the dark and clung to her the way he’d seen grown-ups do in the other rooms; like the pictures he saw years later of people hanging on to the sides of lifeboats and bobbing planks as the Titanic sank behind them.