Russ Manning was pleased with his work in progress, a triptych, or three-paneled painting, Work In Progress: Transsexual Transformation

Depicting Sheila's sexual conversion, the first panel showed Sheila as a man; the middle panel showed Sheila as a transsexual. Once she had completed her sex-reassignment surgery, the panel on the right would show her as a woman--or, rather, as a transwoman. At the moment, Sheila was as much a work in progress as his triptych, but his painting, once completed, would be an eternal record and testament to her transformation, always and forever a Work In Progress.

Or, at least, so he'd thought--until Sheila had given him the bad news, the terrible news, that she'd decided not to undergo the sex-change surgery that would complete her transformation from man to woman. She had decided to retain her male genitals, to be always and forever a pre-operative transsexual, a shemale. In effect, her decision would ruin his masterpiece. The triptych would remain unfinished. The crowning achievement of his career as an artist would be destroyed.

At first, he'd tried to persuade her to go through with the operation.

"Why would you come so far, only to deny yourself the culmination of all that you have so long craved?" he'd asked her.

Sheila had averted her eyes from his gaze. "I can't explain it," she'd said.

In his desperation, he'd been cruel. "Maybe you never wanted to be a woman, after all."

"You care more about your damned painting than you do about me," she charged, tears, warm and stinging, welling in her sapphire eyes.

He'd known that desire had had nothing to do with Sheila's need to become outwardly what she'd been inwardly all her life. It was need, a compulsion, that drove her to become what she was intended, by God or nature or both, to be.

Sheila had no reply for Russ' spiteful comment. She herself did not understand completely why she'd chosen, at the endpoint of her transformation, to retain her cock and balls. All her life, she'd wanted nothing more than to be rid of them forever. In the end, however, she'd found herself unable to part with them. Many times, she'd tried, in her own mind, to account for her ambiguous feelings about her male genitals. The best she'd been able to do was to say, "Being a shemale is the best of both worlds."

Meanwhile, there was Russ' masterpiece, Work In Progress that would, it seemed, remain forever unfinished.

The left panel, Man, showed Sheila as Stephen. Tall and slender, with fair skin and curly blond hair, there was something fine and delicate about his bone structure. He had only the faint suggestion of the bony ridge above his eyes that is typical of the male sex; his cheekbones were high; and his chin, more pointed than square, was fine and graceful. His eyes were large and luminous, with thick lashes, his nose small, and his lips full and sensuous. He had almost no visible larynx. Although his buttocks didn't show in the painting, since Russ had rendered a full frontal view of his model, the viewer couldn't see the sleekness of the full, firm-soft orbs that were as sexually ambiguous as his face, abdomen, arms, legs, hands, and feet. Because of the natural femininity of his features, Stephen looked like a man mostly because his hair was short and a substantial, if flaccid, penis hung, circumcised and manly, before a pair of decidedly masculine balls. It was easy to imagine him as a woman or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to see the woman within him--

--the woman who peered down upon the viewer from the triptych's central panel, Transwoman. The creature in the middle panel was splendidly beautiful. All that was masculine (which was very little) of the man shown in the previous panel had been expunged except for his genitals. In addition, some features that were absent in the male form were present in the transsexual version of him--or her. The short curly hair was not merely curly any longer; it was a shoulder-length cascade of fire and light which included great rings of curls that framed the lovely face. Although paint had added the fine touches to the figure's facial features, the pigments had been applied to simulate a flawless application of the cosmetics that enhanced a woman's natural beauty. The eyes, which were already rather feminine, even in the Man portrait, were highlighted with "eye shadow," "eyeliner," and "mascara," all painted with a deft touch of the brush. "Blush" had brightened the figure's cheeks, and a soft pink had added a lustrous, wet look to the pouting lips. "Foundation makeup" had smoothed away the few wrinkles that would otherwise have appeared. Russ had painted the face as expertly as a Hollywood makeup artist paints the beautiful countenances of actresses and models, using hues and tints to suggest, accentuate, mute, shade, and redirect the eye, creating a mask of beauty to overlay the Transsexual figure's own natural charms. He'd applied the same superb talent in delineating her breasts, highlighting their fullness, their roundness, their firm-soft, silky texture. Their natural creams, pinks, and golden hues, as well as a variety of muted shades and tints unperceived by many who had not the artist's eye, were enhanced and heightened by Russ' artistic genius. The nipples were tinted such a soft pink that they resembled the flesh of delicate roses rather than a woman's skin. Were one to touch the painted surface--not that one would think of actually doing so, any more than he or she might stroke the canvas of a Rubens or a Rembrandt--he or she would expect to feel the swelling of the puffy areolas and, in fact, so convincing was its depiction, that the admirer might suppose that, in fact, he or she actually had felt the distension of the silky smooth halos of flesh. The abdomen was rendered as faithfully, so that one might almost feel the sleek flesh, the hollow of the concave belly, and the slight rise before the downy pubic hair. The legs were long, sleek, and shapely. The only incongruities of the beautiful figure's form were all the more startling because of her otherwise absolute femininity. After the gorgeous woman's face, the perfect breasts, the narrow waist, and the downy pubic hair, the cock and balls were shockingly out of place. Until the viewer's eye had traveled to the subject's groin, never would he or she have supposed the creature portrayed in such exquisite glory to have been anything but what she seemed--a woman of surpassing loveliness. Although the cock, circumcised and marble-smooth, if flaccid, and hanging improbably from her lower belly, before a loose pouch filled with testicles, was undeniably beautiful, it, like the testes, seemed to be a jewel or an ornament more than an organ of the male sex, although, undoubtedly, they were such genitals. The apparent impossibility of such a beautifully feminine figure's sporting such manly equipment enhanced, rather than ruined, the eroticism of the work. The viewer found that his or her gaze returned again and again to the cock and balls, as to the face and breasts, of this otherwise feminine creature.

The panel on the right was an as-yet-bare canvas, which Russ had intended to call Woman. Together, the three panels, viewed from left to right, had been intended to show the complete transformation of a transsexual, from man to transwoman, to woman, but, now, Russ' masterpiece had been ruined by Sheila's last-minute decision to retain her male genitals.

Weeks of work, spent creating and revising his paintings to make them not only excellent but perfect, were wasted, thanks to Sheila's damnable indecisiveness. For the first time, Russ understood how truly frustrating, even maddening, Hamlet's irresolution must have been to his father's ghost and to the others whose lives had been affected by his mad variableness. Because of Hamlet's inability to decide and his refusal to act, by the end of the tragedy, not only his father, but his uncle, his mother, his beloved Ophelia, her father, her brother, and he himself also were dead. No one would die because of Sheila's change of mind (or heart), unless Russ thought, he killed her himself, but one of the world's great erotic paintings was irremediably lost, and this loss was worse than the deaths of a million men and women of flesh and blood, for art was eternal and flesh was but temporal. Sheila's decision not to go through with her sex-reassignment surgery had cost the world the erotic equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Roger van der Weyden's God of Pity or Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, or any other such inspired three-paneled painting. In refusing to undergo her total transformation, Sheila had sinned not only against herself, but she had sinned, also, against Russ, and, more importantly, against art itself.

For such an offense, Russ told himself, he should never forgive the bitch. He should regard her as his worst enemy and as a person totally beyond redemption. He should do so, but he could not. She was too beautiful. When she looked at him, spoke to him, or touched him, his heart would melt. He could not dismiss her from his presence; he could not resist her soft murmurings, her entreaties, her caresses, her kisses, her more profound intimacies. Try as he may to deny or reject her, he succumbed to her charms, to her womanly ways, although, he told her, he had not forgiven, and could never forgive, her, any more than he could ever understand her refusal to be made complete.

"I think I can explain why I want to keep my cock and balls," she told him, finally, after they'd made love evening on his bedroom balcony.

She had sucked his cock, with as great fervor and devotion as ever she had shown in times past, and he'd ejaculated his seed into her face. The thick, viscid, white semen clung to the bridge of her nose, looped across her cheek, drooled from her lips, and dripped from her chin. Beads, like melted pearls, adorned her hair and eyelashes. She did not wipe it off. She would never insult Russ that way. Instead, as always, she would wear his semen with pride, letting it dry into brittle flakes.

He lay beside her, his cock smeared with the remnants of sperm that had not spurted into her face, and studied her slick, glistening features. He liked the look of his fecundating fluid in her hair and eyes and on her nose, cheeks, chin, and lips. It marked her as a slut, he thought, and as his, for the semen was his seed and only a slut would let such a fluid splatter her face and lips and teeth and tongue.

"Why" he asked, abruptly but without the harshness with which he'd meant to invest the word.

Haltingly, with many pauses, she explained. She didn't want to part with her penis and testicles, she said, because she didn't want to become a woman, not completely and for all time, any more than she wanted to remain entirely and forever a man. As a transsexual in transition, as a shemale, she was both male and female. At the same time, however, she was, paradoxically, neither. She seemed to transcend the arbitrary categories of sex and gender. By being neither male nor female but also both, at the same time, she seemed to be more, not less, of a man and more, not less, of a woman.

Sheila's explanation astonished Russ. It was profound. Although she was by no means a stupid person, the depth of her insight rocked the artist. It was a revelation to him that, as an artist, he should have seen himself. Her understanding not only amazed him, but is also inspired him. Throwing back the blankets that covered him, he bounded from the bed, startling his lover, and sprinted, naked, from his bedroom, into his studio, where the triptych stood, its right panel not only unfinished but also unbound. Now that Sheila's declaration had stimulated his creative energy, he couldn't wait to begin--and to complete--the third panel of his threefold painting.

So rapt was he with the idea that had seized him as to how to finish the triptych that Russ had not heard Sheila's barefoot approach. He was unaware of her presence until he heard her speak, concern in her whispered query: "Is everything all right?"

Russ seized her in his arms, kissing her. His lips ground against her own, his teeth pressing hard against hers. "Everything is magnificent!" he exclaimed, when he'd released her. "You are magnificent!"

"What did I do?" she asked, befuddled.

"I cannot talk now," he replied. "I have work to do!"

Russ remained in his studio for days, Sheila bringing him food and drink, most of which remained unconsumed. He left the studio only to answer the calls of nature. Sheila worried about his health. After a week, she became concerned about his mental stability. His project obsessed him. Never had she seen him so passionate about anything, including her.

She telephoned a friend, Arnold James, who was also an artist, a musician, confessing her anxieties to him.

"He is an artist," Arnold advised her. "Let him create."

Sheila sought a second opinion, this time from an actor, James Laudell.

"All true artists are obsessed," James told her. "Russ is an artist; therefore, Russ is obsessed."

Although James' logic seemed fallacious to her and Arnold's advice seemed dubious, Sheila decided to bide her time another day or two before insisting that Russ take a break from his work. Maybe, she thought, she could seduce him, keeping him in bed for a day. At sex, equipped as she was with breasts and womanly buttocks as well as a cock and pair of balls, hands, and a mouth, she could entertain him for hours. Maybe, after she'd sucked his cock and he'd fucked her ass, he'd forget about his masterpiece long enough to get a few hours of sleep.

When she went to his studio, Russ was putting the finishing touches on his third painting.

Sheila gasped, astounded at the work.

Hearing her, Russ turned, smiling. "What do you think, my love?"

"It's beautiful!"

Russ chuckled. "Of course, it's beautiful," he agreed. "How could it be anything else, based as it is upon you?"

The third painting in the triptych, Woman, showed Sheila, still a shemale, ascending from the ribcage of her male body, which lie sleeping. The male version of Sheila, Stephen, had been rendered in muted tones, almost as if he were a corpse or a marble statue of one, but the female--or, rather, the shemale--was golden-hued and so perfectly executed that the flawless figure seemed to be an angel or a goddess rather than a mere mortal being. The azure sky into which the transsexual rose, streaming with brilliant sunlight, suggested an apotheosis. The painting combined the image of a strange birth, similar to Eve's arising from the sleeping form of Adam, with that of a goddess' ascension, or the deification of a woman--or of a man-woman, a hermaphrodite.

"It's fantastic," Sheila said.

Russ kissed her.

Their lips parted, their tongues slipped inside one another's mouths, and their kiss became deep and passionate.

"I was worried about you," Sheila confessed, after they ended their lip lock.

"Worried? About me?"

"Your health. You weren't eating or sleeping. You were hardly breathing." She gave him an intense, penetrating look. "You weren't even fucking!"

Taking her hand in his, he led her from the studio, down the hall, and into his bedroom.

They removed their clothes, climbed into bed, and made wild, passionate love. It seemed to Sheila that, at the moment of her climax, semen spurting from her erect cock, she left her body and ascended into the heavens far beyond the confines of earth, transcending the maleness and the femaleness of her hermaphroditic body and the restrictive, socially dictated roles of masculinity and femininity. It seemed to her that she'd become the goddess that her beloved artist had depicted in the triptych that showed the transformation of a transsexual to a state beyond the flesh. Only the semen spewing from her prick--and the warm, thick seed that gushed from Russ' cock, buried within the depths of her rectum--kept her bound to her body and to the earth, keeping her in the flesh as she entered the realm of the spirit, a new Eve, not merely born, but reborn, of man.

She was no longer a work in progress; like Russ' triptych, she was complete.

She was a masterpiece.