Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  “Why me?”

  “You are gentle and beautiful.”

  “You saying I’m a fag, Ishtar? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Special men,” I answer softly to the lovely fur tuft of body hair at the small of his back, “special men have joy and gentleness. Special men who have allowed to live that which is the profoundly feminine in themselves, and still remain men, they are beautiful to me.” I wish to imagine the tuft is a tail. “I would get you in the bathtub.” The bathroom is at the end of the black hall.

  He laughs without assurance. He opens the door. We step inside.

  I close the door to the bathroom. I swing the furca and its blue light is cosmic in the darkness. What I can glimpse of Mack’s face is solemn and tense. There is great beauty in his body. Outwardly he is calm. I am not. My hand quivers as I drop three drops of Durkee’s Food Color, blue, edible, in plastic squeeze bottles, into the tub. The tub is streaked from its faucet with acid green and blue. I turn on the faucets. They fight me and then, with agony and coughing through the pipes, down into the bowels of the old hotel, the water rises, spitting, into the tub. I hang the furca, which spits also now, on the shower faucet above us. I remove the cotton balls from Mack’s ears. I tear from top to bottom his black shirt and the black shorts and I say:

  “I am now taking away from Mack darkness and stiffness caused by the matter of uncleanness on account of which matter of uncleanness he became dark and stiff; I am taking away sin.”

  He is somewhat amused. I believe he welcomes the delay.

  I hand him his mirror and my seam ripper in his hand and I beckon to him to crawl between my legs. He laughs and obeys. As he stands behind me I take away from him the mirror and the seam ripper and give him the #1 golf club sock and I say: “Behold, I have taken away from you womanhood and have given you back manhood; you have cast away the manners of woman and you have taken up the manners of man.” He allows me to kiss his feet, which have brought him to me.

  He is likely not convinced. It doesn’t matter.

  They need ritual. “When do we fuck, Ishtar? I mean, I have a lot going back there.” He waves to the bedroom of snake babies writhing without consciousness on the bare nest bed. He passes me the mirror and the seam ripper. I place the golf sock on the tub’s rim. The water is ready. Mack is grinning but he is docile in his actions. He allows me to kiss his knees, which have knelt already to me. He allows me to kiss his organ of generation, which shall bring him pleasure. He allows me to kiss his breast, formed in beauty and strength. He allows me, at last, to kiss his lips, which shall utter the sacred names.

  “Come on, Ishtar.”

  As I slip the tablecloth from my bare shoulders, I beckon to him to descend into the tub. He steps in and I clip the tendon of his heel with my seam ripper. The blood flows beautifully into the blue water. It is blue enough to be Aegean. I cut a small incision into my breast, which spurts blood. I too climb into the tub. He is in horror. He sits on the edge of the tub grasping the back of his heel. He takes the seam ripper from me, thinking that he has disarmed me. I watch in the waters the bloods mingling. I point above to the furca. It spits and heals our wounds. He shivers. “Heal,” I say loudly, and he bites my ankle. My cats bite my feet and reach often for my neck. I understand.

  “Why me?” he asks again in a strangled voice. I put my finger to my lips. I take his hand and pull him to me. We kiss, standing. We sit. His eyes are large and soft. He shuts them closed as I hold his head under water. When I release him he jerks up angrily, but I smile and, standing over him, pull him toward my feathers.

  I hear him exhale sharply, his breathing still uneven. He sinks himself into me and I, standing above him, blessing his head and his shoulders with fruitfulness and everlasting grace, am, at last, eaten. Around us the blue arcs leap from the sweating steel faucets to the toilet handle and along the shower curtain rack. I feel a floating ecstasy, my legs without gravity, only magnetism. He works magnificently, carefully, assuredly. I sink down to him. He begins to enter me. I push him away for a moment for a donation into the #1 golf club sock. I pull the string closed tightly and he takes me finally. Ishtar is satisfied. His eyes are closed. This man, this God eater, knowing fully who and what I am, is also satisfied. I offer him a feather which has been adrift on his shoulder. He opens his eyes. They are bright with the brightness of clairvoyants and seers. “I know. I know,” he whispers often as I hold him and dry him with the tablecloth. He is sleepy and soft “Feathers?” he asks tranquilly.

  I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his lips. “When you are awake, you will go to Claire.”

  “No,” he murmurs. “You.”

  “Claire.” I do not like doing this.

  “Wasn’t I good enough?” He kisses my shoulder blade and turns in my arms.

  “Perfect.”

  “Want you only. Ever.”

  I slap his feet to waken him. “Claire.”

  His eyes are large and filled with mysteries. I love him.

  “Do you love me, Ishtar?”

  “Completely.”

  “Then how come you send me away?”

  “You must be fruitful; you must multiply; you must teach.” I shine the furca into the waters of our love and he looks with me at the reflection of my face. My cheeks are round and flushed. “Claire is I. With you, she will be much more than she is now. Neither of us is anything alone. Help her, for you have been chosen and you are a good man.” I am very beautiful after I have been loved well.

  “I don’t want to give you up, Ishtar.”

  I wink at him in the water. It is all I can promise.

  “Do you really think I’m good, Ishtar?” We look now at his reflection. I point to the waters. I point to himself.

  “All of you. All of you. Go now.”

  I watch him walking, limping, down the hallway out of the darkness of the hotel corridor. He will do well. His chin is a little too soft. But he will do well. His ankles are lovely. I would like also to be Claire.

  “Don’t stand behind any TV sets. Don’t fly your kite near wires,” I call to him down the hall. It is not an ordinary way to end these initiations, but then times have changed and new dangers stalk the dark halls of these worlds. “Don’t play with electrical appliances near water. Call your power company if you see a broken line.” My heart is tangled as the thorns as he goes to his young bride. The tear is on my cheek. Who shall comfort me? The rug at my feet is covered with hot tears. I am void. I am empty. I am waste. My heart melteth. My knees smite together. “Never use anything wire or anything metallic in your kite,” I call down the emptiness. “Never fly your kite on rainy days.” Much pain is in my loins, and darkness gathers. Remember, electricity is energy looking for a place to go.” The hallway is empty. There is no one to comfort me. There is no man to hold me and understand. There is no man to rub my back and breathe into my hair and be mine forever. There is no man to hold me and say, “I understand.” There is no man.

  I dress, nailing with pegs my tablecloth into the old floor of the dining room. There is a Seven-Eleven grocery store where I will pick up napkins just above Chittenango. I throw the #1 golf sock into the lake and pray that the seed of Mike and the egg of Claire have form, joy and continuation. I have done this well. The seam ripper I throw also and pour out the remainder of the food coloring. The lake gleams cobalt and well under the moon. I keep the mirror. I wish, halfheartedly, that I could be Claire and she could be me and do my work. I weep into the chest of an old elm. Who shall comfort me?

  He wasn’t that good.

  He will ask me, before going to Claire, to run away with him. Where can you go, I shall ask him, with a woman with feathers?

  Altoona, he will answer.

  And where is Altoona? I shall ask.

  Anyplace. Altoona anyplace. Let’s just go.

  Where can one go with a crotchful of feathers? With a boy who is just knowing his manhood? For a night perhaps two nights and he would make love once, twice, somewhat compe
tently, and then sit up with his naked knees and beauty-spotted shoulders and say, “I’m scared.”

  And if I were also to eat the pomegranate of this rock star’s fruits, would I too have to dwell in his underground. Once, in Sunday School, I was allowed to read a prayer to the congregation. I approached the pulpit too quickly and had to wait, standing before the people who watched me, for the rabbi to finish his discoursing. I waited, with prepubic impatience, resting an elbow on the pulpit and my chin upon my hand. My mother hissed from below, “Remember who you are.”

  They always remind me. “How can I become King, Ishtar?” they ask as they roll over, still quaking with my post-pubic rhythm. “Do you know the best way to demolish the most Phoenicians with the fewest Etruscans?” “I’ve been to the moon because I think I’m a god. Maybe because I’ve been to the moon, I therefore think I must be a god. Which do you think comes first? As a god, I can have any woman I want but I keep screwing up with my wife, who I really love, and she always catches me and I think I want her to catch me and tell me I’m not a god so I can relax. What do you think?” “Would you write a set of laws up for me, Ishtar? For my people?” “And whose name shall I sign, Lipit?” I ask as I daub my feathers clean. “Well, if you don’t mind, uh, Ishtar, just sign mine.” “I think when I grow up,” he said as he sniffed my bicycle seat, “I’ll be a ladies’ doctor. What do you think?” “I’m worried about that eclipse. Would it be a good time to plant the grapes?” “Hey, I think I’d like to have a studio and record music. What do you think? I always dug building things.”

  And flying kites near power lines and sticking pennies into sockets and shoving your glorified gonads into the wellsprings of life and wondering why you are burned alive and eaten whole. You are ascending into the source of life, the universal power, with your little kite, darling, and that is why, rightfully so, you are afraid. Don’t hurt us; we won’t hurt you. Okay?

  “If you could be as accomplished a man as you are an astronaut, love, you might at least not get caught.” “Why?” he asks under his crew cut and heterochlorophened smile, “wasn’t I any good? I thought you enjoyed that.” He shoves his ringed pinky into my bellybutton and I squeal. None of them have been that good.

  I’m waiting. And so is Robert. A month has passed.

  Do you ever listen to Paul Harvey?

  He spoke this winter of a woman’s body found in a frozen grave between Turkey and Russia. A ram’s foot was perfectly grafted to her ankle. The foot was grafted on by electricity. There could have been no other way. Let them speak of medicine men and shaman magic, and Lickety shick split razor blades. The foot was grafted on by electricity. That, as a modern miracle, is being discovered. Jewish students were warned not to study those parts of the Texts which dealt with the power. Already, ancient battery cells have been found in a Baghdad museum. The girl was a high rank priestess. The men who limped, Jacob, David, Achilles, Baldur—and the men who wore golden high heels, and the men who had shortened heels or shortened thighs—they were ritually lamed to show their divinity as I had chosen them above others. I asked only a simple shortening. Some played at being divine and chosen by mincing around the Senate floor, but I had long stopped that ritual by Roman times. In Spain, I have seen matted dirty black sheep in the fields above the beaches with their back legs tied together. They were bad sheep, I was told. Tied, they found no mischief, and did not jump the fences. It was precisely this way in which we began the laming of those first men whom we chose to be civilized and to dwell within the walls of our cities. Just as today, we must wear wedding rings, they wore buskins, their slippers, their golden sandals as a sign of their chosenness. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. My posts were buckled, my temple floors the scene of sacred limping dances, the coffins of my people slipper shaped. You have forgotten why you drink from my shoe, haven’t you?

  I am sure you know that the Queen of Sheba had a donkey’s foot.

  Guiding kohl on her eyes from an alabaster frog palette, Ishtar stirred from her golden stool and viewed Set, the dark year’s king, in her hand mirror.

  “Lady Mother, One who Sits, Isis, all my horses and all my men can not restore Osiris.”

  “Aah, no, Set. Restoration is guaranteed, granted, promised after dismemberment. You must not shirk this or Osiris will treat you equally at the year’s end when you are dismembered and tossed to the waters. I have spoken, my pretty king.”

  Set prostrated himself at her heels. “The river people tell me that his organ of regeneration has been devoured by the letos fish. It is that which we can not find.”

  Ishtar turned, under the circumstances, quite calmly. “Set, my lover, my son, although I can tolerate your dark ways and your heavy-handed love-making for the year of your reign, it would be utterly impossible for me to retain you as king. I could not bear your sullen morbidity the next year without the lightness and sweetness of my King of Light.”

  “He’s a fool. He sings his head off. He is impractical.”

  “Yes, his singing grows cloying. Too much perfection, too much harmony can be dull, and often during the year while you lie fallow, I confess to yearning for your passion and your thrusting, for the thickness of your body and the boring of your member. I am charmed but tired of the smoothness of his boy’s love. I am needful of you both. I can have neither of your without the other and, Set, without kingship, humankind would stray off balance. You must take all of your horses and all of your men and scour the river until Osiris is back together again. Before the seasons change.”

  Set kissed her feet and Ishtar smiled. “Ah, then, Lady who Sits, am I a more pleasing lover than Osiris, the World Egg?”

  “You are both divine. It would be so nice, Set, if without the priests knowing, I could have both of you perhaps only for a mad, rolling, tumbling night, the totality of light and dark, boy and man, lover and non-lover at once. But it would raise such total havoc among the stars and the crops.”

  Ishtar touched his shoulder with the mirror of her soul. “Come, Set, dark builder, my architect of the lower regions, take me as I sit and then go to seek your brother.” Ishtar watched the curves of his back and the tuft of hair at his tailbone for a few moments with her mirror. A man with the qualities of both brothers would be delightful.

  Later, when Set withdrew himself from the lap of the Mother, she spoke wisdom to him breathlessly. “No longer shall dismemberment occur in my lands. It is too good, this act, and it is too dangerous this remembering. Fashion for me, Set, a building with its four corners precisely at each wind and its center reaching to the polestar. Let the mathematicians and the astrologers construct it so that my heroes and my kings may perfectly leave their bodies waiting while they project astrally and that when they return from my gardens of Paradise in Venus, whether a day or a year has passed, the body will be as fresh and the weapons as sharp.”

  “And after a year?”

  “Bodies will not matter if they choose to remain in my gardens, under my apple trees. Nor weapons.” Ishtar-Isis blessed him and kissed his mouth. “Go now, search the river and its banks, search the wadis and the runs, search the highwalls and highways and the White House Lawn and if you find him not, you and your children and your children’s children and their children after them shall seek him ever, crawling over the world on my day. Go.”

  17

  “SHE’S DIRTY, SHE DON’T PUT ONE FOOT IN MY KITCHEN. I DON’T cook all this for dirt. You hear me? And make her take those damn boots off. The floor’s clean. You hear me?”

  I am in Grace’s basement. I sit on a crate and listen. I hear Mack. He slams the door. His engine flatulates. Since daybreak I have listened to Grace’s Enna Jetticks snapping angrily on the kitchen Congoleum. Grace has thought for days of sauces and Claire, who shall arrive soon, has thought of blow jobs. I, of course, balanced in my desires and my abilities, think simultaneously of these and other exotic items. Grace, bless her, is too old and Claire has much to learn.

  It is pleasant, albeit
lonely, in this moist penetralia, where stalks of strange roots are tied into sacred bundles and piled on wooden tables, where seeds germinate in flat beds under taut cheesecloths and slatted boxes of mushrooms trap moonlight from an open coal shaft. There is a wonderful, perceptive clicking at my shoulder and below my feet. Two black boxes with red dials measure time and energy and below my feet, I hear either a sump pump or a quark detector.

  I am not certain and so I divine, lifting my sardonyx, and my sardonyx lights up with cosmic brilliance in my presence and lifts the dark from the room as a torch. I test the sound below the concrete. Seeds burst their shells prematurely and I am sorry. The machine, grinding and pulsing, responds eagerly to my rays. The stones of the foundations sing in chords. It may very well be then a quark. With Grace, all things are conceivable. Write that down, somebody.

  With Grace, all things are conceivable. I should not be surprised if, upon lifting the stretched comer of cheesecloth, I should find nestling planaria or seeds of infants. There is a synthesis here. Time is Energy. Time, more than a measuring, is a form of energy and like the knots on Grace’s crochet work, time maintains life, connecting events yet keeping them apart. It is this energy, I shall tell Claire, which keeps things from skittering off into low places and lumping up in Cornwallian peat bogs and Californian tar pits. If, for instance, Claire, I tip these timetables, life, whole populations, would slide to tangled chaos, planaria buried in the rutabagas. But no, all is well, for the most part, and today I shall tell Claire, who needs so much knowledge, “Claire, Time is Energy.”

  Bitch.

  While we are waiting for the roar of the chariot, I would without being shameless, indicate to those of you who are interested, that the horseshoe, the signature of Lady Luck, is significant of the magical female parts. Pudenda. Pudenda were in the basket of Delphi, the holy basket. A tisket a tasket. Only afterward did such trash as the phony fabled smelly foreskins of the Christ become sacral objets, venerated and stored in jeweled arks. However, all such information being lost, as well as the basket, green and yellow, I was pleased to find in Woolworth’s today, the rhinestone stars, palms and horseshoes of another age there in the wire basket and I drew my perfect hand through their sharp five and ten contours nostalgically. Much has passed. But much is to come. They in the basket began to glow, my symbols, impregnated as they were with my sensuous cosmic touch, with the soft and tender mother hands, with … you realize I’m simply jealous and it is why I am bragging so. I am tragically envious of Claire of the Unmatched Breasts now entering above as the Sabbath Bride rather than myself. Let us then go above and witness this scene.