When the actors are gone, Lucky and I go over the list. We do not discuss Salome. Lucky has already set the other two women’s resumés aside.
Before we leave: “God, she was amazing. She’ll be great, Mars. I’m really glad it turned out this way, you know, that she decided to drop that crossdressing stuff.”
“Mmm.”
“It really gave me a start, seeing her that day. She was so convincing as a man. I thought…well, nothing. It was stupid.”
“It wasn’t stupid.”
“You didn’t seem surprised—did you know that first time when he…when she came in that she wasn’t…? Why didn’t you say?”
“If I’m looking at someone who can play John, I don’t really care how they pee or whether they shave under their chins. Gender’s not important.”
“It is if you think you might want to go to bed with it.”
“Mmm,” I say again. What I cannot tell Lucky is that all along I have been in some kind of shock; like walking through swamp mud, where the world is warm silkywet but you are afraid to look down for fear of what might be swimming with you in the murk. I know that this is not a game: Joe was a man when he came in and a woman when she came back. I look at our cast list and I know that something impossible and dangerous is trying to happen; but all I really see is that suddenly my play—the one inside me—is possible. She’ll blow a hole through every seat in the house. She’ll burst their brains.
Three weeks into rehearsal, Lucky has unremembered enough to start sharing coffee and head-together conferences with Jo during breaks. The other actors accept Jo as someone they can’t believe they never heard of before, a comrade in the art wars. We are such a happy group; we give great ensemble.
Lance, who plays Herod, regards Jo as some kind of wood sprite, brilliant and fey. He is myopic about her to the point that if she turned into an anaconda, he would stroke her head while she wrapped herself around him. Lance takes a lot of kidding about his name, especially from his boyfriends. During our early rehearsals, he discovered a very effective combination of obsession and revulsion in Herod: as if he would like to eat Salome alive and then throw her up again, a sort of sexual bulimia.
Susan plays Herodias; Salome’s mother, Herod’s second wife, his brother’s widow. She makes complicated seem simple. She works well with Lance, giving him a strong partner who nevertheless dims in comparison to her flaming daughter, a constant reminder to Herod of the destruction that lurks just on the other side of a single yes to this stepdaughter/niece/ demonchild who dances in his fantasies. Susan watches Jo so disinterestedly that it has taken me most of this time to see how she has imitated and matured the arrogance that Jo brings to the stage. She is a tall black woman, soft muscle where Jo is hard: nothing like Jo, but she has become Salome’s mother.
And John the Baptist, whose real name is Frank and who is nothing like Joe: I’m not sure I could have cast him if he had come to the audition with red hair, but his is black this season, Irish black for the O’Neill repertory production that he just finished. Lucky says he has “Jesus feet.” Frankie’s a method actor, disappointed that he doesn’t have any sense memory references for decapitation. “I know it happens offstage,” he says earnestly, at least once a week. “But it needs to be there right from the start, I want them to think about it every scene with her.” Them is always the audience. Her is always Jo. Offstage, he looks at her the way a child looks at a harvest moon.
Three weeks is long enough for us all to become comfortable with the process but not with the results: the discoveries the actors made in the first two weeks refuse to gel, refuse to reinvent themselves. It’s a frustrating phase. We’re all tense but trying not to show it, trying not to undermine anyone else’s efforts. It’s hard for the actors, who genuinely want to support each other, but don’t really want to see someone else break through first. Too scary: no one wants to be left behind.
There’s a pseudosexual energy between actors and directors: there’s so much deliberate vulnerability, control, desire to please; so much of the stuff that sex is made of. Working with my actors is like handling bolts of cloth: they each have a texture, a tension. Lance is brocade and plush; Susan is smooth velvet, subtle to the touch; Frankie is spun wool, warm and indefinably tough. And Jo: Jo is raw silk and razor blades, so fine that you don’t feel the cut.
So we’re all tense; except for Jo. Oh, she talks, but she’s not worried; she’s waiting for something, and I am beginning to turn those audition days over in my memory, sucking the taste from the bones of those encounters and wondering what it was that danced with me in those early rounds, what I have invited in.
And a peculiar thing begins: as I grow more disturbed, Jo’s work becomes better and better. In those moments when I suddenly see myself as the trainer with my head in the mouth of the beast, when I slip and show that my hand is sweaty on the leash—in those moments her work is so pungent, so ripe that Jo the world-shaker disappears, and the living Salome looks up from the cut-off t-shirt, flexes her thigh muscles under the carelessly torn jeans. We have more and more of Salome every rehearsal.
On Friday nights, I bring a cooler of Corona and a bag of limes for whoever wants to share them. This Friday everyone stays. We sit silent for the first cold green-gold swallows. Lance settles back into Herod’s large throne. I straddle a folding chair and rest my arms along the back, bottle loose in one hand. Lucky and the other actors settle on the platforms that break the stage into playing areas.
It starts with the actors talking, as they always do, about work. Lance has played another Herod, years ago, in Jesus Christ Superstar, and he wants to tell us how different that was.
“I’d like to do Superstar,” Jo says. It sounds like an idle remark. She is leaning back with her elbows propped against the rise of a platform, her breasts pushing gently against the fabric of her shirt as she raises her bottle to her mouth. I look away because I do not want to watch her drink, don’t want to see her throat work as the liquid goes down.
Lance considers a moment. “I think you’d be great, sweetheart,” he says, “But Salome to Mary Magdalene is a pretty big stretch. Acid to apple juice. Wouldn’t you at least like to play a semi-normal character in between, work up to it a little?”
Jo snorts. “I’m not interested in Magdalene. I’ll play Judas.”
Lance whoops, Frankie grins, and even the imperturbable Susan smiles. “Well, why not?” Lance says. “Why shouldn’t she play Judas if she wants to?”
“Little question of gender,” Frankie says, and shrugs.
Susan sits up. “Why shouldn’t she have the part if she can do the work?”
Frankie gulps his beer and wipes his mouth. “Why should any director hire a woman to play a man when they can get a real man to do it?”
“What do you think, Mars?” The voice is Jo’s. It startles me. I have been enjoying the conversation so much that I have forgotten the danger in relaxing around Jo or anything that interests her. I look at her now, still sprawled back against the platform with an inch of golden beer in the bottle beside her. She has been enjoying herself, too. I’m not sure where this is going, what the safe answer is. I remember saying to Lucky, Gender’s not important.
“Gender’s not important, isn’t that right, Mars?”
Lucky told her about it. But I know Lucky didn’t. She didn’t have to.
“That’s right,” I say, and I know from Jo’s smile that my voice is not as controlled as it should be. Even so, I’m not prepared for what happens next: a jumble of pictures in my head, images of dancing in a place so dark that I cannot tell if I am moving with men or women, images of streets filled with androgynous people and people whose gender-blurring surpasses androgyny and leaps into the realm of performance. Women dressed as men making love to men; men dressed as women hesitating in front of public bathroom doors; women in high heels and pearls with biceps so large that they split the expensive silk shirts. And the central image, the real point: Jo, naked, obviously female,
slick with sweat, moving under me and over me, Jo making love to me until I gasp and then she begins to change, to change, until it is Joe with me, Joe on me—and I open my mouth to shout my absolute, instinctive refusal—and I remember Lucky saying It is if you think you might want to sleep with it—and the movie breaks in my head and I am back with the others. No one has noticed that I’ve been assaulted, turned inside out. They’re still talking about it: “Just imagine the difference in all the relationships if Judas were a woman,” Susan says earnestly to Frankie. “It would change everything!” Jo smiles at me and swallows the last of her beer.
The next rehearsal I feel fragile, as if I must walk carefully to keep from breaking myself. I have to rest often. I am running a scene with Frankie and Lance when I notice Lucky offstage, talking earnestly to Jo. Jo puts one hand up, interrupts her, smiles, speaks, and they both turn to look at me. Lucky suddenly blushes. She walks quickly away from Jo, swerves to avoid me. Jo’s smile is bigger. Her work in the next scene is particularly fine and full.
“What did she say to you, Luck?” I ask her as we are closing the house for the evening.
“Nothing,” Lucky mumbles.
“Come on.”
“Okay, fine. She wanted to know if you ever slept with your actors, okay?”
I know somehow that it’s not entirely true: I can hear Jo’s voice very clearly, saying to Lucky, So does Mars ever fuck the leading lady? while she smiles that catlick smile. Jo has the gift of putting pictures into people’s heads, and I believe Lucky got a mindful. That’s what really sickens me, the idea that Lucky now has an image behind her eyes of what I’m like…no, of what Jo wants her to think I’m like. God knows. I don’t want to look at her.
“Did you get my message?” Jo says to me the next evening, when she finally catches me alone in the wings during a break from rehearsal. She has been watching me all night. Lucky won’t talk to her.
“I’m not in the script.”
“Everybody’s in the script.”
“Look, I don’t get involved with actors. It’s too complicated, it’s messy. I don’t do it.”
“Make an exception.”
Lucky comes up behind Jo. Whatever the look is on my face, it gets a scowl from her. “Break’s over,” she says succinctly, turning away from us even before the words are completely out, halfway across the stage before I think to try to keep her with me.
“Let’s get back to work, Jo.”
“Make a fucking exception.”
I don’t like being pushed by actors, and there’s something else, too, but I don’t want to think about it now, I just want Jo off my back, so I give her the director voice, the vocal whip. “Save it for the stage, princess. You want to impress me, get out there and do your fucking job.”
She doesn’t answer; her silence makes a cold, high-altitude circle around us. When she moves, it’s like a snake uncoiling, and then her hand is around my wrist. She’s strong. When I look down, I see that her hand is changing: the bones thicken under the flesh, the muscles rearrange themselves subtly, and it’s Joe’s hand on Jo’s arm, Joe’s hand on mine. “Don’t make me angry, Mars,” and the voice is genderless and buzzes like a snake. There is no one here to help me, I can’t see Lucky, I’m all alone with this hindbrain thing that wants to come out and play with me. Jo’s smile is by now almost too big for her face. Just another actor, I think crazily, they’re all monsters anyway.
“What are you?” I am shaking.
“Whatever you need, Mars. Whatever you need. Every director’s dream. At the moment, I’m Salome, right down to the bone. I’m what you asked for.”
“I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want this.”
“You wanted Salome, and now you’ve got her. The power, the sex, the hunger, the need, the wanting, it’s all here.”
“It’s a play. It’s just…it’s a play, for chrissake.”
“It’s real for you.” That hand is still locked around my wrist; the other hand, the soft small hand, reaches up to the center of my chest where my heart tries to skitter away from her touch. “I saw it, that first audition. I came to play John the Baptist, I saw the way Lucky looked at me, and I was going to give her something to remember…but your wanting was so strong, so complex. It’s delicious, Mars. It tastes like spice and wine and sweat. The play in your head is more real to you than anything, isn’t it, more real than your days of bright sun, your friends, your office transactions. I’m going to bring it right to you, into your world, into your life. I’ll give you Salome. On stage, off stage, there doesn’t have to be any difference. Isn’t that what making love is, giving someone what they really want?”
She’s still smiling that awful smile and I can’t tell whether she is talking about love because she really means it or because she knows it makes my stomach turn over. Or maybe both.
“Get out of here. Out of here, right now.” I am shaking.
“You don’t mean that, sweet. If you did, I’d already be gone.”
“I’ll cancel the show.”
She doesn’t answer: she looks at me and then, phht, I am seeing the stage from the audience perspective, watching
Herod and Herodias quarrel and cry and struggle to protect their love, watching John’s patient fear as Herod’s resolve slips away: watching Salome dance. When she dances, she brings us all with her, the whole audience living inside her skin for those moments. We all whirl and reach and bend, we all promise, we all twist away. We all tempt. We all rage. We stuff ourselves down Herod’s throat until he chokes on us. And then we are all suddenly back in our own bodies and we roar until our throats hurt and our voices rasp. All the things that I have felt about this play, she will make them feel. What I am will be in them. What I have inside me will bring them to their feet and leave them full and aching. Oh god, it makes me weep, and then I am back with her, she still holds me with that monster hand and all I can do is cry with wanting so badly what she can give me.
Her eyes are too wide, too round, too pleased. “Oh,” she says, still gently, “It’s okay. You’ll enjoy most of it, I promise.” And she’s gone, sauntering onstage, calling out something to Lance, and her upstage hand is still too big, still wrong. She lets it caress her thigh once before she turns it back into the Jo hand. I’ve never seen anything more obscene. I have to take a minute to dry my eyes, cool my face. I feel a small, hollow place somewhere deep, as if Jo reached inside and found something she liked enough to take for herself. She’s there now, just onstage, ready to dance, that small piece of me humming in her veins. How much more richness do I have within me? How long will it take to eat me, bit by bit? She raises her arms now and smiles, already tasting. Already well fed.
Ghost Crab
Linda L. Nelson
Pale and lashed to my ravenous water,
I cruise in the sour smell of the naked climate,
still dressed in gray and bitter sounds
and a sad crest of abandoned spray.
—from “Drunk With Pines” by Pablo Neruda
I.
My name is Jack. I like to surprise people. To name the bird by its song.
Several weeks ago, Helen and I listened through the fine, spring green skin of a tent as wild ponies thundered by in the dark, screaming as they swerved into the cold bay. I could smell salt, their thick soaked coats. I was lying with my eyes open, staring, wondering how the tent protected our skulls from being crushed beneath the herd’s hooves.
We were on vacation. Our first.
Here in New York, where we live, I run a sex club for women. It’s my job to create a space in which women can fulfill fantasies they don’t even know they have. Which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from simply creating their fantasies for them.
You’d be surprised by how many there are of these. Women who don’t know they have fantasies.
I like my job, and I work at it. It’s the skill I’ve learned in order to survive. That’s the nature of jobs, after all.
If this were
the 1940s, you could call me a gigolo. It’s a term toward which I have a distinct inclination and affection.
But I don’t want to tell you about fantasies. Or how I fulfill them.
I want to tell you about the ghost crab.
II.
Helen didn’t stir when I unzipped the tent, the zipper as icy and difficult to manipulate as my own sex-stiffened fingers. Her back was embedded in the damp floor, her lumpy silhouette engraved there by these fingers: fingers that had pushed into her over and over, scorching; fingers without ears to hear her cries or eyes to see her try to dig herself deeper into the dirt. I felt ungainly as I extricated myself from our shell, stumbling into my boots as I crossed the thick dewy weeds.
The ocean is darker today than I’ve ever seen it, more intent looking, Helen had said to me the evening before. We had just arrived, and before pitching camp had taken a walk across the strip of land from our bayside site to the ocean. We were standing next to each other, not touching, gazing out from a seemingly infinite vastness of Atlantic shore and sea and sun. It seemed to stretch for miles around the edges of her so that I couldn’t breathe there was so much of it, a light so huge and red it could only be hell, a hell, distant yet imminent and not entirely threatening in its presence; and in the vacuum created by my empty lungs, I felt something sucking us forward into the future.
Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica Page 20