Whichever regulars happened to be high grew ever more amazed at the blending of the rainbow disco ball into the screeching microphone once the fat man in the rhinestone-silvered suit began to dance, Xenia enthusiastically singing along although one could hear only the black girls who kept breaking off to kiss one another on the mouth. Free of Ricardo, the transwoman rushed over to gobble more wedding cake, returning to her wonderful lesbian, who smiled and made room right beside her! Earrings were glittering; men in suits kept hugging T-girls. The bride towered over the groom, who whispered naughty things into her shoulder. The straight man kissed the plastic orchid in the hair of the Honolulu T-girl, who refused to play liars’ dice with him, and the ever-giving lesbian in her green spangled blouse began to sway to music; never moneyless, she had quietly bought drinks for everyone around her, murmuring to Francine amidst the excitingly deep voices of the T-girls. Xenia with her ruined face and her crumpled black-red mouth felt a duty to work extra hard; she dragged Al to his feet and made him dance. His eyes were red; he didn’t want to, but she hissed: Do it for Selene!
Shantelle, who loved to take everything upon herself, was explaining to Sandra: When you get yourself married in the eyes of the community, it’s our obligation to keep the love alive!—while Xenia kept dancing and retelling the plots of all the Hollywood movies she once starred in, some of which remained unseen in directors’ secret vaults, and Samantha, who used to work in one of those mid-level establishments where the strippers all wipe the catty pole clean with the same rag, and now made a vocation if not a career of displaying the boundary line between a cheap wig and a sweaty middle-aged male forehead, sat at the bar’s last stool, blotto, clapping her hands whenever Selene kissed shy fat Ricardo, who would need to leave within fifteen minutes to avoid getting fired from the furniture store. The minister had said: I pronounce you husband and husband, and the sentimental transwoman wept without knowing why. And the cloud of the hymen is like a shining emerald, whispered the straight man. Samantha kept weeping exhilarated tears and the transwoman, who had swallowed even better pills, felt happier and happier for Selene (not for Ricardo, whom she had never met before, and suspected of meditating abandonment)—happier still because the lesbian was smiling, sometimes at her but usually at Selene.
Eager to hear the lesbian’s voice, the transwoman wondered how to coax it forth; what if she herself were to sing? . . .—but everyone said her voice was awful even when she sang hymns in church. Unable to turn away from her, she longed to say: Neva, what do you sound like?—The lesbian (she who caused everything to happen) kept silent, but at each toast to the wedded union of Selene and Ricardo, she did touch shotglasses with the transwoman, who rapidly fell in love.
6
In the lesbian’s time songs were customarily bought and sold from machines, which may explain why no songs got sung about her even after she died; old lovers gave up speaking about her, firstly because the machines expressed ever newer topics onto those tiny rectangular telephone screens over which we bent, stroking words and pictures as if these were jewels; and secondly because since death was not supposed to happen, it needed to be forgotten as quickly as possible. Hence the young disdained the old, whose sallow wrinkles called into question expectations of eternally increasing happiness; as for the dead, their unclean state might be contagious—for what if our very own many-colored dramas, whose stories promised perfect pleasure, someday betrayed us by coming to an end? Death was an ill-mannered cough at a concert, a bad smell at a party; it meant running short of money just when someone had expected to buy herself the present that she really, really wanted. So when the lesbian died, our happiness refused to close. New-beloved beauties swam into our ken like the wriggling slate-diamonds of manta rays, but my own longing for Neva resembled the slow-pulsing translucent parasol of a jellyfish. In my soul I called her you who were loved above all others. Here came a shoal of rays swimming together, then other jellyfish like mushrooms, and the long narrow spear of a manta’s tail. If you have ever heard the ancient lyric in which long-dead Anacreon asked his Muse which metal-worker could have fashioned the sea with its shining silver waves, you may have wondered about this other sea in which our swimmers swarmed, doubling back on lives, or circling around them, so that they would never get beached at the end. Here in this bar where our lesbian once lived, the fan’s three blades shone vaguely silver, and all the fish kept wriggling toward happiness because the jukebox played new songs. Some of us might have feared that if we mentioned her too much, she would climb back out of her grave, naked and rotten, to torture us with the horror of her end; we could not understand that she had already shucked off her flesh just as the transwoman once did in her last boyhood years, pulling out the semiliquid prosthetic breasts she’d carried all night inside her slinky pinky party dress, and hiding them against the daylight as if they were slaughtered things. By day she had concealed herself from the truth; while day and night the lesbian now lay in darkness. We no longer speculated as to what she might have seen, won or suffered, to make her the way she was.
I could tell you how in her arms our lovemaking so often ceased being what rape prosecutors refer to as “goal driven”—everything being equally present and perfect, as when we rubbed our tongues against hers for hours and hours. But my certainty that it felt that way for all of us may be misplaced. If I weren’t such a loser I’d have kept quiet.
Two months after the memorial service, I did speak her name right here at the Y Bar, at which two lesbians and a lonely old queen smiled sadly, not looking at each other; no one blamed her for dying, but since she was dead, it seemed better that she should stop coming around—for there were new women’s names on our lips. (We all have our war stories, said Francine. But you know what? Making love with Neva, feeling tied up in knots about her, we all got through that, because we had to. But this part I don’t know how to get through—so shut up, and let’s . . . oh, what the hell.) So I too gave up mention of Neva, which made the secret all the sweeter in its sadness.
Then late one night at Amanda’s Spot the transwoman and I were getting drunk for no reason (I forget where the retired policeman was), and when the fat T-girl in the spangleblue skirt came stamping out onto the stage and flashed her strap-on so that lesbians in the audience all screamed for glee, our lesbian, the dead one, came back for both of us, perhaps because she was the only universally loved woman we knew who had actually been born with a vagina; Judy and I protected our memories from each other but we did agree that Neva had been graceful, lovely, awfully nice although how nice exactly remained disputable. The transwoman resumed weeping. She must have said something to Selene or Samantha, because after that Neva’s name rose back up into mention at our bar, much as the bloated corpse of a drowned victim returns to the surface. Remembering how we used to desire her, some desired her still, while the rest collected adequate gratification from the memories, which might as well have been lovely irregular coins bearing images of vulvas, insects and hydras. She who used to sit just past the edge of us, smiling at us, never at herself, remained our treasure.
7
Sandra once said in reference to some dead movie star, probably Marlene Dietrich, that to be perfect must be a burden and a sadness, at which the lesbian rose up in my mind, because to be such a one as her who was a promise to so many might have become an outright horror. When the transwoman first told him about her, saying ohmigod, what a stunner, the retired policeman chased the lesbian’s smile on his computer, partly for laughs but mostly because watching and hunting any person, especially someone unknown, reminded him of how he used to be; before the transwoman had even finished rinsing her mouth in that hotel room sink for which they both found so many uses, the lesbian’s face was filling his screen from corner to corner, shy but proud, with her lips painted red and her teeth so white and clean, as if she were offering herself to him; his sated penis tried to stir, doing its due diligence, and so eventually did he, even showing up at the doo
r of my room at the Amity Hotel, where I no longer live because the night manager and I disagreed on the subject of an underaged visitor of mine. Anyhow, I told the retired policeman some of what I knew, keeping back the best parts for myself, and after twenty-odd minutes the transwoman, obviously following instructions, rang my buzzer, so now there were three of us, and four forty-ounce cans of malt liquor in her purse: two for her and two for me (not our usuals); he stayed faithful to his Old Crow. So I stretched out on my bed, halfway enjoying the novelty of company here where I generally lay alone, Francine being my favorite exception; and he sat wheezing in my one chair, with Judy in his lap, while we talked about the lesbian, almost as if there had been no time to do it while she was still alive, with the idea of her face floating over us, a perfect mask of serenity like the anciently-carven zo-onna of a Japanese Noh actor; he was good at asking questions while pretending not to, while I for my part kept coaxing and complimenting the transwoman, less because she might say something I hadn’t heard than because it was a way of getting back at him who if he wasn’t going to make straight up inquiries deserved nothing; as it happened, in the end they did both tattle out new stories; a week later Francine excreted three more secrets; then through the retired policeman’s steely kindness I met the lesbian’s former neighbor Catalina, who had never gone to the Y Bar. That brownhaired brown girl, current and former resident of Room 545, now sat across from me in the window niche of a juice bar, daintily, thoughtfully reaching her fingers into the past: I’m getting a bunch of memories, all right. Which one to pick?—And she sat thinking very seriously.—Okay, resumed Catalina, I started having some super intense dreams about her, and that was when I knew this was gonna be different. I dreamed about my mom giving Neva a key . . .—Scratching away mascara-clots, Xenia for her part said: All right, here’s what I recall. Her body couldn’t bend more than mine. Somewhat flat-chested, but decent tits; pretty brown hair, very innocent or maybe even blank brown eyes, and a beautiful little-girl body, very cute pussy . . .—What about her personality? I asked.—She said: She reminded me of this Rebecca whom I did sex work with for maybe four years; we were hand job whores together; we were fucking together and she was very possessive, but she claimed not to be a lesbian . . .—Interrupting, I insisted that Neva had never been possessive, to which Xenia replied: You think so because you don’t understand the difference between fucking as a man and fucking as a woman . . . !—at which point I went my ignorant way.—Samantha refused to discuss the lesbian, but Sandra gave me a poem she had written about Neva and herself as mermaids on a white bird-island somewhere in the North Sea; even Shantelle pissed out a few of her stinking recollections; then late one afternoon I woke up recollecting and possibly even understanding certain aspects of the lesbian, and those lost memories I now dribble through my fingers, enjoying their cold silveriness and the soft sweet clickings when they touch each other.
Child Star
Association with women is the basic element of good manners.
GOETHE, 1809
Well, Judy Garland isn’t sophisticated. There’s only one way to put it—she’s nuts about her mother.
JAMES CARSON, 1940
1
A Finnish woman once told a tale of another Finnish woman who got regularly called away from her woodcutter husband to become a wolf-wife in the swamps, fragrant with mud and bilberries, lusting to tear heifers to pieces, howling with delight whenever her wolf husband penetrated her. About her new fanged and hairy shape the tale explained: The Devil may shape a witch into a wolf or a cat or even a goat, without subtracting from her and without adding to her at all. For this occurs just as clay is first molded into one, then shaped into another shape, for the Devil is a potter and his witches but clay. Exactly thus the murderess regards her victims. Between the one daughter whom her twisting ligature will make famous and the other daughter, poised and pretty, who knows nothing until she is awakened by the downstairs neighbor’s screams, nothing can be added or subtracted, because each girl is a hunk of the common clay. Likewise works the mother, squeezing and twisting her offspring into the most finished shape; and should the daughter evince distress, never mind, for thermodynamics proves that nothing can be created or destroyed! The awful question: What color was your daughter’s hair? should be calmly answered: The same as it always was and will be, because the child never existed in and of herself; the mother gave her birth (as could be said about whatever the Goddess creates) only for her own pleasure, separating out of herself her own substance, which at whim or will returns to her. How can mere busybodies who exhume the dead girl to pluck a hair sample comprehend that? Goddess, forgive them; they know not what they do. It took four strong men to hold down the woodcutter’s wife when the police carried her daughter’s corpse away. But the wolf’s wife, cross-examined in court, sat utterly calm even though her fingers kept drumming on the table. Whether the official cause of death would be set down as throttling, or aspiration vomiting from being throttled (or vomiting from being tortured, raped or simply frightened), the wolf’s wife knew that her prey never died because it never lived nor was anything but her own projection invented to feed her dream of hunger. This mother had beautiful claws. On the witness stand she turned them over and admired them. Just as Judy Garland used to envy Joan Crawford for her long, glittering fingernails, so even the woodcutter’s wife, whose hands were roughened by housework, could not help but wish she had fingernails like her enemy sister! And now, on a tiny oval velvet pallet, a resurrection man carried in the choicest of the daughter’s relics. Her hair is a little lighter with just the right touch of gold to enhance those lovely eyes that feature dark curling lashes. Those eyes and lashes were rotten, of course, so to help the jury visualize them, the accused woman smilingly indicated her own.
2
The mother’s biography begins in the easy days between wars when America promised to grow forever better, at least for clean-thinking right-colored sorts who worked hard; needless to say, the retired policeman told it worse than it was, with searches, and then dried blood inside a cupboard, which caused somebody’s mother to be arrested, but there were no bloodstains in the lesbian’s story, as even the compliant transwoman remarked out loud; unembarrassed, the retired policeman kept picking my brain about Neva’s childhood, but I pretended not to know anything; to get him off my back I started quizzing the transwoman, who said: And just then I looked out the window, I don’t know why, and I saw Neva . . .—Glaring into my eyes, the retired policeman demanded: You mean to tell me that even when she was in the crapper, you never snooped through her purse?—Correct, I lied.—By then they were both pretty sure that I had no information to swap; on the other hand, since I was one of them, having loved the lesbian, and since I never blabbed to anyone else but Francine, who also dwelled in our inner circle, it gratified them to expose me to some details. Moreover, the retired policeman knew that I was nearly as intelligent as he; whenever he gifted the transwoman with his famous bedtime lectures on historic criminal cases, all she did was gape admiringly; if it weren’t for his other peculiar requirements, he would rather have dated a soul mate. On a certain faraway occasion when I treated him in the Cinnabar (Carmen had not yet been fired for embezzling the till) he had demanded whether or not I believed that old-time flypaper could have been soaked in water on a soup plate for several days, and the resultant arsenic infusion employed for murder purposes; I replied that arsenic was an effective poison based at least in part on its solubility. He liked me then. He could see I was good for something. To reward me, he bestowed on me one of his knowledge-pearls: Arsenic eaters tended to undergo a speedier postmortem decay than the rest of us.—I’ll drink to that, I said. So now all three of us were drinking to the lesbian’s mother, at my expense, in my room at the Amity Hotel: a twelvepack of Coonhound malt liquor in the extra-tall bullet-shaped cans. My guests felt so comfortable with me that neither one even closed the bathroom door whenever it came time to go piss it out, s
o here’s a knowledge-pearl for you: Judy stood up to pee just like the rest of us.
The Lucky Star Page 3