Unlike her, Neva (a more interesting name than Karen) owned nothing but obligations. Power is a burden, no matter how it might be spent. But I cannot say that power is not sweet. And I would not deny that she felt some kind of rapture, to be so honored and raised up into what she now was.*
2
No longer shielded from the lusts of women and the brutalities of men, she began to fulfill her purpose. Well, what of the role itself? How authentic was it? Just as the Hollywood actress, whose true tasks are to take direction in embodying the commercialized fantasies of others, and to be the submissively unattainable object of public yearnings, falsely appears to be her story’s subject—spoiled, enriched, ravishable, envied and petted—so anyone whose doom is to be seen must keep drudging away to sustain her “look”—anyone, that is, except for the lesbian, whose beauty went bone-deep. Again she confounds me. From where they came, those allurements and involvements of hers, or even from what substance or energy they had been extruded, I can tell you no better than I can make sense of those pleated woman-robes flowering outward from the black center on the underside of a Greek drinking cup.
E-beth had been made apparently irrelevant, like a former church-window’s roundness now filled in with stones so that its ovoid sill of paler pebbles remains inexplicably. It seemed that her mother could no longer hurt her, and of course she would never or always be lonely. Her new life already fitted her with almost ominous ease, as if she lacked anything to renounce. To be sure, she, resisting, still occasionally believed herself to be unloveable; but she had been well taught to take the wills of others for her own—and there were so many wills! As Reba had explained, if she only did good to herself and others, there was nothing else she would need to do; and if she removed herself from consideration the work would be even simpler.
On the ferry from the island she stood on deck, breathing in rain and gripping the railing, until a middle-aged lady in a suede jacket came to stand beside her. The lesbian found herself instantly understanding what this person was longing for her to say, so she said it, the lady opening her brown eyes and commencing the languid swaying of a wounded Amazon; presently the landing-horn moaned; they crossed the gangplank into the city and went to bed.
Next came a stronger woman who also needed to get something out of the girl.—
What would any of us have aimed for, if we could have been her? I who hope for nothing but to maintain the altars of my seven addictions cannot imagine. For Judy Garland, success was like candy. She reads all the fan magazines. She is a Ping-Pong champion . . . She makes fudge . . . She is a husky, hearty little girl with a huge appetite . . . And at the end she was shouting into the tape recorder: I’m not something you wind up and put on the stage; I wanted to believe and I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn’t. So what?
As for Neva, before her beginning she had already reached the end. What the old woman had done to her restored her to indifference . . .—or one might say that she took on a stately and almost vegetal placidity, much as when Apollo’s prey turned herself into a bay-tree so that the god could rape her only by plucking her many leaves.—How could a bodhisattva be troubled by anything? Smiling and ready, she loved us.
3
Certain dooms arise from their victims’ own deeds, and many result from accident, but some are simply magical, as when a pretty young soul named Luz Hernandez-Chavez, persuaded by the public defender, pled guilty to third degree felony battery, which then, because it was a hate crime as Judge Hempel explained, enhanced itself most miraculously into a second degree felony even as the public defender was patting the defendant’s shoulder and latching shut his briefcase, so that she had to swallow a decade in state prison. To be sure, Luz tried to spit it out like a rapist’s cock; although the tired public defender was already on vacation, she wept and cursed until his colleague agreed to move for a withdrawal of the original guilty plea on the grounds that she did not know she was pleading to a hate crime, at which point the case rose brightly (appealed against her by the district attorney) all the way up to the Second District Court of Appeal.—Well now, sighed Judge Luther, wasn’t this crime motivated by some kind of hate? And he walked into the courtroom, so that everyone had to rise.
The district attorney explained: Christina Rojas is a declared lesbian and therefore falls within the statutory protected class.—The public defender’s colleague began searching for something on the old trial transcript, but it ducked into hiding, so that the district attorney could not be checkmated and therefore continued joyfully: Luz Hernandez-Chavez, in combination with Ramon Lopez and Maribel Kingslee, drove together from Vallejo to Stockton for the sole and admitted purpose of beating up the victim, who was in a rival gang.—Judge Luther looked at the defendant over his glasses. His niece had been raped by gangsters, so he wished he could send Luz to the gas chamber. The district attorney was now saying: The gang to which the assailants belonged stigmatized homosexual activity, and because the victim was a lesbian, this woman and her friends assaulted her.—At last the public defender’s colleague found the page for which he had been longing. He smiled delightedly, but the district attorney was already poisoning our minds: Specifically, Your Honor, the arrest warrant stated that Luz Hernandez-Chavez continuously beat the victim until ordered to stop and that the victim was thereafter transported to the hospital due to her injuries . . .
Objection, ventured the public defender’s colleague, not for the first time, but she got overruled, and so Judge Luther said: We affirm the conviction of Luz Hernandez-Chavez, and the denial of her motion to withdraw the plea.—Both other judges concurred; poor Luz therefore served every moment of her stipulated ten years, passing the time by dreaming of smashing in the face of the first stinking bull dyke she would meet outside.
At last they dismissed her. Strutting gaunt and angry down the street, she met the opener of all our locks, the one who existed without us, the lesbian. Right away Luz was sobbing sweetly in her arms.
In the morning Luz said: I want to be honest and I want to be loving. With you.
Thank you, said the lesbian, running her hand through the other woman’s hair. Soon she went away.
4
Once upon a time Judy Garland confided to the press: I have a private instructor in my dressing room. It’s loads of fun . . . I’m taking a postgrad course on my favorite subjects, music appreciation, art appreciation and French. I’m learning oil painting, too. I’ve been at it five days. Sometimes the lesbian must also pretend to have fun. That is how celebrities gratify us little people.
For both of them, as for any of the world’s other sweethearts, it would all be wonderful. Both their mothers schooled them to lie; Neva was even better than Judy at keeping secrets . . .
But I Feel Like a Terrible Person
Dr. La Forrest Potter of New York believes that “once a woman is seduced by one, it is almost impossible for any man, husband or lover to win back his wife or sweetheart from the fascinating toils of these perverts. No man stands any chance against the active Sapphist . . .”
FRANK CAPRIO, M.D., 1954
What we’re really scared of is that your love will go dead on us; that you will leave us.
JUDY GARLAND, 1955
1
Another day came when she stood in a motel bathroom beside a stranger. A fullgrown woman she was then, smiling and tilting her head, without a stitch on but for that moss-lush towel of new white terrycloth wrapped round her hips, with her breasts nearly as white as that, a trifle tawnier maybe, and her teeth yet whiter, and golden-white glows of light running down her tawny-pink thighs, which would only turn snowier in those last years. Her thick brown hair hung down her shoulders, half before and half behind her as she smiled, shyly gripping her right hand in her left, snugging in the towel against her crotch; the hollows of her throat caught more light, and those soft round breasts of hers, just ripe, ju
st firm, shone out from the rest of her like ripple-twinned reflections of the Arctic sun in some fjord when it is late on a midnight summer night and the water glows ever so faintly pink while two suns go on being soft, soft white, almost weak, or maybe just mild; one never tires of looking at them and wondering about them.—Smiling, the lesbian let fall the towel, exposing the issue of her life: what she would do with the loves of others.
That was summer; in the autumn she would wear her hair in bangs like an Austrian ski champion whom she once glimpsed through a restaurant window. She had not yet perfected all her manifestations, such as that certain way (learned from E-beth and then unpracticed for all that time on the island) in which she would gaze at her cell phone when it rang, with that expression which showed each of us that another lover was calling.
In place of E-beth’s smile, which as I said yearned and promised rather than demanded, the lesbian’s, which demanded nothing either, was loving and sad.
She released the towel. The stranger adored her; then she broke his heart. (Another way of stringing together these facts would be to imagine that she found herself desiring to be held while slowly stroking his back, but he was all business, so business was what she gave him. I myself don’t believe she desired anything.)
Each of us experiences anxiety in a specific part of the body. When something made Karen nervous, she got a stomach ache—happily cured with a pipe cleaner between her tonsils. If she stayed nervous, she got diarrhea. Neva was supposed to no longer get nervous; on the island they had polished her heart until it was as shiny as the linoleum on the poolroom floor at Jingle’s Bar. Had she lived as long as I, she might have come down with acid reflux; as it was, by the time I met her she showed distress in swallowing, as if the food stuck in her throat. Did that signify nervousness, repression, desperation or ordinary middle age? Once or twice I’ve wished that our former goddess Letitia had been in the same room as Neva, because as the former had so often advised our transwoman Judy: I’m an empath. I can see everyone’s emotions. I know you better than you know yourself. (She babbled on and on without ever asking a question. Her self-delight was sweet in its way.)
Neva felt guilty; Neva felt sick. She had not fully come into her power.
I know there have been other complications, she told the stranger, but don’t you know that I love you?
Indeed she did . . .—but he raged; he called her a liar—because she’d do it with anybody! After leading him to the understanding that the center of her heart could hold any number of souls, Neva closed herself into the bathroom, feeling nauseated, and this time nothing came up.
2
The next time she visited her mother, a photograph was lying face up on the coffee table. It was already late at night.
Who’s this E.? inquired her mother. Is she a special friend of yours?
The lesbian fell silent.
And who’s this girl with the braid?
I never met her.
And yet this picture does belong to you.
Yes, Mother, said the lesbian.
Waiting for E., Stanford ’74. What does that mean?
I don’t know.
I found this when I was dusting the bookcases, her mother explained. At first I thought it had something to do with your other friend. But you don’t see her anymore, do you?
No, said the lesbian.
Karen, how long has it been? Since you . . .
Years, Mother.
And what have you been doing all this time? How do you live?
Some friends have been helping me.
But you can’t live on charity all your life! What do you plan to do? Is it something to do with your friend?
Not really, said the lesbian.
I gather you had some kind of falling out. But you won’t confide in me. You never do.
The lesbian looked down at the rug.
So you won’t tell me what this is about?
Don’t worry, Mom.
But why did you hide this picture? Karen, what’s your little secret? It must have made you very, very sad.
I think I’ll go to bed, said the lesbian.
In the morning the photo had transferred itself to the counter of the breakfast nook. Turning it over, the lesbian gazed at the brown-braided girl whom she had never met but who might or might not have dwelled in that blue house on the night that E-beth sent her out of the car to deliver an unknown letter. In the sunlight the snapshot’s highlights showed yellow, while the girl’s red mouth had gone pale pink. Her hair was now tinged with wine, and the solarized faces of the Beatles on the wall behind her were even more deliciously lurid.
The lesbian hesitated. She heard a door open upstairs. Quickly she hid the photo in her overnight bag, in hopes of never again discussing it.
Her mother came slowly downstairs. She looked astonishingly old. She said: Karen, will you still not tell me?
Swallowing, the lesbian said: What am I to tell you?
Where have you been all these years?
3
I adore you so much, said the lesbian, and if it got to the point where you just couldn’t stand my other people . . .
That was how Sandra talked, at least in my hearing. Neva was nearly fullgrown now; everything she said would soon ring (at least to the retired policeman and me) slippery, enigmatic.
The man considered the meaning of where you just couldn’t stand my other people. Into his chest came a sour-sweet feeling, not quite sickness, sorrow or dread. Improving himself, he determined to tolerate anything, if only Neva would keep loving him! For her part, she learned what not to say while he was adoring her. The island’s emetics and whippings had refined away her shame; almost all her new actions she did rightly, and the rest erased itself along with her inexperience. What she needed to do would happen even of itself, carrying her with it under disguise of being done by her. Her bangs were in her eyes, her head was bowed and her eyes shining sideways. Again she wondered how she could possibly endure this dreadful state of being. Meanwhile, the man in the motel bathroom, looking at her smoothly stubborn little face and especially at her lips, suddenly conceived a vision of her anus—because this organ, after all, is nearly independent, semi-sentient, as determined to keep shut as a clam, which opens only when it chooses; soon the lesbian was crying out with pain as he penetrated her from behind, her moans indistinguishable from those of pleasure; he was fondling her face, stroking or choking away her tears, until finally she wished to sob: I don’t like this; but it was nothing compared to what the island witches had done to her, so she kept quiet, and soon enough, remembering how E-beth used to scold her for failing to always feel wonderful about herself, figured out how to make the best of it, as if anal penetration presented her with some kind of promise; soon one of their so-called favorite things was when he would be licking her pussy, rubbing the rest of it with a finger, and sliding two fingers deep and quickly in and out of her anus, the anus that resisted but in his interpretation hungered; and this hunger was what he so conveniently perceived in her face.—Shantelle, as haughty-looking as one born to the crown, her unsmiling eyes disdaining us from beneath deep-arched eyebrows, would simply have said: Okay, let’s get it over with.—But Neva said what the witches did: I love you.
Next she pleasured the man’s brother, his niece and his nephew. Her vulva was as rich as a bowlful of fresh quartered limes.
I who cannot be female will never know whether it was true what Xenia once told me: Between women the sex can be very hetero. Everybody wants to be fucked, so it’s simply a matter of how are we going to accomplish this. Between women there are more options.—Anyhow, none of the men went away ungratified.—But no matter whose hand she held, they called her the lesbian.
4
The retired policeman once told us the tale of the nuclear physicist who because his wife had stopped loving him slipped radium into thei
r son’s pillow. (Francine grew fascinated that he lovingly dubbed her Francium.) The boy already felt sick by the time that burns began to express themselves on his face—at which point the father considerately concealed more radium in the mattress. By the time he was arrested (he pled insanity), their child had leukemia.—To reduce the probability of suchlike retaliations, the lesbian must never stop loving anyone.
And now her story enters in upon its purpose, which is to establish whether the one can ever love the many as perfectly as the many are called upon to love the one. We are instructed to love God, the ruler, or the Motherland, and each of these is said to love us all faithfully and even uniquely in return, to the extent of that entity’s perceived omniscience. But for a member of the many to love as if she were the one, well . . . ! Some of the many despise that, knowing themselves incapable of doing the same, so that they brand her immoral, selfish, hypocritical. Naturally, they will change their opinions once she descends to love them.
5
Her bangs grew out. She became ever more softspoken. Everyone could watch the shinings of her long hair.
When her expressions and procedures were perfect, she bought a bus ticket, paying cash from that sealskin pouch or billfold, which looked and smelled as had E-beth’s hair in that first year when she butch-trimmed it into a silver pelt (the driver said: If you do what I ask, then we’ll be friends), and not many years before the Cinnabar got darker, narrower and more hollowed out (the new barmaid would insist that it had always been that way), when hardly any homeless tents had risen up on Ellis Street, she who dawned above us passed into San Francisco, with shadows slanting up the granite facade of the Golden State Mall on Market Street, accompanied by streetlamp trios glowing like bronze, flickerings of people’s legs and of bicycle wheels, clatters of wheeled suitcases being dragged down toward the stairway’d pit of the underground rapid transit, and the amplified prophet’s voice: Jesus said I am the first and I am the last; Jesus, Jesus, Jesus: He trusted us with the judgment that . . . Christ’s door and Jesus is Lord and God raised from the dead so that we will be saved. See, there’s no more guessing.
The Lucky Star Page 10