On Civic Center Plaza a black man dressed in black slumped on a bench, with a white blanket pulled up to his waist. Seeing Neva, he slowly straightened, and his eyes began to glow.
In a tiny dark apartment on Hayes Street she pleased a married couple all day and night. Then she inhabited snapshots of other women one after another, the colors muted, the women smiling or sometimes sleeping. Almost around the corner from the Y Bar rose the Hotel Reddy, where she paid in hundred-dollar bills for Room 543, which was centrally situated between Catalina’s place and Room 541 where we guests of Neva often heard a man beating a woman; her lover-to-be Victoria lived with a sister Helga in Room 547—and all this lay convenient on the third floor, catty-corner from the stairwell. She loved us all without preference—although most of us turned out to be women.
Neva
She still takes her Teddy Bear to bed with her. She puts her dolls to bed every night of her life.
GLADYS HILL, 1938
I never played with dolls, never.
JUDY GARLAND, to Gladys Hill, 1940
Mom wants me to be safe . . . but I don’t think that’s at the top of God’s list.
KATHRYN SPRINGER, 2014
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Judy Garland once said: I think women get themselves mixed up by making too many promises. There is something so romantic about promising your heart forever to a person. Whether or not the lesbian made outright promises is a matter I resist weighing in on, but that soul of hers and her pubis like a cobra’s hood both approximated promises, being perfect. (I used to imagine her upside down on the catty pole, with her legs wide, wide apart.) And she kept being Neva, loving without pitying us—or did she? (My reconstruction of her, or if you like my projection, requires me to humanize the superhuman.) She apparently felt that any loving (or pitying) was beautiful! When it pleased us to deceive her, she agreed with all our childish lies. When she smiled, it was as if nobody had ever smiled that way, as if she had either overcome or completely become herself; in short, they perceived her as she once perceived E-beth.
Francine once told me (in dirtier words) that all the lesbian’s relations with us—her entire career, if you will—could be characterized as reactive and defensive. But I had had my own experiences of Neva, which is to say my own ecstasies. Even if a disproportionate allocation of her efforts did go to overcome a certain bad dream that was as simple and gruesome as a promontory of black bones, why should that concern us? Hadn’t she been raised to serve others?
Not long before she left home she’d said: You know, Mother, I keep having nightmares.
Well, replied Mrs. Strand, you have no idea how difficult it’s been for me.
Now Neva was dead. The transwoman bought me a drink and announced that the lesbian had never felt sufficiently loved. But how could that be? Judy and I, not to mention all the rest of us, certainly gave her most of whatever love we had, dishonestly promised her the rest, and pleasured in pleasing her, even as she fulfilled herself (at least apparently) in fulfilling us. So what did she need nightmares for? As for us, some learned better than others, but even the most selfishly, dangerously desperate felt better when we had lain down in her arms.
And since I was there, I can swear that this was all true, the truest thing you ever could imagine; truth was when the Y Bar’s front door swung open, and her silhouette began to come in from the glaring light.
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Shantelle, Selene and Xenia, sitting in a row, turned their heads toward her like three snaky-haired Furies silently inviting some mortal to drink from a cup of steaming poison; then she came in out of the light for them to see her, and they loved her.
Who We Were
And in my case there is no question of performance—my job is solely to remember lines and positions and rattle them off as quickly as possible never mind the meaning etc., etc. All the time I think it must be my fault, but really I know it isn’t.
JENNIFER JONES, to David Selznick, 1953
It is natural that when one thinks of sex and wants to feel aroused, one thinks of one’s own sexual experiences.
HILARY ELDRIDGE, quoted in Female Sexual Abuse of Children, 1993
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Of course the retired policeman’s broken-spined true crime paperbacks, priced in cents rather than dollars, would one and all have received her into their stories, eroticizing her into a perfect victim or manipulator—since from the very first even Francine was widening her nostrils, sniffing after the lesbian!—Correction: I meant to say, she who for professional reasons had become the best of us at seeing, if not necessarily remembering (although Francine was excellent at remembering who had broken which rules), saw over, past and through our titillated attentiveness to conclude without effort that here was someone worth paying attention to.—So we crowded into the Y Bar to smell Neva, thirsting for her, most of us not yet daring to desire her (the retired policeman, stronger than anyone, sought to take our minds off her by explaining, supposedly only to Francine: We had a jury say that even though he confessed to it, he’s frickin’ nuts. It was kinda one of those cases. We knew he was involved. Even the jury could see it. But they were thinking, well, the judge put fear in us and you have to look at the fuckin’ evidence. So they made it attempted homicide, which was fine with me, because it got him off the street and we never had that type of homicide since . . . )—but within two winks and three drinks, he limped home, after which love reinfected us, the kind of love that perpetually craves any animal scent of its object, be it her sweat fresh or stale, or the hayfield fragrance of her hair, the excitingly sharp odor of her armpits, or the smell from inside her shoes. And all this happened so quickly that even to me who was there it grows ridiculous in the telling, and therefore wretched, hence almost without interest, like some young girl’s lies about really truly seeing Wonder Woman. We came wide-eyed unto her:—Just as a dead woman’s corpse attracts flies both male and female, so our lesbian, now in fullest flower, drew us without distinction. Were you to ask whether Letitia in her day had exercised a comparable gravitational pull, I would have said: Let me see Letitia’s picture!—But even if those two had sat side by side in real life, how could I have compared them? Just as the most spectacular orgasm decays into a glow, which sublimes away, leaving but a residue of vague fondness, so feminine allure passes on, and all we fans and ex-lovers retain is a wavering impression as of electromagnetic force (represented at the Y Bar by Francine’s washed out old postcard of the giant breast with pink spectacles on it, a tasteful memento which every now and then fell off the shelf). I could tell you what Judy Garland’s wide white forehead once meant to me, but my descriptors would be placeholders. I could even try my best to represent that sweetly sad and white, white face of the young Judy Garland in the transwoman’s old silver gelatin photoportrait: her airbrushed skin enrolls her in that soft marble pantheon whose retouched pubises are hairless, slitless mounds of perfect whiteness, and whose armpits are smooth white hollows; as Screenland magazine explained: She looks healthy and happy and wise without being sophisticated. But what could I convey beyond rippling echoes?—Regarding Neva, there was something about her cheekbones that we adored, and maybe something about her top front teeth when she smiled, but what about the color of her eyes, which only I would have sworn were brownish-green?—We all sought out her secret, in useless hopes of copying it. (Although we pretended to be unaware of it, we knew all too well that the lesbian, our goddess, was she who suffers.) Our investigations briefly flowered into a perverted game, which we could equally play alone in our beds or sitting on our stools at the Y Bar, discussing her with one another until she walked in. But because we could never establish any cause of her effect, we tired of this, stared at her almost in misery. Then we simply stared.
You might have tried to tell me that she did not belong here, being too good for us, as was certainly true, but my sole reply is that precisely on that basis, oh, how she belonged he
re! We desperately gave ourselves over to her—another way of stating that she was our slave, our thing, whom we had now captured and intended to use most avidly.
No, said wise old Xenia. No matter who has which genitals, there’s always one in the couple that’s more of a top; there’s a catcher and a pitcher. I admit it can switch back and forth. Sometimes the butch is more the pitcher, but oh, it can switch.
What about Neva? I asked.
What about her?
Is she a top or a bottom? We need her so much, and yet she does whatever we ask . . .
What’s Judy?
A bottom, obviously.
So what’s Neva?
That’s what I’m asking.
I need to piss, said Xenia.
By then I had other questions. Why Neva, and not for instance Shantelle, who practiced both intuition and science in her varied manipulations? (Shantelle said: Neva’s special, sure. There’s some kinda magnetic energy around the bitch who got chosen, because she got chosen.—But why was she chosen? I asked.—That shut her up!)
Since what had been done to her on the island still remained unknown to us, Francine and I, who both failed (exultantly) to resist her, sometimes posited to Selene that Neva’s magnetic power was nothing more than coincidence between our need to worship and her presumable craving for adoration—a marriage cemented by coincidence. Hoping we would like her better if she agreed with us, the transwoman quoted an appropriate scripture from Judy Garland, who warned each and every actress who would come after her to never lay aside humility: If she loses her sense of perspective, she may begin thinking how great she is, when actually her success may be just a matter of luck and a few pretty close-ups.—And with Neva, she said, maybe it’s just the way she looks at us or something.
Or something, said Francine. Six dollars.
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The first time I myself saw her stride in, which as you know was at Selene’s wedding, I remember that she stood just within our darkness as if she were waiting for her pupils to enlarge so that she could see us in our boredom and numbness, showing off our shallow friendships, petty cruelties and filthy jokes, not knowing that we illuminated ourselves far more distinctly than that through our various lonely self-tortures. (Al sat toadlike in his chair, shaking his head back and forth, while another man with folded arms stood smilingly shaking his head.) She looked, not long but long enough—she who would soon take my hand. After that one time, she never paused when she came in.
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Now I had better introduce some of us (the rest will not hesitate to insinuate themselves): half-secretive addicts and dreamers, greyhaired little boys who suffered without knowing why, because they never worked out that they should have been girls; women stained with a need which they told themselves was simple femininity; souls who hated themselves for being neither fish nor fowl—not to mention all of us who no matter how “enlightened” our self-acceptance trudged the night streets in dread of having our skulls smashed in. In absolute terms we were not such wretches as all that, but who could be anything attractive in comparison to perfect Neva? Anyway, we all had meteoric pasts:*
(1) Sandra, most innocently gentle of us all, was nearly but not entirely a G-girl. She projected the silky, faraway little-girlness of Natalie Wood.
(2) The straight man was a recent graduate of one of those vacations which begin in a double bed and end in two single beds, each party lying silent, rigid and desperate, longing for the other to be the loving angel of yesterday, dreading the next sound, wishing it could be over. When Madeline came out from the shower, he saw with horror that she wore a towel around her and quickly dressed with her back to him. Soon she was saying so bitterly: You don’t know how it’s been for me with you not seeing me for six months and me all alone and remembering the last time when you said we’d never live together, so I got resigned, and now you say, well, maybe we can live together, but that’s just because you don’t like the idea of me living with someone else. I think you’re pretty damned insensitive.—Then she left the straight man, who accordingly longed to ejaculate his loneliness into someone else. Fortunately, he had Sandra.
(3) Shantelle, lacking the benefit of Natalie Wood’s driving mother, was the kind of lover who would only suck you with a condom on, and never let you taste her, “for health reasons,” but who fake-moaned softly (for considerations of discretion) and plausibly, in hopes of hurrying matters along. Of course the foregoing rules went by the wayside in cases of lust, anger or profit. She knew that some women looked down on her for being a hardcore double bitch, but fuck them! Her favorite thing of all (aside from being with Neva) was losing her temper. The delicious smell of her rage often exalted Judy into a yearning to lick her armpits.
(4) Holly, blonde and barrel-shaped, was a one-oh-one-percent out lesbian whom we hardly knew; with Neva now in the picture she swam into the Y Bar more and more. First she looked intrigued to be among us; then she started getting sadder and sadder.—Or am I imagining this? Sometimes I make up stories, to help me feel more alive; and it could well be that all my fellow drinkers at the Y Bar were just as happy as I; they often imply that I am stupid, upon which I go inside myself and pretend.
(5) Xenia, who back in her speed freak days used to shave her head, effecting some kind of androgyny, but nonetheless never eschewed long eyelashes and leopard prints, kept pretending to be twenty-five. If I could turn into a woman, but not into Neva, maybe I would hope to resemble Xenia. Unlike me, she was always up and doing. She moonlighted at the Pink Apple, about which establishment she said: You get to the stage and do your thing, and the people are very happy, and you look behind you, and they’re taking their money back . . .—She readily entered into love but flinched at inevitabilities. Rich in stories and advice, she knew what to say to those who suffered, so long as they looked up to her wisdom while allowing her to be young. (Well, Xenia kind of feels a notch above, said Francine. Most of us aren’t like that. When I text her I do say I love you.) She intended to leave us anytime, thanks to her superior options.
(6) Hunter, formerly a shy child who collected pictures of kd lang to put on her bedroom wall, was or possibly was not a part of Xenia’s departure plan; we avoided her because she was beautiful and unavailable. Sandra once told her that she embodied whatever lesbian chic might be, at which she smiled. The transwoman was nearly through with hoping to imprison her in adulation forever. Like the rest of us, Hunter yearned to kiss the lesbian, but most certainly loved Xenia in some strange and noble way which could not be explained.
(7) Waiflike Erin was almost gratuitously kind to Judy, who thirsted for stories about being a little girl or being a woman, which the retired policeman referred to as all that phony first period crap. Sometimes when she told Judy about something that had happened to her long ago, Erin could not believe herself. Preferring not to cry in front of others, she went outside and improved her day by forgetting. She never wanted us to find out where she lived, although I guess Neva must have known. Now Erin was forty; she tried to go on being a waif but that was getting more difficult.
(8) Francine got through life by refrigerating her own desires. She so well knew what each of us drank, and followed those data into our mouths and up into our skulls, to discover how we thought (answer: not in words), and even what we lived for, which is to say, how we each went about ruining ourselves: most of us going fat and diabetic from alcohol, our truest medicine, whose grace, entering our blood one shot at a time, allowed us to tolerate the lesbian’s infidelities.—Francine’s coolly careful affect invariably (and I submit unfairly) put the retired policeman in mind of a certain well-tailored, motherly old landlady he had once arrested who advised the court: And I would like to point out that I was never in the deceased woman’s room alone.—That bitch got convicted, of course. But Francine remained at large.
(9) I was a nothing; I existed, if at all, for no good reason. My most distinguishing chara
cteristics being foreknowledge and passivity, I realized that when my wife Michelle began to stare silently at me for half an hour at a time, weeping silently, that I should hold her or leave her; so I did neither. But when it dawned on me that her flat of birth control pills had remained three-quarters full all month, I took charge; which is to say that the interrogation extruded from her a denial so shamefacedly false that why I failed to pull out of our connubial activities is a mystery, especially since I then had two other women on the side, the nasty little addict and the tall gaunt thief; but at least the pills resumed their one-by-one diminution—down the toilet, no doubt. Since Michelle had now missed two periods I determined to suggest an abortion, in consideration of the lukewarmness of our attachment; so I got drunk and watched the shadows changing on the wall. Once Cassandra was born, I certainly should have shown how much I loved her, but I blamed her mother for dishonesty, which was why I spent even more time in the beds of other women. And so Michelle’s silences developed a more scheming quality. Half poisoned with dread that she would run away with the child, I fled to the city of Martinez for a three-day cocaine weekend with a young lady who had found me adorable. Upon my return I found mother and daughter gone, along with most of their clothes; for a souvenir they had left me a sinkload of dishes now invested by a regiment of German cockroaches. Since I had lived off Michelle, and the rent would be due on Wednesday, I skipped out, parasitizing a man and his wife who failed to keep their promise to have my likeness appear in a sex magazine. Michelle must have gone to her mother. I rang up the old lady, who called me a monster and warned me never to contact her or her daughter again. Thus assured that I was correct as usual, I called Michelle ten times an hour until finally she answered, coldly verifying my hypothesis. The mother died; after some years Michelle contracted an incurable illness, as I had been hoping she would, at which point Cassandra, whose heart they had inculcated against me, went to distant relatives in Morgan, Minnesota. Thus my glowing career. I have folded down the corner of this page in order to more easily rehearse my accomplishments.
The Lucky Star Page 11