There you go. Fourteen dollars, said Francine.
Then the transwoman looked up and abandoned her Dutchman. Seeing Neva, she felt as happy as Judy Garland on morphine.
14
Because she loved the fair sex even more than I do—enough to become a member—the transwoman is one of my heroines. Moreover, what the lesbian did to her, not that I entirely understand it, was so extraordinary that her story might as well come first as well as last. Besides, I heard its most salacious details from her, so why not infect you with the virus? Although neither of us drinks as much as when Neva was alive, we still toast each other now and then, usually at the Cinnabar. I think of her as my little sister, and she thinks of me as someone who would be better off dead.
From what she later told me, I gather that she meant at first not to tell the retired policeman, who anyhow also kept or at least used to keep Melba, that old diva who could still smile fetchingly although it cracked her paint to do it; for a drink and a stinking kiss she aided him in his projects, which was why Judy vengefully concluded that a girl’s dates were her own business. In short, she confessed no sooner than she had to.
Meanwhile, like the stripper who wears a T-shirt and nothing else, squatting over the jukebox to choose the toniest accompaniment for her act, while coincidentally marketing her low-hanging fruit, our Judy now most thoughtfully schemed out her debut with Neva—because sooner or later it had to be her turn!
First of all, she had hopes that the lesbian would be allured by the broad shoulders and male strength of transwomen, and perhaps just a little by their masculine smell—because wasn’t Neva attracted to anything?
Judy could barely decide what to wear, much less how to act. Unlike Erin, she had never been beautiful all the time. But Himmel’s department store had agreed to try her out on Monday, which thickened her confidence. So why not get her hooks into Neva? In the end, she followed the advice of her namesake: Most of all, on a date I think a girl should be herself . . . I’ve had my moments when I thought I’d try to act like Marlene Dietrich or even Garbo. And then I’d figure that it was my natural self, such as I am, that attracted my date in the beginning . . . Whether her “natural” self possessed any exchange value whatsoever is a sterile question, by which I mean that Judy Garland couldn’t have answered it, either. But that famous photograph of Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon in 1978 was another confidence-builder: that face was unafraid of anything! If Judy could only lose weight, be beautiful and make muscles like Martina’s . . . !
Hating herself as usual, she could not even introduce herself, but it so fell out that Victoria, who owed her twenty dollars and moreover was growing more night-social, almost chatty, finally (while the rest of us merely laughed at the way Judy kept trying and failing not to look at the lesbian, much as she so often unsuccessfully essayed not to steal our pills), took her hand, led her up to the bright side of the bar, and placed her hand in Neva’s. Neva smiled then. She kissed Victoria’s forehead. Victoria flushed and turned away.
Hi, said Judy.
Hello again, said Neva.
Do you remember the first time we met? I bought you a drink at Selene’s wedding, and . . .
Her idol smiled a little, squeezing her hand.
I’ve heard about you, said Judy. I mean, I’ve heard even more. And, gosh. People say things . . .
Oh? said the lesbian.
That you’re wonderful and everybody loves you. Are you beautiful all the time?
I’ll try, said the lesbian.
At Selene’s wedding the transwoman had been spared any obligation of describing herself, her lonely employments or her sad life. What now? She longed to stroke the fine hairs on Neva’s arms.
Literalizing what she romanticized, she had pictured her idol as dwelling somewhere as high up the hill as Mason and California, where one can gaze down into a narrowing canyon of lights all the way to Market Street and the light-riddled ridge of darkness behind it, all the while half-listening to the cable car wires scraping like knives on whirling whetstones; and the Fairmont Hotel would be, at least in her expectations and recollections, eternally decked out in rain-glossed Christmas lights.
In fact, as do most divinities, the lesbian lived practically around the corner.
15
And so Neva took her upstairs, sat her down and asked her what she would like to do, or possibly have done to her.
It was not so much what Judy replied as how she said it that stimulated her hostess’s intuition; within a twinkling she knew exactly what needed to be done, and did it, folding her new sweetheart into her arms.—Judy, of course, began to weep silently. She said: Oh, Neva, I—I feel so loved! . . .—which at that point meant seen.
And the lesbian kissed her lips. The transwoman was ashamed to open them, but the lesbian kept gently, patiently licking between them, until she finally let the lesbian’s tongue into her mouth.
16
Judy’s mouth stank. The lesbian endured that, because she needed so much to make this sad person happy!
17
A certain half-great writer who was also a half-great Fascist used to divagate about this wave of pleasure or that stream of pleasure; when it rained pleasure his characters got drenched right to their bones; when pleasure seeped out of the sewers it invaded them through the soles of their feet, creeping up their legs in an inverse of the way it left them when they had finished being high on ecstasy pills; and so once upon a time a nubile heroine of his experienced a stream of pleasure rising up her arm and spreading across her chest and insinuating itself into her most intimate fibers, as if pleasure were an electroid current, composed of clitoral electrons, conducted from one body to another, through human tissues. Certain apoplectics have described their attacks using comparable tropes.—It started in the fingers of my left hand, said an old fellow who used to be me, and it rushed up my left arm, into my shoulder and up my neck; I was talking on the phone with my lesbian friend, and once that feeling reached my head I couldn’t speak, or understand what she was saying . . .—Just this experience now took hold, with coruscations of pleasure rushing from the lesbian’s fingers into the transwoman’s upper arm, down into her fingers and back up into her shoulder, the current presently dividing in order to tingle inside her breasts until her hardening nipples seemed to be spewing out sparks in the manner of Roman candles.
Too good, it seemed—a divine visitation, which at any moment would leave Judy high and dry forever. But it stayed inside her, every moment she was with the lesbian! After awhile it even began to be hers. And then I’d figure that it was my natural self, such as I am. I liken her to some casual swimmer who, gulled by those smooth green waves which seem perpetually available to return anyone and everyone to the sandline, faces outward, approves of the horizon and breaststrokes toward it for the merest moment or two, then back-floats, enjoying the clouds . . . only to realize that she is now far, far away from the cove where her friends lie happily on their towels; already she has passed the wide-lipped lava caves; she is being carried out to sea! So she turns back toward shore and begins to swim, not too hard at first, because she had better not tire herself out with nobody here to help her; nor does she verify her progress often, in case its slightness would discourage her; but after, say, a thousand strokes it would be reasonable to raise herself up—and she has gone nowhere! A little anxious now, she rolls over and backstrokes, which she knows she can keep up for a long time, thanks to the happy buoyancy of big-breasted chubby people. She gently sculls and determinedly kicks, trying to keep calm. After all, she isn’t getting out of breath. After five or six thousand strokes she looks up again, and now the beach is closer, but not much . . . and in this one moment she has already begun to be pulled back out to sea. Knowing better than to panic, she rolls over once more, backstroking steadily and resolutely, sculling more powerfully, kicking faster, and after a very long time, worrying and tiring, she lo
oks up; this time the shore is sufficiently close for her to see the miniscule silhouettes of waders and sunbathers. Thus encouraged, she gets on her back again and keeps at it until she is nearly out of breath. Now she can see the colors of people’s bathing costumes; she is almost as close in as the farthest surfer. All but one of the lava caves are seaward of her. But she needs to swim more powerfully, because here the undertow is very strong, so she resorts again to the breaststroke, putting her heart into it until she gasps. She should be close enough now to touch bottom with her feet, but she isn’t. Dispirited most of all by the monotony of the work, she pants on. Much later than she ever would have imagined comes the moment when she can stand up in the surf. For awhile she rests there, while the green waves strike between her shoulders, sometimes almost knocking her down. Then she begins to wade out of the ocean. With each step she grows safer but also heavier, and when she finally reaches dry sand, with seawater rushing from her hair and her bathing suit, she feels as if she were sinking into the earth.
So it was for the transwoman when, having embarked on a deceptively easy swim into the currents of womanhood, she finally came back home into the lesbian’s arms.
Two hours afterward, in the miraculously eternal present which would shelter her whenever she was with the lesbian, they lay side by side with their legs wide open, and as she whirled her middle finger round and round the little hard bullet of the lesbian’s clitoris and the lesbian began to pant and lick her lips even as her right hand slid sweetly up and down the transwoman’s towering penis, there came one of those moments so familiar to devotees of recreational drugs; and just as a military veteran rarely confides his memories of horrific killing and dying to anyone but another veteran, so the psychedelic veteran locks his insights away from sober people, whose inability to understand too often expresses itself in laughter or contempt; indeed, these experiences lie nearly as far beyond the reach of verbalizing as any color does; whoever has never seen red can by reading multiple descriptions achieve a practical intellectual understanding—it is associated with, for instance, blood, lips, vaginas—but to experience a steady laughing warmth around one’s heart after seeing the lesbian’s mouth would exemplify an entirely different order of understanding. And so it is with chemically induced realizations, hallucinogenic spiritual visions and extreme sexual experiences. What the transwoman felt when she and the lesbian were masturbating each other would have seemed if stated directly as drearily quotidian as a shimmering pebble withdrawn from the brook and left to dry into dullness; so I must now fail unless I can somehow write beyond or around myself, but let me try: It seemed an absolutely certain fact that even as she felt the lesbian’s clitoris and the tiny V-shaped wall of flesh above it and the shining smooth wet plain of pink skin below it, she felt what the clitoris was feeling; she experienced the lesbian’s pounding heart and happy rushing urgent excitement as that middle finger graced her faster and faster, and she could feel what the lesbian’s right hand was feeling as it so tenderly and correctly caressed her penis’s smooth skin; she and the lesbian had become each other even as they continued to be themselves, although all there was to both of them was moving hands and excited sex organs; mouths, eyes, breasts, hearts, brains and straining thighs existed only in some subsidiary sense; in short (and here is where the glistening pebble goes dry), she felt an absolute if deeply narrow oneness with the other woman. You or I can shrug. How often have we dismissed such portentous assertions? My friend, unless something like this happens to you, you will never believe. The transwoman did, of course, and their union went on and on. They neither climaxed nor needed to; what they felt was less intense than an orgasm, but wider: a steady and apparently endless stream of pleasure.
18
Once they separated, Judy decided to break her date with the retired policeman so that she could lie down in her room alone, thinking about the lesbian.—What normativizers might consider a weakness, namely, her tendency to dream herself through life, was actually her help and strength, because why not sidestep the so-called “real questions” if their answers would only prove one’s helplessness? For instance, the lesbian’s beauty, instead of discouraging her, made her thirsty to try to lick it up—as if that were possible!—For a long time she felt a remnant of that strong and steady bliss which had warmed her in the lesbian’s arms and lingered as a kind of peace. It seemed as if she could stay awake all night, taking stock of what she had made of herself and who she ought to be. That feeling lasted on and on, as apparently durable and reliable as a wide stone ledge. She went out into the hallway, raised the greasy windowshade, which was smeared with commemorations of bygone houseflies and cockroaches, and looked into the darkness. The feeling was still there; perhaps she could trust it. Although she had begun to feel cold, her hands and face still glowed, because they had been so close to the lesbian. After awhile, she returned to her windowless room, locked the door and stared into the mirror above the sink. She granted that she was ugly, but at least she was trying to be who she was. Her temples began to ache. She lay down on her back, remembering the lesbian. Her feet felt colder, and perhaps that trustworthy feeling had lessened a trifle, or somehow descended. Her hand still smelled like the lesbian’s cunt, and that comforted her. Her certainty of union remained, but the sensation of bodily transference had gone to join all her past climaxes: schematically remembered at best, the unique feeling gone forever. Now she felt cold around her heart. Undressing, she brushed her teeth, moisturized her face, hands, shoulders, legs and chest, combed out her hair and shaved her bristly chin. She was sweaty, but her body might still retain the lesbian’s scent, so she declined to shower. Her nightgown had once been bridal white; now it was grey. She pulled it over herself. Just then her phone began buzzing. It was the retired policeman, so she let it ring. When it stopped, she turned it off. Then she got under the sheets. Staring at the ceiling, she touched herself, pretending that her hand belonged to the lesbian, but it didn’t feel that way. She switched off the bedside lamp. After a dismal five minutes she switched it on again, sat up, pulled her purse off the vanity, snapped it open, and felt around among the tissues new and used, the old bus passes, the keys and condoms, until she found the retired policeman’s bottle of tranquilizer pills, two of which she dry-swallowed. Then she turned out the lamp again. It took a long time before she began to feel sleepy, but when that sensation came it was delicious.
She woke up late in the morning, with a headache, shivering, nauseous and desperate. Unable to endure herself, she sat on the toilet weeping.
By noon the retired policeman had given her a black eye in the interest of crime control, after which they made up, by means of her opening herself and receiving pain like a true woman; then she arranged a second date with the lesbian.
19
Next came Hunter’s turn. She sat nursing her usual (a double Slambang over ice), while Selene was telling Francine: We also had this understanding that when we were grocery shopping at certain places, we wouldn’t hold hands. With a lot of Latinos around or children around, we wouldn’t. If we were with friends, it was okay. If we felt that we weren’t safe, then we wouldn’t do it. We would wait until we got home and to the car. Even with family we weren’t intimate.
Eight dollars, said Francine.
I’m more open about it now, said Selene. I think if it makes more people uncomfortable, too bad. We give heterosexual couples the liberty of doing what they want. Now it’s about, if it’s little kids, they need to see that that’s normal.
Hunter finished her drink. She drummed on the counter. Finally the lesbian came in.
Xenia would fuck anything, which made Hunter bitter and jealous; this first time with Neva had been intended foremost to punish Xenia—who of course was simply proud that they would both get to compare notes, as if they were sharing a likely seafood dish at the Cambodian restaurant on Hyde Street.
The bathroom door opened, and the lesbian came in, saying: Here’s a nic
e clean towel.
Admiring the sweet rounding of her abdomen, Hunter wondered once more whether or not the lesbian was herself or performed herself, and if there was a difference.
As for Neva, when she had undressed the other woman, she found her plumper and still more fairskinned than she had appeared in her leopard-print dress, and the nipples on her big breasts were charmingly small and pink without any areolae; one by one they hardened on the lesbian’s tongue. The two of them started kissing. With her habitual quickness the lesbian realized that Hunter wanted first to kiss more than be kissed, so she opened her mouth and let Hunter very shyly explore it with lips and tongue. She slid her middle finger between Hunter’s legs. Hunter was still wearing her leopard-print panties. The lesbian glided her finger back and forth on the smooth polyester until it was dripping wet.—Please, Hunter, she whispered, let me eat your pussy now . . .—And in the sweetest possible frenzy, Hunter jerked her panties down and threw them onto the floor. Her vulva was compact and small-lipped, with a short blonde fringe on either side. Happily closing her eyes, the lesbian began to do as her mother had taught her. Soon Hunter, who reminded me of the violated woman who above all indignities never forgot coming downstairs from the rape crisis center as the mailman ascended, looking up her skirt, was sighing as if from far away, and when she climaxed the noise she made was what a child would hear in a seashell.
Although few would dare accuse the gods of misleading us, given the disparity between us and them in knowledge, not to mention mortality, who would deny that they withhold nearly everything that we foolishly long to learn? I for one feel grateful to go on in ignorance of my death-particulars; and if awareness of my shabby love-destinies fell upon my upturned head, would I be better off? In any event, when we beg, assert, declare and declaim to the Goddess, she most often replies with a smile of heartbreaking neutrality. And exactly that smile now met Hunter when, lying sleepily in the lesbian’s arms, she asked: Neva, do you mind if I ask you something?
The Lucky Star Page 16