Aha, that proves it! You’re raring to get away from me, but you don’t have the courage. Ain’t that right, Frankie boy? Why, I know you so well! You were born to crawl, Frank, but now you’d rather crawl to your Earth Mother and kiss her ass.
She stood staring at him, gripping her temples.
You know what? You’re a user. You’re a goddamned leech, he said. Remember when I paid full restitution for your gift card fraud at that stinking wig store? I should have let you go down.
Clenching her fists, she continued to say nothing, and the quarrel might have fizzed out like an old man’s erection, were it not for the scrap of green he saw beneath her pillow. Before she could stop him, he pulled it violently out. With a nasty smile he wadded it up and inhaled with sarcastic soulfulness.—So that’s what your Karen piglet smells like, he said. Or is that you I’m smelling, Frank? Something stinks . . . !
3
The story of the green scrap typifies all three of its principals.
Just as she used to sense her mother’s midnight approaches well before the doorknob turned, so now the lesbian could smell the transwoman coming into the room—cheap deodorant, dimestore perfume and male sweat. For her part, of course, the transwoman adored the odor of Neva’s body, and sometimes when she lay awake with the retired policeman snoring beside her she liked to scheme out ways of stealing her goddess’s socks or panties—relics to be kept forever. She could have asked for a present, because when did the lesbian say no to anyone? But any such overt gift would have lacked the spice of secret transgression. Closing her eyes, Judy had nearly succeeded in imagining that she was inhaling Neva’s breath when the retired policeman belched in his sleep. She rolled toward the wall. The most practical plan (originating in his instructions on roving surveillance) was to wait until Neva had to use the toilet, and then quickly, quietly open a dresser drawer. But as it happened, her quotidian female persecutor smoothed the way. One afternoon while helping to clean her hostess’s apartment (hoping to pay herself in stray hairs, used tissues or whichever other souvenirs could be obtained), she felt under the sofa and found the first moon-green blouse that the lesbian used to wear so often to the Y Bar; it had been ripped down the front. Oh yes, Shantelle played rough!—From the dirty darkness the transwoman grabbled out all but two of the scattered buttons.—It’s beyond saving, said the lesbian.
Neva, how did you feel when it happened?
All right.
You weren’t angry?
She couldn’t help it.
Has she ever raped you?
Judy, it’s not good for you to ask what I do with others. It makes you unhappy, and it’s also not fair to them.
I know, but . . . Will you buy another green blouse?
If you want me to.
Oh, I do! When can you?
The lesbian laughed sadly. The transwoman dropped the ruined blouse into the garbage bag, and then, when the lesbian went down the hall to get the vacuum cleaner, the blouse flew out of the bag and into a certain someone’s purse. That wonderful feeling, almost as good as a climax, whenever she stole something and got it safely into her concealed possession, had abandoned her for ages; she didn’t dare to shoplift anymore. This was failsafe. Her primary aim accomplished, she could now afford to be magnanimously honest, so when the other woman came back she asked: Neva, could I please have these buttons?
Sure, said the lesbian, knowing everything.
Did you have that blouse a long time?
Oh, not so long . . .
They vacuumed, mopped the kitchen, cleaned the refrigerator, dusted both closets, scrubbed the shower, disinfected the toilet, changed the sheets, then carried two loads to the laundromat. The transwoman was the happiest girl in the world!—because none of this counted against her apportioned time.
When she got home, just before dawn, waving at a silent someone in a miniskirt who stood in the half-dark (the woman’s face shadowed nearly into skullishness as she offered herself bravely and sincerely to the darkness), Judy counted the buttons into an empty coffee can—counted and counted and counted them, because she’d already lost one!—and then, sitting down, pouring herself a double shot of bourbon, she took out the lesbian’s blouse. Tenderly she smoothed it out. She brushed away lint and crumbs. Then she held it to her face, and took possession of what she had won: Neva’s scent.
How could I describe her rapture? She felt as powerful as Wonder Woman! Giggling and giggling, so thrilled was she, she felt as if she were sitting so high in the opera house that if she only possessed a ladder on top of a ladder she might almost have touched the ceiling-disk, which was meant to mimic tropical sea-sky around the spearheaded golden crystals of the chandelier; of course that would have been too grand for her, so let me instead imagine looking from a dark balcony, way past you and me, down into the illuminated twiddlers in the orchestra pit.—Neatly folding her treasure, she enclosed it in a plastic bag, in order to preserve the fragrance as long as she could. Then she hid it in her lingerie drawer, meaning never to tell anybody. But it soon flew out of the bag and under her pillow, where the retired policeman so triumphantly discovered it.
4
When he implied that Neva stank, he knew that he transgressed, but, as so often happens when two people pass years in a “relationship,” they had both grown careless of each other’s feelings.
She said: Take that back. Please.
He laughed at her, so she snatched up a glass with her toothbrush in it and threw it at him. It struck him just below the eye, then fell unbroken to the carpet.
He laughed again.
5
While the lesbian was invariably sickened by self-loathing and the defeatist taint of failure whenever she had to leave someone, no matter how superficial or even abusive that person had been, Judy could not help but feel satisfaction in witnessing the distress of the very few lovers from whom she had actually separated of her own accord. Like many of us, she longed to feel “valuable.” So when she proposed to leave the retired policeman and he got teary-eyed, she instantly took notice. Not being so high and mighty as to think (as would Shantelle) that this was right and reassuring, she felt overwhelmed. It nearly seemed as if she meant something! . . . —which alone sufficed to rescind their divorce.
Of course you love her, said he. You’re two peas in a pod. Your parents rejected you, so you’ll do anything for attention. And Karen’s got her own reasons for fucking anything that moves. Just don’t think you mean anything to her.
She says I do.
A pet reptile will crawl up your skirt to get warm, not because it loves you.
But Neva says—
People say all kinds of things, he explained. You say you’re a woman. You even pretend to be Judy Garland. Frank, you’re the phoniest little faggot that ever lived.
What does that make you?
I don’t lie to myself. I know I’m a pervert, and misery loves company, period. Do you get that, bitch? You’d better memorize it, because there’s going to be a quiz, right now. So pull up your dress and bend over.
Don’t call me Frank.
Why not?
I said please don’t call me Frank.
Whatever you say, bitch. You can call me Frank for all I care.
6
What she only half realized was that after such moments of estrangement, and sometimes even immediately after, his tenderness for her reblossomed; so that while she continued in the despairing certainty that he no longer loved her, he had already returned to the past when all was perfect between them; and although it may be correct to insist, as several of her predecessors stubbornly have, that we cannot cross the same river twice, or even once, he looked back and saw the water flowing over the place where they had crossed, so that whatever wound they had made in the water no longer mattered, whereas Judy stood wet and muddy on the far bank and asked herself why she should forg
et this. Hence he, forgiving by forgetting, quickly found her sorrow still occluding the inch of sunshine between them, and then, less offended than simply wearied, stood sadly aside, hardening her conviction of abandonment. Thus they went on alone together. Whenever she lost her desire for him, he used to go out to the hall in the middle of the night and masturbate. A few months later, when she began to experience increasing difficulty in sleeping, she would shake his shoulder to make him stop snoring, and after this began to happen several times each night, he started sleeping on the bathroom floor. As a matter of fact they both snored, as ageing people tend to do, and sometimes he would lie awake by the toilet, feeling her snores vibrating through the wall. From her point of view, he snored like a monster as she put it.
By now more infidelities were inevitable, and although one might have expected him to move first, the unfaithful party turned out to be her, not that she was actively to blame, since the game commenced when Melba, who had never given up insisting that the retired policeman remained the love of her life and that they were in actuality still together, decided to undermine Judy’s inconvenient romance, which she could very easily do by seducing Judy, who after all was more susceptible than almost anyone who had ever lived. The first step was to flatter her, which took five minutes. The next was to slide her hand up her skirt, and as Melba accomplished this maneuver, right there at the Y Bar, she whispered in Judy’s ear that she had with her two doses of a certain exotic love drug, and she also had a place. Although the transwoman had been warned never to accept Melba’s various offers, the possibility that someone might desire her (in other words, no matter how withholding the retired policeman might become, Judy still had options), clinched the transaction; and Melba even paid for both their drinks.
7
These pink pills were supposed to be something snuggly-speedy combined with a synthetic version of the Peruvian hallucinogen ayahuasca, through which, the story went, one could literally see another’s emotions; however, it spared its patients the vomiting that was a hallmark of true ayahuasca; anyhow, before either one of them had even climaxed once, the transwoman, who had barely begun to adore Melba’s mons veneris, grew confused and fell rapidly asleep, snoring so loudly that first the lampshade and then the bedroom door itself began to vibrate, unless of course (the Goddess being unavailable for consultations) these vibrations might be simply a false perception caused by the drug, which presently carried Melba out of her own cold corpse and into the transwoman’s mouth, behind her teeth, across her tongue and beyond her glottis until everything began to appear vaguely impossible, just as when one pays to descend beneath the street of some European city, finding interminable Roman structures in that narrow slice of upraised darkness; so it was when Melba went inside Judy’s consciousness, or at least hallucinated that she had—and isn’t belief nearly indistinguishable from fact?
To enter into this other woman’s skull was to find herself within a grand stone basilica whose eyes were high narrow windows, colored by the stained glass of Judy’s thoughts, across which sun and cloud chased each other in eternal insignificance, thereby muting and brightening their fixed figures; and nowhere in this grand space whose stone floor had been inscribed with dates and crude robed men in three-pointed hats was there either blood nor brainy miasma, because she, the penetrator, had herself become blood and brain, invisible to herself, happily hypnotized by the jeweled mosaics of thought-light: the saints were the ones whom she loved and could not stop praying to: the retired policeman, her father who had punished her, God as she conceived of Him (a kinder, fairer yet sterner version of the other two); and there beneath three-petaled red and lavender blossoms of illuminated glass stood everyone’s true love, the lesbian, in a night-dress of ultramarine, outstretching her hand toward her unknown (at least to Judy) mother, weeping ruby tears; while in an adjacent window, although the skull’s original inhabitant had pretended to forget her, darling, dangerous Shantelle, who longed for her love to swallow up all the others, smiled sleekly, with sunshine entering the nave most dazzlingly through her white, white teeth. Truth to tell, the presence of this latter intercessor did not trouble Melba nearly as much as the lesbian’s, which was sufficiently prominent and beautiful as to be unforgivable—so much so, indeed, that the many mean, stained, wrecked, corrupted and broken aspects of Judy (for instance, the crypt of her childhood’s skeletons, which had terrified their involuntary keeper all her life, or the broken statue from her late boyhood or girlhood, canted and armless, staring up as in agony) could not soften Melba into pity any more than the transwoman’s continued insistence that the lesbian did not love her could do anything but, were that person at all human, drive the lesbian away. Naturally, Neva did and would love her. Therefore, Melba hated Judy. Had she pried up any mosaics from that stone skull-floor she would have realized how rotten her intended victim’s attachments truly were: Judy would have loved her for nothing!—But Melba left her alone, and so by an error Judy’s love for the retired policeman was saved.
8
Whistling, he unbuckled his belt and permitted Judy to kiss it for half a minute.—Oh, baby, she sighed, it smells so good, just like you . . .
Turn over, he said, and began carefully (gently at first) flogging her buttocks just the way that she liked it. She started weeping. He kissed the back of her neck. Then, to him most embarrassingly, he found himself weeping also. Judy was delighted. Saying nothing, he breathed hard, then suddenly whipped her once with considerable force so that she screamed.
That was a good one, babe! he chuckled. Oh, Jesus . . .
9
Judy’s life, in short, proceeded on its quotidian way. She got high on goofballs, and when the straight man smirked at her, she giggled to me: Cool, I’m being recognized, but he’s not gonna hound me for an autograph . . . !—Just as when some café opens on a rainy morning and a man hastens out into the rain, in his arms a neat stack of empty crates to be filled, while behind him the graffiti’d grating half rises, catching silver rain-light and greenish-yellow streetlight, and through the window one now sees the waitress pulling chairs off the tables and setting them right, so from the transwoman’s open heart someone or something set out into the world as usual to forage for somebody or really anybody, while something else within her began dusting away cobwebs and mopping up last night’s tears. But into the café people are already coming, lowering their umbrellas, greeting the waitress, choosing tables, setting down their purses, chatting or darting their fingers over their darling mobile phones, making dates, contentedly paying to be served, while into Judy nobody but the retired policeman and Neva went, not even the shivering woman whose umbrella now blew inside out.
Show Nights
I’m terribly critical, but sometimes I have liked myself.
JUDY GARLAND, 1948
Today’s women who have sex with other women encounter intolerance wherever they live.
KAT HARDING, 2004
1
Now once more it was show night. Although a drunk had broken the catty pole, Francine was lining up glasses just the same, deploying ice and squirty fizzy water from the siphon, planting black plastic cocktail straws in each assemblage, and finally, just to be honest, swishing in a pinch of watered-down alcohol.
Xenia, whose silver dress had long since been just so, was informing Sandra: You see, my early experiences were with really femme girls. We were always really high, and there was a lot of whipping. I cheated on my butch speed dealer girlfriend and if even Neva wanted me to be faithful I would cheat on her too. Praise the Goddess she doesn’t care!
Three dollars, said Francine. Sandra, you need another?
No, replied that girl, I’m good.
(Actually she was not so good, because last night she had been dreaming of the smoke-blackened windows of a ruined castle, whose tiles and glass had long broken and fallen. Cirrus clouds scudding through the doorways. She was inside, or maybe outside, wai
ting for Neva: the one who was so magical that she could for all Sandra knew sleep with a dead woman and still conceive a child! And somewhere, maybe behind the castle or else in the courtyard, rose a young beech tree whose waist was bent and whose green-fingered arms rose high up as it swayed to wind-music. Sandra was a young blonde girl in a red tartan skirt; she wore her hair in a knot, and her slender arms and legs were ever so white. She sat down on one of two facing stone seats at the edge of the roofless hall, hoping for Neva, looking out the broken sill of a window down at the shaking maples and oaks and beeches, while the wind hissed up and down. Neva would never come again! And Sandra awoke in tears.)
Shantelle had made herself over as a red-glowing girl with a red scarf tied turban-fashion around her forehead; her extra-long lashes flexed like dancing tarantulas. Casting down her glittering eyes into the glow of her phone, she texted some admirer or financial connection, while Xenia was explaining to Francine: When my girlfriend was doing business, Christobel would come and collect me from the strip club. Actually she had a friend who would pick me up without speaking, and she would take me to her house and it was very rough play . . . —while in the dark corner where the retired policeman so often sat, Al and I were compressing Judy’s love handles so that she could zip herself into a thirteen-dollar fuck-me skirt. She was giggling with excitement; she loved to be operated on.
By now the Y Bar was becoming someone’s dream of a canted orchestra, with everyone clapping to the tuba and the stage lighting up, Xenia teasing Shantelle, really asking for it, until Francine saved her from what she deserved. While I waited for the retired policeman, a naked-chested boy in a skirt and collar was already hugging everybody with a sparkly-eyelidded smile.—This might be one of our best show nights ever!—I remember a troop of show-hungry lesbians and G-girls, their young voices getting shriller as they caressed each other’s naked shoulders while Francine pounded ice most crashingly, and I remember the backs and slumped shoulders of the line of European men leaning forward at the bar with their coats hanging on the chairs behind them and a line of blue light glowing behind Francine. By then we had finally gotten Judy packed into her outfit.
The Lucky Star Page 28