I won’t blame you, Shantelle surprisingly said, but I’m feelin’ fuckin’ disappointed ’cause I had taken that day off from work and I was feeling well and . . .
I got married, said the lesbian.
What the fuck are you talking about? I’m your girlfriend!
The lesbian, she who alone could shine over the immensity of Shantelle’s love, explained: I’m in Carmel right now, on my honeymoon.
There used to be something magnificent and highly erotic when Shantelle lost her temper; the lesbian liked it when Shantelle slapped her face and beat her. Just now she merely felt that familiar ache in the center of her chest, of grief and of dread that the impending growth of that grief might be desperately insupportable; yet all the while there was something clean and proud in her, that she was finally being true to herself alone.
I just don’t understand, said Shantelle in a dull voice that Neva had never heard before. I feel frustrated. I feel so angry! Because some people I got absolutely no interest in and never want to hear about did something in Hawaii! You know what? Leave me the fuck alone! Don’t you ever talk to me no more!
And she slammed down the phone. Neva had a feeling of relief.
She lay on her back watching the ceiling fan spin like the propeller of a lazy plane to nowhere, with the string for its power switch and the string for the light bulb that hung down from it like a robot angel’s teat twitching both more moderately and more evenly than the hip-fringes that hung from a certain stripper’s panties at the Pink Apple. She watched it until it made her sleepy. She had a headache.
She looked at her phone and saw that Shantelle had called but not left a message. Judy had called her eight times in the last hour.
She stood up. She brushed her hair and opened the door. The little girl Andrea came running toward her, shouting with glee.
9
Upon her husband’s return, they strolled around the tide pools of Point Lobos. A woman in a red skirt was taking a man’s photograph, the hem riding maniacally up her thighs. Young men clambered over the rocks. Couples showed each other cell phone photos. A Japanese couple took three selfies, in obedience to what Freud asserted about the individual in the group: His emotions become extraordinarily intensified, while his intellectual ability becomes markedly reduced . . . The straight man was clutching at her with his skinny rigid fingers, and the white white foam slithering in through the dark channel of barnacles.
The lesbian gazed down at those dark green kelp-fingers, strangely like palm-fronds, outspread rays of a green sky in the black sky of a tide pool, whose patchy galaxies crawled with crabs.
Excuse me, said a man. Would you please take our picture? We just got married!
The lesbian took his cell phone and aimed it.
That’s great, said the man. I’ll take your picture if you want—
No, said the straight man.
From a higher point they now overlooked the sea, which was overlain by a reflected cloud-mass that reminded her of cornstarch dissolving in water.
How would it feel to dive down in there? First there would be the coldness in her nose, then the sound of her pulse, the smell and choking taste of the sea, while above her the dark kelp-pods would ride the waves like the heads of a bird-horde.
Neva, he said, you look so far away.
She squeezed his hand.
He demanded: What are you thinking?
I love you, she said.
He fucked her raw; she never complained.
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“Honestly, I’m in no hurry to grow up,” Judy continued, her large eyes serious and a plaintive note of sincerity in her face.
ROBERT MCILWAINE, 1939
She doesn’t want to grow up. She wears short skirts, no makeup off the set.
GLADYS HALL, 1938
But gosh, everyone who knows me at all says I’m not grown up!
JUDY GARLAND, 1939
The lesbian had promised to be back from her honeymoon by six, or six-thirty at the absolute latest. If anything happened she was supposed to call the room. Judy’s phone was most definitely on. She unplugged it, just for an instant. She held it to her ear. That was how she listened to the passage of time, which on Saturdays was most often represented to her by the whirling stormclouds of clothes in the bank of dryers whose porthole vistas seemed at the same time to look out onto something grand and to repeat the same constricted circling almost without end—the end, of course, infallibly presenting itself once the money ran out.
At seven-fifty she began to feel sick to her stomach. She looked at the lesbian’s roller suitcase on the floor, and the lesbian’s bottles of pills on the dresser, and the photographs of her and the lesbian together that the lesbian had taken and laid out in two neat rows. (The famous overnight bag was gone, of course.) Like a good secret agent, she looked under the bed, finding nothing but dustballs, a live cockroach and a business card bearing two interlinked female symbols. She was wondering whether Neva might have been killed in a car accident, or if she could be trapped on the phone with Shantelle, or had the straight man waylaid her and dragged her back to his house? She knew that Neva was almost perfect; her sole flaw was her inability to say no.
Judy wondered what to do. She might or might not have just enough money to pay for the hotel, but what should she do with Neva’s belongings? And since she had checked in under a false name, without showing identification, what if they refused to accept cash, or insisted on seeing a driver’s license? Hungry and dispirited, she waited for the phone to ring, fearing that if she called the lesbian’s phone and the lesbian happened to be with the straight man, whom she had often heard hectoring her, something bad might occur . . .—while Xenia was thinking, not without an IQ boost from her Old German Lager: What are all these others to her? She can’t really love them all; that’s impossible. I wonder if she’ll ever explain it to me? And how can I put myself forward? I wish I were five years younger; maybe I can lose ten pounds if it’ll do any good. If stinking old Judy can do it . . . Oh, I’d do anything if I could pull off wearing a super-tight pencil skirt! Anyhow, I’d better be very careful not to act like an idiot.
As for me, I was already fantasizing what I would do with her next Wednesday; I’d ask if she could come over and she would say she could; then I’d give her a generous pinch of sugar-brown MDMA crystals, after which I’d start playing with her nipples; I’d eat my MDMA a half hour after that, so that I could still function, if you know what I mean. That night I dreamed that she stood in her dark blue dress before a red curtain, with a golden halo around her head.
The retired policeman got out of bed before ten, although the toes of his left foot ached so fiercely with the icy hotness of peripheral neuropathy that he would rather have stayed in until late afternoon, when the transwoman would honor her appointment to massage his feet and swollen ankles; but he was on the greatest case of his career, so after checking his mailbox he limped down those seven grand steps, pushed open the glass door and emerged from Empire Residences into the nasty world of Karen Strand. By eleven-thirty he had walked all six of those Turk Street blocks, and now pretended to tan himself in the hemispherical glow of the Best Auto Repair parking garage, until the vermilion hand on the street sign changed to the emerald disk that meant go, permitting that law-abiding gentleman to trudge round the corner, creeping through a crowd of Latin types who stood shouting outside the grocery store, while the old hotel signs kept overhanging like pallid hooks. Shouldering open the righthand swinging door, he scanned the sticky tables in our stuffy dark bar which smelled of bad breath and toilets. Francine eyed him as if she had forgotten who he was. Just then that washed out old postcard of the giant breast with pink spectacles on it fell off the shelf. Francine failed to notice; he should have told her, but until that first shot of Old Crow went down he lacked the get-up-and-go, so she repeatedly stepped on it, marching back and forth on Dr
ink Patrol; finally it was sticking to her shoe, and then she picked it up, sighed, reread it once and dropped it into the garbage can. Wearily she poured out his Old Crow.—Fuck that, he said, to remind her that the customer is always right. Then he ordered a glass of cherry soda with two shots of bourbon in it, in honor of his diabetes.—Six dollars, she said. He tipped her three so that she would love him.—An old man as fat and pale as a banana slug sat in one of the front row seats stretching out his pallid ectoplasmic arms in yearning to the sleek blonde T-girl who reached back toward him with a fake smile; she must have seen the color of his money.
Francine refilled his glass (and on the dark side of the bar, around her secret packet closed Shantelle’s hand, as rapidly and violently as a snapping turtle biting off a child’s finger).
Now see it our way, the retired policeman insisted. A robbery at the shoe repair place, where the business is ninety percent cash, so some guy had a gun, so the off duty officer was wrestling the guy and he was getting his ass kicked, so he shot the guy, lost his job. Now look. He fought the robber for three fuckin’ minutes. Three minutes is, well, it’s a long time to wrestle somebody when you’re going at it. Full punches for three minutes straight! I’ll bet after a minute and a half you’re gonna be thinking, fuck this. And he was at a place that was being robbed at gunpoint, and he tried to stop the violence, got hung out to dry on the basis of blood alcohol. You just never know what the calculation’s gonna be. Coulda been a liability issue. Well, he got his job back through arbitration. Now what’s he gonna do? He’s gonna sue the department. Now do you worry about everything you do on a daily basis, forever and ever?
He’s a friend of yours, said Francine. And you care about him, so—
Suicide, he said brightly.
Oh, shit, said Francine. J. D., I’m so so sorry.
The retired policeman waited for Judy, longing to grab her by both cheeks and shake her head back and forth while she barked like a dog. Finally he opened his old flip phone. When he dialled her up, she did not answer, so he went home.
As soon as he was out of the picture, that cunning lady came in, the pleats of her skirt shining whiter than blue and bluer than white. (To be more specific, she wore a short white skirt and a lace top, just like Nancy Kerrigan’s skating ensemble in Detroit just before she was assaulted.) She wasn’t exactly worried, because we had not yet arrived at the absolute latest. Having scammed her way out of that hotel room, she felt almost exhilarated; maybe she would perform again this Friday at the Pink Apple! So she clicked her shotglass against Shantelle’s, and they chanted in chorus: That’s what I’m supposed to be, a legend.
Al crept in, looking even more pale and rubbery than at Ed’s wake. He sat down beside me and said: I just can’t understand why someone would do that. She was so sweet to me at first. I always treated her right. And then to ghost me like this, it’s not fair. I texted her four times last Sunday. And we used to text each other like fifty times a day. When I left her place on Saturday, she was still calling me her husband.
Did you tell her to?
Well, yeah, but she didn’t seem to mind. Now look. Do you think it’s right, what Neva’s doing? Can you see any excuse for her behavior?
I thought about it. Then I said: No.
Until we were in the Piggy Gobble this morning I still had some hope, but now I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s over, he said, checking his cell phone again, in case Neva might have texted. I think if she gets in touch with me today, I won’t answer until tomorrow.
I almost had to laugh, watching Al trying over and over, never successfully, to understand the sudden mystery that was Neva. It distracted me from my own fear, grief and hatred.
In the niche above the bar I spied a snapshot of two chunky old women embracing in a fern-licked doorway.
Francine dropped a glass, which did not break. She fumbled with the remote control, and the television suddenly boomed: Six months ago, I hadn’t known my true love existed, but now I can’t imagine a world without her—
Sorry, said Francine, turning the volume down.
The television showed a commercial about the military keeping America safe, amen.—Look, said Xenia. My son flies helicopters for the U.S. Army. Up in Fairbanks, Alaska. He’s a lieutenant-colonel. Can you top that?
Anytime I want to, said Shantelle—who now called the lesbian’s little white phone to apologize for having been such a mess, but the voicemailbox was full.
Like a dog sitting on her hind legs with her nose straight forward, trying to become a perfect triangle of readiness, the transwoman prepared herself for the lesbian’s arrival. The Y Bar was silent because our Neva was late. Francine finished washing the glasses, so she washed them all over again.
Anyway, said Xenia, the Army bitch in that commercial was really hot.
You mean sexy? said Selene.
Sure.
Sexiness is really alluring, said Selene, but lately I’ve been wondering: What exactly is charisma?
Finishing her Old German Lager in a single noble breath, Xenia set down the bottle, grinned and said: Charisma? Well, that’s just like before life beats the shit out of you. What is alluring is the sparkly bright energy. Sexuality is very alluring. I’m thinking of my friend Mariah, who’s covered in tattoos, you know, cat tattoos. Maybe it’s because of her kindness and her intelligence, I don’t know, but she truly catches your eye—
Then Francine said: What about Neva? What’s her charisma?
I don’t know, said Xenia, and then they all fell silent.
No, said Shantelle, smiling and making a partially folded-in improvement on the Fascist salute, her elbow locked tight against her red-bra’d right booby—a move stolen from a Mexican showgirl she’d once seen in Vegas.—There never was no such person as Queen of the Whores, although I did once know this crazy white bitch named Domino who went around with high pretensions. But that was nothin’ like what Neva does—
Closing her eyes, Judy pretended that she was being kidnapped by Neva, who would beat her just right.
After a long time Sandra came in, looking for Neva. Judy sat wringing her hands, while Shantelle tried again to call the lesbian, whose phone went straight to voicemail. Accordingly Shantelle called two other fresh bitches she had lined up, both of whom proved available, so after that was arranged she called Neva again, but this time Neva’s phone was off. Now Shantelle’s mother was calling her; the bitch must be fresh out of prison. Shantelle decided not to answer, in case the lesbian should call. Triumphantly she announced: Someone’s calling me. I don’t know who it is. It may be Neva. I was hoping it was Neva even though it’s an 866 area code. No, it’s a telemarketer. And you know fucking what? Neva’s phone’s still not ringing.
The Y Bar felt as stifling as the inner chamber of a buried sandstone temple, where condemned ones prolong their doom by sucking oxygen from the grooved hieroglyphs in the walls. Slowly, slowly Judy moved her drink so that she could sit next to that patient friend, with whose long red hair she began to play. Shantelle began fidgeting, rubbing her naked knees together as if some perfume arose from between them, while Sandra smiled anxiously.
Judy said: Tell me a story.
Just right now I’m kind of tired . . .
Then will you answer a question?
Okay, sweetie.
Is lesbian love different from the heterosexual kind? I mean—
Well, said Sandra, I think a lesbian couple has to be different from a heterosexual couple. I feel that there’s a certain amount of fear when you’re being penetrated; there’s a certain amount of fear about being overpowered; and I don’t think you can escape that. With lesbians there’s a different kind of fear but it can’t be that.
What do you mean? said Judy. Every good girl wears a strap-on.
You know, said Sandra, I remember that when I was a senior in college, I lived in a house with three girls and
a guy; and I remember them talking about it; I remember this girl getting ready to have sex with him and having her say how scary it was when you’re face to face with a penis and my roommate Janie saying, yeah, when you’re right there it’s terrifying. The first time when I was naked with a guy, I only agreed to touch it with my foot. By the time I was with Louis, I was kind of over that. They start to look more similar. They’re almost like mythical. I think one thing that surprises me about penises is that they all look sort of innocent and clean.
Judy said: Tell me a story about penises!—at which Xenia came to Sandra’s rescue as follows: Did you see that picture of Madonna? They say she got filler in her cheeks, and now her face looks so fat!
Sandra replied: Well, what do you expect? She’s fifty-eight!
Fifty-nine, said Francine.
And we all had great fun trashing poor Madonna, forgetting how old our very own Neva might be; until the transwoman finally stood up for the abused star: Well, you know, I’d give anything to look like her.
Judy, sweetheart, not even plastic surgery would do you any good. You know what you need the most? I’ll bet it’s something you’ve never thought of, but it would really, really help.
What is it? Oh, please tell me what it is!
A bath.
Then they all started laughing at her; Shantelle chortled so much that she choked on an ice cube, and then Francine got to show off her expertise at the Heimlich Maneuver. The transwoman missed that glorious moment; she crouched in the bathroom crying.
Pretty soon she was over it, of course; in her life she had heard worse—and what about poor Judy Garland weeping all night because Three Smart Girls had made Deanna Durbin into a star? Our Judy counted her motherfucking blessings. She went home without saying goodbye to anyone, and no one said goodbye to her; then she took off her clothes and sniffed her armpits. All she could smell was deodorant; maybe Shantelle had just been teasing her. Just in case, she drew herself a nice hot bath, with lavender suds that obscured the filthiness of the tub, then got in and lay there, thinking about those photos of the stars with their filler. The before and after pictures of Kimora Lee Simmons, who was now forty-one, showed a definite plumping out of her lips. And now everybody was running Kimora down! Could you believe it? The transwoman longed to take her in her arms and hug her. Actually, she wouldn’t mind getting her own lip job. How much did Kimora’s plastic surgeon charge? Ten thousand at least, probably. Oh, well.
The Lucky Star Page 67