Oh, said Judy.
How old are you?
I . . . Forty-nine.
Well, some of my friends came out in their sixties. As for you, I personally don’t have a problem with it, Reba reassured her. A lot of lesbians do. I see the need especially for women to be alone with women born as women. But I think in a general setting, when they are transitioning, if you identify as a woman, that’s good enough for me.
Here Reba laughed; Judy thought of it as a sweet laugh, but wasn’t she sentimental anyway? And Reba said: Who am I to judge?
How did you get that way? said Judy.
Because I’m kind of open.
But the other old woman, who so far had been silent (her name was Diane), now said: I don’t understand it. I’m not comfortable. I live with women that are even less comfortable with it than I am. I tend to be a little softer, but I admit I don’t understand it. I know that I wasn’t comfortable living in my body when I was heterosexual, so how can I judge you for wanting to be a female? But transgender men still bring that patriarchy with them, and if they bring it into the woman’s circle where we already feel oppressed . . . They’re already a little more out there than women going into being men.
Judy said: That’s not fair.
Diane said: Well, men who are transitioning to be women do bring along the male attitude. We can have a woman who’s becoming a man talking normally, but a man transitioning to being a woman will try to take over the group. It’s your shoving your male attitude into our faces that we won’t stand. We talk about this in group, too—
Judy said: Well, Neva would have said—
They both laughed, and Reba said: Dearie, Neva was a special case.
She was the Goddess, said Judy, almost defiantly.
She might have been your Goddess, said Diane. You know, Judy, a long time ago I knew that I needed a feminine-based religion. I worship the Goddess. I see her in everybody. She’s our Creatrix. We as women are the birth givers. We create. Patriarchy has taken that away from us. To me She’s everything. I don’t think of myself as a fanatic. I don’t have to shove it down somebody’s throat. I see a goddess in Reba, a goddess in all my friends, in everybody. We all fight patriarchy. We’re all gonna die, but I don’t believe in heaven or hell. Whenever something went wrong I used to always blame God. Never once since I have been studying the Goddess have I ever said, why have You done this to me?
Judy said: Here I am finally ready to join and be one of you, and you don’t want me. So I want to know, why have you done this to me?
You’re not ready. Anyhow, when we talk about loving everybody, it’s not in a sense of your looking at them with starry eyes. In my sense, you’re looking at all their faults. When the Goddess looks at us, She’s not looking at us as perfect beings. Men are not allowed in our rituals. You know, I can still appreciate a goodlooking man walking down the street. I can appreciate you.
No you don’t, said Judy.
Reba gave her a little slap, even softer than she liked it, and said: You’ve got so much love in your life and you don’t even see it. We love you, Judy. You won’t remember this but we’ll look in on you and maybe you’ll come back to us . . .
7
Although Shantelle had repeatedly expressed extreme hatred for the lesbian in those last weeks, after that death she rapidly grew so lost and desperate as to sit sobbing at the Y Bar, begging everyone she met to kill her because she lacked the courage for suicide—at which the person of whom in the entire world she was most contemptuous, the transwoman, sat down beside her. Too aware of her own odiousness to make the mistake of hugging her, or indeed touching her in any way, knowing quite well that even the gentlest declaration of lovingkindness might meet with a punch in the face, the transwoman simply murmured: Shantelle, here’s something for you.—The other woman jerked her head around, balling up her fists, but when the transwoman winked open a hand to show a tiny packet of aluminum foil, she snapped it up like a greedy turtle, then rushed weeping into the ladies’ room. When she came out, her eyes were still red, but she wore the look of trustful hope, and in less than twenty minutes the relief she had thought impossible began to sweetly woo her; she smiled crookedly, with her eyelids half-lowered, and, slurring her words, began to mutter the lesbian’s name. The transwoman paid for both their drinks, took her by the hand and, no longer fearing her, led her home. Shantelle kept searching for her ring of keys, which she was holding and then dropped onto the sidewalk. The transwoman picked them up and unlocked the gratinged gate for her. She said: Shantelle, here’s my spare key. I’m going to give you all the drugs you want, to help you heal, because I . . . and then Shantelle slurred out: I love you, too, you stinking he-she bitch.
Sometimes Francine forgot to charge Shantelle for her Peachy Keen. She didn’t even scold her when she vomited on the floor. (Throwing up on molly, it’s like a great experience, a gorgeous young lesbian was assuring Sandra. By the way, did you feel my fingers in you at that party?)
What Shantelle wanted was marijuana wax.
She would creep into Judy’s place at four in the morning and just take the wax, which was kept in the freezer behind the ice cube tray. Judy would wake up but never said anything; she knew it made Shantelle feel better to be stealing.
After three weeks she had to ask the retired policeman for a cash advance, and when that was gone she went to the Y Bar with the last shard of wax and said: Shantelle, honey, I don’t have the money to keep buying this for you.
Shantelle said: Everything’s gotta end sometime.—Then she said: Why did you do this for me?
Not knowing which reply might provoke her to rage, Judy told the truth: I just wanted to, that’s all. As soon as my finances improve I’ll get you some more.
Well, fantastic, said Shantelle, but what the fuck am I supposed to do until that happens? Answer me, bitch! What the fuck am I supposed to do?
Now you be nice, said Francine.
I’ll try to make some money tonight, I promise! I’ll really hustle! Shantelle, I’m really really sorry—
Just die, said Shantelle, hardly even angry.
The transwoman tried to reply with a silence as serene as the lesbian’s smile. Then a flock of blonde girls rushed off to the ladies’ room, where they stayed for half an hour.
8
One day the truth caught up with Shantelle, and she came to me.
Did you give Neva the stuff? she demanded.
Who’s buying this round?
You are.
On the house, said Francine.
Answer me, said Shantelle.
Well, I asked, did I or did I not off myself?
She began breathing hard. I decided that if she were to attack me I would punch her face as hard as I could, by which time Francine would be on duty with the baseball bat.
Did you want me dead? I asked. Is that why you sold me the stuff?
I don’t care shit about you.
I clinked glasses with her. To our left, three girls huddled around a single phone which showed a celebrity’s image. Then the three girls held up the phone and took a selfie with it.
Well, she said then, maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had the time to think it through.
Done what? Sold me the stuff?
No, I would. I did it so you wouldn’t suffer.
Do you think I wanted Neva to suffer?
So you did give her the stuff.
She never asked me for anything but that one time. You think I could have turned her down?
You know, I watch the TV news, she boasted. And they say when you give somebody the wherewithal to overdose, that’s murder. You could get twenty years in prison for what you did.
I’ll be sure and share the credit with you.
Why fuckin’ bother? she said, rising with her glass in her hand.
Wouldn’t you have g
iven it to her? I asked.
If I had a gun, said Shantelle, I probably would have killed her earlier. That’s why I didn’t keep one around.
9
After a lonely while, a half-Chinese quarter-male TV actress named Xing walked into the Y Bar, seated herself on the barstool beside mine, and ordered a root beer and rye. Until then our heliotropic gazes had swung toward a slender young woman in a checked shirt whose keys and laminated identity card hung from a purple lanyard imprinted with the silhouettes of dogs and horses; but when Xing came in, the day grew as white as light in a wide Mexican doorway beyond some red awning that drooped like an old woman’s eyelids. Faithful to Neva, Francine disdained her, but Xing reminded the rest of us of Natalie Wood at fifteen, posing naked-shouldered and naked-armed, with a slender string of pearls around her neck and everything airbrushed so angelically; so that was the end of the woman in the checked shirt. What were we supposed to do, but respect the moment? Back in 1769 a sage had informed Great Britain’s restless colonies: As to sovereignty itself, it is unsusceptible of destruction; and, like the sun, only sets in one place, that it may rise, with full splendour, in another. So it was and will be, especially to us whom everyone had spat on. New customers sleepwalked in; sometimes lone men would shadowbox to the deep slow electronic music. Even the retired policeman was looking into Xing’s eyes and sharing his troubles: I used to go out, answer calls, push a black-and-white, but that’s not gonna catch the dope dealers, catch the prostitutes. What’s the use? . . .—Thanks to Xing, there were more lesbians at the Y Bar than ever before, so the unknown owner finally fixed the catty pole.
Xenia was saying: Here, Francine. For you.
Thank you.
All right, dear. And then after a couple of pills, Selene gets a higher pitch, and it’s that tone of hers, like an everlovin’ drill goin’ into my head . . . !
But they don’t hear themselves the way we do. I don’t hear myself.
No, Francine, insisted Sandra, I think that there’s romance involved with mermaids that doesn’t have to be incredibly sexual all the time. I think that there’s a sense of adventure and communion with the natural world. And there’s certainly a way to feel that your body is beautiful as a mermaid, just beautiful and free, without having to have sex right away . . .
And then Xing smiled on Sandra and they went home together, Sandra carrying her sweet, sweet narrow-lipped come-on smile; oh, how her brownish-green eyes were shining and her armpits shaved to perfect alabaster as she pulled her frilly white nightgown over her head and offered her redhaired vulva in memory of the lesbian!—How good was it? We had not entirely forgotten the way Neva could lighten her touch upon another woman’s clitoris into something that barely existed (fragment of fresco like a faint stain of menstrual blood), in order to lead her up the knife-edge to orgasm—any firmer would abrade her while any lighter would be nothing at all—carefully spiralling in on that tiny delicate hardness, Sandra moaning yes yes yes, her mouth wide, the moment eternally new and perfect.—Was Xing that good? Well, she never picked me. (I’m not a fan, the retired policeman consoled me.)
On the following night Xenia, doing her best Greta Garbo, which is to say, powdering and overpowdering her face into something masklike, then flaring her nostrils, baring her teeth and narrowing her eye, attempted to impress Xing as follows: My lesbian friends are mostly highly professional. Highly professional working women.—And Xing picked her!
The next morning I inquired into how Xing compared to Neva, and she replied: No comparison. All of this undoing of genders, I’m not sure that I’m committed to it, but I will say that Xing is hot! And the thing about Neva (of course you’d never know this) was that she only wanted to use toys. You have toys, you have issues.
Shantelle, feeling nearly prepared to follow the lesbian’s way to practice love and be infallible at it, wiped the sweat off her face, looked Xing saucily up and down, shot her a fuck-me grin, then submitted to rejection with a curse, feeling so humiliated that she might as well have been a naked girl alone on a red-glowing stage, slowly twisting, expecting nothing, not even a dollar; while I bowed my head—and our new adorable one smiled. Then we who had been dead arose with cries of joy.
Xing turned out to be nearly as considerate as the man who steals a couple of his wife’s pills for his ex-mistress and her new boyfriend. Holly found her as good as the lesbian (she who had so many times taken my hand), and Samantha, who always lied, said she was even better, but I remember when the transwoman raised a glass to her, and Francine, who according to her own calculus had done everything right (it was only life that had failed her), stood smiling at her from behind the bar, while Xing looked indifferently sideways, watching her mirror image fix her hair.
I remember that slender girl pressing her knees together, never for me, and all those ladies whirling their skinny blue-white arms like spiders while I stood in the corner watching; Francine rolled her eyes at me.
With the help of mascara whose television praise ran as follows: So effective, a panel of independent experts reported improvement in ninety-seven percent of all women, Shantelle perfected her new look until she finally got selected to go home with Xing, who roosted in a grand one-bedroom in Tenderloin Heights. As soon as they were in the bedroom, Shantelle lunged to pull up Xing’s nightdress as if expecting to discover between her breasts or thighs something to steal . . .—because Shantelle would always be the kind of person who, had she made the journey with the Chosen People to the Promised Land, nourished each day by manna from the Goddess, would still, preferring the unproved visible to the divine Unseen, have worshipped a golden calf. But all she found was what she already possessed. Already disbelieving in that slow and perfect intercourse of tongues in each other’s mouths, so satisfying that it seemed (to her at least) that without hands, breasts or sex organs they both still would have felt fulfilled; already forgetting how she used to lay down her head between the lesbian’s breasts, weeping easily, until she felt relief, she finally lay down alone, dreaming of cold black crocodile islands beneath the full moon.
How was it? inquired knowing Xenia.
A-one. A shitload better than Neva. Xing, now, she’s my stud broad.
Seven dollars, said Francine.
Four lesbians stood at the bar, embracing one another. Francine washed glasses. A tall pale darkhaired lesbian (one of the four) started kissing Xing on the breast of her leather jacket, and the other three laughed ha-ha-HA! with their hands punching each other’s shoulders. I still remember the knowing wrinkle at the corner of her eyes as Samantha swayed and wriggled. A bespectacled lesbian in plaid started tapping her long pale forefinger in a beer-spill, and the tall lesbian stripped down to her silver tights, swishing back and forth in hopes of alluring our Xing; Shantelle had selected “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” from the jukebox and we all loved it!—And then Xing was playing pool with the bespectacled lesbian.
And now, when everything pertaining to Neva had vanished, although I at least, and there must have been others like me, still awaited her, as if she had merely passed through a swinging door which went on vibrating, Judy came in, and I saw that for her there was no return.
Two nights later she swished into the Y Bar, ordered a bourbon and ginger ale, walked up to Xing’s stool and offered herself, thinking: I’m only here to love; that’s what Neva says . . .—Once she had been rejected she went peaceably home to instruct herself: Never mind; I’m not working that hard for it; I don’t deserve it. I only love Neva, Neva, Neva! . . .—after which she played with herself, imagining that Xing had bought her a two-toned gauzy midi outfit with breast-peeps. Following two nights of this, the retired policeman, who had long since returned her pills, was looking bitterly at his darling and demanding: Who are you fucking now? But it never got serious, even though the novelty almost made it seem as if the lesbian were blooming or bleeding even more magnificently than before; Judy was already losing the memory of
how it had been when she was inside the lesbian, how the lesbian had felt and tasted, but for awhile she held on to the unique topography of her lover’s vulva.
If you bring forth what is within you . . . , she recited. But she forgot how the rest of it went.
If you bring forth what is within you . . .
She went home, got high and thought about it. How might she set out to find love for herself, now when there was none? Then she figured out a great joke. She went to the bathroom and chanted to the mirror: If you bring forth what is within you . . .
Then she bent over the toilet and tickled her throat.
(As for me, what did I have? I owned if you don’t stand for something . . . and listen to the cunt.)
The retired policeman had given her back that much-faded snapshot of the braided young woman whose name we never knew, the one reaching out both arms from her bed and Waiting for E., Stanford ’74. She tore it up. Then she flushed it down the toilet.
Late one night she strolled past the Women’s Dream Center and into the wide parking lot she knew so well, following the inner side of the fence under the billboard and behind a car to the safely dark place where she had first blown the straight man, spitting his semen into a puddle. What had it been for? And now she continued up to Ellis Street, where she paused outside Glide Memorial to whisper three prayers for the lesbian, one for Shantelle, two for the retired policeman and six for herself. In the interest of cheerfulness she bought herself some five-dollar crystal-blue sunglasses, but they broke on the way home. She walked up Venus Alley, pressed the buzzer and clipclopped upstairs to her lord and master in his queen-sized bed. He was cleaning his ears. Squaring her shoulders, then widening her eyes at him in an expression which he always found idiotic, she said: I’m gonna go on loving you and pretending you love me, because what else do I have anymore?
The Lucky Star Page 70