“Who’s the kid?” I asked Lupe.
She rolled her eyes. “Baby Jesus. Don’t you know anything?”
“No. I’m Jewish, remember?”
By the next evening, we’d unpacked the sheets and blankets from Lupe’s old trunk, made the bed, and set things around the bedroom. Lupe’s belts and ties hung from hooks on the wall over the bed, lace curtains draped the windows, and the Virgin of Guadalupe rested on the bedside table.
“Maybe I should put her back on the trunk under the window, what do you think?” she asked.
I hesitated not only because she so rarely asked my opinion, but also because I’d developed a strange attraction to this candle. “I like it by the bed.”
She shrugged. “If you want. But I think it would look better over by the window.”
To her it was a work of art to be placed like the pictures she was lining up against the walls so she could decide which ones to hang.
“It might be useful by the bed. For a bit of light,” I said.
“Right,” she answered with a sideways smile.
Did I find the Virgin attractive? I’d never been drawn to purity before. Sweet women didn’t attract me. Was this a religious vision of love and compassion? Not likely, because I was raised by Jewish hippies whose true religion was anarchist politics.
Though my arms still ached from carrying boxes up to the third floor, I felt my clit swell at the sight of Lupe’s smile. My exhaustion disappeared along with my philosophical questions.
“Praise the Virgin,” I said as I fell on the bed. “Let’s light the candle.”
Twilight was slowly darkening the room. The picture on the candle glowed, seeming to expand, its image pulsating in my brain when I closed my eyes and let Lupe tie my wrists to the headboard with bands of silk. She ran her tongue down my neck, sucking lightly, then continued to slide it between my breasts, circling my navel before descending to grab my clit lightly between her lips.
I was floating, close to coming, the Virgin for some reason throbbing along with me at the back of my eyelids, when Lupe slapped my face until my cheeks turned bright red, saying, “Play fair! Let’s turn this around.” As if she’d read my mind, as if she knew the Virgin was stuck in there, and she didn’t want the competition. She untied my wrists and guided my head downward to her cunt while she stretched out on the bed.
“My little sex slave,” she murmured, ruffling my short hair.
How many other women had she said this to? As far as I knew, I was the only one she’d ever wanted to live with. My heart began to pound as I parted her legs to look at her slit, something she always liked me to do first.
“How perfect is it?” she whispered, loudly enough to be heard in the back rows of a large theater.
“Unbelievable,” I responded, holding up the Virgin candle for a closer inspection.
And that’s when I sucked in my breath, because there it was: a perfect oval, a dark fringe of hair, pink outer lips, fuchsia inner lips, a dark fold in what looked like robes, a clit like a crown at the top, and the rosy asshole smiling like a small boy’s face.
“O,” was all I could say, my mouth circled around the sound of it. Ever since Lupe and I had been together, I hadn’t noticed I was fucking the Virgin herself.
“What are you doing?” She was cross because she didn’t like me to deviate from our script. I was supposed to tell her how perfect her lips were, how neat each crease, how erect the clit, and then sink my face into her until she started coming, when I had to stuff exactly three fingers in her cunt and pump slowly back and forth until she told me to stop.
Then I would have my reward: she’d thrust one of her vibrating dildos deep inside me, pushing against my womb until I exploded. She always let me pick the dildo as long as it was her favorite green silicone Jolly Giant. He pleased me as well as any, so I didn’t object.
But this time I couldn’t go on as though nothing were different. I had to tell her.
“I see the Virgin from this candle in you.” I held the candle aloft, the better to see her with.
That’s when Lupe snapped the light on, blinding me, and accused me of being crazy like her grandmother. She got up and paced around the room with her arms folded, then lay back down, flinging one leg over my shoulder, pushing her cunt almost into my face. “Okay, look at it in the light. Sniff it, come on. Take a deep drink. This is what’s real.”
But in the brightness I saw in the dark circle of Lupe’s hair the rosy folds of the Virgin’s robes, crowned by orange shafts of reflected lamplight radiating from Lupe’s clit. There was the scent of roses, too, which must have been soap or powder still clinging to her fur. Her black cat jumped on the bed and came to stick his nose in, but immediately backed off, hissing. Lupe had named that cat Lucifer, so whatever put him off must have been divine.
“You’re right,” I lied. “The vision is gone. I don’t see it anymore.”
“Good. Now let’s get back to business,” she said, switching off the light.
I blew out the candle.
That I did still see the Virgin would be my secret. I didn’t see her in the rolls at breakfast the next morning; I didn’t see her in the peach we split and fed each other, the juice running down our chins. But I saw her in my mind, and knew she was still in Lupe’s cunt. I wanted to take pictures for proof. I had my cell phone; I had a camera that fit in the palm of my hand. I’d photographed her cunt before, so I figured she wouldn’t suspect what image I wanted to capture if I waited a few days so she’d forget my vision.
We visited her mother and grandmother. The old lady looked up at me from the corner where she spent her days in prayer and slowly closed one eye. Was that a wink? What did she know?
The first time we’d gone over to their apartment, she’d asked Lupe, in a Spanish that sounded hopeful, though I didn’t understand a word of it, if I was, perhaps, a boyfriend.
“Her name is Rebecca. Not a boy!” she’d shouted at the old lady in English, before translating her grandmother’s remarks for me. “And she’s quite deaf, so we have to shout,” she’d explained.
“I keep telling you shouting won’t help because she doesn’t speak much English anyway. Nobody ever listens to me,” her mother had sighed.
On this visit the old lady smiled flirtatiously at me when I helped her to the table and pulled out her chair. Maybe she still thought I was a boy, or maybe she sensed I was a fellow visionary. We all sat down to a lunch of homemade tamales. Lupe and her mom began a loud conversation as if they meant to include the grandmother, which they clearly didn’t because most of the talk, all in English, was about her: the pains in her knees (“From kneeling in church every day, I swear it!”), the rash that was developing on the backs of her hands (“A stigmata, you think?” “Oh, shush, don’t give her ideas.”), the way she kept calling Lupe’s brother’s second wife by the name of his divorced first wife. (“I think she does it on purpose to embarrass him because she doesn’t believe in divorce. I swear it!”)
I felt right at home with these people because their intense voices and waving arms reminded me of the way my parents would debate politics by the hour, their shouts blending into what became for me a comforting background, a discussion that could be about anything, or nothing. Lupe’s grandmother kept praying, though, and giving me quick glances, which was disturbingly unfamiliar.
When we left, Lupe ranted about how worried she was that the grandmother was driving her mother crazy. “But even though my mom doesn’t go to church anymore, she still has that Catholic sense of guilt and duty, so she’ll never put her in a home. Abuela’s mother, my great-grandmother, lived to be 101, so we’ve got a good twenty years of this ahead of us. But if my mom goes first, I wouldn’t have any problem putting her away.”
By the time we got home, I realized this was not a good time to try to get a picture of Lupe’s cunt.
Lupe usually fell asleep after sex. She couldn’t help herself; an orgasm would put her right out, typically with her body
flung carelessly across the bed, legs sprawled open for my continuing admiration. I’d photographed her before in this Sleeping Beauty state. I still had some old shots of her cunt in my camera, but as I clicked through them, I could find none that reflected the image of the Virgin. Now Lupe took to sleeping curled up, her fists held protectively between her clenched legs, while I sat and waited for her to relax. But the few times she did, she’d roll over on her stomach, hands still between her legs, as if she knew my little camera was ready for her.
Maybe there was something to be seen in the curves of her hips, in the breasts squeezed between her arms. I ran my camera over her body, my eyes fixed on the monitor, but I didn’t see any saints or virgins. I clicked pictures of the licorice cleft between her breasts, the browned loaves of her ass, the sweet crescent of her back as she curled around herself.
Nothing was going to happen. She would never unfurl herself to me again. We’d make love in the dark, and after she curled up to sleep, I’d light the candle to watch the flame flicker behind the image of the Virgin.
One day when the candle inside the glass was half gone, Lupe threw the whole thing in the trash.
“We need new candles,” she announced. “Plain ones. No pictures. No more damn saints.”
She went out that afternoon and bought silver tapers that she stuck into glass star candleholders and placed around the flat. For me she bought an old menorah she found in an antique shop on McAllister Street, whose little candles—all nine of them—she lit every night.
“I thought you’d appreciate this, Beck,” she said when I protested.
“I do, it’s lovely, but it’s not Hanukkah, and you don’t light all the candles every night even then. It’s like, well, you don’t keep your Christmas tree up all year, do you?”
“We could. We could get a plastic one, like my mom’s.” She shrugged. “Why not? Who cares about all that religious stuff? If it’s pretty, light it all year. If you can see the Virgin in my cunt whenever you want, I can light your menorah every night.”
My skin jumped. This was the first time she’d mentioned my vision since the night I’d had it. Was this an unfolding? Or was the whole thing still eating at her, keeping her on guard?
“You never let me see your cunt anymore,” I reminded her.
She stood before me with her legs apart, hands on her hips, as if daring me to push her down on the bed. But I knew that if I did, she’d scratch and bite because she should be the one to do the pushing, not me. I put my hands on her shoulders anyway and shoved. Something had changed; instead of protesting, she fell back on the bed, legs apart, smiling up at me. She unzipped her jeans and wriggled out of them, threw her black panties on the floor, and spread her legs wide.
“Come on,” she said. “Give me proof.”
And I saw, in the bright sunlight streaming through the thin curtains, the rosy folds that made up the Virgin of Guadalupe: her face so dark I couldn’t quite see it, the throbbing crown on top, the child’s face below. I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and nosed it in there. She jumped when she heard the buzz of the flash, but said nothing. I looked at the picture I’d just taken, and there it was, even more clear than the real thing.
“Here,” I said, thrusting my phone at her.
She held it, studying it, saying nothing. And then she asked, “Did I tell you about the time my grandmother saw the Virgin in a banana?”
“You mentioned it, yes. You laughed at her.”
“It happened more than once, actually. The Virgin must like bananas as much as Abuela does. But the first time, my mom was pregnant with me when my grandmother cut that banana lengthwise down the middle, and opened it up, and there was the Virgin of Guadalupe. My mom said the banana was all black inside, like rotted from the middle. But Abuela said it was a sign that I was going to be a girl named Guadalupe. And I was going to do great things.
“‘Like what?’ Mom asked. ‘Make us all rich? If she stays a virgin forever, how can she marry money?’
“But Abuela just shrugged. ‘Virginity has nothing to do with sex or marriage,’ she answered. ‘It’s in the soul.’
“Mom thought she was loony, but she went along with it because she thought Lupe was a cute name. And then she made banana bread out of that banana. My grandmother was livid—it was a saint! How could she? Abuela wanted to preserve that banana forever. Now the baby—me—would be cursed! I’d lose my soul. I’d never know who I was. Besides, Abuela wanted to show the neighbors, like she always did with the saints she found in food. She says you can find saints anywhere if you know how to look. Me, I have a good imagination. I can see anyone anywhere if I put my mind to it. Anna Nicole Smith in an ear of corn. But I’ve never seen a saint spontaneously. I guess I’m just not on the saint hotline, or something. Maybe Abuela was right. I’m doomed to never know myself.”
Lupe sighed. Was she really sad about this, or was it some trick to make me relax before she called me a delusional idiot?
“And you know what?” she went on, looking at the picture again, “I’m not even sure I see it here. It’s like figure and ground, you know, in a psych textbook. First you see the vase, then it’s two women nose to nose, then it’s the vase again, flashing back and forth. I think I maybe see the Virgin of Guadalupe in this picture, but then it’s just my cunt, like a trick, fooling me. And maybe you’re even more fooled. You’re a Jew, Beck; if religion has any logic, you should be seeing Moses spreading the Red Sea of my cunt, or whatever.”
“I’m not religious—I just believe what I see. And if I saw the Red Sea parting, I’d believe that, too. But I think my vision, if you want to call it that, comes from you.”
“I want to believe.” Her voice was small. “But I can’t. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“What? Religion, or wanting to believe in it?”
“None of it. Hold me. Kiss your Virgin.”
She wasn’t being ironic. With my lips on her folds, I was too close to see what exactly I was licking as I lightly tipped my teeth to her crown, my tongue to the baby Jesus. I bathed her rosy robes in my saliva until she began to sing in a way I hadn’t heard her do before, a high-pitched, pure wail descending to a melodious growl, a wordless language I understood completely, a language that nudged me to all the right spots around her crevice until she quivered into silence and fell immediately to sleep, leaving me to pull back and watch the Virgin’s throbbing crown as I stuffed my own cunt with my fist, my silent mouth open as I came.
Lupe began to sing with a band, all women I hadn’t met before. I’d never heard her sing until that afternoon, but now she sang all day in her terrific range, from soprano to growl. She sang Mexican songs, old Beatles tunes, and all kinds of ballads, ancient and modern, from “Barbara Allen” to KT Tunstall and Norah Jones. But when she practiced with her band, it was always her own original wordless shrieks and howls, the sounds she originated every night now in our bed. Her voice was the only instrument she played.
She bought another candle of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and kept it lit day and night, and when it burned down, she put another candle inside the glass to keep it going. Poor Lucifer would hide under the couch when she sang, and would fly out the door whenever the band arrived to practice. After a while, that cat didn’t come back at all, but Lupe didn’t seem to miss him. She spent more time with her grandmother, who always, Lupe said, sent me her very best wishes.
“Abuelita knows your soul,” she said with a nod.
Anybody’s soul, or just mine? I was afraid to ask.
Her band started performing in clubs; they called themselves the Virgin of G, with Lupe as G, dancing to the rhythm of her own rising and falling cries. I usually went along to watch their act. First the band would play to warm up the audience, and then Lupe would come out into the spotlight wearing the shortest skirt she had, and begin to wail in that wonderful, wordless voice, up and down the scale, making my spine and quim quiver together. I wondered jealously if she had the same effect on the rest of the a
udience as they danced wildly, twisting and flailing their arms like no dance I’d ever seen. Lupe’s dress and the music the band played were like a cover for the purity of her voice, which shone like a candle illuminating her soul.
“G!” The audience shouted. “G! G! The Goddess!”
I could tell they didn’t see the vision. Even when the audience was all women, or Mexican, they didn’t get it. I don’t think the band understood, either. There were two black women on bass and guitar, great blues players who loved to weave their music around Lupe’s voice, and a drummer with long blonde hair that she tossed back and forth as her drumsticks flew, and this really hot French dyke named Severine on piano, who wore dark green leather straps around her wrists and ankles. They were in the groove with Lupe, and yet not. Their music was rhythmic sex, while Lupe was something deeper, silent at her core even when she sang. Only her Abuelita and I could see her soul.
At the end, Lupe would bend over and flash her twat at the audience, but it was so dark and she was so far away no one could see the Virgin within her.
When we got home, she’d lie on the bed, spread her legs, and ask me what I saw, and I would say, “The Virgin is blushing pink tonight and her crown is sending out rays of light. The baby Jesus is hiding behind a bouquet of red roses, no, there he is, popping out now.”
“Get me a mirror,” she’d order, and then she’d look closely. Sometimes she’d exclaim, “Yes! It’s just like you say tonight. Perfect!” and other times she’d sigh, “I don’t see it. Suck my clit hard; make me come. I see more clearly then.”
And after, when she’d look in the mirror, she’d call out, “Yes! Yes! There she is, she hasn’t left me,” and begin to sing her chorus of moans and growls.
Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 Page 2
