The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  III

  What the Cat Caught

  In the face of another’s great excellence the only possible salvation is love.

  GOETHE, 1809

  The conscious prayer of the inferior may be that his choice may light on a greater than himself; but the subconscious intention of his self-preserving individuality must be to find a trustworthy servant for his own purposes.

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, 1924

  1

  The lesbian was nearly always on time for our appointments. That made it easier for us to pretend that she was faithful to each of us alone.

  Of course we all (except for self-secure Francine) longed to know exactly what she was doing, and with whom, whenever each of us was not with her. That was why the transwoman listened at the door. The highlight was hearing Sandra climaxing like a singing teakettle. In those days Holly liked fingering Neva and kissing her, so all the moans were muffled, but that just made it all the more exciting to listen in.

  I remember that during that period my usual time was three p.m. on Thursdays, although like Shantelle and Judy I soon learned how to beg for extra meetings. When I came on foot, I made sure to walk sedately, in order to avoid being sweaty for the woman I loved.

  Sometimes when I emerged from the elevator the transwoman would be sitting on the landing, weeping softly, her face flushed with humiliation; on happier occasions she was kneeling there, practice-pouting into her makeup mirror, doing her best Sophia Loren. Since the carpet was so grubby I would remind her that she might be soiling her dress. She liked it when I brushed the cigarette ash from her bottom, using the palms of both hands.

  The two of us might hear Shantelle inside, cursing the lesbian for sending her away. (The transwoman courageously rolled her eyes.) Sometimes we heard the eternally invisible domestic abuse in Room 541, or else Catalina opened the door of Room 545 to wave. (Victoria was almost never home.) I knocked, and my predecessor stormed out—a cue for the transwoman to scurry downstairs. Shantelle and I kept getting along; we never stopped liking each other. (Whenever I can, she once chuckled into my ear, I find somebody willing to listen, and I tell ’em the worst thing that’s happened to me. I shoot it in ’em just like poison! Hoo, is that fun!) So the lesbian would stand half inside, blowing her a farewell kiss, at which point Shantelle would ruefully rather than bitterly say: whatever!, stride past me, then either keep going in hopes of bullying the transwoman, who half-enjoyed that game, or else whirl around and ask me to lend her five dollars. I always had it ready, just in case. Then she’d say something like: Pull a good scream out of the bitch! at which I’d flatter her, one for-instance running: If you didn’t do it, nobody can . . . —at which she and Neva laughed together. Just as immediately after crossing Bush Street, Taylor Street steepens into bejasmined affluence, so Shantelle’s mood enriched itself then! She might even repeat that she loved me.—On the Saturday night after Thanksgiving I caught her listening all alone to the drizzle-drums from beneath an old awning in Chinatown, while fish-perfumed gratings drank in loneliness and rain, but please don’t judge Shantelle by any such lapse; sneak peeks don’t count!—She would punch the elevator call button and maybe slap my ass; once the steel doors closed on her the transwoman might sometimes be heard supercautiously shuffle-creeping back to listen at the door; and then, not until then, would I allow myself to raise my eyes, taking in the lesbian, who awaited me in the doorway.

  The rest of the time I tried not to dwell on the interval now upon me, because here was my true life, for which I would gladly have thrown away all the rest; and any fool would be sad to admit that most of his life did not go for living. If what I truly was existed only now, then I preferred not to face the falseness of other hours. And should I ultimately manage to accomplish some other form of life (for instance, as when a shadow of illness descends into a woman’s breastbone), I preferred not to know of what it might be made.

  In other words, I couldn’t stop thinking about Neva, she who sent forth airy light from her arms.

  One night I was riding the bus on Mission Street, and a black woman was doing her best to provoke the black man across the aisle, crying: Go ahead and hit me, you bitch niggah! Suck my dick! I’ll beat you down so bad no fag’ll ever fuck yo ass again! Suck my dick, suck my dick!

  He replied: You don’t have no dick, you dyke niggah—

  That’s right; I’m a dyke, but you ain’t no man; you nothin’ but a bitch niggah. Hit me, niggah! Go ahead. Or you gonna just talk about it on your phone like some little girl?

  Shut up, bitch—

  Don’t tell me to shut up. Go ahead. Hit me, hit me! Ain’t you enough of a man to shut a woman up? I dare you! You ain’t no niggah, you coal-black thick-lipped nig-ger. I’ll kick yoah bitch ass—

  He said: My grandma raised me right. I don’t hit no woman who ain’t hit me fust. You hit me fust, and you’ll see.

  She said: You coal-black bitch! Here’s a woman that needs to be slapped down, and you ain’t enough of a niggah to do the job—

  It went on and on. I kept quiet. Finally the woman got off. The man was shaking to retain his self-control in the face of the immense volume and humiliation of her words. Another man told him: You did right, brothah. Police wouldn’t’ve heard a word she said. They would only have heard you hit a woman.

  I did and said nothing. Had Judy been there, she might have tried to act like the lesbian, putting out her love until they beat her unconscious. Had I tried to act like Neva, what would I have done? Neva of course would have only needed to be there for all parties to be happily drooling; she always had an unfair advantage, so what was I supposed to do? I did nothing, closing my eyes and dreaming about Neva’s cunt, in which my ecstasies were eternally varying yet never unheavenly, like a single great hoard composed of the tiny lovely irregularities of golden Visigoth coins.

  On that latter subject, if you were to ask me how I knew that she was the Goddess, or at least my Goddess, I would say that whenever I was inside her I would find myself reminding my penis: Pay attention to the cunt! . . . Do exactly what the cunt says! Right now the cunt is getting juicier; it’s throbbing; it’s giving you permission to thrust deeper and faster, so go ahead, but never fail to be guided by the cunt! The cunt will tell you what to do. You don’t have permission to climax yet. Just obey the cunt in everything, and you’ll achieve goodness. All right, now you can get ready; the cunt is on the verge of granting you full permission . . .

  Because Neva understood me so perfectly (so I assume), she never asked me to talk about my life or any other matters.

  There was no reason why she or anybody should have loved me. As for me, I had no one else to love.

  I considered the possibility that my hopes and pleasures might soon be over. (I might have been the first who began to wonder whether we were actually better off for these séances.) Like the retired policeman, I knew everything on earth.

  2

  When I approached that doorway, she never took me into her arms. She stepped back, then once I had come in she closed the door behind me, quietly setting the deadbolt. Only then did she kiss me.

  For the first few times I used to ejaculate the instant her tongue came into my mouth.

  3

  For almost any human beloved the eminence she had now reached would have been lifeless—not for her, because she truly felt that obligation to love.

  I said that we “pretended” to ourselves that she was “faithful.” But that is only a way of explaining it to whoever cannot understand. The real truth is that she belonged to each of us only, just as God does. And if you cannot believe this, then tell yourself that she misled us who demanded to be misled. She spoke easily but said little—she who for our sake hid her burning thoughts from us.

  In compensation I have condemned myself to tell you the thoughts of us others.

  4

  Al’s turn arrived. He was the
curlyhaired boy watching her sadly from the corner; as she came closer she saw that his face was withered and blotched, just like the hands in his soft white sleeves.

  Since he was called gay, and we called her the lesbian, what sort of intimacy would one expect them to reach? That made no difference, because as the ancient Spartan poet Alcman once sang: Let no mortal fly to the sky, nor flee from wedding Aphrodite. In other words, Al was not permitted to abstain.

  Once upon a time, before the lesbian and before even Letitia, Al and Ed were drinking together, and on the bar between them lay a nineteen-year-old snapshot of Ed doing drag as Judy Garland, while on the overhead sports television came a noise like the shrieking and foot-stamping of some spoiled girl who wanted to be an actress; Francine was chuckling: Ed, you sure were a hot chick!—That was when the transwoman decided on a fling with Ed, who said: Sweetie, I’m no way going there.—But once he got distracted by his bone cancer, Judy, in a move that would have delighted Shantelle, moved in on Al; long before Ed even reached hospice, the transwoman was presenting herself on knees and elbows like a horse for Al to sweetly ride, which he did, caressing her back and whispering how sweet she was. Our Judy, in short, was a junior Neva: there for everyone! And she kept it up.—But was she really Al’s kind?

  Neva now took him away. Time for what those stapled mimeographed 1970s circulars used to refer to as Double Domination: Petticoat Punishment! To Al she seemed as coldly yet sensuously self-possessed as the goddess Isis, whose robe was tied between her marble breasts in a marble clasp or knot the undoing of which would leave one easy motion between her and nakedness. Their time lasted forever. He knelt on the floor while she stood over him, staring. Finally she touched his forehead. He could hardly bear it—for it is a terrible thing, as they say, to fall into the hands of the living Goddess.

  In the end he practically crept away backward, while Catalina waved bye-bye from her open door. (But don’t for a moment imagine that Al did not cherish this thing with the lesbian, this connection which could apparently be prolonged forever.) Then the lesbian, hearing on the stairs the footfalls of a bigbodied someone who was trying to walk lightly, knew that the transwoman would soon be ringing.

  In the Y Bar we sat waiting for the lesbian. Finally an Italian inquired: How many dollars was the original cost of this bar?—A German lady looked up the answer on her phone.

  5

  Next came more rough sex with Shantelle, who, while not being the most empathetic of us, still could scarcely avoid perceiving that in the bright course of her pleasure-taking, an expression of discomfort, not yet anguish, slowly began to disturb the lesbian’s masklike face; indeed, she gazed upon her tormentor with the same sorrowful steadiness which we find in depictions of the Virgin of Sorrows, whose breast has been pierced by a snakelike golden sword, while cherubim buzz around her like flies and vultures. Well, so what? Shantelle knew that pain is power.

  Every night Shantelle would come into the bar, grinning and sometimes talking loudly to herself; Judy was afraid of her, and Xenia disliked her for picking fights, while Francine stayed calm and distant behind the counter.

  Xenia said: But the thing about Shantelle is, she’s always going to assume the worst about everyone she knows, and worse than worst about anyone she loves.

  I think you’re right, said the lesbian, smiling a little. But it doesn’t matter.

  One day Neva was making love at Shantelle’s place, and in the next room of the transient hotel she heard a woman shouting obscenities at a little girl; the little girl screeched back and there came a slap. The woman ranted and scolded on and on; there was a pleasure in it, a sunny release; the woman was loving herself. The door slammed, and rapid footsteps shook the hall. Then the little girl sobbed for a long time; the lesbian could hear it through the wall; it infected her like somebody else’s long ago pain. Shantelle paid it no attention since it was in her ears all the time. (Well, said Francine, I would say that Shantelle’s a very cruel and dangerous person.) The lesbian brought her to satisfaction as quickly as she could, kissed her and hurried away. After that she most often received her in her own apartment, although of course when Shantelle preferred otherwise she had to go along.

  Afterward she made time for Sandra, whom I overheard saying: You see, Neva, I’ve been very lonely. Being with Louis is better than being alone.

  Okay.

  Don’t you have an opinion?

  My opinion is that I love you; that’s all.

  And Sandra went away sad.

  After her, I took my turn; and one day, believing that Neva might have the power to lift him back up, came the straight man himself, clutching at her with his skinny rigid fingers.

  She called him honey and he said he adored her and could hardly wait to be in her arms again, at which she said: Yes, honey, I want that, too.

  When do you want me to call you? I’m free tomorrow night.

  Well, I don’t know, because I might be seeing Judy, Richard, Samantha and Catalina.

  Maybe Sunday, then.

  Yeah, Sunday might be better, said the lesbian, in his opinion a little vaguely; and eventually they made a date for Sunday at noon. He did not want her to perceive how strangely terrible he felt, to know that tomorrow night she would be with Judy—although Sandra would have been worse. Why should it distress him? They both had other lovers, and, if anything, the fact that she had others helped him to hold up his head high in front of her when he did the same.

  He played a round of liars’ dice with Shantelle. She cheated, and he let her win. Then he rushed home and coiled up tightly in bed, neither crying nor wishing to cry, not exactly jealous as the word was usually meant, but deeply hurt, as though his stomach were bleeding. And he lay still for a long time being sad.

  6

  No, baby, I know what you actually need, I heard him say on occasion to both Sandra and Neva. In fact he only knew one thing:

  When he was four years old he saw something dark yet bright with blood moving in the mouth of his grandmother’s Siamese cat.—Bad, bad! his grandmother scolded. You killed another bird!

  There was a smell of innards. His grandmother took the bird away. Maybe she buried it after it stopped moving.

  The first time he saw a woman’s slit, he remembered that scarlet brightness winding and twirling across feathers and then returning inward where the trembling bird had been eviscerated, the cat watching the boy wide-eyed, then streaking away to avoid his grandmother’s anger and hopefully catch another bird.

  Until he was grown he had wondered whether he belonged somewhere else—a typical reaction of any sentient life-form still immature and hence out of tune with this universe of cruelty. Not finding an answer, he did as we, and cheapened himself.

  Sometimes he imagined walking on a beach, and somehow washing away his unknown trouble, although he was never sufficiently enlightened to dream of islands. He could almost envision the white-laced blue sea rising up in endless green shoulders.

  Like the confirmed lawbreaker who always has and always will be framed by unimaginable powers disguised as police officers, he went on denying the awesome character of our universe. Finally he denied the Goddess.

  In his early childhood there had been a girl named Naomi whose hand he held when they went walking through the grass. That was all he could later remember of her. He passed through other sweethearts, married, strayed and became Sandra’s faraway boyfriend. By then his affections were nearly as pallid as the retired policeman’s swollen belly. Sandra began to withdraw from him. She had her men and he his women; that was how it needed to be. But when she fell into Neva’s orbit—and when he realized that she loved Neva more than him—he felt the gruesome pain of that scarlet gash, which this time was not the perfectly healthy groove below Sandra’s belly but the bleeding explosion in his heart.

  At the Cinnabar he informed me that on the first occasion when Sandra came to him af
ter having been with the lesbian, he could not help but be distant; but having already understood and expected this, Sandra set herself very sincerely, patiently and lovingly to reassure him until he was melted, and when he sought his jealousy, it was gone! Presently came his first turn, followed by the next epoch. They had made a rule, which he had intended to enforce: Neither of them would bring Neva home to make love with her in their bed. But then he came to see that it was so inconvenient sometimes not to invite Neva over, and that restriction seemed silly. The first time after he had lain down beside Neva in their bed, when Sandra touched him he burst into tears. Their bed was changed now. It would never be the same. But she was as patient and affectionate as ever, so that what he had done came to feel like something he had offered up to all three of them. When Sandra brought Neva back, he expected the bed to feel soiled, but it didn’t. Maybe it would have had there been some other lover, some smelly man; after all, this fellow was straight like me.

  In a scripture called “The Song of the Pearl,” the narrator, who must be a soul thrown down among us, and may also be a divine messenger to the rest of us, receives a letter that speaks to him in a woman’s voice: Remember that you are a son of kings and see the slavery of your life. Did the straight man now become a prince reminded of his kingdom, or merely a slave distracted from his servitude?

  Ordinarily his back hurt if he sat in one position for too long, but now he felt that he could watch over Neva forever, joyfully and without pain. On the sofa, she slept mostly on her side, wearing everything but her shoes, apparently smiling. The white evening light was as soft as silver between her and the doorway. Sparrows were cheeping and a coolness blew gently in. Sandra’s two pug dogs scuttered happily across the floor, sometimes slipping and skating helplessly, much to their own astonishment; then they leaped up onto the sofa. One of them nestled behind Neva’s head, while the other, outstretching its forelegs, made a curving descent through space, rushed to the door, wagged its tail, then slept. At five-o’-clock sharp he awoke her as promised, so that she could meet Francine at the Y Bar. At six-o’-clock Sandra came in.