The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  So they started fucking again. She was very sexy and enthusiastic. (From her point of view it was all about him gripping her round the waist and breathing redfaced into her ear.) He felt very needy and grateful because he had thought that it was all over.

  He had felt sad in many other ways before. He had never before felt sad in this way. The smell of her skin and the taste of her pussy now made a kind of sunset in his skull.

  7

  When they first began making love four years before she had been very tight and dry; she said it was how she was made; they would always need to use lubricant. He was tender, considerate and experienced; soon she was taking it up the ass. He had sex drugs galore, and one of the happiest moments of his life was when they were both drunk and wasted on empathy pills and he lay on his back with his cock sticking straight up, and without any lubricant she slammed herself down on him with a joyous roar. In the morning she was a little sore, of course, but they kept loving in that direction. And now with her off the birth control her pussy was juicier and thirstier than ever; it had always tasted sweet, but now it had even fresher and more exciting notes; she must be throwing off make-my-baby hormones. He had always desired her, but never so much as this. He couldn’t stop touching her. He sucked and sucked her, holding her, kissing her lips and sucking her tongue while his fingers carefully brought her forward, desperate for her rabbitlike cry of fulfillment which was thin, high, frail, and ever so sweet to him.

  And then they had to get the applicator. They had learned to fill it full of jelly first. Even so there was that pause while they reached for it and then he or she squeezed it in.

  He tried to joke about it; he wanted it to be funny. Tipsy and laughing, dying to penetrate her, he rolled the empty applicator aside and said: All right, you pretty baby-killer, you!

  He’d reach down below the Bible drawer for the applicator and say: All right, let’s kill our baby now!

  And she would smile ever more palely, and after the third or fourth time she said: That makes me sad . . .

  He never told her how sad he was. It was monstrous to him, that she was going to make a baby in a clinic with some stranger’s sperm, when she kept killing his!—He was my brother in selfishness; we all operated so far below our Neva!

  Sometimes he’d eat Sandra’s pussy until she screamed out her third or fourth climax, and then he’d put his penis inside her, just for a minute; she’d look worried but allow it, because she trusted him. And he’d start thrusting carefully in and out; it felt so good; he’d say: Do you want me to stop?

  She always nodded, until one night when she said: Oh, oh, I don’t know!

  And he was so close; he wanted so much to come inside her and give her the baby, but he knew that if he did they’d both feel even sadder later, so he got off her and they killed another baby.

  Then Manfred returned to his wife, the straight man dreamed of dead birds and Sandra started worshipping Neva in earnest.

  8

  Just as a fraternity man first snorts coke because the brothers offer it, then snorts coke because that way he can drink all night and never get drunk, then snorts coke and skips the booze, so Sandra first accepted the offer of Neva to be social, then found out that loving Neva helped her to love the straight man, then realized that she did not need the straight man at all. But she loved him; he was her boy; she had promised to never ever leave him even if she sometimes might close this or that heart-ventricle to him.

  Spying on Sandra and the lesbian, he saw their pallid heads approach each other in the lurid doorway; then those two were staring sightlessly into each other’s skulls.

  9

  Again she gave her word that whenever they were alone together her body and soul would be utterly open to him, not just to keep that old commitment but also because she sincerely wanted it so; indeed, she was longing to open herself to him all the way, until he could see right up her, all the way to her fluttering bloody heart.

  Meanwhile, strictly to further his scientific curiosity, he began visiting Neva.

  And so he and Sandra moved back in together.

  10

  I can’t help but feel that you are punishing me for what I did and said, Sandra told him. I do feel chastised. And it is especially hard when you say that we can’t talk about it for an unknown length of time.

  Something about the straight man had always been difficult and dark. Granting that his fundamental unavailability (as Sandra explained to Neva) was part of who he was, which is why she respected it, by that very token he ought to respect how lonely it made her.

  Neva nodded, held her and kissed her. (Last night she had dreamed that the only place to make love with Judy was her mother’s unmade bed, which smelled. She further dreamed that her mother stood in the doorway giving her such advices as: Don’t forget her pussy. Remember her pussy.—Then her mother waited outside the closed door, listening.)

  But how do you feel about it? her adorer demanded.

  The lesbian replied: How I feel is that I love you.

  But you’re not jealous when Louis and I . . .—I don’t understand. And what do you suppose it’s like for me when Louis comes over here, or you see him while I’m waiting outside?

  Neva said nothing.

  Thus the first instance when Sandra began to tell her: I don’t understand why you won’t open up to me when I am so willing to open up to you.

  Or, as another crucified soul once cried out: My Goddess, my Goddess, why have you forsaken me?

  11

  Naturally she did close herself off from him. She hoped to live exclusively in the gold chamber of the lesbian’s womb.

  Although for a fairytale eternity she swam along beside Neva like a champion mermaid heroine, she was now getting weighed down by the secret, or, as she described it, the pressure of the secret, which pushed her deeper underwater; she was getting tired.

  12

  You know that I love you, don’t you? asked Sandra. This matter of Geoffrey is a little odd, but I know you understand, and I’m so grateful for your support and advice. I never could have gone through with it if you hadn’t helped me.

  Well, and did he propose? asked the straight man.

  Oh, no! But we had a very, very nice time.

  Just remember, honey: Every day that he doesn’t return to his wife is another victory for you.

  I guess so . . . Darling, are you sad about something?

  I’m happy for you.

  That isn’t what I asked.

  Of course I support you. I’m proud that you’re making yourself happy.

  But you know that I love you, too!

  Of course I know . . .

  And that I desire you . . .

  Sure, he said. Not long before, she would have said: Don’t you know that I love you the most?—She used to say: Louis, I worry that you’re slipping away . . .

  13

  It might have been less frightening for her to propel herself down deeper as if she were a Neva-imitating intercessor for still more feeble and troubled mermaids such as Judy; indeed, the cunning pretense of acting so might facilitate her own escape; for The Gnostic Scriptures most truly proclaim that between us and the light above there is a veil, and upon the veil has grown a shadow, so that to ascend now means to enter into confusion and terror; hence it is best to go down first, and grow accustomed to the true darkness before venturing into the false kind. But Sandra had trouble being false; the most she could be was secretive. When she stretched her hand down to Judy she sincerely meant to help her, even if the latter drowning mermaid pulled her farther into death. So she was preparing herself to see through Neva’s shadow without realizing she did so. Meanwhile the straight man most scientifically plunged himself into the opacity which clothed Neva’s naked luminescence, because having blinded himself to all prior mysteries, he craved this one. But it was false darkness whi
ch he inhaled, without understanding the true one. And so he and Sandra were equally and separately lost.

  14

  And what do you do? the straight man inquired on their first so-called date.

  What do you mean? returned the lesbian.

  I mean, what do you do for money? Jesus, what else could I mean?

  Nothing.

  That’s pretty weird.

  She was silent.

  But that’s you, isn’t it, Neva? Pretty and weird. You don’t charge for it?

  I would never do that.

  Then how do you live?

  Like this . . .

  Drinking in her face, he tasted that calm wide-eyed gaze of a woman waiting to make love without desire.

  15

  He had money. He took her to the opera: an opportunity for Spanish damsels to click their castanets and show some leg (the conductor’s wrist waving like seaweed); in came swishing girls in red corsets, necklace-gleam and cheek-shine of a smiling lady in the darkness; and then two young women with brilliants in their ears, leaning against the railing of the orchestra pit, staring back up at the boxes together through the same cell phone screen. Beside him, the lesbian’s white hand stroked her white leg up and down; something was itching her. On his other side was a pink skirt and shining knees slightly parted; their owner had sat down without acknowledging his nod. He looked: a pretty woman held a faux-jeweled clutch most tightly under her shaven armpit. The lesbian, knowing what he was up to and in fact quite relieved to be ignored for once, watched the ballerinas spreading their thighs and crabwalking sideways.

  As the world expanded, its silences got louder, and gold shone brighter and brighter, as if it were gold and silver together, while the hair of blondes turned almost green. He had bought a glass bangle for the lesbian, who presently slipped it off and began to run her forefinger around its inside. He longed to smell her face. The ring sparkled on her finger; he longed to lick it.

  Now the ballet had something to do with a certain magenta empress with a face of crystalline fungus. Her flabby old labia were hanging like the formerly silver curtains in a long dead noble’s private box at the opera. Now here was the lesbian with her white skirt slipping up her thighs as she hovered over him, grasshoppering her legs as she struggled not to be borne away.

  Wake up, wake up, said Sandra. Honey, you’re tossing and turning—

  16

  Unable, so she claimed, to understand the straight man’s talk of bargains and agreements, meanwhile sinking into dark water, while the lesbian shone, with respites, farther and farther above her, Sandra felt even more alone than before.

  As I have said, this woman was the loveliest-hearted of Neva’s worshippers. When we others victimized her, her reaction almost always was the innocent grief of a child, unmixed with anger. She performed at least as many patient kindnesses for Judy as Francine, and far more than Xenia. Nurturing to stray cats and dogs, glowing with affection and infinitely deserving of it, Sandra sank quite slowly into desperation. A constant lover, companionable and present, would so far as she could see have saved her.—I remember when I used to think like that.

  Tell me how much you love me, she begged.

  I love you . . . began the lesbian, but Sandra said: Tell me something you’ve never told me before.

  I love you enough to snuggle you and . . .

  And what? asked Sandra anxiously.

  Enough to hold you tight . . .

  The lesbian was feeling very tired.

  I adore you. Do you adore me?

  Of course I do—

  Are you as passionate about me as in the very beginning?

  Yes, I am—

  Are you more passionate? Because I’m more passionate about you every day.

  Me, too, said the lesbian.

  17

  And the straight man continued his researches. Experiments were all they were; he swore he felt no attachment to Neva. (Often he’d just as soon play liars’ dice with Shantelle!) As Sandra withdrew ever farther from him, he considered our universe from the objective side, his penis not yet throbbing with need but certainly beginning to call attention to itself, in a way that as yet remained less desperate than pleasurably anticipatory, like the way one’s mouth waters when a succulent dessert arrives at the dinner table; he lay awake at night imagining thrusting into this girl or that woman, not necessarily Neva—who received him well, of course. She made him feel something that he used to feel which pills sometimes persuaded him had revisited him however temporarily and half-heartedly; this thing was his life itself which once used to stir in his heart and penis and had now deserted him as coolly as our first love leaves us, for he was used up now, flabby and tired, greyfaced and complaining, worrying all the time about money and the future, as if worry could somehow save him from his predestined hole in the ground. Smiling, his life departed him, casting around for someone less boring. Fortunately, there remained several diverting questions to dig into, such as: (I) Could someone improve Neva? (Let’s not forget that the Grand Inquisitor improved Jesus’s work, and the Prophet Muhammed later did much the same.) (II) When we had no choice but to love her, on account of how perfect she was, then did we truly, purely love her?

  There came a sad Monday night of two flabby dancers in alternation who for a long time puzzled over which song to dial up on the jukebox and then halfway through it kept slowly disinfecting the catty pole. Why did he even visit the Pink Apple, anyhow? One girl looked better from the front than the back; she lured him into a twenty-dollar private dance during which he never forgot Sandra. The other dancer, the redhead, kept making a show of her ass, so that quiet men in ball caps placed money for her on the edge of the stage; she didn’t help him away from Sandra, either. (Discovering Neva, a girl in leather bent her wrists across her breasts, then turned up the corners of her mouth in a smile so impossibly wide and deep as to encompass the entire lower hemisphere of a perfect circle.) The barmaid owed him two dollars in change but pretended to know nothing about it and kept nagging him to tip the dancers. Worn out, he made another date with the lesbian, longing for her pity if for nothing better.

  He inquired: You’re not actually a lesbian, are you?

  No, people just call me that.

  So what are you?

  Whatever you make me.

  By then his outspread fingers could not desist from the oscillating caresses through which they drank in pleasure from her milky-white breast—indeed, this pleasure tasted like rich sweet milk—and from her soft smooth shoulder, which tasted like sweat, meat, sexual excitement; and from her perfect upper arm, whose flavor the fingertips never identified before they simply had to rush back to gently kneading pleasure out of her breast, drinking it greedily through every ridge and whorl, while she smiled at him and sweetly kneaded his penis, a procedure which felt so good that he took one hand away from her and began to play with himself, one hand for him and one for her and both of them (he insisted) equally happy, their fingers drinking in the joy which propelled them into something that pretended to be eternity.

  But the lesbian sat up. She threw on her green blouse, and right away, the straight man began to feel cold from right under his heart all the way down to his icy feet. Our Neva was about to go away!

  He could have visited her as often as the rest of us; but, preferring not to lose himself, contented himself with one encounter every other week. The closer he got to her, the more he longed to smell her. He meditated on the delightful sight of her clitoral hood. Given the way he wished to be portrayed it would be inappropriate of me to mention her searing kisses and her body seething against his; I’m told that he once burned his mouth on her red-hot pussy, but who can believe such sentimental lies? His sensations in her bed and after were curious, to say the least; everything grew new and brightly colored at the moment of climax; then, in direct proportion to the duration and physica
l distance of their separation, rather grey. Furthermore, each time he departed from her, the greyness thickened. Had he been capable of rapture, his erotic intervals with Neva might have gotten correspondingly richer, but he was not someone of that sort. Having heard how it was with Francine, Judy, Shantelle, Sandra and me, he found this no stranger than he had expected. But his solitary bed did get colder, and his ceiling lower.

  He found a Mexican girl in a summer dress who was flying around a catty pole, then spreading her legs to show that she had somehow lost her underwear; doing pullups, flashing her bottom in the red night, she somersaulted naked up the pole and descended upside-down, her arms outstretched and her breasts hard and fake. She was gripping the pole between her thighs solely, inching down until her long hair swept the floor and the men shrieked hosannahs. Next came a Chinese girl who was just as beautiful but who forgot to put on her smile until she was onstage; the strobe made him nauseous. So he went back to Sandra and the lesbian.

  The truth is that he could not really make his way. Peering into the lesbian’s persona, he thought to see a cramped dark chamber in which something glittered. And what that something was he longed to see.

  He asked the retired policeman, of course. From that source he received all the sinister interpretations that anyone could have wanted. Next he asked me; I promised him that Neva would irradiate him with the stream of pleasure.

  All right, Francine. Tell me what you know.

  The barmaid answered: Well, she’s wonderful.

  Pulling open the Y Bar’s swinging door, he felt nearly as he had when in his boyhood he stood on the rocky rim of a carp pond, spying out what might be beneath the water’s brown-green mirror: fingernails of fire flicking by in a slow rainstorm (surely goldfish); and then the edge of a waterlily-island twitched as two glistening black claws pulled it down, and a face, half black, half blue, with crimson eye-beads, peered alertly up, hoping to catch some prey. Or, in the magnificent words of Frank S. Caprio, M.D.: In almost every large city, one can find a particular tavern or café where male and female inverts congregate. These places frequently change, for when the establishment becomes notorious as a hangout for “queers” some civic or religious group tries to have them closed. Amidst the beautiful things dwelled some other kind of thing. Perhaps it was not a monster but a mermaid. As yet he still loved Sandra more than Neva.—What a stupid tautology to say that this story could have ended differently!