Well, she always made me feel good, said Al, who died of cirrhosis soon after.
Actually, Francine reminded him, you were terrified of her.
Don’t speak ill of the departed, he said. She might lay a curse on you.
I need help, said Xenia. I need help to get over her. I don’t know what she had, but now she’s gone.
You could see something real inside her and not just acting, said an Austrian tourist.
Well, but she was sure going downhill, said my favorite German.
What a caring girl, said a Dutchwoman whom our Neva had sent away happy.
An angel, I one-upped him.
Oh, she’s with the angels now, said Francine.
Victoria grew silent, then went away, dry-eyed.
I told you, said the retired policeman. It’s the old JDLR thing. Just don’t look right. That’s why stop-and-frisk is a real good idea, for the sake of the public. Cops kind of know.
Meanwhile the straight man’s memories of her kept sinking into the earth. He wisely avoided the funeral.
Sandra, who kept in touch with him for almost three months, told me, as I would have expected, that he could not stop speaking of the lesbian, apparently hoping that even if she could not be restored to him, some fragrance or light of hers could touch him even from the grave.—Sandra mourned her more sincerely, or deeply, or something, than he, which offended him, so that he cut the connection. (For half a year her period wouldn’t come.) The retired policeman, who as you know loved to gift me with his own interpretations, proposed that their quarrel was nothing more than a relitigation of history. The death itself more than satisfied him; it was that story’s best ending. Consider the way James Dean crashed to death not even a month before Rebel Without a Cause hit the theaters . . . and in due time Dean’s costar, smoldering little Natalie Wood, conveniently drowned herself! Now they were both immortal. So was Neva.—And here’s another oddity from this case, he said. You remember that sealskin pouch she had? Well, of course the boys were hoping for a little assets forfeiture, and when they turned it out on the evidence table, more hundred-dollar bills came out than . . . Well, let’s just say they couldn’t fit them back inside again. Sergeant Corasaniti has a new Glock .45, and the department’s going to get decent riot gear, and even the pathologist is a happy man.
With a “better” husband, would she have survived and even scored a crystal or two of reagent-grade contentment? After all, she and Judy were sisters: how they both needed to please! Had Neva somehow consummated her needs entirely through the straight man, how would the story have ended? I can almost see her and him embracing, mouth to mouth and tongue to tongue until they suffocated; that’s what monogamy is.—From his point of view, all she did was turn her smile from one soul to another, never meaning anything close to love.—But I never cared about him.
I thought about the way that the love and the sex with Neva used to go on and on, and now would never come back again. Without her, my arms and legs began to ache. When the grief had swelled some time in my chest, it metastasized, ringing and pounding in my head, oozing slimily down my sore throat, exhausting my eyes and chilling the back of my neck. My back ached and I got swollen glands; sores bloomed in my mouth, and even distant gentle sounds set me on edge. Take that as a compliment to Neva.
And because Francine could not stop crying, I took her home and penetrated her from behind the way she said she liked it. Even when she was climaxing she kept her head down, sobbing into my pillow. Remembering what I had learned from worshipping Neva, I got myself to obeying Francine’s cunt, being guided by the cunt, going in and out and climaxing only exactly as I was told. I think I fulfilled her; that could have been another beginning of sorts; but when I proposed a less short-term accommodation for mutual comfort, she said: Richard, you’re a sweet guy, but I’m really into women.—Well, so was I.
As for the transwoman, I can only say that the retired policeman was wonderful with her. He walked all the way upstairs on his puffy aching legs, unlocked the door (because being who he was he had long since copied her key) and conducted a clean sweep of all her pharmaceuticals, even down to over-the-counter barbiturates, so that when she came staggering in, already huge-eyed like a space alien on God knows what, he was sitting on her bed with the confiscated items beside him in a double-strength paper bag from Save ’n’ Shop. She was too high to scream; her mouth opened and she clutched between her legs.
Judy girl, he said, we’re gonna have us a little puke party.
No!
One way or another, you’re gonna sick that up. Now let’s go. Right here. That’s a good girl. Down on your knees. Lemme grab hold of your hair so it don’t go in the toilet. Now get to work. I said do it. You gonna puke up those pills or am I gonna shove your head in the bowl and waterboard you like a goddamn raghead? Judy, I’m being super patient right now, but my legs are hurting from standing here and pretty soon I’m gonna get mean. Judy, are you listening? Honey, you just got to. Neva’s gone, but you still have me. I’m not letting you go with her. You won’t see her again. Now go ahead. You can’t get out of this. I got your hair. Will you make this easy? Nod your head yes.
She shook her head no, of course. He sighed. He waited.
Cock . . . feather . . . , she whispered.
Glaring around, he found her ratty old faux-peacock feather boa hanging from, of all places, the showerhead. It was sodden and mildewed; she must have pissed on it or something and then tried to clean it. He yanked loose a feather (dyed chicken) and tickled the back of her hand with it.—There you go, honey. Now get this show on the road.
Obediently she took hold of the instrument. He resumed his guardian grip on her hair. Snivelling and whimpering, she bent lower, opened her mouth wide and tickled her tonsils. When the thick brown vomit came out, he almost got an erection, because this was a new kind of game.
Again, he said. Again. All right. Good girl. Here’s your mouthwash. Rinse good. I’m gonna start the shower for you. Come on. Strip. Hurry the fuck up. Okay; that’s good. You know something? I really love you, Judy. That’s my girl. You’re my very good girl. I’m gonna keep all your pills until you stop wanting to off yourself. Come on. Get in the fucking shower. Oh, me and my goddamn life . . . !
In the shower she kept crying so violently that the neighbors started kicking the wall, but when she came to him where he sat waiting in his underwear on the edge of her bed and his doubly pregnant paunch hanging down over the elastic, she gazed at him with something like the gently wide-eyed submission of the pretty girl in orange (aged thirty-six) who had strangled her mother for money, hid the corpse in the shed, then unexpectedly got visited by justice, the dark-uniformed bailiff now gazing down on her, perhaps compassionately, as she begins to rise and commence serving her sentence of up to seventy years, although it might be only fifty-three: I choked her, strangled her, then I pulled her down to the shed. Then I told my boyfriend about what I did and he wanted to cut her up. Sometimes the retired policeman wondered whatever happened to that bitch.
That night while he was snoring she tried to cut her wrist with that rusty boxcutter she kept in her purse, but it was what he called a fake attempt—in blander phraseology a cry for help. For three days and nights he kept her handcuffed to the bedposts, until she finally promised not to give her life for us as Judy Garland did.
2
December came, then a little rain, less than we used to get when I was young; and to me it now feels so long ago—even before Martina Navratilova defected from Czechoslovakia!—that we might as well have been figures on a buried Corinthian jar, dancing round the hydria; my memories keep listening with the uplifted ears of black horses, although all they hear is the rapid steady hissing of a police car up the otherwise unmarred greyness of Howard Street; if the lesbian were coming up to us through the dust my memories would hear her; the transwoman no longer listens, but lacks a need to, bec
ause unlike me she is as faithful as the headless woman from Miletua who holds a rock partridge tight against her stone breast. Desperate to rest down in the lesbian’s darkness, she pulled down her panties and lay across the retired policeman’s knees so that she could forsake the razor-edged burden of herself and sleep with Neva, yes; sleep with Neva: When he was beating her, she felt so happy to have been shaken out of herself, into the blissful darkness of freedom.
And Francine was always there. Alicia had been fired. Just as barren Wisdom, they say, is mother of the angels, so Francine who now had nobody nourished our dreams.
Sandra began again to envision mermaids out loud, and Judy to aspire to serving her. But as the saying went, why keep her eggs in one basket? Hence it was Erin whom Judy accompanied to Vallejo, so that after turning right and left and left and right among the Mission style houses they could visit the grave of her whom we wished had made us.
Judy said: Was she really that old? I don’t believe it.
Erin took a cell phone photo of the lesbian’s headstone. It looked as clean and shiny as candy, because early that morning Francine and Holly had come with ammonia and nail polish remover to scrub away the graffito instructing Karen to SUCK DICK YOU BIG DYKE.
Judy said: She might have been thirty at most . . . Erin? Erin, why are you so quiet?
Erin said: When I was little I wanted to live in tunnels underground and have a secret kingdom underground. I had a lot of fantasies about it. It would be really muddy and earthy. This was before I went to the Carlsbad Caverns or went to subways. I just wanted to be underground. I liked the smell of dirt; I liked playing with worms.
They stared down at Karen Strand’s headstone, and Erin said: Now I think, no, I wouldn’t like it anymore.
Judy eagerly said: I’ll bet you had a little girlfriend you used to share those fantasies with—
Erin said: I didn’t talk about that stuff with anyone.
Then they went away. That was when Judy realized that Erin would never become one of her special friends.
Once they were out of sight I slithered up to lick my darling’s headstone. Closing my eyes, I seemed to see her bare marble breasts perfect, the tongue beginning to show between her marble lips, her shining wrist poised on her head. I might have given her the so-called melon hairstyle of Cleopatra . . . and I thought it for the best that she had died like this.
3
We were still clinging to the lesbian and hoping that she would raise us up. We had barely departed from the time when the lesbian was licking the inside of Sandra’s ear; then Samantha draped her leg over the lesbian’s shoulder in order to be entered with a sky-blue dildo; next the lesbian lay as limp as a feral kitten caught by sadistic children, while Shantelle happily fisted her. Strapping on her extra-long black dildo, the lesbian knelt, grasped Judy’s ankles and penetrated her; after which Xenia, pulling aside the strap of her camisole so that the lesbian could grip a breast, closed her eyes and opened her mouth for a kiss.—Remembering Neva became nearly as much fun as retelling the death of Natalie Wood.
A punk T-girl with pink hair and red shoes came in one night in her short plaid skirt silkscreened with Betty Boop’s image; she was as convincing as the original Judy Garland, and Xenia, who was high on goofballs and Old German Lager, approvingly shouted out: She’s a filthy whore! but we withheld our worship, and the punk girl never came back. Xenia staggered off to the toilet. Half an hour later she was telling Francine: So the closest I felt to community with queer women was in Seattle with six, seven women who were all gay. I don’t feel that yet.
Maybe you will someday, Francine said wearily. Three dollars.
Meanwhile the transwoman, who had inherited most of the lesbian’s slips and dresses, found that they did still not fit, and rather than let some other woman use them she tore them to shreds.
She tried to go through the motions at the Pink Apple, without Xenia, telling herself: No, Judy, don’t give up! You’re starting to flower . . .—but there was no Neva to do it for—Neva, Neva, who had crushed her down with loveliness—no Colleen even (sometimes she dreamed of that girl’s reddish-orange naked legs whirling around, and the girl saying: Always . . . ), no one but the retired policeman, gazing up at her with pity, all the while admiring himself for bestowing use on that useless creature. (That was how she read him. The way he actually felt was how he used to feel in his first three months on the force, when he would hear a woman shouting and screaming in her holding cell; he got over that.) Sandra had promised: I’m so gonna be there on opening night!—but then she got sick . . .
Number One performed in a cheap curly wig and a skirt like a Mexican blanket, gesturing, crossing her legs, collecting dollar bills from eager men; her name was Synesthesia; Judy could have topped her, although I liked the way she kept swaying and flogging herself upside down, then pouting; she kept constantly opening and closing her long pink legs like nutcrackers. Her face was pretty enough. Tattooed and laced, she kept shaking off sweat and money. Suddenly I began to remember my baby daughter and her first smile. Cassandra had been a very sunny baby and used to laugh when she held my thumb in her tiny hand; in those days I often went to the toilet in order to burst into tears more happily and easily; once I had gotten my catharsis in there, I ran the faucet and reminded myself that even if I stayed with her and Michelle, Cassandra would change into someone else; then I felt relieved that I never had and never would need to do anything. I came out, and Synesthesia was onstage, hugging a happy sweaty lesbian; Judy still remained in the game . . .—but Number Two was Vulvalicious, the blonde in the red-checked suit-dress, who was vastly wide and pillowy, creased and bulging and quadruple-paunched, blue lipstick and eyebrows, whirling her tiny head as if it were a distant moon over a snowy landscape; Judy was no more than a shadow of a faraway planetoid against that lady’s pallid flesh.—And unfortunately, Judy was Number Three.
Wicker-jickering on ultra-tall heels, she came onstage, raised her skirt and tried pretending that just now the retired policeman was sodomizing her while all these people watched and laughed . . .—but in truth she lacked the wherewithal to embrace her inner disgustingness anymore no matter how lewdly she wriggled, so she forgot her lip-synched lines and so her applause pattered away and turned into jeers as in the old days; she’d become a drunken crab creeping lethargically on the empty stage.—Well, they turned on Judy Garland, didn’t they?
4
High as fuck on Concentrax and blue dolphins, Judy came swishing up the Hotel Reddy’s carpeted stairs, trying to keep smiling, because the security cameras might be proof that she was starring in a movie. Then she remembered that Neva was gone. She banged on Catalina’s door. No one answered.
5
She walked through night and wind all the way to Chinatown and came to the retired policeman’s former haunt, the Buddha Bar. And there sat the retired dancer Helen, whom she had not seen in ever so long. And Helen was gracious again, and even remembered her!
It’s Judy, isn’t it? You’re the one who hoped to perform in musicals. You look good; you’ve lost a lot of weight . . .
Oh, thank you, said the transwoman. You’re one of the nicest people I ever met, except for Neva. You kind of remind me of Julie Andrews. But Neva just died. She was a real star for some of us, and . . . And we feel like, well, actually I can’t remember when Marilyn Monroe died, but you’re so pretty like her. Suppose you’d been in Marilyn’s shoes, and everywhere you went people wanted to . . .
Oh my goodness, said Helen. I guess it would depend on whether you had a good support system.
Could I please buy you a drink?
No, thank you, Judy. I have to be running along pretty soon.
Did you ever hear of Neva?
I’m afraid not.
She was really just like a goddess. I . . .
You’re upset, Judy; I can see that. You know, I think often when celebrities sadly di
e young, you kind of idolize them because they were at their peak and you can’t fathom it. Michelle Pfeiffer is so beautiful, and I hadn’t seen her in a movie in ages. How must she have felt to go on the shelf? I don’t know, but you can get raised up and feel that you’re super important and believe everything that you hear and then come crashing down. I mean in this business, the media doesn’t allow people to grow old gracefully.
And the thing is, I’m already old! I never got to make it big, and now I see that if I’d only had more discipline or whatever—
Judy, said Helen, I can remember that when I lived in London I was at my peak. I felt confident. I never had that here. I could just tell that when I got here, I felt less comfortable. After Wicked Frogs I had one audition, and I thought, I just can’t do this anymore. You know, you’re used to taking rejection, but . . . Oh, my gosh, Judy, I have to go. It’s been so lovely chatting with you—
But how do you stay happy once you—
My husband still works in the profession. There was a little bit for me of being envious of him in that world. You work at night, you’re out on the town and it’s fun. There’s not really many jobs where people clap and cheer you. I think I kind of grieved. I watched the Golden Pussy Awards on television and I still wanted to . . . I mean, really, you train, and you slave at this job, and then, I mean, what am I now gonna do? And I know dancers for whom a lover and children never happened. One of my friends, she was not particularly successful, but she was really really good at getting to know people and she’s the operations manager of a huge restaurant in London. No one has everything. So, Judy, make the best of it. Goodbye now.
6
And then the beautifully whitehaired old woman in the denim shirt sat with folded arms, looking into Judy’s face.
Well, she said, we hold our meetings on full moon nights, and then we do get a lot of women who are like you in that way. So basically we tell them to take their time. Be in the community and see how it fits for you. You don’t have to prove anything. If you hang out here in the community for awhile, you’ll find out.
The Lucky Star Page 69
