Having enjoyed several experiences with supernatural lovers in the past, I was not in the least alarmed. The beautiful Chinese fox-spirits who suck semen out of a man until he dies can be beaten at their own game: sustained, repeated, remorseless penetration will kill them first, so that suddenly, in the middle of the act, the lovely longhaired lady squirming on the bed becomes a sad little fox-corpse with its tongue hanging out. As for the elf-ladies of Central Europe, I’ve found them innocuous, since all they truly desire is a man’s happy surrender for twenty or a hundred years, which in any case spend themselves ecstatically, like a single night. What he-man would pass that up? Everyone you used to know will be gone, of course, but one can’t be miserly in the game of love.
That is how life is for those of us who can be caught by the sudden, astonishing dearness of a strange woman’s back.
If you want to know, I was in love with femininity. That was why I hazarded myself with supernatural bedmates. In my quest for the most womanly woman of all, I sought out her who was not half derived from man, which is to say her who had never had a father.
Regarding the fox-women I do admit that in each case I felt bad for doing it, but then I thought: It was her, me or abstinence; and neither of us had wanted the last! She would have murdered me if she could.
I remember the first, who tried her feeble best to be good to me, but dared not cease even momentarily from being good to herself as she saw it, which meant protecting herself from what she was doing to me by draining my semen; once I began to show signs of anemia she cut herself off from my neediness. Unfortunately, it is impossible to divorce a fox and live; these beings do not accept abandonment, perhaps because once they have attached themselves to a given host, severance would cause them great suffering. At any rate, she had a lovely voice and long brown hair — but what is the use of remembering her? When she died, I remember how the white waterfall of urine gushing between her dark thighs turned into a snowy tail.
Departing the room forever, I emerged into the Chinese beauty parlor whose beautiful hairdresser, in a polka-dotted miniskirt, was rapping the shoulderblades of a happy man. — I think you have very good time? she demanded, continuing her business as rapidly as a chicken-and-rice vendeuse can slice with her cleaver.
And I remember the latest, who kept striding and kicking, prancing and flashing various shades of leg and breast while her lies alone smiled in the friendly darkness. She possessed the small unwinking eyes of a splay-legged turtle. Unlike the first, she not only preyed on men, but camouflaged herself as a prostitute. Light puckered up on the floor. My semen trickled down her black bikini, as slimy as a worm. Pretending to be happy and desirous, she dragged me into the back room.
At her funeral an old Chinese lady raised an incense stick above her head, clasped her hands at mouth level, silently praying before the shrine, her eyes tightly shut, her lips clenched; I suppose she must have been the procuress.
Below, in the creamy brown river, floating shacks on logs like old houseboats gone to decay reminded me of other lives that she and I could have lived; and I remember a hill of flower trees, coconut trees, papaya trees; a railing whose tiles were hot to the touch; and a street on which headscarfed women slowly strolled. The ones who were fox-spirits in that town frequented either the Tong Chong Chinese Club or the Lai Zhu Unisex Hair Salon.
And regarding the elf-ladies, I truly have no regrets at all. Thanks to them, I have already lived a thousand years.
Once an elf-lady married me, and then left me largely alone while she went out to enchant other flies into her spiderweb. I spent most of that century chopping wood for her. Grey hairs grew from my chin as slowly as the stained glass windows of ancient cathedrals ooze from rectangles into trapezoids. Brown creeks unhurriedly undercut the leaning trees of my solitude and occasionally some long narrow weasel-like animal clattered from stone to stone, chasing a fish. When she returned at last, with a hypnotized knight clinging to the tail of her white horse, she set the knight to breaking stones, dismounted and with a laughing kiss set me free. It had all been a game. I felt joyous and strong as I wandered back into the world, and found a fairy hoard of gold upon the way.
Ultimately, the play of light through banana leaves leads one to heaven, which I now inhabited with my naked Wenuke, who seated herself on a river rock, laving her drawn-up thighs, her desire to devour me as sweetly naked as a baby’s toes wiggling in its mother’s lap.
Whenever I left, even for a moment, I was attacked by her sadness at my back. Moreover, each time I tried to get up from beneath her, I felt weaker and she clung to me with greater determination. I had no illusions.
Once upon a time, a certain carnivorous woman sought to do to me as she had done to my nine hundred predecessors. Just as a smiling Thai mother dabbles her child’s face with sacred water while he grimaces, so this fiendish lover of mine began to baptize me with a silver poison drawn from between her legs; fortunately, I confounded her with my bezoar stone, and she perished in a single shriek. How and when would Wenuke make her attempt to murder me?
We sat alone together in her rotting house, and in the rocking chair which would have caved in beneath a child’s weight she knitted me a green pullover, the threads blossoming one by one as her needle drew them up toward the light, her face calmly poised over the growing garment that resembled a swatch of turf; sometimes she smiled, and sometimes peeped at me as if she might be plotting something; but what if it was only that she loved me? I had hollowed out the handle of my keychain and filled it with a military herbicide. Do you consider me a scheming betrayer? But I never killed any lady except in self-defense.
I was in love with every one of them, for they eschewed the tiresome unpredictability of human women, who might start an argument at any moment, or decide to leave me. At least the supernaturals always knew what they wanted.
The carnivorous woman I mentioned had murdered my best friend five hundred years before; and when I encountered her in that alien city I suddenly heard the ghost of my friend laughing his happy sniggering laugh, watching me from overhead in the night, knowing my misdeeds, and a pet phrase of his came into my head; he said it and laughed, said it and laughed, but in the laugh there was only bitterness; he was saying his pet name for the woman who had now become my lover. Well, who was he angry at? She had destroyed him, not I. Her kiss was as lovely as the sea’s salty spittle squirting up against the walls of my heart.
And then I saved myself from her and she died in that long scream.
Wenuke was certainly as tender as sautéed snowpea shoots in a careful Chinese restaurant.
She sucked the semen out of me with her mouth, and kept sucking, until finally, when she raised her face and looked at me, I saw it trickling from the corner of her mouth, and there were threads of blood in it. I felt so dizzy that I could hardly think. If I didn’t get away right now, I would die. I stood up, clung to the bedpost for a moment and staggered naked down those rotten stairs, expecting her to pursue me with her whipping tendrils, but she lay as if uprooted; and presently, just before I fled the house, I heard from upstairs the beginning of a keening like the sobbing of a child left alone at night with a cruel mother, a sobbing that continues hour after hour while the child tries to do what the mother demands, always failing to please her.