Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (71 page)

Reluctantly she did. And a wicked war
of words ensued, a dispute that raged for weeks. No Vatican representative came
to Syria, but overheated electrons zinged eastward across the Mediterranean on
a regular basis, and hard-boiled electrons often passed them, heading west.
Several times Domino seemed to lose her stomach for the fight, but Switters,
operating on not much more than a hunch, propped her up, girded her loins
(though he might have preferred to ungird them), and pushed her back into the
fray.

Toward the end of April, she
prevailed.

She didn’t know if she had simply
worn them down or if they were getting nervous as June and the “New Catholic
Women” conference approached, but quite abruptly one day in the weeks following
Easter, the Church fathers relented, going so far as to issue a thoroughly
polite formal invitation to meet with the Holy Father in a fortnight’s time.

Hugging Switters, almost sobbing with
relief, she said she was overjoyed that it was done and that, in the end,
winning an audience with the pope was worth all the Sturm und Drang.

“Personally, I’d rather meet Pee-wee
Herman,” he said, “but if you’re happy, I’m happy. And if you’re
safe
and happy, I’m happier yet.”

She suggested that he must be happy
on his own account as well. He could leave now, leave at once, and start
attending to his considerable personal agenda. “Not so fast,” he said. “You may
have won the compulsories, but you still have to skate the freestyles, and
there ain’t no way your coach is abandoning you until the last damn twirl is
twirled. Oh, no! Not with
this
set of judges. Some way, somehow, I’ve
got to escort you to Rome.”

She told him he was out of his
cotton-picking mind. She told him he was crazy and brave and sweet. He told her
he was just curious.

The May moon looked like a
bottlecap. More specifically, entering its last phase, the moon looked like a
bottlecap that a fidgety beer-drinker had squashed double between macho thumb
and forefinger. The moon was making Switters thirsty, and he said as much to
Toufic, but the truck driver wasn’t listening.

“I want to love America,” Toufic
lamented, “but America requires me to hate it.”

Toufic had come to drive the
Pachomian delegation to the airport at Damascus. He arrived on a Monday evening
so that they might get a very early start on Tuesday morning. He arrived with a
crumb of hashish for Switters, and they sat by the car now, smoking it in the
faintly moon-painted desert. He also arrived with American offenses on his
mind. Offenses in Iraq. Offenses in Yugoslavia. Those offenses made Toufic
angry, but mostly they made him sad. His large brown eyes seemed saturated with
a kind of molten chocolate grief.

“What is wrong with your great country?”
Toufic lamented. “Why must it do these terrible things?”

Switters held a cloud of candied
smoke in his lungs. “Because the cowboys wiped out the buffalo,” Switters said.

“Everywhere a buffalo fell,” said
Switters, “a monster sprang up in its place.”

Switters was going to list some of
the monsters, but his mouth was dry, and he feared he couldn’t expectorate.

“There’s a direct link between the
buffalo hunts and Vietnam,” said Switters.

Straining to comprehend, Toufic
sighed with his eyes.

“When Lee surrendered at Appomattox,”
said Switters, “it sealed once and for all Wall Street’s power over the
American people.”

Switters said, “There’s a direct link
between Appomattox and genuine imitation leather.”

“But,” Toufic lamented, “your country
has so
much
.”

“Well,” said Switters, “it has
bounce. It has snap. It has flux.”

“Americans are generous and funny,
the ones I have met,” Toufic lamented, “but I am compelled to oppose them.”

“It’s only natural,” said Switters.
“American foreign policy invites opposition. It invites terrorism.”

Switters said, “Terrorism is the only
imaginable logical response to America’s foreign policy, just as street crime
is the only imaginable logical response to America’s drug policy.”

Toufic wanted to pursue this in greater
detail, but the hashish was kicking in, and Switters was rapidly losing
whatever interest he had in politics. “Politics is where people pay somebody
large sums of money to impose his or her will on them. Politics is
sadomasochism. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Switters said, between pursed lips,
for he was holding in the last of the oily smoke, “Let’s talk about . . . let’s
talk about . . . Little Red Riding Hood.”

Switters told Toufic the story of
Little Red Riding Hood. Toufic was puzzled but enthralled. He listened
attentively, as if weighing every word. Then, Switters told Toufic the story of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He did the voices. Switters did the big gruff
bass Daddy Bear voice, he did the medium-sized nurturing domestic Mama Bear
voice, and he did the little high-pitched squealy Baby Bear voice. Toufic was
absolutely spellbound.

Toufic wanted more. So, next,
Switters tried to describe
Finnegans Wake
to him. It was not a complete
success. Obviously baffled, Toufic became disinterested, even slightly
irritated; but Switters persisted in his “titley hi ti ti” talk and his “where,
O where is me lickle dig done” talk, just as if he were back at the C.R.A.F.T.
Club in Bangkok.

But Switters wasn’t in Bangkok, he
was in the Syrian desert, and the May moon, entering its last phase, appeared
folded over on itself like a thin yellow omelet. It was making him hungry, and
he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver was no longer listening.

Six of them crowded into the Audi
sedan long before dawn. Toufic, of course, was at the wheel, and there were
Masked Beauty, Domino, Pippi, Mustang Sally—and Switters, dragged out in nun’s
habit, traveling (he hoped) on ZuZu’s passport. As they lined up in the dark to
pack themselves into the car, Masked Beauty turned and faced them. “We are
going to Italy,” she announced solemnly, perhaps unnecessarily. “You will find
that it in no way resembles Italian nights in our dining hall.”

“Italian nights? What are those?”
asked Mustang Sally, referring sarcastically to the fact that the sisters had
not enjoyed an Italian night since Switters had cleaned out their wine cellar
back in September.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” crowed Switters,
trusting that he’d turned the tables and awakened the rooster.

The drive was hot and hard. For
fifteen or so miles around midmorning, they were shadowed by a helicopter. This
particularly angered Pippi, who badly needed a pit stop. Watching her squirm to
hold her water, Switters was given yet another reason to despise choppers.

They arrived at the Damascus airport
at half past one, believing themselves unfashionably early for a 5
P
.
M
. flight. Such,
alas, was not the case.

Switters had purchased their tickets
over the Internet, courtesy of Mr. Plastic, and they picked these up at the
Alitalia counter without a hitch. (When Domino inquired how he intended to pay
for them, he said that was not an issue, since he’d charged them to his
grandmother’s attorney, whose credit information he’d had the foresight to
hijack after the woman cheated him out of his cabin in the mountains.) Up to a
point, clearing customs likewise had gone smoothly. Switters, wheelchaired and
bewimpled, pushed by Pippi and fussed over by Mustang Sally (as though he were
the most unfierce of invalids), was accepted as Sister Francine Boulod (ZuZu’s
real name) without question. Whenever an official looked him over, Switters
would commence to drool, inspiring the
douanier
to shift his attentions
elsewhere. The trouble came when the women were advised that while they were
free to leave the country, or free to stay, once they left they could not
return: the Syrian government would not be renewing their visas.

Lengthy protests and convoluted
discussions followed. When the Frenchwomen objected that they could not possibly
depart Syria under those circumstances, the customs agent-in-charge shrugged
and said, in essence, “Fine. Don’t go.” Switters wasn’t liking the implications
of this at all, but he dared not open his lightly rouged, drool-bedewed mouth.

Having eventually exhausted her
arguments with officials at the airport, none of whom could supply her with a
reason for the visa restrictions, Masked Beauty began making frantic phone
calls. Nobody appeared to be in that day at the Syrian Foreign Office. Every
living soul at the French embassy seemed to be in a meeting. The abbess made
call after call, to no avail. And now, Flight 023 was boarding.

At the last minute, just before the
gate was closed, it was decided that Masked Beauty would remain in Damascus to
attempt to resolve the visa problem. The rest of the party would proceed to
Rome, where with any luck, the abbess would catch up with them in time for
their papal audience on Thursday. They left her stewing, rubbing her nose as if
it were a lamp whose genie had gone on coffee break. They barely made the
flight.

The three former nuns and one
quasi-nun (here’s a way to avoid the “earrings”) had reserved rooms, on
Switters’s recommendation, at the Hotel Senato. A smallish
albèrgo
, the
Senato sat, modest cheek to pagan jowl, next door to the Pantheon in the Piazza
della Rotonda, the loudest, most colorful, most, for that matter,
Italian
corner of Rome, and a favorite of Switters’s, although he sometimes complained
that the area bordered on being too damn vivid.

At the check-in desk, the clerk
handed Domino a message. It was from Scanlani. He welcomed the Pachomians to
Rome. He informed them that their audience with the Holy Father had been moved
up to 14:30 hours on Wednesday, the following day. And he advised them that in
Italy it was illegal to impersonate a nun, so all of them, most especially
their “chief of security,” ought to change into civilian clothes.

It was a rather stunned flock of
penguins that lugged its bags (there were no bellmen at the Hotel Senato) into
the dwarfish lift. Only two persons could fit at a time, and Domino and
Switters elevated last. “I know you don’t like the sound of this,” she said,
fluttering Scanlani’s note, “but it’s going to be okay. I only hope my aunt
gets here in time. The prophecy is hers. I don’t feel right about surrendering
it without her.”

After dropping off her bag in the
room that she would share with Mustang Sally and Pippi, Domino came to
Switters’s room to help him off with his habit. “Hold still, ZuZu,” she said
playfully. “Only forty-six more buttons to go.”

Beneath the heavy habit, he wore his
undershorts. The boxer shorts with little snowmen on them and maple trees with
buckets attached for collecting maple sap. With a sudden flourish that
astonished them both, she yanked them down around his ankles.

She fondled him until he was as stiff
as a tire iron. Then, cupping his testes in the palm of her hand, like a
farmgirl weighing guinea eggs, she knelt before his Invacare 9000 and gave him
a single lick; a long, slow, wet, pedestal to pinnacle lick. He laid his hands
on her head, hoping to guide her into more of the same, but she stood and
backed away from the chair. She was shaking.

“I want you so bad I could scream,”
she said. “I want you so bad I could yell and spit and scratch the flowers off
this wallpaper. I want you so bad I could kick the furniture and pray to God
and piss in my panties and weep.”

“
But
?” he asked, as she took
another step backward. It was only one word, but his mouth was so dry he could barely
utter it. As a matter of fact, it came out in Baby Bear’s voice. He was stiffer
than before, if that was physiologically possible, and a fever had descended
upon him like a satyric malaria.

“
But
I’ve made a vow to Mary
and to myself and to that part of myself that is Mary and vice versa. Not until
I am married.”

“We cou-cou-could marry tomorrow,” he
stammered. “Hell, the
pope
could marry us.” The imp had hold of him for
certain.

Domino smiled. It was a smile that
could have overturned three or four Vespas in the piazza beneath their window.
“Silly goose,” she said. “It would never work out between us. I’m too old and
you’re too . . . Anyway, you will make fun of this, but when I enter St.
Peter’s tomorrow, it is important to me to enter as a virgin. I may not have on
my habit, but between my legs as in my heart, I will be a nun.”

“The maidenhead Lazarus,” he
muttered, hoping that he didn’t sound too sardonic. He did, after all, admire
the sheer obstinacy of her commitment to the patriarchs’ bogus notion of
innocence. “The hymen that rose from the dead.”

She frowned. But then she smiled
again. “Yes,” she said with an air of pride that was only partially feigned.
“And it’s the only one on the planet. It’s unique.”

“So far as we know.” He was still so
aroused his eyeballs were hard.

“Yes,” she agreed, as she backed out
of the room. “So far as we know.”

The next day they lunched just off
the piazza at the gastronomically glorious Da Fortunato al Pantheon, although
only Switters and Mr. Plastic had much of an appetite. Thrilled to be out of
the chickpea zone at last, Switters gobbled both grilled sea bass and spaghetti
alle vongole veraci, washed down with a carafe of frascati. It was Italian
asparagus season, and he ordered the
aspàrgi bianchi
in three different
preparations, pausing between each to improvise asparagus poetry: “Erect as the
white knight’s lance, a flameless candle that lights the country ditch, pithy
pen with a ruffled nib for writing love letters to his cousin, the lily; O asparagus!
lean lord of spring”
etc.
etc., on and on, in Italian, French, and English,
until the waiters joined Domino and Sally in rolling their eyes.