Skinny Legs and All (37 page)

“Why, thank you,” said Buddy. “Thank y’all.” He pulled at the green bow. “Lemme see what’s in here.”

“Hope it fits,” said Verlin.

“It will,” said Ellen Cherry. “It’s a straitjacket.”

The minister didn’t respond. Very slowly, very carefully, he loosened the wrapping, exhibiting a bit more patience with his Christmas surprise than he had for the end of the world. Restless, Verlin stole glances at the halftime show, and Patsy sponged a smear of yam from the tabletop. Under the sink, the cockroaches monitored Patsy’s action with exasperation, as if the cockroaches were a needy institution and Patsy one of those coy philanthropists who never give their money away.

The family gathering dissolved about ten-thirty. Alone, Ellen Cherry’s thoughts returned again and again to Raoul. She had all but decided to invite him up, but when she went to the toilet to take a pee, she discovered that she’d gotten her “dot.”

Oh, well
. She sighed. And while begrudgingly inserting a tampon, sang three complete verses of “Jingle Bells.”

On the day after Christmas, Verlin and Patsy went to the Museum of Modern Art to have a look at the Airstream turkey. It was Patsy’s idea. “I’ve seen the fool thing for nothin’,” complained Verlin. “Why do I have to pay some Yankee good money to see it again?”

They went in a taxi, its windows rolled down to receive the unseasonable warmth. The chaos and din of Day After shoppers flooded in with the weather. “It’s like Asia,” said Patsy, marveling at the multitudes, their gaily colored burdens, their amplified murmur. “It’s like—” said Verlin, unable to conceive of a continent, a country, any community of humans with which to compare this parcel-packing, fume-inhaling, elbow-throwing, traffic-dodging throng. “It’s like the coronation of the locust queen,” said Verlin finally. Patsy didn’t understand, and Verlin wasn’t sure that he did, either, although his cerebrum supported the frail memory of a plague documented on a wildlife show.

Understandably, Ellen Cherry had scant desire to see the turkey again, especially now that it was surrounded by art. Surrounded by art? The turkey
was
art. The art cardinals had ordained it so. Well, she would wager that it was the only work in the Modern Museum in which a couple had enjoyed a honeymoon, although, on second thought, there were several paintings in the collection that looked as if they’d been fucked over.

When they stopped by the Ansonia on the way to the airport—Patsy had to pick up her pie plates—her parents had little to say about the motorized turkey except that it looked “different, really different” parked inside a big, grand room. They did, however, chatter about another piece of Boomer’s, something the museum apparently had purchased out of the Sommervell show. It was, as they described it, a huge, welded steel coathanger, maybe six feet long. Folded over its bar was a flat, deflated skyscraper, sewn out of canvas, its windows, entranceways, and other architectural features painted on. The piece was hanging from the ceiling, and there was a card on the wall that listed Boomer’s name, the materials he had used, and the title. The title was
Donald Trump’s Pants Come Back From the Cleaners
.

“Obviously,” said Ellen Cherry, in a mock Ultima accent, “it’s fraught, simply fraught, with significance.”

Verlin was perplexed. “I see that stuff of Boomer’s on display in a famous museum, and I see them pictures of ol’ socks and cans and spoons that you’re making . . .”

“I’m still freaked out about that spoon,” said Ellen Cherry, glancing at the mantelpiece.

“Oh, honey, it’s not exactly in the poltergeist class,” said Patsy.

“. . . and I wonder who all’s crazy in this world and who’s sane.”

“Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.”

“That’s pretty language from a young lady.”

“I will say this, though: the looniest artist I ever met was normal as white bread beside Buddy Winkler.”

“You take your uncle Bud too serious. He’s mainly just talk. And some of that talk we sinners would do well to heed.”

“I hope for his sake it’s just talk, because if I ever find out he had anything to do with shooting Mr. Cohen . . .”

“Hush, girl! Don’t you be insinuatin’ stuff like that.”

“Okay, but . . .”

Ellen Cherry accompanied them to the sidewalk, where Pepe whistled them a cab. Raoul wasn’t on duty yet. After Patsy and Verlin had driven away to La Guardia, she went back upstairs, lay down on the sofa, and attempted to nap. Every time she started to doze off, however, she experienced the sensation that the spoon on the mantelpiece was watching her.

Eventually, although she felt ridiculous in doing so, she got up and stuck the spoon in her underwear drawer. Next to her vibrator. It would have been humanly impossible for her to imagine the conversations that were to ensue from that meeting.

After New Year’s (a toxically lonely New Year’s, on the eve of which she’d gone searching for Raoul, her diaphragm already in place, only to be informed by Pepe that Raoul and “his band” had up and split to Los Angeles, man), Ellen Cherry was switched to the dinner shift at Isaac & Ishmael’s. She had become, for all practical purposes, a cocktail waitress, since business at the I & I was largely confined to the bar.

The important thing was that there
was
business. When word of the huge, high-definition television spread through the neighborhood, men dropped in out of curiosity and stayed to drink, snack, chat, and watch sporting events. Many foreigners who were connected to the United Nations had developed a taste for American sports. To watch the contests on a mammoth screen while washing down familiar Mediterranean treats with their native beers, wines, thick coffees, or teas was an enticement hard to resist. Only a few complained about the bamboo. Some even brought their wives. On Super Bowl Sunday, when the bar was packed to overflowing, Greeks actually sat down next to Turks, Arabs next to Jews.

A Super Bowl kicker could have placed a field goal inside the smile of Roland Abu Hadee. Spike Cohen wore a satisfied smile, as well, although his green eyes, greener than the Egyptian beer freighted by the waitpersons, greener than the cucumber slices that garnished the dishes of
baba ghanoug
, eyes hooded now by a crooked arch of scar tissue; Spike’s eyes turned frequently to survey the street—and the nondescript black shoes of the two security guards, marching on the frosty sidewalk, to and fro, to and fro.

When Ellen Cherry and Boomer were turkeying across America, they frequently found themselves looking at the rear end of vehicles upon which bumper stickers or license-plate holders proclaimed publicly and rather plaintively, “I’d Rather Be Skiing.” Or, “I’d Rather Be Golfing.” Some of the discontented motorists would rather have been hang gliding, while others wanted everyone on the road to be advised that they would have preferred to have been spiking a volley-ball, climbing a mountain, sailing a boat, riding a mule, picking wild mushrooms, playing bridge, square dancing, or building the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks.

“I wonder what
my
sticker would say?” Ellen Cherry had mused. “I reckon it’d be, ’I’d Rather Be Painting.’” She took a long pull from a can of diet Pepsi. “How about you, hon? What would your sticker say?”

She suspected that he’d insist on “I’d Rather Be Engaged in Cunnilingus,” although she knew, and believed that deep inside
he
knew, that his proclamations of ungovernable sexual appetite were, like most males’, somewhat exaggerated. She wasn’t positive that he’d even heard her, for he had been scanning the roadside, counting cows, mentally welding broken hay balers, or something equally absorbing. Yet, Boomer hadn’t hesitated. He’d made a frown so sad and wide that it was reflected on the side of her athletically sweating Pepsi. And he’d said:

“They’re a right sorry admission of defeat, them signs are. If my life was that compromised, I sure wouldn’t advertise it. My sign would say, ’If There Was Something Else I’d Rather Be Doing, I’d Damn Well Be Doing It.’”

Ellen Cherry recalled that exchange as she subwayed to work. By the time she walked from the station to the I & I, the Super Bowl would be over, thank goodness, but there was bound to be a lot of cleaning up to do. She didn’t dread it, exactly. In fact, she was ambivalent to a degree that made her wonder how her bumper sticker would have read had one been affixed to her buttocks on that nippy January afternoon. Her life seemed deflated, vacuous, pointless, like Colonial Pines personified. But she couldn’t think of a single other thing that she’d rather be doing. At least nothing to which she was willing to admit.

SEVERAL BLOCKS AWAY,
the objects were lined up at the window grate, wondering where everybody was. It wasn’t unusual for them to puzzle over the whereabouts of Ellen Cherry and Spoon. The objects—the can and the sock, at any rate—thought about Ellen Cherry and Spoon as frequently as a reformed cigarette smoker thinks about his little lost friends. Today, however, the population of Manhattan seemed to have disappeared as completely as their comrade and their potential benefactor. There was nothing moving on Fifth Avenue except Turn Around Norman, and he looked like the last strand of spaghetti to twirl out of Pompeii.

The congregation at mass that noon had been untypically small, consisting primarily of elderly women, held upright by mahogany canes and the galvanizing glare of their diamonds. The few men among them had bolted the instant the service ended. Even the archbishop beat a hasty retreat, diving into his waiting limo and lashing his chauffeur with his rosary beads, like a jockey whipping a mount. What was the hurry? Where could everyone else be? Conch Shell tried to reassure Painted Stick that nothing momentous had transpired in Jerusalem. “The age that is to come has not yet come,” she said, but she wasn’t totally convincing. Those two had never heard of the Super Bowl, naturally, and the other two had forgot.

Eventually, an old sedan rattled up to the crosswalk, full of music, smoke, and rust. When the light changed, it pooted and tooted off in the direction of New Jersey, but not before the objects noted a sticker on its bumper that announced, “I’d Rather Be Partying.” Can o’ Beans imagined it an infraction of taste, if not of grammar, declaring, “You should never trust anyone who uses ’party’ as a verb.” He/she felt appropriately chastised, however, when Dirty Sock growled and shot back, “Uh-huh, and don’t trust anybody who’d rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.”

“Touché,” said the bean can. “Although in the age that is to come, the two needn’t be mutally exclusive.”

SOME OF THE SUPER BOWL
fans stayed on for dinner. Alcohol must have made them very hungry or else very brave. Spike Cohen alone seemed to remember how dangerous the I & I could be. From his post behind the cash register, he kept one eye on the street, as if the street were a crocodile-skin shoe that might at any moment revert to its original state of being. When, around the corner on First Avenue, a truck backfired, thin electrical noises came out of his windpipe.

Spike’s jitters were for naught. Except for the fact they they ran out of chick-peas, the evening produced scant catastrophe. The next evening was positively humdrum. And the one after that was as bereft of disorder as a Heidelburg symposium on anal retention. In truth, the entire winter passed as peacefully and leisurely as a python digesting a Valium addict. The many enemies of the restaurant and its politics either shifted their attention to targets closer to the Middle East or else decided that the intractable Cohen and Hadee simply weren’t worth the trouble. In any case, Isaac & Ishmael’s first stint as the most famous restaurant in New York definitely was over.

Relatively speaking, Ellen Cherry Charles likewise spent an uneventful winter. About the only time that the needle bounced on her seismograph was when Boomer informed her, at the close of one of his increasingly infrequent letters, that if she would drop by the Sommervell Gallery, she could pick up a check.

It seemed that Boomer had been booted off the kibbutz for making what he called “an improper suggestion” (she had to grin as she wondered what the fool might have recommended), but he and his sculptor friend (still no mention of the sculptor’s gender: it could only be female) were “sharing a space” in West Jerusalem, where they were collaborating on a project of apparently monumental scale. “This here is a real sculpture,” he wrote. “Even you’d have to say so.”

Soon after Christmas, she had written and asked him point-blank about what duties he was performing for Buddy Winkler, and now in early February he wrote:

The only single thing I’ve done for Bud is buy some welding supplies and deliver them to a basement over near East Jerusalem. It was a right weird scene. There were three or four rabbis in long black coats, black hats, and woolly black beards sitting there in a cellar so dark you couldn’t read Braille with a blowtorch, and these old boys were knitting. Knitting away with them long clickety needles, just like your mama. I asked them if they was getting ready for a baby shower, but they couldn’t speaka the English, and the fellow who let me in explained they were the sacred knitters knitting the sacred garments that the high priests would wear once the Temple was rebuilt and open for business. I asked him when that might be and he patted me on the shoulder and said I understand you weld, and I said yeah, for a price. He smiled and showed me to the door and that was that. Bud ain’t said boo to me since.

I guess you been hearing about how bad things are on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It’s a sorry situation. Kids shot or beat up every day. Palestinians setting fire to the orchards. Jerusalem is as jumpy as a jitterbug in a blender. The word you hear most here is revenge. Arabs talking revenge, Jews talking revenge; old people, young people, everybody’s set on some kind of vengeance. I swear, they’d rather have them a mess of revenge than a big juicy steak and a roll in silk sheets with a movie star. Crazy folks, crazy town, but highly interesting. Wonderful amount of secrecy and intrigue. I feel like I’m somewhere being here. You know what I mean? Lot of places you go to, when you get there you feel like you didn’t really go anywhere, but not Jerusalem, not for a minute. There’s honeysuckle here, too, same as Virginia. Smells like the City of Heaven, all right. And the rent’s cheap. Which reminds me, I know the Ansonia’s a burden on you. If you’ll drop by Ultima’s, she’ll help you out with a check.