Skinny Legs and All (53 page)

She moved on to the acrylic department. Now came the fun part. Without regard to price, she began to pull jumbo jars of paint from the shelves. And, burping all the while, her esophagus smoldering like a soggy fuse, she chanted the names of the colors as she dropped them into her basket.

“Indian red,” she sang. “Mars red, venetian red, cadmium red, vermilion, and rose madder.” There was alizarin crimson, magenta, and that thorn in the backside of the sinful, sister terra rosa.

There was cobalt blue, cerulean blue, prussian blue, ultramarine blue, and, with just a soupçon of garlic, french ultramarine blue.

“Hansa yellow.” She liked the sound of that one so well she sang it twice. “Hansa yellow” (patron saint of jaundiced piano players). Then, “zinc yellow, lemon yellow, yellow ocher, mars yellow, naples yellow, and brilliant orange.

“Thio violet, prism violet, mars violet, cobalt violet, dioxazine purple.”

Next, those nightmares of newlywed homemakers, raw sienna and burnt sienna. ("He likes his medium rare, boo-hoo.”) Raw umber and burnt umber ("There, there, dear, we’ll send out for pizza.”), vandyke brown, brown madder, thalo copper, silver, gold oxide, and payne’s gray.

“Viridian, o viridian! Green earth, cadmium green, hooker’s green” (protectress of novice prostitutes) “and sap green” (patron saint of voters who believe all Irish-American politicians are honest).

“O sing mars black, lamp black, ivory black, and titanium white” (blessed are the Caucasians who went down with the ship). “Sing iridescent white and light portrait pink.”

What did she forget? Lily white, basic black, snow white, black beauty, white christmas, black friday, white supremacy, black power, the color purple, people-eater purple, the color of money, long green, lawn green, lorne green,
Lohengrin
, the color of your parachute, the color of my true love’s hair, puce, mars puce, mars chartreuse, mars bars, little-boy blue, blue bayou, blues in the night, paint-the-town red, do-it-up brown, james brown, dorian gray, red skelton, red october, tom clancy red, better-dead-than red, better-ill-than teal, greenberg, goldberg, long-john silver, mellow yellow, electrical banana, yellow peril, yellow fever, mayonnaise yellow, mustard, relish, and onions.

Ellen Cherry’s head was spinning. She felt dizzy and faint. She should have known better than to mix rum and art supplies. With effort, she hauled her purchases to the checkout counter, where she parted with considerable cash. After the transaction, Dave called her a cab. She waited for it on the street so that she might inhale some crisp, cool air.

By the time that the taxi deposited her back at Isaac & Ishmael’s, her vertigo had subsided, and her heartburn was but a dying ember. Spike and Abu had gone, as well. “I’ll be doing some decorating,” she informed the skeptical security guard, and she let herself in with her key. She wasted little time, but unpacked her supplies, arranged the paint jars in a row at the rear of the bandstand, fetched a stepladder from the pantry, turned up the thermostat, stripped down to her underpants, and went to work on the wall.

Whistling, humming, bobbing, weaving, scratching, contorting, swilling diet Pepsis, playing the eye game just like she used to do, she painted until well past midnight. Then she collapsed on the office couch where she and Spike Cohen had . . .

She awoke at dawn, toasted some pita bread, washed it down with milk, and surveyed what she had done. For the most part, it pleased her. There were contours that needed thinning, volumes that needed weight, lines to be shortened or lengthened, passages of color to be tinted or shaded: she was a bit rusty, after all. Yet, on the whole, it pleased her. And, of course, there was a lot of blank picture plane left to cover. The wall was eleven feet tall and fourteen feet long.

After calling Nabila to say that she would have to forgo Thanksgiving dinner due to a headache, she hopped back on the ladder and painted all day. Most of Thursday night she painted, and Friday and Friday night, Saturday and Saturday night, Sunday and Sunday night. She took daily sponge baths in Abu’s beloved sink, but never changed her underwear, and long before Monday, it looked like . . . well, if Joseph had been a cross-dresser, the Bible might have made reference to his panties of many colors. ("The girls in the drawer are not going to believe this,” said the polychrome briefs. “Om wooga nam.”) The I & I she cleaned out of diet Pepsi and Coke, leftover
falafel, tahini
, and, yes, even
baba ghanoug
. By Sunday, she was having an hourly coffee with rum, just to keep the motor running.

When at 8:45 on Monday morning Spike showed up to admit the plasterers, Ellen Cherry was so deep in sleep that an industrial crane couldn’t have lifted her out of it. Spike hovered over her, cursing the kidney stone that had knocked him loose from her embrace. His fingers itched to touch her nipples, although one of the nipples was gold oxide and the other mostly french ultramarine blue. Her feet, too, were spattered with paint. Nevertheless, Spike bent and kissed lightly his favorite toe. Then, he covered her nakedness with his
ongepotchket
coat and went to the kitchen to phone Abu.

“Our little artist lady has struck!” he announced. “The big one she’s dropped.”

“Send the plasterers home,” said Abu, when he had learned the details.

When Ellen Cherry finally awoke, the bar was packed with men watching Monday night football. Each of them had noticed the new mural, but only one of them, Detective Jackie Shaftoe, followed it as avidly as he did the game.

Ellen Cherry dressed and slipped out the back door, through the frosty courtyard. She was still exhausted, but there was a zip in her step. She could have kicked the moon.

Now, Spike and Abu had two confounding works of art on their inexperienced hands, and throughout the week they studied them with equal zeal. The husband’s piece, the sculpture, was the critical work, of course, since a decision about its deployment had to be made. On Thursday evening they made it.

Abu explained to Ellen Cherry their rationale. “Concerning this Pales character, I cannot suppose how much research your Boomer conducted—”

“Probably not very much. I’d guess he just stumbled across the story somewhere and took a shine to it.”

“But we skipped tennis today so that we might verify his claims at the library.”

“And did he have it straight?”

“Hoo boy! He told only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Indeed, dear Cherry. It seems that the cult of the donkey deity extended throughout much of the ancient world. I was surprised to learn that Palatine Hill in Rome also was named for the clownish Pales.”

“To our credit maybe—maybe not—we Hebrews tend to regard him as male. ’Iao,’ we call him.”

Ellen Cherry sang, “And on that farm he had an ass, Iao, Iao, O.”

“You’re laughing, already, but you may not be so wrong.”

“As you accurately reported. Tacitus wrote that the Semites fell into venerating the ass because had it not been for wild asses they never would have survived in the desert. It was probably more complicated than that. How complicated? Well, it isn’t enough that the children of Lilith, Adam’s ’bad’ wife, were born with donkey haunches or that Samson slew the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass or that Jesus chose to enter Jerusalem on the back of one of those scrawny steeds, but very early images of the Hebrew Messiah depicted him as an ass-headed man crucified on a tree.”

“That’s
wild
.”

“Even earlier, in Egypt, there was an ass-headed deity my ancestors called Set, who was crucified annually and wounded in his side. On more than one Sunday morning in spring he rose from the dead.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You’re kidding, she says. That, little darlink, is what I’m saying to the next goy what is accusing my people of Christ-killing. You’re kidding.”

“As a goddess, Pales was the protectress of herd animals, thus insuring the survival of the tribe. As a bisexual, Pales was served by both priests and priestesses, usually dressed in big wooden donkey masks. The temples where Pales was worshipped gave us the word ’palace.’”

“Fascinating, you all.”

“During the Festival of Palilia, which was appropriated into the Christian calendar as the Feast of Saint George, some rowdy games were played in those temples.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Today’s innocent children what’re attending birthday parties where Pin the Tail on the Donkey is played—hoo!—they don’t know what they do.”

“Iao Iao O,” said Ellen Cherry.

Since Pales had been an important religious figure, one whose pale specter still haunted the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, and since he—or she—was almost entirely forgotten, to a large extent deliberately obliterated by revisionist theologians, Spike and Abu thought that it might be a swell idea to revive the figure.

“It is dangerous to forget the past. Of course, it will be controversial, but it is such a lively sculpture, if the narrow-minded fundamentalists can rise above their insecurities, even they might enjoy the antics of our prancing donkey.”

“A kick in and from the ass,” said Ellen Cherry. “Well, I applaud your decision. There’s a jarring poetics of spatiality in this piece. By that I mean the implicit assumption of unified form in space is exploded by the presence of three independent components—the rocks, the map, and the figure—that are only subliminally connected, but which playfully echo the constant clash of images and their meanings in the human mind.”

Spike and Abu looked her over.

“Hoo, such
hoking a tchynik
,” said the one.

“What’s a girl like you doing in food service?” asked the other.

“But you know, you all still haven’t told me what you think of my mural.”

In truth, they weren’t really clear about what they thought of it. Certainly, it would never occur to them to drape or replaster the wall, for that might hurt Ellen Cherry’s feelings; and they had to admit, moreover, that the painting added color and energy to the room. Whether or not they understood it, appreciated it wholeheartedly, or supported it against the attacks of others, well, that was a horse of a different collar.

And it did invite a few attacks. Among the staff and clientele there were several who delighted in the mural, many who found it easiest to ignore it, and several who were affronted, even angered by what they took to be an insult to their ideas of art and their perceptions of reality. At various times, Abu and Spike fell into each of those camps, though seldom for longer than an hour.

When a British employee of the UN remarked, “My seven-year-old daughter could have painted that,” Ellen Cherry responded icily in the only way one could to that most hackneyed and yahoo-brained of reactions to art:

“Maybe she could. But she didn’t. And I did.”

During cocktail hour on Friday, as the bar was filling with regulars, there was considerable banter concerning the painting, much of it lighthearted, none of it informed. After a particularly snide evaluation by the fat Egyptian doctor, Detective Shaftoe rose to his feet, lifted his can of beer to the mural, and said softly but very emphatically:

“Museum quality.”

Then he sat back down.

The sullen, burly American black with the white hair and oft-broken nose was known to be a man who spoke only when he had something to say. The others respected his opinions. If Shaftoe pronounced the painting worthy of being hung in a museum, there wasn’t a fellow in the room inclined to disagree. But the majority in the bar was also in harmony with the bartender when, after a deferential pause, he said:

“Guess that’s why I don’t go to no museums.”

“
Any
museums,” Dr. Farouk corrected him. Can o’ Beans would have loved the guy.

The viewer’s eye entered the painting through the beak of an owl. It was a nighttime painting. Although the scene, if one could call it a scene, was interior, the stars were nevertheless plainly visible, and the furniture was flecked with foam from the moon.

Through a diamond-shaped window, animals could be seen snoring on a hillside.

There were prominent architectural overtones, but the picture, if one could call it a picture, might also be read as a landscape. Wasn’t that an oak tree shading the cookstove, and wasn’t the oak choked with mistletoe?

Gooey and thick, the paint had been applied with luxurious abandon, and yet the mood it evoked was not of modern luxury but of preindustrial grandeur; the black, muddy, smoky grandeur of life at the edge of great forests. Pastoral pageantry. The woodcutters’ ball.

To the extent that the imagery suggested a rediscovery of a forgotten past, it likewise suggested that that “lost” past was the perfect expression of contemporary urban sensibilities. From where had the city-dwellers come, after all? What was the metropolitan equivalent of jollifications around the bonfire or of the fanged things that ambushed maidens on their way to the well?

Though the painting was heavy and dense, pulled by gravity like the skin of a crone, nothing stood still in it. The mushrooms, the fetishes, the wool and the wine, the mascara jars, the poppies, the crickets, the poison arrows, the bravura helixes of juicy smoke all spun like the stars: onward, outward, inward, backward, sideways, upside down, and forever. The iron sword that was embedded in the trunk of the oak was as vibrant as the little silver spoon that bounced on the buffalo hide, the golden cradle that was balanced in the crotch of the tree rocked so hard that the sky rocked with it, a zodiac transformed into a music hall.

Despite its complexity, its nocturnal richness, there was something slaphappy if not slapdash about it, something careless and childlike. Itch as it might with stellar information, buckle though it might under a weight of ashes, adobe, and bone, it also was as topsy-turvy as a nursery rhyme; it was kachina pinball, an episode from chipmunk television.

It was not unlike—and one is forced to say this—the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. Salome, when she arrived for her Friday night performance, took one long, captivated look at it and consented to dance the Dance of the Seven Veils.