Still Life with Woodpecker (25 page)

More than once, Leigh-Cheri tried to convince herself that she’d fallen for him, but she knew that she was only in love from the waist down. No matter how ardently the peachclam might gush over him, her heart was unmoved. On those occasions when the peachfish was most ebullient, her heart would grow moody, turn up the collar on its trench coat, pull down the brim of its hat, dangle a cigarette from its sullen lips, and go walk for hours on the poorly lighted streets of the waterfront. If a heart won’t listen to a vagina, what will it listen to? The question went
unanswered—but Wednesday and Saturday evenings passed in physical rapture, and until there arose a difficulty procuring Tura limestone for its facing, the pyramid proceeded ahead of schedule.

MORALITY DEPENDS ON CULTURE.
Culture depends on climate. Climate depends on geography. Seattle where the clams were singing, Seattle where the trolls were hiding, Seattle where the blackberries were glistening, Seattle where the bloomers of the sky were drooping, Seattle the city that washed its hands with the incessancy of a proctologist, Seattle was far behind her, at memory’s rest on a dank, deep mossy bed. Now the Princess lived at the edge of a vast desert, under the seal of the sun. The change in interior geography was just the opposite. Indoors, she had traded the barren attic for a lavish flat. Her outside world and her inside world had swapped places. Had there been a corresponding psychological shift? And had its effects edited her moral code?

Perhaps. Slightly. But something had happened in the intimate immensity of the attic that, if not negating that alteration, had rendered it trivial. She had become sensitized to objecthood.

Thanks to the Camel pack, Leigh-Cheri could no longer snub an object. Thanks to the Camel pack, she had been cured of animate chauvinism. Among her acquaintances at the university, among the enlightened delegates to the Care Fest, those who railed most liberally against racism, sexism, and ageism discriminated hourly against the inanimate objects around them, denying them love, respect, and even attention. But though she’d reached no conscious conclusions on the matter, Leigh-Cheri had
come to consider the smallest, deadest thing as if it had some life of its own.

During the day, out at the pyramid site, she’d find herself regarding the tools of the workmen with at least as much admiration as she regarded the workers themselves. Her grip lingered on doorknobs much longer than necessary. She patted the big granite blocks with the casual affection others might spend on a passing pooch, treating the stones as though they had individual personalities, while the wooden canteen from which she quenched her thirst became a special friend; she treasured its mouth against her mouth, was prepared to defend it against adversaries. In the evening, after she’d soaked off the desert dust and applied a fresh coat of zinc oxide to the blaze of her nose (redheads burn easily), she’d stroll through the flat (provided it wasn’t Wednesday or Saturday, of course), randomly picking up ashtrays, music boxes, coffee cups, letter openers, artifacts, or candies, boring into them until each expanded into a limitless world, every bit as rich and interesting as that other more physically mobile world about which she remained curious but from which she was once again isolated.

In a society that is essentially designed to organize, direct, and gratify mass impulses, what is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? Religion? Art? Nature? No, the church has turned religion into standardized public spectacle, and the museum has done the same for art. The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so much that they’ve become effete, sucked empty by too many stupid eyes. What is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? How about a cold chicken bone on a paper plate at midnight, how about a lurid lipstick lengthening or shortening at your command, how about a styrofoam nest abandoned by a “bird” you’ve never known, how about a pair of windshield wipers pursuing one another futilely while you drive home alone through a downpour, how about something beneath a seat touched by your shoe at the
movies, how about worn pencils, cute forks, fat little radios, boxes of bow ties, and bubbles on the side of a bathtub? Yes, these are the things, these kite strings and olive oil cans and Valentine hearts stuffed with nougat, that form the bond between the autistic vision and the experiential world; it is to show these things in their true mysterious light that is the purpose of the moon.

One Wednesday evening, lying beside A’ben Fizel, at rest after a four-quarter, double-overtime copulation, Leigh-Cheri startled both herself and her intended by sitting up suddenly in bed, grasping the Vaseline jar that she’d been watching in the moonlight, and asking aloud, “Whatever happened to the golden ball?”

IN TIME,
Leigh-Cheri became intimate with most of the inanimate objects in her environment, including that inanimate object that controls the reproductive cycles of all living creatures, that inanimate object that choreographs the tides, that inanimate object that influences sanity, that inanimate object to which J. Isaacs was referring when he wrote, “… the history of poetry in all ages is the attempt to find new images for the moon.” (The moon is the Empress of Objects, and as a practitioner of lunaception, Leigh-Cheri was in its league). There was one object in her domain, however, which she pointedly ignored, even though that object was particularly enlivened by moonshine. It was her engagement ring.

More than likely, she was afraid of what the ring signified. She had fully accepted A’ben Fizel as a lover, yet to contemplate their marriage made her shiver and sweat. Whenever she tried to imagine herself his lifelong bride,
she grew immediately morose and set to thinking about the pyramid instead, even though the day of the pyramid’s completion and her wedding day were the same.

In Fizel’s country, it was taboo for an engaged couple to appear together in public, so except for slippery Wednesday evenings and slishy Saturday nights, she rarely saw him. A’ben procured materials for pyramid construction and organized the labor force. At this he was so efficient that the project, which should have taken a minimum of two years, looked as if it would be done in twenty months, the delay in delivery of limestone facing notwithstanding. But A’ben seldom appeared at the building site. An inveterate night-clubber, he frequently flew to Rome or Mikonos for a single evening’s revelry, only to sleep away the mornings and devote afternoons to strenuous gymnastic sessions and meals of grapefruit and raw garlic. He had leased a satellite to relay telecasts of every game played by the American professional basketball team whose franchise he owned, and presumedly sports biz consumed a fairly large portion of his attention.

The week that Leigh-Cheri arrived in his country she was honored with a reception at the family palace, where she met the patriarch, Ihaj Fizel, one of the most financially powerful men alive. She also was introduced to A’ben’s two brothers. The mother made a brief appearance, the sisters weren’t seen at all. When Leigh-Cheri asked about the women, A’ben shrugged. “Is unimportant,” he said. Leigh-Cheri got the impression that females counted for little in the land of the Fizels, and that, doubtlessly, was
one
reason she looked at the diamond ring with no more enthusiasm than most people looked at cigarette packages—looked but chose not to see.

“What is this golden ball of which you have the curiosity?” asked A’ben the night the subject abruptly arose.

Leigh-Cheri didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. She was immersed in the silent zone, where to become motionless is to be elsewhere.

“If you want this golden ball, I buy it. Do not to worry of expense.”

Still she didn’t reply. Noticing that she was holding the Vaseline jar, transfixed by the bashful yet sensuous glow of its contents, and recalling that in America “ball” was a slangy euphemism for coitus, A’ben began to wonder if “golden ball” didn’t refer to some special kind of sexual intercourse in which he wasn’t versed. Maybe it referred to sexual perfection, the ultimate ball, and maybe he had failed to provide it, and maybe Vaseline was supposed to help. Smitten for the first time in his life with pangs of self-doubt, he asked sulkily, “This golden ball, it is something you have had with the Woodpecker man?”

A’ben had never mentioned the Woodpecker before, and it was jolting enough to cause Leigh-Cheri to come back from her reverie, although the phrase “come back” is misleading because in the realm of meditative daydream the only way to “go there” is, paradoxically, to totally “be here.”

“Er, uh, not exactly,” she stammered. She returned the Vaseline to the bedside table, withdrawing her gaze from the sea light of its luminous goo. “He, ah, he said something to me once. I only just now understood what he meant.”

Accepting her explanation in all of its inadequacy, Fizel permitted the subject to be changed to limestone. The next morning, however, he fired messages to customs officials at every point of entry in the Arab world demanding that any traveler bearing a passport in the name of Bernard Mickey Wrangle be turned away. Forcefully, if necessary.

LESS THAN A MONTH LATER,
believe it or not, a man bearing just such a passport stepped off a plane in Algiers. When informed that he could not enter Algeria, he put up a fight and was taken into custody.

A’ben Fizel was notified. Fizel sent the Algerian police commissioner a case of cognac, a tub of caviar, and a pearl-handled riding crop that had once belonged to King Faruk. “Wrangle is a dangerous international thug with Zionist affiliations,” cabled Fizel. “He should be detained in maximum security. Indefinitely. Which most suits your taste in motor cars, commissioner, the American Lincoln Continental or the German Mercedes-Benz?”

Fizel then proceeded to add a hundred workmen to the crew at the pyramid. Work was to continue around the clock until the limestone facing was on and the inner chambers met Princess Leigh-Cheri’s specifications. Fizel also ordered his palace staff to speed up preparations for the wedding.

YOU WOULD THINK
that an electric typewriter would know better than to bite the hand that pays the light bill. Yet the Remington SL3, in its wanton dedication to humdrum technological practicality, persists in obstructing attempts at old-fashioned literary genius. You would think that a woman obsessed with building a full-sized pyramid
in the last quarter of the twentieth century would know better than to cross the one man who could make it possible. Yet Leigh-Cheri had refused A’ben’s embrace and was speaking to him sharply.

“Why the hell am I being guarded?” she demanded. “Why do I trip over those two lummoxes every time I turn around?”

Leigh-Cheri’s enthusiasm for sex simultaneously delighted and frightened A’ben Fizel. Months before, he had secretly assigned a eunuch to keep watch on her, assuring that her passions were not so rudderless as to allow her to drift into another’s arms. She was, after all, left alone a great deal, and he was uncertain if two services a week were sufficient to cool her racy motor. Upon learning that a Bernard Mickey Wrangle had been apprehended in Algiers, A’ben had doubled the guard. It became obvious to Leigh-Cheri that the pair was camping outside her door.

“Those men of which you call dumb oxes are trusted by me. They are to—”

“Spy on me.”

“No. No!” He shook his head forcefully. “They are to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From the bad men. You could be kidnap. Men that your television call ‘terrorist’ do such things. Ways of Middle East are not familiar to you.”

That should have calmed her. She was aware that abductions and skyjackings were fairly common political tactics in that part of the globe. But red hair is slow to lay back once it’s got its dandruff up, and her bitchy mood required further opportunity to express itself.

“I’m familiar enough with Middle Eastern customs to know that Moslems don’t eat or make love on Saturdays. Why do you always visit me on a holy day? A day you don’t dare to be seen in a disco, right? Your countrymen refuse to work on the pyramid on Saturdays, you have to hire Greeks. I’ll bet they don’t know how you spend
your
holy day. No meat on Saturday, A’ben. Right? No meat on Saturday.”

The lids drooped like paper wrappers over his chocolate-drop eyes. A guilty tic began to palpitate in the left corner of his mouth. “Perhaps I am too long in America,” he said softly. “Perhaps I am too much confuse Mecca with between your thighs.”

Leigh-Cheri had to laugh. “Thighs, A’ben.” She opened her negligee and patted herself. “These are called thighs.”

His eyes watered. His lower lip quivered like a snail that had just learned the meaning of escargot. Sorry now, she set about to kiss the quivers and tics and tears away. Soon the forgotten guards were nudging one another and grinning at the sacrilegious yet not unholy noises escaping from the flat.

“IT WON’T BE LONG NOW,”
said Leigh-Cheri to a spoon. Moorish architects were wont to make their windows look like keyholes, and the redheaded Princess stood at such a window as if she were a bloodshot eye keyhole-peeping at the pyramid while it was being dressed. It was Sunday, a day as milky and muffled in the Moslem world, oddly enough, as it was in Christendom. The day shift, made up mostly of Greek and Yugoslavian masons—the sun-wise Arabs chose to work nights—was on the job, affixing limestone facing, but Leigh-Cheri had given herself a day off.

“It won’t be long now,” said Leigh-Cheri. If there was a trace of anxiety in her voice, the spoon couldn’t tell.

A’ben had loved her well the previous evening, and she’d slept quite late. She lingered over her breakfast tea,
then devoted some time to playing with the teaspoon. It was as noon as noon could be when she stood at her window, staring across the shadowless city, low and blanched and jumbled as a boneyard, as a retirement picnic for used-up schoolroom chalk. In the noonday sun, the pyramid, too, gleamed white. Despite the intense heat, the city seemed cold. It was eternally alien to her American temperament. But the pyramid…. The pyramid was real to Leigh-Cheri in a way that buildings of her own society were not.