Skinny Legs and All (25 page)

As quickly as they were settled, as quickly as they had made the bed, scoured the bathtub, and stocked the kitchenette shelves with
ramen
, pizza mix, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and six brands of roach killer, Ellen Cherry had fetched her slides to the Sommervell Gallery. Ultima didn’t exactly fall out of her Josef Hoffman “Sitzmaschine” chair, but she was interested enough to promise to come up to the Ansonia and examine the paintings themselves. Three days later, she came.

For his part, Boomer had found that welding shops were located mainly in the outer boroughs. Holding out for a job in Manhattan, he was lying around the apartment reading an espionage novel when Ultima showed up. She was so breathless that they thought she must have climbed the stairs. It turned out that she had chanced upon the big roast turkey in a nearby parking lot and suffered a cultural experience of the brightest magnitude.

“Why, ol’ Boomer made that,” said Ellen Cherry, innocently, pointing to the husky fellow lounging on the sofa in a T-shirt, Colonial Pines High School track shorts, and one purple sock.

“Really? Really, darling? Oh,
magnifique
!”

Ultima Sommervell was tall, dark, and jumpy, somewhere on the dry side of thirty. Her face was shaped like a strawberry and colored like an olive, simultaneously soft and tart. She was simply but elegantly attired and coiffured, the kind of woman who might have been designed by a Bauhaus architect, except for her bosom, whose free-flowing volume all but contradicted the severe planes of the rest of her body, impeding her balance, creating such a clashing contrast that, speaking strictly aesthetically, she might have benefited from a double mastectomy. It was as if Gropius had created her, then allowed Gaudi to add the boobs. In a spitty British accent, which reminded Ellen Cherry of a schoolgirl trying to mimic Alfred Hitchcock, she continually interrupted her self-assured appraisals of Ellen Cherry’s canvases to query Boomer about the drivable bird.

“What I find in your pictures finally is an awkward dichotomy between illusion and abstraction. Energetic, yes; charming, yes; but as I said, awkward. They typify the unlovable nuttiness of modern art before it finally matured and developed a social conscience.” She turned to Boomer. “What are you saying with your
enormous
silver turkey, Mr.—ah—Boomer? It seems fraught, simply fraught, with commentary.”

Professing that the market was running rather thin for what she termed “socially insignificant picture-making,” Ultima nevertheless agreed to represent Ellen Cherry on a limited basis. She selected three paintings, requesting that they be delivered to her gallery. Her uptown gallery, not the SoHo branch where, Ellen Cherry knew, all the action was. Then she asked Boomer if she might have a tour of his “monstre sacré.”

Wriggling into his jeans, Boomer seemed eager to accommodate her.

When they had gone, Ellen Cherry didn’t know whether to be glad, mad, or sad. She’d gotten a foot in the door of a major gallery, no mean accomplishment for an unknown artist fresh from the ferns. It ought to have been New Year’s Eve squared in her heart. But she wasn’t happy with the way Ultima had carried on about that dumb turkey. She wasn’t happy with the way Boomer had stared at Ultima’s tits.

“Really, darling?” she found herself muttering, after Boomer and Ultima disappeared into the elevator. “Oh
magni
fucking
fique
.”

The first ax hit the persimmon tree when Boomer informed his wife that Ultima was going to sell the turkey for him.

“I thought it was
my
turkey. I thought it was my wedding present.”

“Yeah, but you don’t get the picture, honey sugar. This isn’t no used-car deal. Ultima wants to sell it as
art
. And I’m the artist. I made the fool thing.”

Wasn’t that cute? It was art and he made it. Well, okay, let him enjoy his delusion. Ellen Cherry had to confess that the turkey was a novel idea, and she was all too aware that it was costing a small fortune to park it in the neighborhood. Whereas, should it sell, she would share in the proceeds and could replenish her materials. She decided to be pleased.

But further chips flew when Boomer commenced to accompany Ultima to the “presentations.” She was pitching the Airstream two or three times a week, Boomer at her side.
At her front is more like it
, thought Ellen Cherry, examining her own petite protrusions in the bathroom mirror. Suspecting that cookies were being eaten behind her back, she began to test Boomer in bed. Either his relationship with Ultima was strictly business or he was, indeed, a biological marvel.

But there was a rain of green persimmons on their coital parade following the eventual purchase of the rolling roast by the Museum of Modern Art. Ellen Cherry had thought that the sale would be the end of it, that Boomer would use his half of the profits to set up his own welding shop and they would return to the life they had plotted and planned. But no, according to Ultima, Boomer was in demand. His turkey was a smash, and he was constantly being invited to parties and gallery openings. For a while, Ellen Cherry went along. She was even grateful at first for this backdoor entry into the New York art scene, although rather quickly she came to think of it as entering a peacock through its rectum. She withdrew.

“In the old days,” she complained, “and it wasn’t that long ago, artists had the best parties in the world. They had wild and imaginative parties. There was romance, there was colorful behavior and brilliant conversation. Look at these posing contests we’re being dragged to! Look at these artists we’re being bored by! They’re vain as fashion models and shallow as real-estate developers. All they talk about is money. Careers. And will any single one of them look you in the eye? No sirree. They’re too busy looking over your shoulder so that if something new should pop up on the horizon, they’ll be sure to notice it—and exploit it—before you do.”

“I guess that’s what I like about ’em,” said Boomer. “They aren’t these great soaring eagles of genius like I imagined famous artists would be. They’re just as pretty as everybody else.”

“They weren’t always. Artists used to be special. A breed apart. It wasn’t that long ago.”

While Ellen Cherry was genuinely disappointed by her introduction to the New York art world, by the revelation that it was just like Seattle’s, only bigger, part of her dissatisfaction may be attributed to the fact that her husband was lionized at the parties, was treated as if he were the creative one, while she, except by the occasional lecher or fancier of ungovernable hairdos, was largely ignored.

Boomer continued to go out.
Vanity Fair
reported that he was “Ultima Sommervell’s favorite escort.” The art world took to Boomer Petway. He was a welcome shot of gamma globulin in its jaundiced system. People who ought to know better were delighted with his upbeat redneck manners, his muscles, his aloha shirts and new red beret. When he and Ultima performed the tango at their favorite club, Boomer adding bizarre little variations due to his lame foot, Liberty’s torch wasn’t good enough to light his cheap cheroots.

Ellen Cherry sat at the Ansonia, wrapped in her belief in the unique and the beautiful, solaced by her eye game, and further comforted by the knowledge that, (1) a check soon would be arriving from the Museum of Modern Art, and, (2) Boomer would ball her with bravura once he got home—although the hour of his homecomings seemed to be inching steadily in the direction of sunrise.

The chain saw didn’t run amok in their persimmon grove until that dawn when Boomer, instead of making love to her, wanted to talk about art.

“At least six Palestinian youths were killed by Israeli army gunfire yesterday as demonstrations, strikes, and protests erupted anew in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip after a month-long lull in the uprising.

“The casualty toll for twenty months of strife includes at least four hundred Palestinians dead and about a thousand wounded, according to official figures. Palestinian sources said there were six hundred additional dead and thousands more injured.”

Ellen Cherry had programmed the clock-radio to wake her at three in the morning so that she might get up and brush her teeth, thus presenting Boomer with a fresh, minty mouth to kiss when he got home. Instead of music, however, the radio punctured her sleep with the foregoing report from a news service correspondent in Jerusalem.

For some reason, she started wondering what time it was in Jerusalem, if there were wives there concerned about oral freshness, and whether Israelis and Palestinians used separate brands of toothpaste. She wondered if Jezebel had brushed her teeth on that fatal day when she “painted her face and tired her head” before going to the window. Ellen Cherry lay there wondering these things for a full half hour, but time proved to be of no essence because Boomer didn’t show up until quarter past five. By then, bacteria had returned to her scrubbed gums like bathers returning to the beach after a summer storm and were holding sour picnics there and fetid games of volleyball.

Boomer came through the door like
The Thinker
on ice skates, moving fast, fairly gliding, yet pensive, distracted. Ellen Cherry, reawakened, was set to give her mouth another brushing (bikini-clad microbes could hear the rumble of distant thunder) but changed her mind when Boomer slid into bed with his jeans on.

Optimistic, nonetheless, she snuggled up to him and ran her fingers through his chest hair. As she scratched his pelt, it gave off fumes of stale tobacco smoke so concentrated that they would have asphyxiated the Marlboro Man; but at least, thought she, he didn’t reek of Ultima Sommervell. Ellen Cherry had commenced to unbutton his fly when, staring at the ceiling, he asked, “How do people go about making pieces of art?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. How do you make art?”

“You ought to know. Didn’t you make that ’significant’ turkey some famous museum bought and hasn’t paid for yet?”

“You know as well as me that I didn’t start out to make anything significant.”

“Artists hardly ever start out to make significant art. And if they do, it’s usually a flop. Help me with these buttons, hon.”

“I don’t get it.”

“And you’re not going to get it if we don’t take your pants off.”

“If artists don’t set out to make significant art, what do they do?”

“Oh, Boomer.” She sighed, and abandoned his fly. “Maybe they do set out to make something significant, in a roundabout sort of way, but it’s not like setting out to make something practical or useful. For one thing, it’s more like play than work. On the other hand, they don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. The good ones make art because they
have
to make it—even though they probably won’t understand why until after it’s already made.”

“But how do they know what to make?”

“That’s dictated by their vision.”

“You mean it comes to ’em like in a dream?”

“No, no, it’s seldom that dramatic. Listen, it’s really pretty simple. If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.”

“You paint landscapes . . .”

“Right, but they don’t look like the landscapes that nature provides, and hopefully they don’t look like landscapes that any other painter has ever provided. If they looked like either one, then there would be no excuse for me painting them—except maybe to earn money or call attention to myself, and those are low motives that lead to low art. Not that artists can’t use money. Not that we couldn’t use a little around here. What did Ultima say about why that check didn’t come?”

Boomer was quiet for such a long time that she thought he must have fallen asleep, but when she regarded his face in the dawn’s dairy light, she saw that his eyes were as wide as pinballs. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Just studying on what it is that I’d like a gander at but can’t see because the world don’t have it in stock.”

A sudden icy wind razored through the persimmon branches. Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy.

“
Why
, Boomer?”

By the time he got around to confessing that Ultima wanted to market further examples of his art, half of Manhattan was at breakfast, and a persimmon famine was abroad in the land.

Summer and the check for the turkey arrived on the same day, although in separate envelopes. The check so distracted the Petways that they momentarily forgot to sweat.

(That same sweltering mid-June Friday had found the five pilgrims—who’d scooted, toddled, and bounced across the Rockies at the pokey pace of 4.2 miles per night—stuffed into a prairie-dog hole, taking shelter from a line of tornadoes that was coiled on the horizon like the bedsprings of Bluebeard. When an impatient Painted Stick ventured out to investigate, a twister snatched him up, lifting him more than a thousand feet in the air. According to Conch Shell, who had peeked at the whole thing, the stick beat the lightning right out of the funnel, poked the cyclone in the ribs so hard that it set him down not an arm’s length from where it had picked him up. “Goodness! If that had been Mr. Sock,” said a flabbergasted Can o’ Beans, “he would’ve blown all the way to Panama.” “How the hell do you know?” asked Dirty Sock.)

The turkey had sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Ultima Sommervell scooped off exactly half of that (dealers had come to regularly charge artists commissions of fifty percent). Of Boomer’s half, the gallery withheld nearly forty percent for state and federal taxes. That left seventy-five grand. Boomer’s mother needed to be placed in a nursing home, so he contributed twenty thousand toward that. Over Ellen Cherry’s strenuous objections, he donated five thousand to the Reverend Buddy Winkler for some religious project that had yet to be adequately defined. He paid nine months’ rent in advance at the Ansonia, for the security that was in it: that amounted to eighteen thousand. He handed Ellen Cherry five hundred for art supplies and five hundred for new clothes. The remaining thirty-six thousand was deposited with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in a joint account. Most of it was slated for Boomer’s welding shop.