Skinny Legs and All (29 page)

In addition to the frog tongue, in whose banderole she painted a fly, Ellen Cherry gave Boomer the black, bumpy tongue of a chow dog. Then she rooted in his mouth the soda-straw tongue of a butterfly and the Y-flick tongue of a boa. She gave him a woodpecker’s tongue, arrowheaded and barbed; an ox tongue, muscular, broad, and hung with drool; and, finally, the shy, happy tongue that the porpoise employs to push the waves to shore. After the seventh tongue, she rested. Then she began to work on his ears.

There was nothing disrespectful in her alteration of the portrait. The tongues lacked any psychological or symbolic significance. It was a painterly act, a purely visual experiment. “Don’t take it personally,” she said to Boomer’s picture. “I’m just having fun.”

“Why didn’t you come to my opening last night?” Boomer’s picture said back to her.

Obviously, the picture didn’t speak. Even with seven tongues, it was mute, as all pictures are. However, so certain was Ellen Cherry that Boomer would be confronting her with that very question, perhaps before the day was through, that her unconscious mind forced the words from the picture’s mouth.

The words had an accusatory tone. After she heard them, after she
imagined
that she heard them, she couldn’t paint anymore. She laid down her brushes. A lot of
leban zabadi
would run under the bridge before she would pick them up again.

In the lobby of the Ansonia, there was a public telephone. To demonstrate her independence from Patsy, the newlywed Ellen Cherry had elected not to install a phone when she and her groom had moved into the apartment, and now she didn’t think that she could afford one. So, it was to the pay phone that she descended, bearing the coin of the realm. She was in her painting clothes, spattered and baggy.
Thank Jesus Raoul isn’t on duty yet
, she thought.

Boomer sounded sleepy. He must have been still a-bed. It was half past noon, but, then, he would have had a big night. She wondered if Ultima was lying there beside him.

“It’s me,” she said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I didn’t get to your opening.”

“No problem,” he said. “I didn’t really expect you.”

“You didn’t?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Well . . . let’s just not talk about it.”

He sounds strange
, she thought.
Strange and cold. Beyond hangover
. Had his show been a total fiasco? It wouldn’t have surprised her. He was in way over his head, and no beret could hide it. “Why can’t we talk about it?”

“Why should we talk about anything important? Spoil our perfect record.”

She was taken aback. “You’re kidding. We’ve always talked.”

“Horseshit, Ellen Cherry. We never talked. We traded wisecracks. Wisecracking is not talking.”

She started to refute him, but couldn’t muster any ready evidence to support her objection. While she was trying to remember the last time they’d had a heart-to-heart, he broke the silence with an outburst. “You know how come we never talked? ’Cause you never believed I
could
talk. Not on your level. I couldn’t talk about art. I didn’t understand art. I didn’t, in fact, give a big rat’s ass about art. And in your opinion, that made me inferior, you know; some kind of second-class citizen like all those other clods in Colonial Pines. . . .”

“No! You were different. And I loved you.”

“You never loved me. You never. You loved to the left of me and to the right of me, maybe. You loved above me and underneath and in back of me somewheres. But you didn’t love
me
. You loved my biceps and my big ol’ welder’s cock, and the way I danced and the way I was looser and more free than you. That’s what the hell you loved. It turned you on that I could be uninhibited, because the only place
you’re
free is on a piece of canvas. In art, you can break loose of your restraints. Otherwise, you’re tight as the peel on a turnip.”

“Hey! Hold on, buster. I don’t know that you’re so uninhibited. Lot of things you wouldn’t do. It was you who wouldn’t call me ’Jezebel.’”

Boomer paused. He lowered his voice. “That’s another story, that is.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Another story entirely.”

“You can say that again.”

But she didn’t say it again. She didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did he. Then they spoke out at the same time, in ironic unison.

“The trouble with you—” she began.

“The trouble with you—” he started. His voice, being the stronger of the two, won the right to proceed. “Is that the only way you can communicate is through art. You’ve never learned to communicate your feelings to a man. You don’t even
want
to communicate in a relationship. You think if you open up to love, you’ll lose your independence or your self-expression or creativity or whatever you call all that passionate, wonderful stuff that makes you feel alive inside. Patsy warned me that you’d never wanna have kids, ’cause raising babies would siphon off that juice that makes your paintings go—”

“My mama never—”

“Oh, yeah, she did! You say you love me, and maybe in a peculiar way you do, but you don’t love me for myself. You never have. When I was just a welder, you looked down on me. You didn’t really want me till you thought you couldn’t have me, till you saw me climbing that ladder you thought was up against
your
wall. If I was to go back to being a welder, Ellen Cherry, if I was to come back uptown to you, you wouldn’t be thrilled with it for more than about two days. ’Cause after you got through having orgasms, you’d have to have a relationship, and that’s a sideline you don’t care to more than dabble in. You can’t be married to a man ’cause you’re already married to your art.”

It was her turn, but she hadn’t the belly for major counterattack. Softly, but with practiced conviction, she said, “Art is the only place a person can win.”

“It may be the only place
you
can win. I believe we can win any damn place we try.”

“The trouble with you, Boomer—”

“Yeah, go ahead now, tell me the trouble with me.”

“You think the world is a piñata. You think if you keep hitting it and hitting it, smacking it and banging it, one day it’ll bust open and all the prizes will fall out at your feet.”

He considered that analogy for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I didn’t do that bad last night.”

“Oh?”

“Sold every damn piece but one. And if I care to travel with it, that one’s sold, too.”

Ellen Cherry was gelatinous with shock. She had to steady herself against the lobby wall. “Why . . . why, that’s incredible, Boomer. That must have been . . . incredible . . . for you.”

“It was right nice. Not all that sensational, really. It woulda been better if you’d showed up. I mean, I kinda thought you might. I appreciate how envious and bitter you are, and I don’t blame you. You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.” He laughed. “I feel like an undercover agent. A mole in the house of art. Anyhow, Ellen Cherry, I started out doing it ’cause I wanted to understand you and earn your respect. Then, I reckon, I wanted to show you up, ’cause you’ve always acted so goddamned
superior
about it. Now, I don’t know. It’s gotten out of hand. Maybe I’m hooked on it, although I feel guilty sometimes. Guilty about you—and guilty about people taking a fool like me so seriously, and guilty ’cause it’s so much fun, in a real nerve-racking, useless sort of way. But that don’t matter. I was heartsick that you didn’t come to the opening. I reckon that’s why I’m pitching a tizzy this morning. Is it still morning?”

They were silent for several literal minutes. A recorded voice came on the line and instructed Ellen Cherry to deposit additional coins. After the last nickel dropped, with a hollow yet musical clink, like a robot passing a kidney stone, Boomer asked, “What’re you thinking?”

“I don’t know. What are
you
thinking?”

“Oh, well, I was thinking that what was said just now probably needed to be said, but after saying it, I’m starting to think that maybe wisecracking is not so bad, after all.”

She smiled in such a way that down in the Bowery, on the other end of the line, he could tell that she was smiling. There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works.

Boomer answered the smile. “Folks take art too seriously. Did I say that already? But, you know, they take their relationships too seriously, too. I sure used to. Then, you did. This morning, I reckon we both are.”

“Seems like I used to know that, but then I forgot. Like a strong swimmer who one day just up and drowns.”

“You cramp and you sink. It can happen to anybody. You let love lay too heavy in your stomach . . .”

“People tend to take
everything
too seriously. Especially themselves.”

“Yep. And that’s probably what makes ’em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously.”

Another smile ran along the wires on its badly bowed legs. “I want to see your show. I do. I will. Soon as I whip up the nerve. Then, maybe sometime we could get together and wisecrack a bit.”

“All right,” he said. “Let’s us do that. I’ll be in touch. Right after I get back from Jerusalem.”

JERUSALEM.
Jeru Salaam. “City of Peace.” The only humorous thing about it was its name. Thirty-seven wars (not battles but wars) fought over it. Reduced to ashes seventeen times by seventeen different conquerors. Each time rebuilt—and each time coveted anew.

Jerusalem. A dry and hilly provincial pit stop on the windy road to nowhere. Lacking a port, lacking strategic fortress sites, lacking fertile fields around it. No trees to cut, no fish to net, no ore to mine, little but thistles for its flocks to chew. A location with almost nothing to offer, yet desired by everyone. Desired for three thousand years.

Jerusalem. Jeru Salaam. Shaped out of pure spirit, irrigated with spurting gore. Incessantly blackened by arson and blood, only to be polished to a golden shine again by prayerful knees and unwinding scrolls of dreamlike prophecy. Jerusalem. When they could no longer bear to hear its children screaming, stones went deaf all over the world.

Jerusalem. A mystical metropolis with seven magic gates. Entered by few, forgotten by none. Simultaneously the capital of death and the seat of immortality. Hub of the wheel of pilgrimage. Focal point of all received starlight. Fly-specked mirror of heaven on earth. Jumping-off place to eternity. The town that logic could not shut down. That city, among all cities, into which both the Second Coming and the Redemption have been booked and to where both the Christ and the Messiah are said to be holding tickets. Jeru Salaam.

As far as Boomer Petway was concerned, Jerusalem was founded in Sunday school and developed on the six o’clock news. It was not a place that anyone actually visited. It wasn’t even a place one discussed, unless one was a religious or political nut (which was getting to be the same thing). Yet, now he heard himself saying that he was going there, and although such a journey seemed even less real to him than his rise in the art world, he conceded that it was probably true.

Throughout his adult life, Boomer had saved the cardboard tubes out of toilet tissue rolls. He wasn’t sure why. He had been given the little cylinders to play with when he was a tot, and some affinity for them had likely carried over into his manhood. In any case, he had more than a decade’s worth of toilet tissue rolls stored in the attic of his Colonial Pines bungalow, and when he commenced to make art, he drove his van down to Virginia and loaded them up. Hundreds of them. He sprayed them with black acrylic, and when they were dry, he employed them like Lincoln Logs to construct a sort of hut, five feet wide and seven feet high. Inside the structure, he released a live crow. The crow was provided with a perch made of bathroom tissue rolls (black, like the others), as well as a black plastic water dish and a black ceramic bowl that was kept filled with a dark variety of sunflower seeds. This piece was mounted in his one-man show under the title of
Ministry of Covert Operations
.

A curator from the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem’s Givat Ram was sufficiently attracted to the piece to make an offer. The Israeli would purchase it on condition that Boomer accompany it to Jerusalem and personally reassemble it in time to be included in an exhibition dealing with issues of national security as seen through the eyes of artists. That exhibition was set to open in less than two weeks.

Ultima thought it a good idea, even though it would mean removing the piece from her gallery ahead of schedule. Boomer, who wasn’t completely convinced that Jerusalem existed, said that he’d think it over. It wasn’t until he heard himself informing Ellen Cherry of his departure that he realized that he had already decided to escape the pressures of his estranged wife, his dealer, and his sudden fame, and jet off with a cargo of toilet paper rolls and a cantankerous pet crow to that puzzling city that has been variously described as the
Eye
, the
Navel
, the
Song
, and the
Hemorrhage
of the world.

Boomer flew out of JFK in mid-November, expecting to be back in Manhattan for Thanksgiving. Sardined into his carelessly packed satchel, among the jeans, boxer shorts, aloha shirts, and compatible couples of socks, was a single purple stocking that, except for some dubious sentimental value, would have been ash-canned ages ago. Yes, as the ever perverse proclivities of Fate would have it, Clean Sock—Clean Sock!—was winging to Jerusalem.

Were the unsuspecting and fortuitous traveler’s long-lost twin apprised of the situation, profane oaths would have popped like corks in the basement of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and it would have kicked itself from one end to the other of that environment that, to its thinking, was only slightly less dreary and confining than the inside of any sock drawer.