Skinny Legs and All (39 page)

The dreaming was pleasant, but the stewing was not. Objects don’t swim in history the way humanity does. Even those rare objects who’ve recaptured the power of locomotion possess an innate patience to which no human saint could reasonably aspire. Nevertheless, Spoon fretted for reunion. She was anxious to tell her traveling companions about the Dome of the Rock, about Mr. Petway being in Jerusalem, about, most especially, the paintings of Miss Charles. The fact that Miss Charles had painted dozens of portraits of them—of
them
: Dirty Sock, Can o’ Beans, and Spoon—could only mean that she was their God-given champion.

And yet
, Spoon stewed,
if she cherishes me so much, why has she sentenced me to the perpetual company of shallow, chatty undergarments and her Oriental instrument of debauchery?
Can o’ Beans had advised her that one could learn from foreigners, but when it came to Phoenician sticks and Japanese dildos, one hardly could make a drop of sense of anything they said. If anything, the vibrator was more obscurant than Painted Stick.

“Where do you come from, sir?” Spoon had asked when they met.

“Same place guano came from that unseen bird drop into misty sea.”

“That’s nice,” said Spoon, trying to be polite. She wasn’t yet aware of the fellow’s obscene function, believing him to be a curling iron.

“Three pound of flax,” said the vibrator.

The underpants didn’t understand him, either, but they acted as if he were as wise as Solomon. (Had Solomon actually been wise, that is.) They bowed to him and called him “Master” or “Daruma,” and, as difficult as it was for them to smother their giggles, they chanted with him for two hours every day.
"Wooga go nami ne, Wooga go nami ne.”

“This would give me a headache,” complained Spoon. “If I had a head.”

“Ah! Headless headache!” the vibrator exclaimed, delighted. “Good. There hope for you, yet.”

Left to their own devices, the panties would spend their time jabbering about fashion, fad diets, celebrity life-styles, and popular music. Even when they were meditating under Daruma’s supervision, Spoon could sometimes hear them whispering about the weight this actress had lost or that one gained. They also loved to engage in relentless and often highly speculative gossip about Ellen Cherry Charles. They maintained a near obsession with Miss Charles’s sex life, which Spoon attributed to the fact that they, singularly and in rotation, were usually in close proximity to the, uh, hub of that presumed activity.

As a defense against their vulgar and embarrassing chitchat, Spoon began to relate her adventures to them: where she’d been and where she was going, under what circumstances and in whose company. Easily entertained, the underpants listened attentively. They appreciated a good story. Not for a millisecond, however, did they believe that she had attained a state of locomotion. To them, it was just a tall tale. Insulted that the panties would question her veracity, Spoon executed a couple of feeble cartwheels and a clumsy pirouette. Don’t think that that didn’t snap their elastic! From then on, they were twice as attentive. Under his reserved exterior, even Daruma was impressed.

Considering that she could locomote, the panties couldn’t understand why Spoon lay around stewing in a dresser drawer. Why didn’t she light out for St. Patrick’s and rejoin her interesting friends?

“First of all, I don’t know the way,” said Spoon.

“Way that is true Way cannot be known,” countered the vibrator.

“Secondly, the very idea of it gives me a fright.”

“Those who would travel must learn to like dust,” said Daruma.

“Most important, though, is that we inanimate objects have an ethical responsibility not to shatter the prevailing reality of human beings. Conch Shell was adamant about that. If a man saw me locomoting, why he’d think he’d gone insane or else witnessed a miracle. Can o’ Beans says that people are too fragile for miracles.”

“
Honto des
’,” the vibrator said, sagely. “Is true. Two thousand year ago, virgin give birth. People still not get over it. Ha-ha-ha.”

“I’ve never considered the Immaculate Conception in those terms,” said Spoon, “and I fail to find humor in it. But I suppose you could be right. Maybe that’s why God had to suspend the miraculous.”

Content to listen to Spoon’s stories, the panties seldom asked questions. In his own cool way, however, Daruma exhibited an abiding curiosity. “The more talking and thinking, the farther from the truth,” he was fond of saying, yet he queried Spoon persistently about such matters as how the decorated stick and the seashell managed to get from Jerusalem to a cave in Utah (or was it Wyoming?). There had been a time when Spoon had puzzled over that, as well. Now, though, she had the answer at hand.

“The Phoenicians took them. You probably think Columbus discovered America. No, he didn’t. He was a good, brave Catholic, and I’d like to believe he was first, but he wasn’t. The Phoenicians had wonderful sailing ships, and they sailed all over the world. Well, probably not the Pacific, but the other oceans. They knew about America many centuries before Columbus. Many, many centuries. Isn’t that amazing? After the Romans destroyed Herod’s Temple in—” Spoon had to stop and visualize numerals. She could see a seven, standing tall with its right arm outstretched, like a safety patrol boy at a school crossing, but she couldn’t conjure up a clear picture of the number to its left. Somehow five didn’t look right, rocking on its brontosaurus tail, nor did the hydrocephalic nine.

“Seventy something.
A.D.
You know what
A.D.
means?”

“Oh, yeah,” said a pair of cotton briefs. “That’s like the current that makes Master vibrate when he’s like operating on batteries.”

“
All
vibrators operate on batteries,” corrected a slightly older pair, bleached as blue as moonlight on snow. “You think a lady would wanna like fuck herself with something plugged into the wall?”

A tittering circulated in the drawer like birdsong in a box hedge. Spoon palpitated, coughed, and elected to press on. “After Jerusalem was destroyed again in seventy something, Painted Stick and Conch Shell ended up back with the Phoenicians. There were powerful priestesses who supposedly could read the future. Phoenicia was by then part of the Roman Empire, the Roman province of Syria. It continued to prosper economically, but the priestesses convinced a lot of people that their culture and religion were doomed. Which proved to be the case. Thanks to them, they began to take measures to try to insure survival, or, rather, reemergence at a later date.”

“When people say ’take measures,’ I always think like, you know, see how tall or wide something is,” said a sweet, young voice from the undie pile. “Forty inches. Fifty inches.”

“Like you mean Liz Taylor’s hips?”

Again the drawer filled up with titters. Spoon turned to the vibrator, who sympathized but offered little help. “Greedy for bait, fish soon caught. You have only to open mouth, your life lost.”

Spoon decided to cut it short. “A priestess carried Conch Shell and Painted Stick aboard a big ship, and they crossed the Atlantic and sailed as far as they could up the St. Lawrence river system. Then a party carried them overland for a long ways until the priestess found just the right hiding place. It was a small cave. The cave had a niche in it, and the priestess hid our shell and stick in the niche, but first she rubbed them in a particular way that put them into a trance. They were programmed not to wake up until they felt a certain familiar energy. That would be the signal that the era of Rome was finished and the earth was returning to its senses. I realize that it sounds ever so frightfully pagan, but that’s the way it was explained to me.”

“Ah, so,” said Daruma the O-maker.

MONTHS EARLIER,
even before Boomer got his lame foot stuck in one of the seven mystical doors of Jerusalem, Ellen Cherry had transferred her wedding band from her left hand to her right, a sign that she was widowed or divorced, although neither was technically the case. Every time that the underwear drawer opened, a burst of light, solar or incandescent, would rush in, followed fairly quickly by a muscular, machine-tooled load of hydrocarbon-laden New York air, and then by Ellen Cherry’s right hand, readily identifiable by its Jezebel-colored nails (long and sharp as the wrought-iron spikes around an embassy) and its simple ring of gold.

Each and every time the hand entered drawer space, Spoon hoped with all her might that it was reaching for her. Alas, were it morning, the hand selected the pantie of the day (Ellen Cherry owned few brassieres, as her lumps lacked sufficient mass to fully occupy a harness); were it night, the hand, always a bit hesitantly, withdrew Daruma. Alas.

One afternoon toward late February, when she had stayed home from work with a beefy cold, Ellen Cherry did remove Spoon from the drawer. What a hopeful moment for the stranded utensil! In the end, however, it was Ellen Cherry who benefited from the encounter.

She laid the spoon on the bed while she blew her nose. Then she picked it up and examined it, as if for a clue, previously overlooked, that finally might explain its queer reappearance. When that proved futile, Ellen Cherry held the dainty object about six inches from her face and initiated the eye game. She hadn’t played the eye game in what Patsy would characterize as “a coon’s age,” but she slid readily into it, aided, perhaps, by the film of tearwater excreted by her head in its attempt to flush alien bacteria.

The scalloped edges of the spoon’s handle began to flutter like a paper clam shell, to spiral as if they were streams of some Botticelli bouillabaisse, a salty, rococo broth from which the emancipated souls of expiring sea snails rose to mingle in the spray with the flying locks of nymphs. The hollow ladle flattened, spread, and thinned in her vision until it resembled the Springmaid armpit of a ghost, and the shimmering silver of its surface manifested itself as a luminous brand of haywire energy. The deeper the penetration of Ellen Cherry’s eye, the greater the loss or breakdown of that energy, and for that very reason it became necessary for her to penetrate more deeply yet, so that she might get in front of, outdistance, the dissolution. With something akin to the visual equivalent of a sprinter’s finish-line kick, she did at last propel herself ahead of dissipation and found herself embedded in a continuous solid reef of what she could only describe as “information.”

For one giddy moment she felt that she had oriented herself at the interface of the visible and invisible worlds, that she was contemplating wholeness, an ultimate state in which all forms and motions were imminent but protected by physical or metaphysical law from the process of selection or favoritism that would compromise them.

The sensation was short-lived, but while it lasted, Ellen Cherry seemed to hold something slippery by its tail. Slippery and altogether crucial. She couldn’t quite identify it. She definitely couldn’t analyze it. Instinctively, she realized that analysis would negate it. It seemed to be a kind of rapture, a rapturous essence that was available in all things if only one regarded them in a particular light. On a rational level, it made about as much sense as a whole deck of aces, yet it provided her with a fleeting joy so intense that the memory of it would comfort her for months to come and would drive from consideration any possibility of retreat or surrender.

The moment itself had passed, however. She needed to blow her nose again and swill another swig of cough syrup. She thought about using the spoon to take the medicine, but decided against it. Returning to normal focus, she opened the drawer and laid a sadly disappointed Spoon down among unworthy companions; “unworthy” not because they lacked the mysterious essence but because they were so ignorant they believed Phoenicians to be the people who modernized window coverings. As in, “If it weren’t for Phoenician blinds, it’d be curtains for all of us.”

Within a week, her immune system had washed her cold out to sea, and Ellen Cherry returned to the I & I to find a change in the situation there. Since there were fewer televised sporting events on weekend nights, the nights when UN employees, like workers everywhere, were most inclined to go out, Spike and Abu decided to experiment with live music in the bar. They lugged a wad of bills to city hall, greased palms left and right, and obtained a cabaret license. Then they auditioned musicians.

After overturning every stone in New York’s ethnic music underground, they located a young Yemenite man who could and would sing both Arabic and Israeli folk songs. Bareheaded and wearing a baby blue dinner jacket so as to appear impartial, the fellow performed on Sundays, accompanied by his eleven-year-old brother on bass and his grandfather on clay drums. His guitar and voice had a melancholy cast, no matter what the tempo, and the tunes in his repertoire featured lines such as, “Yesterday I cleaned my rifle while my girlfriend slept and the almond trees wept with infinite joy.” Business on Sunday nights did not increase dramatically.

For the entertainment of Friday and Saturday night customers, an East Jerusalem nightclub band was hired. “Why not? Israeli Jews like this music, too,” Spike explained. “It’s Oriental music. They don’t believe this very much in Westchester, but Israel is basically an Oriental country, already.”

The musicians in the band were a mixed bag of Palestinians, Egyptians, and Lebanese. Every one of them was older than sixty (sometimes the Yemenite grandfather sat in), but they played with ecstasy and zeal. When they got going, they jiggled the building with shrill desert gusts and tumbling layers of complex thunder. The dissonant melodies of ancient lutes rolled with the rapid-fire punches thrown by the drums, while snake-charmer reeds wrapped themselves sinuously around the ankles of every beat and note.

Indeed, the band did attract patrons, although not in such numbers as to justify the additional expense. It didn’t take long for Spike and Abu to realize that live entertainment was a losing proposition, but they personally liked the music so much that they hesitated to terminate it.