Skinny Legs and All (44 page)

But it was her manner as much as her looks that turned men’s hearts into squirrel cages. First onstage, Salome appeared like a startled doe caught in the headlights of an onrushing truck. Timid and uncomfortable, she would fidget, flick her hair, roll her eyes, nervously clench her tambourine, pluck at the seat of her girdle, and alternately glare at and shrink from the audience. In no aspect, however, did her shyness or self-consciousness inhibit the free movement of her body once she began to dance. The effect was that of a seduction victim who, because she is virginal, betrothed to another man, or contemptuous of her seducer, mentally recoils from his sexual attentions, only to find her body enthusiastically responding in spite of herself. If there existed in the universe any display with a stronger guarantee of igniting the male libido, it had yet to be cataloged.

In Ellen Cherry’s opinion, Salome wasn’t much more than a gauche little schoolgirl “picking at her bottom like her drawers are riding up the crack of her ass,” but, again, nobody was interested in Ellen Cherry’s opinions, least of all not Detective Shaftoe, who, having returned to sit at a front table, got so excited he placed himself under arrest. Salome simply was not a matter of opinion. About an empress, a poetess, a pop star, one might be opinionative, for such women either are frozen in the amber of history or are speeding with one down the illusionary road of one’s own time. Salome, on the other hand, had a quality that was timeless. Although innocently young, there was the suggestion of years of experience behind her. She even seemed wise, not in any conscious or formidable way, but rather as if something strangely meaningful clung to her, a secret knowledge or hidden wisdom; a bright creative power and a dark destructive power, neither of which she had to think about, for she didn’t think quite so much as she was thought.

Salome shook her necklace:
serpent à sonnettes
. She shook her bracelets:
rattelslang
. She shook her anklets:
culebra de cascabel
. She shook her tambourine:
skallerorm
and
klapperschlange
. And it was clear to every Adam in the restaurant, every Adamu in the bar, that she was the one who’d made friends with the Snake, that she’d let it lick the blood of her first menstruation, that she . . .
oooo eee
, that she . . .
oooo eee
, that she . . .
oooo eee
, that she now knew what the Serpent knew.

The harder she danced, the more vividly she projected the image of the passive, slightly unwilling, recipient of male energy; and yet at the same time (though time had ceased to exist) she represented an agent of calamity, a cunning danger to all men. And through the veil of blue smoke and red light, and white steam off the
falafel
trays, every expressionless face—locked in its zone between ego and release, anxiety and delight—every face was thrust up at her.

So occupied was Ellen Cherry that evening with fulfilling her customers’ secondary desires, desires for food and drink (chiefly drink) that she had scant occasion to ponder Patsy’s call. Any decision regarding Boomer and whether or not he need be warned of Buddy’s presumed intentions would have to be postponed. Her immediate reaction, however, was that her husband—technically speaking, he was still her husband—wouldn’t touch Bud’s scheme with a ten-foot welding rod, not even if Bud required his services, which he probably did not. The Boomer Petway whom she believed she knew and understood would never buy into churchdom’s shameless flirtation with ultimate cataclysm, let alone hustle to usher in the doom. Or would he? He’d been both tolerant of and generous to Bud in the past, and an awful lot of otherwise sane citizens
had
bought into it, literally, with cash donations that many of them scarcely could afford.

Perhaps the aura of timelessness radiated by Salome was affecting Ellen Cherry in some subliminal way, but it was impossible for her to picture God just stomping on the brakes one day and sending the world flying through the windshield. What was the point? Was life merely a failed experiment destined to be terminated? Since his prophets had forecast a fiery end thousands of years earlier, it would seem that God had known all along that the experiment was going to flop. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient deity go to the trouble to create an infinitely complex universe if he realized from the beginning that it was only going to malfunction and go down in flames?

“Sorry, sir, they don’t export Maccabee in bottles. Would you care for a can? Or, we do have Stella in the bottle. That’s an Egyptian beer.”

She supposed that another way to look at it was that life wasn’t an experiment but a test, a test that most but not all would flunk. For those few who passed, there awaited a reward, an afterlife not only experientially superior to life but free of life’s planned obsolescence. There was something about such a system that struck her as simplistic, if not degrading, but she couldn’t put her finger on it, at least not right then.

“Two Maccabees, a Stella, and a brandy Alexandria. No, not Alexander, Alexandria. Don’t ask me the difference. If you want,” she told the bartender, “I’ll ask the guy in the fez on my way to the kitchen.”

One thing about which she was reasonably certain, however, was that Buddy Winkler’s insensitivity to the beauty in life, his insensitivity to life, per se, was connected somehow to his ironclad conviction that human beings, unlike God, tended to color outside of the lines—and therefore the coloring book ought to be soaked in gasoline and burned. Time, in his view, was a short, sloppy path from Eve’s crayon box to the Messiah’s fire box.

At that moment, Salome, her eyes demurely downcast, whacked her well-formed and busy young rump with her tambourine, sending a wave of ecstatic vibration over the tabletops and causing two Cypriot economists to spin on their bar stools. The wave hit Ellen Cherry as she emerged from the kitchen, supporting a laden tray. Outwardly, she paid it little heed, but the shape of eternity outlined by its resonating vectors must have guided a zigzagging mental sequence into place, for she found herself suggesting to herself that
all these folks who’re milling about waiting for Jesus to parachute to earth and break up the party are likely to be disappointed
. Personally, she just couldn’t imagine a future, regardless how distant, when some waitress somewhere would not be wobbling out of a kitchen on aching arches to deliver yet another dish of, well, if not
baba ghanoug
, some equally unimposing pacifier of the stomach’s perennially recurring contractions. She was, nevertheless, compelled to concede that an unending future in which an unending parade of waitresses served up unending plates of hash would strike some people as a pretty good working definition of hell, while still others might ask for no finer paradise.

INFORMATION ABOUT TIME
cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.

Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man’s mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he’s got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

Ellen Cherry Charles, no less than Buddy Winkler, participated in history, that modern form of consciousness that glorifies the dismantled buffet, yet blindly craves the waterbed. Unlike the Reverend Buddy Winkler, however, Ellen Cherry had not rejected nature—the living present, the living planet—in order to chase after a transcendent goal. That’s why Buddy’s behavior confounded her. She was much too busy at the moment slinging
tahini
and mopping up spilled gin to analyze in any depth their temporal differences; indeed, though she had moved a fair amount of furniture in her short life, she may have been intellectually incapable of such analysis, even in serene surroundings. Yet, she was entirely correct to propose that Buddy’s disregard for nature, art, and the human experience was tied to his concept of time, especially in regard to an ultimate five o’clock whistle followed by an afterlife.

When the sixth veil falls—and with a barefoot kid called Salome performing the ancient Levantine birth dance in a testosterone-bubbling New York bar, it might no longer be premature to speak of falling veils—when the sixth veil falls, the desensitizing, corrupting illusion of bullet-train history and its apocalyptic destination will surely dissolve.

Roland Abu Hadee once remarked that the reason that Jews habitually accomplished more than Moslems, more than Christians, for that matter; the reason a Jew seldom hesitated to take on artistic, social, or commercial tasks that would frighten off, say, a possibly more qualified Gentile, was because the Jew wasn’t betting all of his or her chips on the hereafter; Jews were boldly playing their hands, cashing their checks,
here and now
; they were going for it in their own lifetime because they had never been convinced, as a people, that the banks would be open in heaven.

The patent truth is that nobody, regardless of race, religion, or personal enlightenment, nobody knows whether or not there is an afterlife. Only the dead can say for sure, and they aren’t talking. Energy never perishes, so the concept of reincarnation makes a certain amount of sense, but there’s absolutely no proof, “memories” of “past lives” (genetic pot shards?) notwithstanding. Despite all absence of evidence, however, there thrives a popular and stern faith in the end of time and in the orchids or onions to be distributed at the finale; and that faith, that wishful—or fearful—thinking, constitutes a veil so thick, so sturdy that it’s a wonder we can see to get out of bed in the morning. If nothing else, the sixth veil is an effective sun block. It may also be a shackle and a shroud.

As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they’re convinced that they’ll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes. Moreover, the faithful are usually willing to risk their skins in whatever military adventure their government may currently be promoting. When the sixth veil drops, there will be a definite shortage of cannon fodder.

Those in high places are not immune. While the afterlife concept renders the masses manageable, it renders their masters destructive. A world leader who’s convinced that life is merely a trial for the more valuable and authentic afterlife is less hesitant to risk starting a nuclear holocaust. A politician or corporate executive who’s expecting the Rapture to arrive on the next flight from Jerusalem is not going to worry much about polluting oceans or destroying forests. Why should he?

Thus, to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line. Theirs is a death wish on a very grand scale, an eschatological extension of Kissinger’s perverse logic—"In order to live forever, we must die as quickly as possible"—and if time doesn’t run out soon, they’re going to form a posse and run it out. Fortunately for them, they see signs everywhere that the end is near. Unfortunately, they’re virtually the same signs that their ancestors saw millennia before them.

Meanwhile, the thermodynamic and cosmological forces that form the basis for “time” spiral merrily along without going anywhere very much. Just around. And around again. Order expanding into disorder contracting into order at a rate so incredibly slow that it bores and bewilders us to the extent that we have to invent psychological endings for it. What the sixth veil conceals is not a blank clock but a relieved expression, the expression on our own faces as we meet ourselves coming from the opposite direction, free to enjoy the present at last because we are no longer fettered by the future that is history.

ON SUNDAY EVENING,
there was no music, and Isaac & Ishmael’s closed early, right after the Yankees game. Throughout the televised contest, at least once an inning, one customer or another mentioned Salome, usually in a voice that was skittery and feverish, the voice of a prospective bridegroom. Alas, the tambourine lay silent, and neither Abu nor Spike could satisfy anybody’s curiosity regarding its mistress’s identity. “Well, what nationality is she?” asked a frustrated fan Abu shook his head. “She says she is a Canaanite. But, of course, that, like her name, is her idea of show biz.” Nobody smiled. “She’s in the student nurse program at Bellevue,” a man said. Everyone looked at him. He was an American, a stocky black man with cotton hair, a relative newcomer to the I & I. “She’s a Lebanese national, here on a student visa. During the day she empties bedpans.” There were incredulous glances. “How do you know that?” “Maybe I’m a fucking detective,” said Shaftoe, and he drained his beer and walked out.

Within an hour, the last cup had been washed, the lights extinguished, and Abu was on his way home. “Mr. Cohen is going over the books,” he said to the security guard as he left. “He will be in the office for a while.” “What about the waitress?” asked the guard. Abu paused. “Oh? The waitress is still here?” He paused again. “There is no problem,” he said at last, and, rubbing his cherry-carrot nose, he climbed into the waiting car.

Thirty minutes later, about the time that Ultima Sommervell was latching her freshly packed suitcase, about the time that the Reverend Buddy Winkler was laying a barbecue-stained Armani jacket in
his
new bag, about the time that Turn Around Norman began to turn in his sleep—a rotation that conceivably could take most of the night to complete—the guard went around back to the courtyard and put his ear to the wall. He wasn’t really surprised to hear Mr. Cohen and the waitress riding the dolphin; in his mind, he could almost see them entwined on the office couch, although he couldn’t have envisioned that Ellen Cherry was naked except for a spanking new pair of leopard-skin stilettos with emerald clasps, the paper and ribbon that had wrapped them mixed in with the clothing scattered about the office floor. The guard was prepared for the thumps and creaks and meatball ping-pong, the feathery throbs and fermented murmurs that were still lingua franca in AIDS-stifled America, but he was decidedly unprepared for what he heard next, a laudation that prompted him to cross himself and beg forgiveness for the imaginary sin of eavesdropping.