Skinny Legs and All (47 page)

It was barely three o’clock, but SoHo had its lights on. The day was as dark as Jezebel’s eyelids. The air was fresh and highly charged. People rushed about in it like apprehensive animals. A lot of the people wore turbans, a lot were wrapped in bedsheets. It occurred to Ellen Cherry that the whole city was starting to look like the bar at Isaac & Ishmael’s. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard English spoken on the streets of New York. On the boom boxes that she passed, each and every one turned to maximum volume as an act of legal aggression, the Spanish singers were rolling their
r
’s for minutes at a time as a result of prestorm static.

She should have gone straight home, unplugged appliances, shut windows, and docked her new shoes in a dry closet, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t. She had made up her mind that she was going to paint again; she didn’t know what, she wasn’t sure when, but inspired by the pessimism of her peers, guided by the strangeness of her experience with the spoon, and letting go of her bitterness in regard to Boomer, she definitely would be painting. And to both celebrate and reaffirm her decision, she thought she owed it to herself, storm or no storm, to pay a long overdue visit to Turn Around Norman.

Norman, Norman. Human pepper mill, grinding away with such breathtaking slowness at the ancient spices that once added the zest of the robust ecstatic to the thin broth of survival. Even if one were unmoved by his actual performance, the kind of concentration and integrity that Norman represented was a model not merely for artists but for. . . . Wait a blue-eyed minute! Where was he?

She had splurged on a taxi in order to beat the rain, and she’d won. The wind had picked up, and thunder was rumbling like a whale with a belly full of Jonahs, but not a drop had fallen, and Fifth Avenue was still relatively crowded. Yet that wasn’t Turn Around Norman by the steps of the cathedral, turning in the place where for years he’d turned without fail in all manner of weather; turned daily (except Wednesday afternoons), including Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday. That wasn’t Norman, that was somebody else.

Her disappointment changed to disgust. And then to fear. For the Reverend Buddy Winkler recognized her immediately after she recognized him, and he broke off his sermon in mid-admonishment to glare at her in the most hostile fashion. So twisted was his face with hate and anger that his boils squeaked like Styrofoam and his gold teeth nearly wrenched loose from his gums. In a flash, like the frog leg of lightning that kicked across the horizon, Ellen Cherry realized both what he was doing there and why he was glaring at her that way.

Two months prior, when Buddy left for Jerusalem, she had notified the FBI and the Southern Baptist Convention of his presumed intentions. If the federal agents had acted on her tip in any way, she had not been privy to it. Moderate Baptists, however, had been hunting for an excuse to remove Bud from his long-time Sunday slot on the Voice of the Sparrow Network, and they quickly suspended him. By no means was he destroyed financially—his executive position with the Third Temple Platoon compensated him quite adequately—and he continued to make guest appearances on evangelical shows (Pat Robertson admired him for his jingoism, Jimmy Swaggart for his Italian slacks); but Buddy Winkler was a preacher who needed a regular pulpit the way a toilet needed a regular flush. So one day he announced that he was “gonna preach the gospel jest like Jesus done it,” and he took to the street. His decision to horn in on “that stupefied halfwit who’s probably on some kinda turn-around-real-slow drug” was intended as a small measure of revenge against Ellen Cherry. Now, she stood facing him, not twenty feet away.

“There!” he shrieked. “Brothers and sisters, there she is!” He was pointing at her with a long, bony finger, his voice sounding less like a saxophone than a car alarm. “It’s her! The Whore of Babylon of whose filthy fornicatin’ wickedness the prophets of God hat warned.”

Several pedestrians looked her over, albeit with the feigned air of utter disinterest that is customary among New Yorkers in public places, while a party of Japanese tourists fixed her in the viewfinders of their Nikons. Then, as the first fat raindrops spattered the pavement, he began to inch toward her.

“Jezebel!” he screeched. “Jezebel!”

Ellen Cherry was too shocked to move. “Jezebel!” She watched a raindrop bounce off the toe of her shoe. “Jezebel!” His eyes were murderous, his accusing finger shook like a lie-detector needle at a White House briefing. “Jezebel!”

In the basement of St. Patrick’s, Conch Shell and Painted Stick rushed to the grate, followed by their three companions.

“Oh, dear,” gasped Spoon. “It’s her.”

“Who’d you expect?” asked Dirty Sock. “Mother goddamn Teresa?”

Can o’ Beans was last to arrive. He/she had been contemplating his/her reflection in the mirror, wondering if Miss Charles had painted him/her from memory or if she’d used another bean can as a model. “This situation is potentially dangerous,” he/she observed.

There was a Spoon-rattling crash of thunder, and the rain began to leave the sky like refugees fleeing a revolution, arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever skills they might have acquired in their dark villages. “Jezebel!”

The preacher advanced on her very, very slowly, as if he had borrowed a page from Turn Around Norman’s book, a book printed on zinc with an ink of cold molasses. But advance he did, jagged wires of lightning twisting like Frankenstein’s umbilical cord across his crazed eyes. He was less than ten paces from her when a mighty cloud clap boxed her ears, shaking her from her trance. She whirled and made as if to run, but her shoe heel, not designed for athletic action, gave way, and she fell to her knees. So drenched was she that she had trouble righting herself in the downpour.

“Jezebel!” screamed the preacher above the thunder, and he bounded toward her like an ocelot toward its fallen prey, his mouth wide open, his phallus as hard as a shovel. As he neared her, at full speed, a shaft, a stave, a wooden pole of some sort suddenly shot through the bars of the street-level grate, blocking his right ankle and tripping him flat on his face. His boils skidded along the wet concrete, a tooth punctured his lower lip. He slid directly into Ellen Cherry, but she managed to stand up and yank off her ruined shoes before dashing to safety in the rain.

The objects pulled back from the grate until the preacher, dazed, soaked, and bleeding, stumbled down Fifth Avenue in the direction of his office, stopping every few feet to turn and stare, puzzled, in their general direction. Then, Painted Stick looked at the others guiltily, as if to say, “May the stars above forgive me. I’ve done it again.”

My heart is a Latin American food stall

And your love is a health inspector from Zurich

PEPE, WHO’D JUST COME
on duty in the Ansonia lobby, was playing the recently released Raoul Ritz cassette on his boom box. He had intended to play it for Ellen Cherry, and he’d also intended to ask her at last about the spoon that had wasted Raoul back in April—was it really hers, how had it managed to land on Raoul? he kept forgetting to inquire—but when she walked through the door in her stocking feet, her dress sopping wet, her knees dirty, her stampede of curls looking as if it had finally gone over a cliff, Pepe’s mind went blank.

“Miz Charl, holy shit, man! What happen to you, man?”

“Hard day at the office, Pepe.” She smiled at him through chattering teeth and padded, dripping rainwater on the tiles, to the elevator.

Upstairs, she drew a hot bath, climbed into it, and had a brief cry. She might have wept longer had she not known that Spike would be by in an hour or two to comfort her. Spike Cohen was good at comforting her. Spike Cohen was good, in general. No starry-eyed old fool, he hadn’t lost his head, begged her to marry him, been jealous of every younger man who crossed their path, or showered her with expensive gifts. About once a week, he presented her with a new pair of shoes, but, then, her shoes seemed to have short lifespans these days, and, besides, Spike got them wholesale. Maybe he wasn’t Tarzan in bed, but he wasn’t Cheetah, either. Any lack of athletic torque or acrobatic flex was compensated for by his tenderness, sensitivity, and attentiveness. And, of course, by the fact that at just the right moment in just the right tone of voice, he addressed her by a particular appellation of biblical origin, a name that for whatever reason had the power to spin her clitoris like the propeller on a toy motorboat.

Thanks to the increasing popularity of Salome, Isaac & Ishmael’s was thriving, attracting many drinkers and some diners, even on those evenings when the girl wasn’t dancing. The place didn’t get real busy until eight-thirty or nine, so on this, Ellen Cherry’s night off, she expected Spike to drop by her apartment about six to spend a couple hours with her. Sure enough, at five-fifty, he tapped at her door with the wedges of a new pair of Maud Frizons. Upon admitting him, however, she saw at once that it might be she who had to supply the comfort and consolation.

“Such a pain I got! Sex is out!”

Spike’s emerald eyes were duller, sadder than usual, and he walked as if he was helping somebody move a refrigerator. He explained that all week he had suffered intermittent pain and cramping in his lower back, and now it had moved into his—He used the Yiddish word for testicles, but Ellen Cherry got the idea. She was contrite. “Maybe we’ve been doing it too often,” she suggested. “Or too hard.” Having never had an older lover before, she was unclear about their durability. She didn’t wish to push the envelope.

“No, no,” Spike protested. “At tennis I probably already strained something. Oy!”

Spike removed his shoes and reclined on the bed. Ellen Cherry put on her shoes, the Maud Frizons that Spike had just delivered, and lay down beside him. She was wearing her kimono, and panties that were the envy of the less fortunate ones in the dresser. They, the underpants in the drawer, were continually shushing one another as they vacillated between bursts of diet-cola twitter and straining to hear everything that transpired in the bedroom. For his part, Daruma the vibrator sensed that something was amiss and that his giggling
zenbo
were likely to be disappointed. “When radish is cooked, crunch fly up chimney,” he said.

The couple shared sips from a flask of rum that Ellen Cherry had taken to keeping on the bedside table. “Anything I can do for you?” she asked.

“No, no,” said Spike, gritting his teeth. Then he told her about a reporter from the Village
Voice
who had shown up at the I & I that afternoon asking a lot of questions about Salome. The reporter had seen Salome dance on Saturday night, and now he wanted to write an article about her. “I say, okay, write all you want, but only with her tambourine does she talk.”

“That’s a fact, Spike. I haven’t heard a peep from her in two months. And she’s out of there fast as those skinny legs will carry her when her set is over.”

“So I tell him, okay, write, write, but be sure you write that a Jew and an Arab together are making it possible.”

“Good. I’m sure he will. The
Voice
is nothing if not political. Even its personals are political.”

“Oy! Those lonely people what’re advertising their own charms, but their shoe size or foot condition never mentioning.”

They conversed for a while about how lonely they each had been before they got together, yet how they’d have croaked of loneliness rather than advertise for companionship, and whether that attitude was a reflection of dignity or repression. It was cozy and sweet lying there talking, and Spike’s pain, like the thunderstorm, appeared to have subsided. At least, he was grimacing with less force. Ellen Cherry didn’t feel quite ready to broach the subject of the Reverend Buddy Winkler’s attack, so she talked about Ultima and the show at the gallery.

“Ultima’s probably right, her artists are admitting defeat. The extraterrestrial in the woodpile is that they expect to be
rewarded
for those defeats every bit as much as if they were triumphs. You get it? They believe they have an ethical, social right to be exhibited and reviewed and collected regardless of their level of skill or verve, and despite the fact that their work is often a deliberate protest against the whole idea of exhibits, reviews, and collections. Anything less, any favoritism shown those with extraordinary abilities, would be unfair, undemocratic, elitist, reactionary, what have you. Jesus! I wasn’t aware that mediocrity was such a virtue. But it looks like both democracy and socialism exist to encourage it.”

“Maybe you prefer a kink?”

At first, she thought Spike was inviting her to indulge one or the other of their sexual proclivities, and she was taken aback by his bluntness, but then she caught on. “A king? No, not a king. I don’t know what system I’d prefer. But I do know that people who really excel at things—whether it’s creating art or running a business—hardly ever make a big fuss about equality, except maybe on the scales of justice. Equal opportunity, yes. Equal results, impossible. The ones who’re so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having ’auras’ around them, they’re usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor. Whether it’s a matter of lifting the deprived up or dragging the gifted down, they want everybody to function on
their
level. Some fun that would be.”

“Not to blame, little darlink. It’s only the new American dream they share.”

“Which?”

“In Europe my family left their toes, but to Ellis Island they brought a dream. The old American dream. Work hard, save your money, be decent, and success you’re bound to have. A business of your own. A house. Nice food on the table, carpets, curtains. Maybe two weeks in December in Miami Beach. Only if you’re my family you swim with your slippers on. Okay. I grew up with that dream. But these artists you’re describing, the self-promoting crybabies what are intentionally being
shlockmeisters
and
gonifs
, they dream the
new
American dream. And the new one is to achieve wealth and recognition without having the burden of intelligence, talent, sacrifice, or the human values what are universal.”