Skinny Legs and All (48 page)

“Yeah, I reckon a lot of people are spoiled like that nowadays. In all fields. At all ages, too. But frankly, Spike, I don’t really care if artists work a forty-hour week or obey the Ten Commandments. I don’t even give a rat’s hair if they pay their dues, just so long as their paintings go the distance. But if they can’t provide me with something gorgeous or astonishing to look at, then don’t expect me to forgive them their trespasses.”

“No, no, little darlink. Everybody must be forgiven.”

“Including Buddy Winkler?” At this point, she told Spike about the attack, and sure enough, he was able to comfort her, to make her feel all right about it, to feel all right even about the retreat of Turn Around Norman. He held her and slowly commenced to knead the loaves of her buttocks and the cupcakes of her breasts. Soon, they forgot the physical and mental things that troubled them, respectively. The dolphin carried them to where the crests were wild and bumpy and the troughs salty and deep.

Lost in her ecstasy, Ellen Cherry hadn’t realized how vigorously she had begun to buck. Mindlessly, she arched and thrust and thrashed until his moans—not of pleasure but of pain—escalated into a scream that froze the sea around her. Gasping, he rolled off her, off the bed and onto the floor, where in a small pool of vomit, he lay ashen and unconscious.

“Oh, my God!” she cried. “I’ve killed him.”

THE AIDS EPIDEMIC,
according to the Reverend Buddy Winkler and his colleagues, was a plague visited upon the earth by Jehovah to punish the sexually adventurous. AIDS was proof positive, they preached, that humanity’s days were numbered. The fact that the AIDS toll was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the mortality figures of the fourteenth century, when the bubonic pandemic wiped out a third of the world’s population, was not the sort of information to which the oh-goody-this-must-be-the-end mentality paid much attention. AIDS was tailor-made for the fantasies of the religious right, because it was genitally transmitted.

To more than one congregation on more than one occasion, Buddy had proclaimed, “Man had congress with sheep and generated syphilis. Man had congress with monkeys and generated AIDS.”

“So what does that tell us about chicken pox?” Ellen Cherry had asked one day.

“Yeah,” said Boomer Petway, “and how about the first man who ever said he was ’sick as a dog’? Was he confessing to something? Was that the origin of collie-ra?”

Ellen Cherry: “And was Rhett Butler the pervert who spread scarlet fever?”

Boomer: “And if you had congress with jazz musicians, would you come down with thelonious mumps?”

Well, never mind those two. There was, indeed, an epidemic loose in the land, and if it was hardly apocalyptic, if its victims were few compared to pestilences of the past (just as the casualties of the two world wars were slight compared, for example, to those of the Manchu-Chinese War of 1644), it was nonetheless serious and scary; all the more so because it was sexually transmitted. It led children to associate love with death.

However, it was neither AIDS nor ninja nooky that felled Spike Cohen. While a frantic Ellen Cherry was on her way to the lobby to call for an ambulance, Spike regained consciousness and staggered into the bathroom, where he passed a kidney stone as big as the Ritz.

Within a few days, Spike was hurting again. A second stone, a calcium oxalate crystal, to be precise, lodged in his ureter and, like a pirate radio station, went on the air with a sporadic signal and a musical format programmed by Nazi biologists and prelates from the Inquisition. Spike was admitted to a hospital, where, fighting sound with sound, a technician operating a litho-tripter aimed high-intensity sonar at the caterwauling stone. When the bombardment abated and the decibels cleared, the crystalline concretion remained, nesting in the tube between kidney and bladder like a stork in a chimney.

Medical generals ordered an invasion. A spring-loaded wire device resembling an egg whisk was shoved up Spike’s penis and through his bladder on a mission to capture the stone. When it was withdrawn, however, its trap was empty, and X rays revealed that the vicious barnacle, a good six millimeters in circumference, hadn’t budged. Spike was then readied for full-scale surgery. The operation proceeded smoothly until a doctor with a shaky hand (probably the result of golf elbow) accidentally severed the soda-straw ureter, a boo-boo that went unnoticed by the medical team (probably because it was arguing over the fortunes of the Giants and the Jets).

That evening, Spike developed a headache and a slight fever. The nurses didn’t regard the condition as unusual, not even when it persisted. Nearly three days passed before it dawned on them that he hadn’t urinated since prior to surgery. A resident physician suspected that a third stone was stuck in the uretero-vesical pipe, but X rays failed to turn up one. Bloodwork was requested. The lab fired back an analysis that made Spike’s bloodstream read like the gutters of Calcutta. His nitrate levels were practically off the chart, and small wonder, since urine, unable to reach the bladder, had been emptying into his abdominal cavity at the rate of eight hundred cc’s a day. In other words, he had enough hot piss in his stomach to fill the combustion chambers of several powerful motorcycles.

By then, Spike was severely nauseated, his face and extremities were swollen, and he was seized by mild convulsions. Medics swarmed over him as if he were the first tee at a brand-new country club. Simultaneously, he was hooked up to a dialysis machine and given a blood transfusion. On the way to the operating theater, his gurney looked like the lead wagon in a caravan of sterilized gypsies. They cut him open again, drained his stomach, and spliced his ureter. It was touch and go for a few hours, but he survived.

His first words to Ellen Cherry, when she was allowed to visit the following day, were: “Hoo boy! I’ve been shot in the head, I’ve been treated for kidney stones. Shot in the head is better.”

Robust though he was, the triple whammy of kidney stones, uremia, and encore surgery exacted a steep levy on Spike Cohen’s constitution. His eleven-day stay in the hospital was followed by a month’s recuperation at his Upper West Side flat. Ellen Cherry nursed him during the day, his son and daughter-in-law at night. His son wasted hours trying to convince him to sue his doctors. “A bad hospital it may be, but the New York state lottery it’s not,” said Spike. “I’m earning my money the old-fashioned way.”

Abu visited the convalescent whenever he could, but he had his hands full at the restaurant. Following the publication of the article in the Village
Voice
, Salome’s fame had spread. Patronage of Isaac & Ishmael’s had been jacked up another notch. Abu made a rule that nobody could be seated in the dining room unless they ordered dinner, yet even that harrowing prospect failed to dissuade the crowds. By seven on Friday and Saturday nights, there wasn’t an empty seat in the place. Bribe and wheedle though he might, Abu could not influence the bandleader to influence Salome to dance on additional evenings. “I will speak to her from the heart,” the toothless musician would promise, pocketing the fifty-dollar bill Abu had offered. “But she is a young girl, she has her studies, she needs her sleep.”

Neatly dressed in one of the dark blue pinstriped wool suits that he now wore in all seasons, Abu would sit by Spike’s bed, cheering him with tales of the I & I’s success and of the attention Salome was calling to their exercise in brotherhood. Abu complained often that he couldn’t find a competent partner on the tennis court, and that little white lie cheered Spike as well. Abu’s visits were short, however. During most of the daylight hours, Ellen Cherry attended to Spike all by herself. She fed him, bathed him, medicated him, mixed him weak rum punches, and read to him from the poetry of Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda.

“When I was a small boy,” said Spike, “my favorite poem was ’There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.’”

“I’m not surprised,” said Ellen Cherry.

“I also liked the ’this little piggy went to market’ routine, but it made my family very nervous. Especially the ’wee wee wee’ part.”

Although it left her time for nothing else except her job, Ellen Cherry didn’t resent the weeks that she spent as Spike’s nursemaid. However, the experience permanently altered the nature of their relationship. Her sexual feelings for him simply evaporated. Perhaps it was his helplessness, perhaps it was an overdose of intimacy. She didn’t know what extinguished it, but she knew that the fire was out. They avoided any discussion of the matter, yet Spike obviously sensed the plunge in erotic temperature. As much as he might have yearned to, he made no effort to whistle for the dolphin or to throw an electric blanket over its cool, slick back. Ellen Cherry and Spike remained fast friends, but never again did they ride out to mid-ocean, where the salt spray glittered in her neo-hussy rouge as he trolled for that radiant sea-thing that many men have tasted but no man has fully seen.

Spike was as thin and pale as the hoarfrost trim on wolfmother wallpaper when he at last resumed his station behind the reservation desk at Isaac & Ishmael’s. It was a peppery Friday evening in early August, and the restaurant was gearing up for a crush of pita snappers and Salome gawkers. Regulars, such as the team of Moroccan irrigation specialists, the UN’s Kurdish translator, and Detective Shaftoe, were at their customary bar stools and tables by five o’clock, prepared to wait a full four hours for the first jingle-bang of the tambourine. By six-thirty, a few smitten Romeos already loitered out front, hoping to catch the dancer’s eye when she stepped from the black sedan that always delivered her and picked her up, although the only eye that ever regarded them was the pugnacious one of her chaperon, the bandleader’s stout sister. Salome neither looked at nor spoke to anyone, but hugged herself, bashful, remote, self-contained, until the band sounded her opening number, at which point she would throw apart her arms and let the glow spread wherever it might, heating the freshly shaved cheeks of diplomats, ripening the green olives in their martinis. “Belly dancers are nothing new in New York,” reported the Village
Voice
. “They have bumped and shimmied here since Little Egypt’s gyrations upstaged the revolutionary flickers of the prototype television at the 1939 World’s Fair. From 1940 on, there have been in the city a minimum of two or three Middle Eastern or Greek clubs featuring practitioners of that ancient art. But Manhattan has never seen a belly dancer such as Isaac & Ishmael’s young Salome.”

At 6:50, the telephone rang. “Isaac and Ishmael’s,” Spike answered. “We’re full up already.” He listened for a moment, then signaled Ellen Cherry. “For you,” he called, wagging the receiver. “Sounds like your mama.”

“I’ll take it in the kitchen. I’m sorry, Spike. I told them never to call here during dinner.”

“Not to worry. We’re full up.”

“Yeah, but I got a ton of
falafel
to sling.”

“Not to worry. So, I’ll take your tables. It’s only for the dancing lady what they’re hungry.”

“Well now, don’t you overdo and have a relapse on me. I want to go buy paints and canvas tomorrow.”

Brushing aside a succession of anonymous hands that reached to pat her buttocks or squeeze her thighs, Ellen Cherry made her way to the kitchen, where she lifted the receiver from the wall extension and learned that her daddy was dead.

Embalmed and in his coffin, Verlin Charles still smelled of mildewed washcloth, a defiance of sorts that somehow comforted Ellen Cherry. Verlin was taking it with him, so to speak.

She hovered over the open casket, reminiscing about things they’d done together, things he’d done for her: the dolls and paint sets he provided, the movies she watched from his lap, the drives to Florida during which he so frequently inquired if “daddy’s girl” needed a Coke or a hamburger or to pee-pee (when all she really wanted was to perfect her eye game). Tearfully, she shuffled the deck of memory, dealing out the cards of thoughtfulness, fun, and sacrifice that demonstrated his love—yet over and over again the black ace turned up to take the trick: the reminder of that day he had yanked her out of art class, rubbed raw her face, and called her “Jezebel.” It seemed to obscure everything else he had contributed to her development and happiness. She wondered if that was natural, if others harbored grudges against essentially loving parents, even after they were gone. If she were to die tomorrow, would she be remembered for a few good paintings, a few acts of kindness, or for her selfishness and spite, particularly in regard to Boomer Petway? She was weeping as much for herself as for her father. When she noticed that the mortician had applied a considerable amount of cosmetics to Verlin’s countenance, an ironic smile sliced through the tears.

Patsy came to stand beside her. “It was the football that killed him,” Patsy said.

“What’re you talking about, mama? Daddy hasn’t played football since he was a kid.”

“Not playing it,
watching
it. He used up his heart in front of that blessed set.”

Later, one of the pallbearers told Ellen Cherry that Verlin had been watching a Washington Redskins exhibition game when he stood and clutched his chest. “Wasn’t the excitement,” the man confided. “It was the long hours and the snacks.”

The Reverend Buddy Winkler avoided any mention of football or television in his eulogy, although he did relate a couple of incidents that had to do with the jigging of frogs. The preacher was eloquent, even Ellen Cherry had to admit it. His saxophone blew joy into the dead man’s eyes, blew peace into his exploded ticker. With hypnotic cadences, he reproduced for the bland Baptist mourners the shadow that a newborn baby casts, then made the shadow grow long and pointed until it ended like a church spire back in God’s own sky. “The way down is the way up,” he said, quoting a Greek philosopher to a group of people who seldom accepted as truth any word that hadn’t come directly from the Bible or a southern politician.