Skinny Legs and All (51 page)
Read Skinny Legs and All Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
“And is Salome restoring some of the original flavor, the old moves?”
“How would I know? For that matter, how would she know?”
“Well, she claims she’s a Canaanite.”
“A conceit, obviously. Those Canaanites who were not exterminated by the Hebrews were absorbed by them. What Salome said, actually, was, ’I’m one of those Canaanite girls whose mothers picked flowers for the altars of Jerusalem.’ A conceit, but I like it. It is musical. A little poem. What I
think
she is trying to say, in her romantic, adolescent way—and I forbid you to quote me on this—is that she is half Arabic, half Jewish. She would have suffered somewhat because of this, and styling herself a Canaanite, a member of a lost race, is her poetic way of dealing with that confusion, that pain. Pure speculation, mind you. Detective Shaftoe, whose information is usually reliable, has said nothing of the sort.”
There was a way in which Ellen Cherry grew to resent both the I & I and its star attraction. The more successful the restaurant became, the more of her time and energy it sapped. She was happy for her employers, but once again her return to painting had been postponed (not that any thundering stampede of great ideas was rushing toward the cliffs of her cerebrum, anxious to throw itself headlong into paint jars down below). As for Salome, she, like Boomer, seemed to have succeeded wildly without really working at it (although how could a chagrined Ellen Cherry be sure that Salome hadn’t spent most of her young life practicing those moves that she executed with such hesitant if not indifferent grace, and, moreover, wasn’t it Ellen Cherry who had asserted that she didn’t care whether or not artists paid their dues so long as the end product sprayed Windex on the panes of perception?). Contradiction may be an unavoidable trait in a many-faceted sensibility in an expanding universe, but bitterness is reductive in the most trivializing way, and Ellen Cherry was aware that it was her fate to have to struggle against it. Over and over, she reminded herself how fortunate she was to have landed her life in a situation where strange things could happen to it. “Why, if I hadn’t learned the eye game when I was little, I could be in Colonial Pines right now, washing and ironing some clodhopper’s shorts.”
Husbandless, loverless, and now fatherless, Ellen Cherry couldn’t have been unaware that men’s shorts definitely were one item missing from any inventory of her world. It was as if some monster Kali-Hoover had sucked all the primary shorts-wearers out of her life. Of course, there was Abu. And Spike, in a recycled guise. And no lack of male energy among the clientele at the I & I. On the other hand, what had become of Turn Around Norman? And that flirty Raoul? They, too, had been vacuumed up off that Middle Eastern rug that seemed to cover the earth in every direction as far as her eyes could see.
She finally got a telephone installed in her apartment so that she could stay in closer contact with Patsy; she exchanged friendly but noncommittal letters with Boomer; she took over the lunch operation at the restaurant, often sticking around late on Fridays and Saturdays to help out with dinner and, in her words, “to watch men go goofy over that spastic little cunt, skinny legs and all"; and—what else? Not much. In her underwear drawer, the gossip dwindled to such a degree that Daruma thought the panties might be actually approaching a Zen state.
“Ripples now vanish from carp pool of mind,” said the vibrator approvingly. Out on the Atlantic, however, ripples were riotous, threatening almost incessantly to sweep Can o’ Beans from the seashell’s hold. And at Isaac & Ishmael’s, a new ripple was about to jar things, as well.
THE HOUR WAS 4:00 P.M.,
the day Monday, the month September. Late September. So late that you’d have to look closely to distinguish it from October. Dip a slice of bread in batter. That’s September: yellow gold, soft, and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process. A hint of chilled marmalade in the air.
In the I & I bar, regulars were assembling to watch Monday night football on the mammoth screen. Kickoff was hours away, however, and the lounge chatter ran to other things. To be precise, one other thing.
“She looks so bored all the time.”
“Not bored. She looks scared.”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .”
“Both. She looks bored
and
scared. That’s what drives me crazy. She gives the impression that if you took her to bed, she’d look at you like that from start to finish.”
“You’re right.”
“It ees true.”
“She wouldn’t just lie there. She’d give you a ride like a wild mule. But all through it, she’d look bored and scared. Hoo! It’s making me crazy. I can’t sleep anymore for thinking about it.”
“He ees right. In zee movies, zee women zat are making zee love are looking, how you say, carry away. Zey look carry away and grateful. A mistake. How much more excitement if zey are looking scared and bored. Then men are jump out of zee seats and rush zee screen. Irresistible!”
“It’s her age, that’s all.”
“Yeah, you guys. She looks at you like you bore and scare her because she’s young enough to be your daughter.”
“If she’s my daughter, I’d be in jail.”
“That’s sick. But me, too.”
There was a spill of uncomfortable laughter. A waiter arrived with a tray of
falafel
, the one item on the menu that didn’t taste as if it had been scraped off the wick of Aladdin’s lamp.
“Anyway, it isn’t her face or its expression. It’s her body, the way she moves it.”
“Oui! Yes. Zose leetle teeties, how she set zem to vibrating! Zey could wheep zee eggs for soufflé.”
“I have seen hundreds of belly dancers. Hundreds. My cousin could dance this dance better than any woman in Istanbul. But this Salome girl who dances here . . .”
“She’s the best. Her movements are softer and sweeter, but at the same time very, very strong. Her dancing is . . .”
“Zilch.”
The man who spoke was Detective Shaftoe. He’d had his face in a beer mug, and it was the first thing he’d said since he ambled in. They stared at him in disbelief.
“Pardon?”
“Zilch?”
“Nothing. The dances she does here are nothing. They’re baby dances. In more ways than one.”
“What do you mean?” The men respected the opinions of the muscular black man. After all, he used to play football. And he often seemed to know things about Salome that nobody else knew.
“I mean that if you think what she does here is so goddamned hot, you ought to see her do the Dance of the Seven Veils.”
Under questioning, Shaftoe admitted that he had never seen this “Dance of the Seven Veils.” He’d only heard reports. But his unidentified sources assured him that if Salome ever performed it, which she probably wouldn’t, all of the other dances she had done would seem prissy, uncolored, and commonplace in comparison.
The lounge fell silent and remained that way through most of Monday night football.
Word spread like a skin disease in a nudist colony. Hardly a customer, new or old, passed through the door of the I & I without asking Spike, “When’s she going to do the Dance of the Seven Veils?” During Salome’s performances, between numbers, patrons would call out, “Dance of the Seven Veils!” as if requesting a favorite tune from a rock star. The first couple of times that happened, she looked as startled as if someone had pulled a gun, but later on, when she grew accustomed to “Do the Seven Veils!” the raccoon fingers of a small dark smile would toy with the meat of her upper lip, and ever so gently and briefly, she would shake her head.
A negative head shake was all that Spike and Abu got from Salome, as well. They pleaded their case before the bandleader, who behaved as if his dental deficit was impairing his hearing. “Maybe someday,” he would say, a little wistfully, looking off into the distance. “Someday when the apricots are blooming. . . .”
Abu was familiar enough with Arabic idioms to know that that little phrase meant roughly the same as, “It’ll be a cold day in hell.” He seized the lapel of the old man’s shiny blue suit. “Tell her if she will do the seven veils dance, I will double her pay.”
The bandleader tapped his own chest. “Also?” he asked.
“When the apricots bloom!” shot back Abu. “You are being paid extra as it is.”
The conductor walked away, leaving Abu to simmer like a pot of
turshi
. Abu conferred with Spike. The two of them were as intrigued with the legendary dance as anybody else. The following week, Abu made another offer. “If Salome will perform the Dance of the Seven Veils just once, we will pay her triple and you double, for that one evening and that evening only.”
Showing gums as pink and smooth as Conch Shell’s aperture, the bandleader vowed to do his utmost. However, the next evening, the old drooler took Abu aside to inform him that it was no use.
“Not even for triple salary?”
“It is not a matter of money, my generous benefactor. There is involved the matter of tradition. There is likewise involved the secrets of women, little that we men care of such things. There is likewise involved personal disposition. The girl is of high intelligence for a girl. She is the youngest girl to study at the Hospital Bellevue. And she wishes to go to her homeland to be nursing her people. I am sorry, dear sir, but the girl will never do this dance.”
“Never?”
“Well. Maybe someday. When the—”
“Apricots bloom.” Abu finished his sentence for him and chased him out of the office.
ELLEN CHERRY ANSWERED
the reservation desk phone on the October afternoon that the I & I received a bomb threat, the first in many months. Prior to joining in the evacuation of the building, she called her employers at their tennis club. They arrived on the scene in white linen pants and white cotton sweaters. Spike was shod in white tennis sneakers, but Abu had replaced his Nikes with black leather dress shoes. The flashing red lights of the bomb squad van were reflected on their plain toes.
“Somebody is just doing this for old times’ sake,” Abu said, smiling. “Who would have thought that religious terrorists could be sentimental?”
“No,” said Spike. “I’m thinking it’s the cops what’re making the threat. They got a party scheduled and are short on liquor.”
“You all aren’t taking this very seriously,” said Ellen Cherry.
Spike touched the scars on his forehead. “Of all people, I’m taking it seriously,” he said. “But I’m thinking it’s just some
shikker
what’s mad because our little lady’s not doing the Dance of the Seven Veils.”
“What is it with this dance?” asked Ellen Cherry. “Everybody’s going on about it like it was free sex and ice cream, but nobody knows spit about it.”
“It’s that shamus what’s started it,” said Spike, referring to Shaftoe.
“But it is an actual dance,” put in Abu. “And apparently it is included in her repertoire.”
“Well, what’s so special about it? Isn’t it out of the Bible or something?”
It was barely three o’clock, but traffic was already gridlocked at the Forty-ninth Street exit from the FDR Drive. The blaring horns and racing engines were so loud that Ellen Cherry flirted with earache straining to hear Abu’s explanation. “No, it is mentioned nowhere by name in the Bible, although Josephus the historian records that it is the dance performed by the biblical Salome at the birthday party of her stepfather, Herod.”
“The party where John the Baptist’s head jumped out of the cake?”
“So to speak. Salome, incidentally, is the same Semitic word as
shalom
or
salem
. In other words, ’peace.’ Thus, our beloved city, Jerusalem, is both the House of Peace and the House of the Dancing Girl.”
“Of what?”
“The Dancing Girl.”
“That’s sweet,” said Ellen Cherry.
“I like it,” said Spike.
Abu went on. “The dance itself predates Herod and that particular Salome, his stepdaughter. In fact, it is very ancient and thoroughly pagan. It is connected to the myth of the cyclic death of the sun god. His moon goddess travels to the underworld to rescue him, but to get him back she has to drop one of her seven articles of clothing at each of its seven gates.”
“Why?”
“I have no clue. But the reenactment of the story apparently continued well into Roman times. Supported by Hebrews. A dancer would drop a veil at each of the seven gates of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the seventh gate, she was in her birthday suit, though we need not suppose that to be the reason Herod requested the dance at his birthday party. I have read that the veils represented layers of illusion. As each veil peeled away, an illusion was destroyed, until finally some great central mystery of life was revealed.”
“What?” asked Ellen Cherry. “I missed that.”
Before Abu could repeat the story, word came from across UN Plaza that the police had, indeed, discovered an explosive device planted behind the bamboo matting on a wall near the bandstand. Spike and Abu were astounded. Ellen Cherry thought instantly of Buddy Winkler.
False alarm. The “bomb” proved to be a remote-controlled cassette recorder. Someone, probably a waiter, had hidden it there in order to surreptitiously record the orchestra, Salome on tambourine. “Looking to rake in some extra cash peddling bootleg tapes,” Abu conjectured.
“That the old American dream or the new one?” Ellen Cherry asked Spike.
“Better flimflam capitalism than a bomb, already. It’s becoming so quiet for the two radishes. Maybe the religious cults are starting to get religion.”
“You know,” said Ellen Cherry, “I can’t figure out the popularity of those cults. Okay, so people can get somebody else to do their thinking for them, what is the big appeal? Are they really that lazy, or is there some secret pleasure in having your mind controlled?”
“I seriously doubt if pleasure is a factor,” said Abu. “The level of structure that people seek always is in direct ratio to the amount of chaos they have inside.”
“Then ol’ Boomer must be as placid as a bucket of doorknobs.” Smiling, she mused for a moment about Boomer’s antipathy for the straight and narrow. “Too bad you never met him, Mr. Hadee. I have a feeling you two might have gotten along.”
Abu and Spike regarded each other oddly. So oddly, Ellen Cherry grew suspicious. She gave them an imploring look. “Shall we tell her?” asked Abu.
“Yeah,” answered Spike, “she’s deserving to know.”
“What is it, you all?”
“Not to worry, little darlink. It’s only that in the near future Abu and me may be meeting your Boomer.”
“You see, Cherry, last year Spike and I decided to donate a sculpture for a war-torn neighborhood that was being restored outside the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. We kept our role anonymous because we were having a little trouble here at the restaurant, and our partnership was somewhat controversial. Through intermediaries, we granted a commission to an Israeli sculptor by the name of Zif, Amos Zif.”
“Ah-ha!” exclaimed Ellen Cherry. The light bulb above her head was plainly visible.
“Ah-ha, indeed. Now, we learned soon enough that Zif had, himself, taken on a partner, a non-Israeli, which was fine with us since our basic intention was that the monument be transcultural. We also learned from you that Boomer Petway was collaborating on a sculpture in Jerusalem. Only recently, however, did we put two and two together and—”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” swore Ellen Cherry. “If the world gets any smaller, everybody is going to have to go on a diet.”
“Yeah, but a problem we got. This Boomer of yours is making big chickens . . .”
“Turkey. A big turkey.”
“Turkeys and skyscraper pants and income tax forms for double agents, and this is not the monument what we’re dreaming of.”
“I see.”
“We are a trifle concerned,” said Abu. “Concerned about image and statement. So we have demanded to examine a model of the sculpture before it goes any further.”
“There or here?”
Simultaneously, there was an Arab shrug and a Jewish shrug, fundamentally similar gestures but as different in nuance as a fez and a yarmulke. “A response we don’t got yet,” said Spike. Then he switched his attention to the bamboo matting that the police had left hanging from the walls in shreds, like the blouse of a horsewhipped adulteress. “How much does plaster cost?” he asked.
Arrangements were made to have Isaac & Ishmael’s plastered. The restaurant would close during Thanksgiving week so that the workmen could take over. “The staff gets a little paid vacation,” Abu announced. The staff received the news with glee—conditions had been hectic that autumn—but some of the customers yowled. Not only would they have to go a week without Salome but also Thanksgiving Day was to football what St. Patrick’s Day was to grain alcohol.
“Now I will have to stay home and watch the dime-sized footballs,” a Greek delegate complained. “And at halftime I will be expected to pay attention to my wife.”
“A cowboy’s work is never done,” said Ellen Cherry, with a yawn.
“I fear that you have produced a non sequitur,” announced an Egyptian doctor, who’d become a real smarty-pants with his English.
“Fuck off,” said Ellen Cherry, who was in one of her periodic failed-artist snits.
“Oxymoron!” proclaimed the doctor, and then proceeded to tell her why. “One cannot fuck if one is off, one can only fuck when one is on. On top or on the bottom. Is this not true?”
Ellen Cherry sighed. Thanksgiving was still weeks away.
Meanwhile, the shredded bamboo had been temporarily and sloppily stapled back on the walls. The rooms looked as if they were coated with an especially healthy breakfast cereal, a decor known as “Early Roughage.” In this high-fiber atmosphere, Salome continued to dance, although she did not dance the Dance of the Seven Veils no matter how many pleading calls for that dance echoed off the bran.
November. Salome danced, Ellen Cherry managed, and the Israelis voted. Boomer wrote Ellen Cherry all about it. Dirty tricks, faked terrorist attacks, lies, threats, and fear tactics of every polecat stripe. Boomer loved it. Naturally, the right won. Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don’t give it social services, give it a scary adversary. Communism might have become a passé bugaboo, but ah, now there were the hobgoblins of terrorism and drugs with which to frighten and subdue the unthinking masses. “I learned this from reading spy thrillers,” wrote Boomer. “If you want to teach kids how the world really works, take away their civics books and assign them some good espionage novels. By the way, can you send me the new Tom Clancy. Can’t buy it over here.”
Boomer went on to say that with the right wing finally, firmly in power—it would officially seize the joy stick in January—there was almost certain to be some sort of commotion when his and Zif’s monument was unveiled. Then, under the block-print heading FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, he surprised her by describing the monument.
He described it in detail, not only conveying the sculpture’s salient formal features but making historical, mythological, and cultural references that he was not likely to have gleaned from any espionage novel. Whatever she thought of the sculpture aesthetically, she had to admire the verbal presentation, and this in spite of the fact that it was executed in a monstrous scrawl. She closed her eyes, and when she did, she saw not the monument that had been so vividly documented but Boomer’s own sweet head, hair escaping his scalp like ozone escaping the Arctic. Had her resentment of him given way to longing, a ghostly subconscious longing, a longing that transcended the strictly physical, a longing for his personality, his being, his . . . his
mind
?
Ellen Cherry shook herself out of ludicrous reveries and returned to the letter. It seemed that Boomer was in some trouble with the authorities as a result of a crate of goods that Buddy Winkler had shipped to him. Boomer wasn’t familiar with the contents of the crate. Customs officers in Tel Aviv had impounded them, deeming them suspicious. “An investigation is under way, and for the first time in my life I may actually have to stoop to retaining a lawyer. This is the end of something pure and good. Once a fellow breaks down and hires his first attorney, he has gone and booked himself passage aboard the hand basket to Hades.”
The epistle closed with a remark of an apparently lascivious nature. Boomer’s penmanship deteriorated as the letter progressed, and though she could not wholly comprehend the closure, she would have wagered her last cent that it was lascivious. His signature resembled the mustache of a Latin American dance instructor. To the bottom of the page, however, there was affixed a postscript of almost academically acceptable legibility. Undoubtedly, he had added it after a night’s rest. It said:
“On second thought, never mind about the Tom Clancy.”
November played out its hand: two dark aces, a pair of shivering treys, and the jack of pumpkins. Salome danced, Ellen Cherry managed, and then the plasterers came and sent both of them home. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Salome (presumably) awoke to study chemistry, change bandages, and sponge froth from the lips of madmen and junkies. Ellen Cherry (positively) awoke to lie abed and brood. After a time, however, she grew bored with despair, got up, performed her toilette, and reheated a pan of I & I
shawarma
for breakfast.
The prospect of breakfasting on leftover
shawarma
was one of the things that was depressing her. It proved to be not all that bad. Any way you sliced it, it beat
baba ghanoug
. She had once served herself a
baba ghanoug
breakfast and had actually swallowed a couple of bites before her taste buds warned her that such behavior was in violation of accords of the Geneva Convention.
She had also been feeling sorry for herself for being alone on a major holiday. Yet, while it was true that her mama had flown to Florida for the long weekend, Patsy would be in New York at Christmas, would, in fact, be moving in with her while she searched for an apartment of her own, a quest that could take about half as long as the search for a cure for the common cold. Ellen Cherry realized that she ought to be taking advantage of this final month of privacy. Besides, she had been invited to share Thanksgiving dinner with Abu, Nabila, and family. So she could stow the self-pity—husbandlessness, loverlessness, and fatherlessness notwithstanding.
Having fallen behind on her rent again, she had also been brooding over finances. But, hey, in addition to vacation pay, Spike had handed her a holiday bonus check in the amount of twelve hundred dollars. That would square matters temporarily. As for the long run, she would find a way to survive. She always had. One thing was certain, though: she would not make paintings for Ultima’s gallery simply to try to raise cash. As she’d said more than once in regard to painting, “Having to do it for money is a far cry from having to do it because you have to do it.”
Which leads to the fourth member of her blues quartet: art-life gloom. Every other person on the street was the failed consort of one muse or another. One met them everywhere. The would-be guitarist who just couldn’t find time to practice, the would-be novelist who developed an allergy to solitude, the would-be actress too weak to withstand domestic and maternalistic urges, the would-be poet who found it easier to get drunk on booze than on language, the would-be filmmaker who for lack of pluck ended up in advertising; the singer, the potter, the dancer who for want of that extra volt of verve, that extra enzyme of dedication, that extra candlepower of courage were doomed to paper the walls of their lives with frustrated fantasies and secret dissatisfactions. Ellen Cherry would breakfast on live cockroaches before she’d turn out like them! She swore it.
Abruptly, she rose and spun one of the canvases that leaned against her walls. Without bothering to change out of her kimono, she grabbed a jar of gesso and commenced to white-out the picture. Had Can o’ Beans been told of this, holding on for dear life out in the swells of the far Atlantic, he/she might simply have tumbled out of his/her twat-pink bunker and joined the garbage to which starfishes attached themselves at the bottom of the sea.
An ice fog of gesso descended upon the image. Soon its upper half was obscured. That the words “beans” and “prepared in tomato sauce” were still plainly visible below the cloud would have failed to mollify Can o’ Beans. “What if an impatient, impertinent Gilbert Stuart had one fine morning imbued with white stuff the top half of his portrait of Washington?” he/she might have asked. “Could schoolchildren look at a double chin and a round white collar and identify them as being first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of their countrymen? What if Leonardo . . .” No, Can o’ Beans would not have been appeased, though he/she might have found it curious that half of his/her portrait was left intact.
The explanation was that Ellen Cherry’s gessoing was interrupted by a knocking at the door. “Who is it?” she called.
“Delivery.”
“Delivery?”
“Florist.”
That was strange. Deliveries, flowers included, were routinely left with the doorman. Most irregular. Moreover, the voice (male) had a queer accent, rather like a southerner pretending to speak French. Buddy Winkler came to mind, though it hardly was Buddy’s voice, and she experienced a tingle very close to fear.
Keeping the chain fastened, Ellen Cherry cracked the door. There stood a uniformed deliveryman right out of the twenties. Wearing a teal tunic with two rows of brass buttons, jodhpurs stuffed into high lace-up boots, and an officer’s cap with a shimmering black brim, he looked like the Great Gatsby’s chauffeur. At the same moment that she classified him as an anachronism, she conceded that any number of gentrified uptown flower shops were capable of forcing a deliveryman to dress in such a foolish manner, and she noted, moreover, that he was cradling one of those long green cardboard boxes in which roses often are packaged. He was also holding a beige paper bag, imprinted with the logo of Barnes & Noble, and that struck her as odd, although if he worked for a general service, she supposed he might deliver books, as well. Still, she didn’t like it. There was something wrong with this picture. The dark glasses, for example. The slick little goatee that wouldn’t have looked out of place swimming in a Brazilian river. The way he stared at her, nervously licking his lower lip.
With the hand that wasn’t gripping the door, she pulled her kimono tight around her throat. If this clown wanted to see tit, he could go to Mardi Gras. She considered opening the door just wide enough to receive the flowers. After all, the jodhpurs had an old-fashioned button fly, not very handy for a rapist. On the other hand, what if the box was from Uncle Buddy, what if it contained something other than roses? No, the guy in the monkey suit was still staring and licking; she had a funny feeling.
“Leave them at the desk in the lobby,” she said. After she slammed the door, she put her ear against it. Several minutes passed before he walked down the hall to the elevator. From a window, she saw him leave the Ansonia. He was carrying the bag but not the box.
I guess it’s okay
, she thought, but the next thing she knew he had turned and was looking up at her. Ellen Cherry jumped back from the window just as he waved.