Skinny Legs and All (55 page)

As was customary in modern election campaigns, fair play was shunned from the start. Spike and Abu were forced to waste an inordinate amount of time working to insure an honest poll. Their efforts were about as effective as Mother Hubbard’s pet care. Proponents of both sides were bringing in relatives, friends, and casual acquaintances, and trying to palm them off as eligible voters, which is to say, regular patrons of the I & I. It was difficult to sort them out, for to Spike most Arabs looked alike, and Abu had the same problem with Jews. Race or national origin had little to do with which side people took, however. There were North Africans who compaigned diligently for football, Americans who passionately endorsed the dance. And vice versa. Straight women and male homosexuals were solidly behind Salome. Lesbians supported the Super Bowl.

In the flush of excitement that followed New York’s victory in the playoffs, the majority leaned decidedly toward the ball game. Then came Friday night, upon which Salome, though as pouty and uncomfortable as ever, danced as if she were bareback on a bucking python, danced like a police whistle in a raid on a bordello, danced like a self-winding watch on the wrist of Saint Vitus. The pendulum swung.

“But I just don’t see how I can deliberately miss the Super Bowl,” said one perplexed gentleman. “It seems . . . unnatural.”

“Consider this, my friend. When was the last time you saw a Super Bowl that wasn’t as dull as bouillon?”

“Well . . .”

“Be honest. Ninety percent of the games have been boring.”

“Lots of important things are boring. Church is boring. That’s no excuse for not going. The UN is boring.”

“Salome is not church, and she’s not the UN—”

“You can say that again.”

“Right you are.”

“—and the Dance of the Seven Veils will never be mundane.”

“Couldn’t be.”

“Hardly.”

“Not a chance.”

“Yeah, but still . . .”

As election day drew near, Spike and Abu carefully calculated the outcome. After much observation, private polling, and scientific conjecture, they concluded that twenty-five percent of eligible voters favored the game, thirty percent favored the dance, and the remaining forty-five percent not only were undecided, they were so ambivalent, so torn, that they probably wouldn’t vote at all.

“Any way we dismember this chicken,” said Abu, “it is going to be an unhappy bird.”

“Oy!” exclaimed Spike. “Palestine it’s resembling.”

Ellen Cherry had watched the fluxions, the dirty tricks, the acrimony and confusion with detached amusement. Personally, she wanted the dance, but only out of curiosity, and she was curious only because she’d learned that her mural had influenced Salome’s decision to perform it. Of course, she had never been especially attracted to athletics. One of the few things she had always admired about Boomer Petway was how he’d lain down the shot put and taken up the tango.

One day she had asked some men at the bar, “What would happen if God snatched your balls away? You know the balls I’m referring to. Suppose a spaceship flew into our atmosphere and beamed up every ball on the planet. Every last football, baseball, tennis ball, basketball, volleyball, golfball, shot put, softball, squash ball, soccer ball, pool ball, bowling ball, even croquet and polo balls, all of them. What would happen? Would the male population go slowly berserk? Would blood flow in the streets? Would you boys just curl up and die? Or would it expedite the evolution of a higher species of mammal?”

A few of them had looked at her sheepishly, the others as if she were dangerously dumb.

“Spaceships do not exist,” said the Egyptian doctor dryly.

“They better not beam up no
goof
balls or you in big trouble,” warned Shaftoe. Those who were familiar with the expression had a hearty laugh.

FOR WEEKS THE CONTROVERSY
had raged around her, yet if Ellen Cherry found it impossible to ignore, she found it entirely possible to belittle. There were more primary concerns snapping off of the synapses beneath her pecan and chicory curls, not the least of which was Patsy’s impending arrival, bag and baggage; lock, stock, and barrel; hook, line, and sinker; bell, book, and candle; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, Smith and Non Sequitur.

In preparation for her mama’s Christmas Eve entry into the nonstop espresso machine of Manhattan, she had whited out with gesso all the nude portraits of Boomer Petway. That operation had served the dual purpose of concealing her artistic adoration of Boomer’s heavy equipment (although she had every reason to suspect that Patsy’s captivation with the manly apparatus exceeded her own) and of providing her with fresh blank surfaces upon which to paint. She was cramping and bloating with the urge to paint, a kind of PMS, and one of her fears was that with Patsy in the apartment she would lack both the privacy and the space.

She’d then proceeded to white-over the pictures of the dirty socks and the bean cans, including the half-can that remained from her last foray into gesso. (Thousands of miles away, a deformed, barracuda-bitten, and thoroughly naked Can o’ Beans—the last remnants of his/her identifying label having dissolved in the tepid waters of the eastern Mediterranean—issued a sudden groan, as if telepathically receiving the news. “Hold on awhile longer, you must, you must,” commanded Conch Shell, who even then could detect the sonic vibrations that advertised the surf smacking a pier in Tel Aviv.) Next, Ellen Cherry had turned to the spoons. One by one, she covered them up, trembling all the while, until there was but a single spoon portrait remaining. That one she had half a mind to preserve as a reminder of the bewildering impact upon her life of the spoon’s enigmatic appearances and disappearances (she still suspected that Secret Agent Petway was somehow responsible) and, just as significantly, of the oceanic rapture and arcane knowledge with which the spoon had rewarded her when she had subjected it to the eye game. Upon reflection, however, she’d decided that there were things in this world upon which it was best not to dwell lest they attach themselves to one’s keel like barnacles, and slowly cause one to leak, to list, and eventually to sink. She had regained much of the equilibrium she’d lost since moving to New York and didn’t wish to risk being thrown off balance again by the weight of a weird dessert spoon. But wait a moment! There were ways in which that spoon, the very weirdness of that spoon, had assisted her in righting herself. Hadn’t the spoon pierced, as if it were a fork, the rigidity of her ego, and wasn’t a tight ego the source of many an individual’s misery; and, furthermore, hadn’t she intuitively painted a spoon into her mural at the I & I? In the end, she chose to save the one spoon picture, but to keep it safely turned to the wall.

There was one painting left with which to deal: the portrait of Boomer with the seven various tongues. That one she delivered to the Sommervell Gallery. Ultima found it inferior to the I & I mural, into which she continued to read social and political meaning even while complaining that the mural accentuated feminism’s soft dark underbelly. Nevertheless, Ultima was certain that the portrait was commercially viable, due mainly to its subject. Boomer’s reputation loomed even larger on the New York art scene since he had deserted the scene for Israel. “Were he Jewish,” said Ultima, “his flight to Jerusalem would have produced only nods and clucks. But here we have a white southern hillbilly Gentile. . . . Well, my dear, our Mr. Petway does keep them guessing.” The portrait sold within forty-eight hours for five thousand dollars, allowing Ellen Cherry to escape eviction. It would have been awkward had Patsy arrived to find her camping in the streets on Christmas Eve.

Prior to Patsy’s arrival, a letter had arrived from Boomer. Ellen Cherry had written to him, as well. Their letters had crossed, perhaps over the Atlantic (whose chops Conch Shell and Can o’ Beans had managed to negotiate just ahead of wintry storms), perhaps over Jerusalem itself, over Gaza, over
intifada
, over stones, sheep heads, honey cakes, rubber bullets, and the endless caravans of ancient superstitions.

Boomer had reported that the Pales sculpture was finished and soon to be installed. Its unveiling was scheduled for the final week in January. After that, he would have some decisions to make. In the meantime, Buddy Winkler would be coming over, though probably not until after the inauguration, toward the middle of the month. In the last paragraph, Boomer wrote rather movingly about the sweet torture of having glimpsed her again, although only after first crowing over the success of his masquerade. “Looking at you in your kimono, it felt like some backyard chef was sprinkling meat tenderizer on my heart,” he scrawled. “A month-old baby could of gummed my heart up like pablum. An old boy with a bleeding ulcer could of digested it easy as cream.”

As for Ellen Cherry’s note, it was succinct enough to fit on a Hallmark card. “Dear Husband and Master of Disguise,” it read. “Thanks for the lovely roses. I knew it was you all the time.”

Patsy’s plane had been an hour late, touching down at noon on the day before Christmas. Her emotions were as frizzled as her hair. “Another hayseed blows into Big Town,” she announced as she came through the gate. “Lord, honey, why didn’t I stay down yonder where I belong? I’m way too old and got way too much insurance money to be let loose in a meat grinder like this. I feel like handing over my purse to the first ol’ boy I meet on the corner, save him the trouble of fleecing me.”

“Aw, mama, you underestimate your shrewdness and overestimate your net worth. You’re going to be broke in no time, all right, but it’ll be landlords and Bloomingdale’s that get your stash.”

That night they fried chicken and trimmed a delapidated little spruce that looked more lost and scared in New York than Patsy did. They drank a fair amount of eggnog with rum in it and ended up crying, mostly over Verlin, although a dozen tears were reserved for Boomer Petway and a half dozen for men in general.

The next morning, Patsy was a bit more intact. “If Bud can get by in this huge ol’ place,” she said to her bacon, “then so can I.”

“You’ll do fine, mama. But please let’s not talk about Uncle Bud.”

“He’ll be expecting to see me.”

“Okay, if you want to, but not under my roof.”

They switched the topic of conversation to Isaac & Ishmael’s and Ellen Cherry went on at some length about Salome, her wide following and narrow calves, and the furious flap that was festering: the Dance of the Seven Veils vs. The Super Bowl. Patsy was fascinated and asked lots of questions. “I could of been a dancer myself,” she said plaintively, her fork circling the high-relief of her waffle like a disabled warplane circling a mountainous region, searching for a place to land.

Her first week in New York, Patsy Charles refused to leave the Ansonia unless in the company of her daughter. While Ellen Cherry was at work, Patsy would clean the apartment and dance to Neville Brothers tapes, naked except for white go-go boots. Once, standing at the window, she’d said to Ellen Cherry, “It sounds so harsh out there. It’s a wonder it hasn’t rubbed calluses on you.”

“It can do that,” said Ellen Cherry. “It can also polish you, make you shine. I remember what Boomer wrote to me once about the Middle East. ’The rougher the world gets around me, the sweeter I seem to myself.’ I guess it’s all in how you receive it.”

“That Boomer.”

“Yep,” she sighed. “That Boomer.”

Eventually, Ellen Cherry began to take her mama to the I & I with her. Patsy helped out in the kitchen and bussed tables in the bar. It gave her something to do and allowed her both to study her daughter’s mural and to witness firsthand the terrible row over the dance and the game. She understood the magnetic pull of football since it had, in her opinion, been the death of her husband, but it wasn’t until she actually saw Salome perform that she could appreciate the spell the girl cast upon an audience.

“Lordy mercy,” said Patsy. “She’s a half-cooked little fritter, but a fellow’d have to be coated with Teflon not to let her stick to his pan.”

A few days later, there was a brawl in the bar. It started when a Super-Bowl-hating woman raked her husband’s cheeks with long crimson fingernails, and quickly spread to other tables before Detective Shaftoe broke it up by firing his snub-nosed .38 in the air. The slug ricocheted off a pipe in the ceiling and struck the mural. A sound came out of the bullet hole like the faroff howling of a wolf.

“That settles it,” said Abu, when he and Spike showed up from the tennis club. Shaftoe and the security guards were still arguing over the detective’s right to bring a gun into the restaurant. “That settles it. We are canceling the election.”

“Hoo boy!” said Spike. “We sound like a banana republic.”

“But you have a plan,” Abu reminded him.

“Correct. We’re kaputting the election and moving on to Plan B.”

Plan B was Spike Cohen’s idea. So disturbed was he by the discord that the conflict between the game and the dance had generated that he had volunteered to purchase several large, expensive, industrial heaters and a canvas canopy so that the giant TV set might be moved temporarily into the courtyard behind the I & I. It wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable as indoors, but there would be food and beverage service at card tables, and those customers who still couldn’t settle on one event or the other might move back and forth, if it suited them, between the Dance of the Seven Veils and the Super Bowl.

As the fateful Sunday was now only eight days away, almost everybody seemed grateful for the compromise. “Looks fine,” muttered Shaftoe. “
On paper.
”

On Monday, January 17, patsy had lunch with Buddy Winkler. She begged Ellen Cherry to go with her, alas, in vain, so she ventured forth alone and, after nine or ten timid attempts, succeeded in flagging down a taxi. To Patsy’s surprise, the address where the cab deposited her was that of a Middle Eastern restaurant. “Why’re we eating this kind of food?” she asked, once she had flustered the good reverend by giving him a hug.

“’Cause I’m going off to Jerusalem in the morning, and I need to accustom my taste buds. I got lots to do over yonder, and I can’t afford to be distracted by queer and unappealin’ sustenance. Your next question, I reckon, is why I didn’t choose to acclimatize my palate in that greasy Gomorrah where Verlin Charles’s only girl is breakin’ her dead daddy’s heart.”