Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  Keeping her distance from the doorway, lest Buddy glimpse her, Ellen Cherry, nevertheless, could hear his words. He kept advocating ejection, by force, of Moslems from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount so that the Messiah could come. She had only the slimmest notion of what he meant, but his voice made her so horny she could barely keep from squirming, crossing her legs, or hopping about, like a little girl who had to go to the bathroom.

  On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz. As a matter of fact, she did believe “Birdman of Alcatraz” to be Charlie Parker’s nickname in prison. In her favor, it might be reported that, despite similarities in the crowds they flocked with, she did not confuse the Alcatraz Birdman with St. Francis of Assisi.

  One of the Egyptian gods had had the head of a bird. With his great scarlet beak, Roland Abu Hadee somewhat resembled him. When Abu came out of the kitchen (the dishwasher had threatened to quit if Abu didn’t stop looking over his shoulder) to join Ellen Cherry at a corner table, she was as pleased as a priestess of the Nile might have been had she been visited by the hawk-headed deity. Abu could distract her both from the buzz of her clitoris (an organ unattended for the past six months) and the chaos out on the sidewalk, where the milling mobs of Moslems, Jews, and Christians, shouting slogans and shaking fists, now had been joined by a gentle delegation of New Age doom-sayers who had seized this opportunity to quietly advertise the latest in a chronic if not insipid series of cataclysms (earthquakes, comets, planetary alignments, etc.), which either failed to materialize or to produce the hoped-for alterations in social consciousness.

  It was much noisier outside the restaurant than within, for the protesters, prophets, cops, cameramen, reporters, and curiosity-seekers outnumbered diners at least twenty to one. A number of celebrities had been invited to eat free at the grand reopening, but among the notables who had appeared at the original opening, only Norman Mailer had had the guts to return. Mailer and the couple dozen other guests seemed to be shunning their dinners in favor of the Egyptian and Israeli wines, which meant that the food was pretty bad or else they were worried about having to run for cover on a full stomach.

  At any rate, Ellen Cherry and Abu had little trouble conversing in a normal tone.

  “This dining room strikes me as rather drab,” Abu confessed. He gestured at the gold-flecked bamboo matting that covered the walls. “We paid a decorator good money for this? There is not a stalk of bamboo in the entire Middle East.”

  “Maybe he thinks Jerusalem’s in Polynesia,” she said.

  “Jerusalem is everywhere,” said Abu, a bit too solemnly. “The aura of it extends around the globe. Jerusalem is everywhere. There is just not enough of it in this room.” He thought for a moment. “My dear, you are an artist. Why do we not hang some of your pictures in here?”

  When she didn’t respond right away, he added, “Naturally, we would have them insured.”

  Ellen Cherry had to smile. Were her paintings blown up with the I & I, she might realize some financial gain from them. “Well, I showed you slides back in June,” she said.

  Abu concealed a shudder. He remembered trees that resembled old gay actors trying on kimonos, hills that bounced like red rubber hemorrhoids. Who could eat in such company? Who could meditate on brotherhood or fair Jerusalem? “Yes, dear, but those were done awhile ago, as I recall. When you lived in that place, Seattle. How about something more . . . recent.”

  “Don’t have anything recent. I’ve not exactly been painting since I’ve been in New York.”

  Ellen Cherry was lying. True, after the Airstream turkey had been sold to the Museum of Modern Art (which had outbid a large corporation that wanted to sponsor it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade), she had thrown her brushes and colors into an incinerator. In late summer, however, she started painting again. Almost feverishly. She had enough new canvases to cover every wall in the I & I, including the pantry and the men’s room. But she wasn’t showing them to anyone, not even her alleged dealer, Ultima Sommervell, who, like Abu, had asked to see new work. It was not Ellen Cherry’s intention to ever, ever show them.

  Suppose, though, that one moonless night you were to dress in black pajamas (the ninja kind, the cat burglar kind), and, employing spider lines and tree frog cups, you scaled the wedding-cake facade of the Ansonia Hotel at Seventy-third and Broadway, climbing (pity your poor butt if you’re afraid of heights) to floor eleven, where you use a short lightweight wrecking bar to pry loose a window frame. Suppose, then, you were to pull yourself in, your ebony Taiwanese sneakers last to slide over the sooty ledge. Discreetly flashing a powerful penlight, suppose you locate the paintings in question, stacked against the apartment wall, their faces resolutely to the plaster. Silently, one by one, you pull them back and inspect them. To your surprise, there’s not a landscape in the lot! In many of the pictures, nothing is depicted but a small silver spoon. Others feature a single bedraggled purple sock. And just when you thought pop art had been buried with Andy Warhol, you discover realistic renderings of a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans. One after another, spoons, socks, and bean cans, spoons, socks, and bean cans, the sequence broken only occasionally by full-length nude portraits of a man you, as an art lover, recognize as Randolph “Boomer” Petway III. From the single bedroom, you hear the feathery moans of a woman sleeping alone, and as you tiptoe out of this Gallery of the Missing, you recall that someone once said, “The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.”

  Abu was called up front to pose with Spike again, to grant yet another joint interview. He preferred to chat with Ellen Cherry or to supervise the dishwashing and falafel-frying, but when one made a grand public gesture such as Isaac & Ishmael’s, one was obliged to meet the press.

  While he was away, Ellen Cherry tuned in the demonstrations. She could hear her uncle Buddy’s sax crooning to the faithful, crooning them up the slopes of the Temple Mount, crooning the Messiah down from heaven to say hi to them there. Screened by a starched white veil of tablecloth, she touched herself between her legs. It was like stroking a live bee. A bee trapped, tiny wings awhirr, in a puddle of molasses.

  When Abu rejoined her, he announced, “I am afraid Spike is permitting the demonstrators to get him upset.”

  “They don’t upset you, Mr. Hadee?” Lifting her errant left hand into the light, she surreptitiously examined it for traces of moisture.

  “Of course they do. I am appalled by the fear and ignorance that motivates such behavior. I am concerned about violence. The difference, dear one, is that I am Arab and Spike is a Jew. Oh, yes! To say that Arab and Jew are brothers and sisters is not to say that we are the same. There are racial differences among people, yes? There are cultural differences, sexual differences.” (At the mention of the word “sexual,” Ellen Cherry involuntarily squirmed.) “In my opinion, those differences can be good. What a dull world this would be were we all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another’s peculiarities. We need only respect those peculiarities—and to be grateful for them. Our similarities provide us with a common ground, but our differences allow us to be fascinated by one another. Differences give human encounters their snap and their fizz and their brew.”

  Trite or not, Ellen Cherry liked what Abu had to say. If he could say those things in Uncle Buddy’s voice, she thought she might follow him anywhere. To her mind, could a man combine Mr. Hadee’s content with the Reverend Buddy Winkler’s style, he might constitute a reasonable facsimile of that Messiah that the excitables on the street were so ga-ga about. Of course, Ellen Cherry was near to drunk.

  “What’s your take, then, on the demonstrations?”

  “My take?”

  “Yeah, you know, your . . .” Her train of thought switched to a siding, perhaps to try to balance its effervescent load. Abu’s flowery freight, how
ever, stayed right on track.

  “There are differences among Jews,” he said. “Jews are not cut from whole cloth, do not imagine they are. Their so-called clannishness, their solidarity, has many exceptions. Yet, a candle burns in their blood, and as different as their lives outwardly may be, each from the other, every Jew reads his or her life story by the light of that same candle. It hurts Spike Cohen when he is attacked so bitterly by other Jews. He may deny it, our Spike the Shoe Wolf, but you can tell the attacks wound him. The Arab, he is used to that. We have been fighting among ourselves as long as grains of sand can remember. Vendettas, raids, bloody feuds, they are more common among Arabs than oil wells or dromedaries. Arabs have injured one another more than they have injured Jews. I am not surprised that there are Arabs out there on UN Plaza who would make me into a lollipop. You understand? My head on a stick.”

  Abu paused. He and Ellen Cherry exchanged furtive glances, both of them laboring in vain to keep from picturing his dark head impaled like a toasted marshmallow.

  Eventually, he continued. “You are an artist . . .”

  He’s changing the subject now, she thought. He’s back to decorating. Well, I can’t help him there. He wouldn’t understand what I’m painting these days. I barely understand it myself.

  "You are an artist. You know that big picture at the museum midtown, that picture by that fellow Rousseau, it is called The Sleeping Gypsy?”

  “Yeah. Sure. That’s a very famous painting.”

  “It ought to be called The Sleeping Arab, that picture. An Arab lies in the desert, sleeping under the crazy-faced moon. A lion sniffs at the Arab, the Arab is unafraid. The Arab dreams on. The river in the background, I think the river is the Arab’s dream. Perhaps the lion is also dreamed: you notice it has left no paw prints in the sand. In any case, that picture, my dear, is the definitive portrait of the Arab character. Fierce and free, sleeping fearlessly beneath the wild night stars. But dreaming. Dreaming always of water. Dreaming of danger when real danger is absent, in order to demonstrate bravado. Arabs live in their fantasies. We are not a practical people like the Jews are. The Jew gets things accomplished. The Arab dreams—and converses with the moon.

  “But, dear Ellen Cherry, what else is in that beautiful picture by Rousseau? Tell me?”

  “What else? What else is in the painting? Let me see. Uh, well, I think there’s a jug of some sort. . . .”

  “Yes. Yes. A water jar. What else?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “A musical instrument. Correct? Kind of a mandolin or what in Greece they call a bouzouki. And that tells you something further about the Arab. Another side of him. We love music. Arabs love the music of the stars. But also the arithmetic of the stars. Both are Arabic inventions. Did you know that? Oh, yes, in the arts and sciences, the Arabs were once masters. Our architecture was original and powerful. We invented astronomy, modern mathematics, map-making, shipbuilding, perfumery. I could go on. We have an ancient literary heritage. In the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, while Europe wallowed in its Dark Ages, while Europe was ignorant and impoverished and altogether barbarous, there was enlightenment in the Arab lands. The Arab world was cultured then, rich, educated, and, in its fierce, dreamy way, refined. Mathematicians strolled in rose gardens. Poets rode stallions.

  “So what happened? Why, my dear, the Crusaders paid us a little visit. The Crusaders came. Christian knights from Europe. And they massacred men, women, and children—Jew as well as Arab, it should be told: all who were non-Christian. The Crusaders destroyed the intellectual and scientific life of western Asia and northern Africa. They burned the largest, most complete library in the world, the great library of Tripoli, and they reduced to rubble scores of scientific and artistic centers. Such a tragedy. Such a waste.”

  Abu leaned across the table, leaned across the bamboo place mats, bamboo napkins rings, and lotus-patterned linen napkins that had prompted Spike to wonder why the decorator hadn’t supplied the I & I with chopsticks, already; leaned toward Ellen Cherry until his rosy proboscis, the flesh incarnate of Painted Stick, was only millimeters from rubbing against her own dwarfed nose, and as the metronome inside her panties suddenly amplified its tick, marking time, marking estrogen time, marking an insect rhythm of feminine heat, he parted his lips. Ellen Cherry fully expected him to bark or growl or hiss. Instead, he spoke in his customary mild tone.

  “Noble Crusaders. Holy Crusaders. They pulled the Arab lands down into the muck pit with Europe. And the Arab lands have never recovered. No amount of oil profit can buy back their enlightenment. How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand. Did they teach you these things in your Jesus school, pretty Cherry?”

  Before Ellen Cherry could respond, one of the protest groups, it was difficult to identify which one, attempted to invade the restaurant, creating a huge commotion as police beat them back at the door. Clubs swung, blood drops flew, cameras flashed, and diners, spilling wine and sputtering lentils, stampeded in the direction of the kitchen. Both her clitoral hum and her champagne static drowned out now by spurting adrenaline, Ellen Cherry made as if to rise, but Abu just sat there. “The Crusaders wanted Jerusalem,” he said placidly. “Jerusalem was their prize. I suppose we cannot fault them for that.”

  It was a long, troubled evening, but the I & I survived. The only damage it sustained was wine stains on its ubiquitous bamboo. Moreover, the media exposure had been terrific.

  On the way home, alone, in the limo, its backseat so spacious, the city it purred through so threatening and unknowable, Ellen Cherry felt like a small child. She pulled her feet, red spikes and all, up onto the seat and hugged her knees. But that made her feel even smaller. In order to grow big again, she began to think about whom she was going to sleep with.

  Obviously, she was going to sleep with somebody soon. It didn’t take Nostradamus to forecast that. But who?

  Boomer would have been first on her list. Fat chance. It almost made her laugh. Eighteen months earlier, when they were crossing the country in the honeymoon turkey, she entertained a scenario: in New York, sooner or later, she was bound to fall in love with a fellow artist, a successful painter, probably; a man who really understood her, her work, her creative needs; and she would have to leave Boomer for him, she would have to break ol’ Boomer’s heart. It seemed so inevitable that she went so far as to rehearse her speech, the sincerely weepy one in which she would tell Boomer she wanted a divorce. (They were in Minnesota then, mind you, Minnesota and Wisconsin, stray grains of wedding rice still sparkling here and there on the Airstream carpet.) What a presumption that turned out to be. What a joke.

  Boomer had left her. And she had yet to meet a New York painter she would allow in her mind or her pants. Granted, she hadn’t met very many.

  As for other men, the bachelors she had encountered at clubs and bars and parties, well, most appeared to have one thing in common: having been hurt at Point A, they insured themselves against being hurt again at Point C by becoming assholes at Point B. In all fairness, that was true of the single women over thirty, as well.

  One-night stands were out, anyway. Fear of AIDS.

  Could she sleep with Mr. Hadee or Mr. Cohen? Yes, indeed, she could. Mr. Hadee was so gracious and sweet, Mr. Cohen so dynamic and handsome. It might be nice to take an older lover. Sleeping with one’s boss had obvious advantages, although it always seemed to backfire on the waitresses she had known who’d done it. Alas, Mr. Hadee was happily married. And Mr. Cohen, well, it made her somehow uneasy the way he stared at her feet. What had Mr. Hadee called him? Shoe Wolf.

  One older man who definitely was not a candidate for her favors was Buddy Winkler, no matter if his voice did carbonate her fluids. Thus far, her daddy had concealed from Buddy that she had gone back to work for the Arab and the Jew. Bud had learned, however, that she and Boomer were estr
anged, and since he assumed automatically that it was her fault, he’d expressed interest in counseling her. God, she hoped he didn’t drop in on her in her weakened condition! Of course, Buddy would have been happy to call her “Jezebel” as often as she wished. What exactly did go on in bed with a preacher? she wondered. Patsy would know.

  At the Ansonia, Raoul met the car. The rain had stopped, and he wore a tight tan uniform with plastic “brass” buttons. Were it not for his porkpie hat, he might have been an officer in a banana republic air force. As he helped her from the limo, he squeezed her wrist. “Didn’t stay long over dare in Jerusalem, Miz Charl.” The thing about Raoul was his availability. She could have him now! That was a solid inducement. Her knees turned into chewing gum imagining it. But she resisted. No more Latin lovers: a pledge she would stick to like Scotch tape to a Chihuahua.

  Raoul seemed to sense that he had been considered and rejected. However, instead of pouting when Mrs. Charles entered the elevator without glancing back, he scribbled in his notebook:

  Muddy Waters he play in the river

  Joan Rivers she play in the mud

  Swami guru play in a big salad bowl

  Counting lettuce and chewing his cud

  The day would come, man, when every blanquita in New York would want Raoul Ritz, man. Raoul was born to star.

  At the bathroom mirror, removing her makeup and wondering in amazement—as she had virtually every day for twenty years—at the epic scope of her hair, Ellen Cherry inquired of her reflection, “You know who I’d like to sleep with? Who I’d really like to sleep with?” She giggled. “I’d like to sleep with the only real artist in New York City. I’m talking ’bout Turn Around Norman.”