by Tom Robbins
She laid the spoon on the bed while she blew her nose. Then she picked it up and examined it, as if for a clue, previously overlooked, that finally might explain its queer reappearance. When that proved futile, Ellen Cherry held the dainty object about six inches from her face and initiated the eye game. She hadn’t played the eye game in what Patsy would characterize as “a coon’s age,” but she slid readily into it, aided, perhaps, by the film of tearwater excreted by her head in its attempt to flush alien bacteria.
The scalloped edges of the spoon’s handle began to flutter like a paper clam shell, to spiral as if they were streams of some Botticelli bouillabaisse, a salty, rococo broth from which the emancipated souls of expiring sea snails rose to mingle in the spray with the flying locks of nymphs. The hollow ladle flattened, spread, and thinned in her vision until it resembled the Springmaid armpit of a ghost, and the shimmering silver of its surface manifested itself as a luminous brand of haywire energy. The deeper the penetration of Ellen Cherry’s eye, the greater the loss or breakdown of that energy, and for that very reason it became necessary for her to penetrate more deeply yet, so that she might get in front of, outdistance, the dissolution. With something akin to the visual equivalent of a sprinter’s finish-line kick, she did at last propel herself ahead of dissipation and found herself embedded in a continuous solid reef of what she could only describe as “information.”
For one giddy moment she felt that she had oriented herself at the interface of the visible and invisible worlds, that she was contemplating wholeness, an ultimate state in which all forms and motions were imminent but protected by physical or metaphysical law from the process of selection or favoritism that would compromise them.
The sensation was short-lived, but while it lasted, Ellen Cherry seemed to hold something slippery by its tail. Slippery and altogether crucial. She couldn’t quite identify it. She definitely couldn’t analyze it. Instinctively, she realized that analysis would negate it. It seemed to be a kind of rapture, a rapturous essence that was available in all things if only one regarded them in a particular light. On a rational level, it made about as much sense as a whole deck of aces, yet it provided her with a fleeting joy so intense that the memory of it would comfort her for months to come and would drive from consideration any possibility of retreat or surrender.
The moment itself had passed, however. She needed to blow her nose again and swill another swig of cough syrup. She thought about using the spoon to take the medicine, but decided against it. Returning to normal focus, she opened the drawer and laid a sadly disappointed Spoon down among unworthy companions; “unworthy” not because they lacked the mysterious essence but because they were so ignorant they believed Phoenicians to be the people who modernized window coverings. As in, “If it weren’t for Phoenician blinds, it’d be curtains for all of us.”
Within a week, her immune system had washed her cold out to sea, and Ellen Cherry returned to the I & I to find a change in the situation there. Since there were fewer televised sporting events on weekend nights, the nights when UN employees, like workers everywhere, were most inclined to go out, Spike and Abu decided to experiment with live music in the bar. They lugged a wad of bills to city hall, greased palms left and right, and obtained a cabaret license. Then they auditioned musicians.
After overturning every stone in New York’s ethnic music underground, they located a young Yemenite man who could and would sing both Arabic and Israeli folk songs. Bareheaded and wearing a baby blue dinner jacket so as to appear impartial, the fellow performed on Sundays, accompanied by his eleven-year-old brother on bass and his grandfather on clay drums. His guitar and voice had a melancholy cast, no matter what the tempo, and the tunes in his repertoire featured lines such as, “Yesterday I cleaned my rifle while my girlfriend slept and the almond trees wept with infinite joy.” Business on Sunday nights did not increase dramatically.
For the entertainment of Friday and Saturday night customers, an East Jerusalem nightclub band was hired. “Why not? Israeli Jews like this music, too,” Spike explained. “It’s Oriental music. They don’t believe this very much in Westchester, but Israel is basically an Oriental country, already.”
The musicians in the band were a mixed bag of Palestinians, Egyptians, and Lebanese. Every one of them was older than sixty (sometimes the Yemenite grandfather sat in), but they played with ecstasy and zeal. When they got going, they jiggled the building with shrill desert gusts and tumbling layers of complex thunder. The dissonant melodies of ancient lutes rolled with the rapid-fire punches thrown by the drums, while snake-charmer reeds wrapped themselves sinuously around the ankles of every beat and note.
Indeed, the band did attract patrons, although not in such numbers as to justify the additional expense. It didn’t take long for Spike and Abu to realize that live entertainment was a losing proposition, but they personally liked the music so much that they hesitated to terminate it.
“Its a marvelous orchestra,” said Spike, “though I regret that they aren’t employing a tambourine.”
“I miss the tambourine, as well,” said Abu. For Ellen Cherry’s benefit, he elaborated. “In the Middle East, tambourines are the expressions of both mourning and mirth. Centuries ago, they were the only instruments played at funerals and at wedding feasts. They make the quintessential music of Jerusalem because Jerusalem is simultaneously a funeral and a celebration. Spike, I will inquire of the bandleader if they might add a tambourine.”
Several days later, Abu reported on the conversation he’d had with the toothless old Lebanese who led the band. “That gentleman tells me they have no tambourine because they have no woman with the orchestra. He tells me that the tambourine is the sole feminine instrument of the Middle East. Before Mohammed came, it was associated with Astarte, the Goddess. Is that not interesting? One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose. At any rate, I inquired if they knew of a woman who might perform on the tambourine with them some evening. They claimed they did not, but when I hinted that it could prolong their engagement here, they agreed to check into it.”
Spike nodded in appreciation. “That’s very nice,” he said. “Last time I’m in Jerusalem, I got to hear a very nice tambourine being played by a belly-dancer woman wearing no shoes on her feet. This was in the nightclub called the Milk and Honey. No shoes, I’m telling you. . . .”
“Milk and honey,” said Abu. “That has become a hackneyed phrase, yet it remains viscerally appealing. Milk and honey. For some strange reason, a little poem.”
The two men babbled away, unaware of the difference that their taste for tambourine music was going to make in their lives.
Ellen Cherry didn’t care much for the band. Its high-pitched nasal buzz reminded her of a prehistoric busy signal. The Yemenite folk singer also failed to set her music gland to pumping, although she evidently stimulated something in him, as he was forever giving her long, smoldering looks. When he asked her for a date, she was tempted to accept. He was broodingly handsome, and as suspect as youthful melancholia always is, it’s nonetheless superficially attractive. Yeah, but I know those Arabic types, she thought. He wouldn’t be content to be my lover. After three dates he’d want to marry me and whisk me off to the Old Country, hide me behind a veil, make me eat the eyes of sheep.
After she turned him down, the gloom of his performances darkened by several shades. Lines such as, “Before I depart for battle, please allow me to wipe my sobbing eyes on your embroidered sleeve,” didn’t have to be in English to cast their pall. Eventually, Spike and Abu let him go.
By April, they were on the verge of firing the band, as well, when the toothless geezer informed them that on the following Friday they would be joined by a “mostly very much beautiful” belly dancer who was “mostly very much excellently skilled” on the tambourine.
While an excited Spike was asking the
old musician whether the woman would be shod or in bare feet, Abu, equally pleased if more subdued, fed Ellen Cherry a tidbit about how, during a period of musical inactivity enforced in the seventh century by Mohammed, approval was given only to the ghirbal and the tambourine, the latter without jingles, since the instrument with jingles was forbidden. “That is what the new religion did to Arabic culture,” said Abu. “It left the drumbeats but took away our jingles.”
“We Baptists don’t jingle much, either,” Ellen Cherry confided. “Except when we’re passing the collection plate.”
IT’S THE THIRD FRIDAY in April. Spring lies on New York like an odalisque on a harem sofa. Like an AIDS baby on a Harlem sofa. A big moon is rising. Like the odalisque, the moon seems filled to overflowing with sweetmeats and sperm, but the haze through which it rises is emaciated, phlegm-choked, and dappled with sores that almost certainly are malignant. Everywhere, softness snuggles up to hardness. Hardness shrugs, says, “So what?"—rakes in a scum of dollars, jams foot-long needles into its vein. Tender green leaves are unfurling on thousands of soot-encrusted limbs. The acrid, Mephistophelian odor of vehicular exhaust stands out sharply against the chlorophyll. When a person breathes, one nostril sucks in a witchy waft of poisons, the other the syrup-scented push of plant life. In the mingle of moonlight and headlamps, neon and leaf-glow, the skyscrapers are as beautiful as a procession of Hindu saints. Bubbling, winking, and crawling with light, they seem as full of sap as the maples in the park.
Spilling from tenements and condominiums, from boutiques and bodegas, the anxious multitudes have found a new tempo, a pace in between the windup-toy frenzy of winter and the deep-sea diver drag of the humid summer to come. Crushing Styrofoam burger cartons, condom packs, hypodermic syringes, and graffiti-spewing spray cans underfoot, they almost dance as they walk, an unconscious rite of spring in their steps, a forgotten memory of sod and seed and lamb and ring-around-the-rosy. The unfinished and unfinishable symphony to which they move is composed of salsa, rap, and funk from boom boxes, strains of Vivaldi sifting out in a silvery drizzle from fine restaurants and limousines, the sophisticated rhythms produced by Cole Porter’s phantom cigarette holder tapping upon the vertebrae of tourists and businessmen in hotel lobbies throughout midtown, fey techno-rock in SoHo bars and art lofts, drum solos banged out on plastic pails and refrigerator trays by brilliant buskers, androgynous anchorpersons announcing the “news,” a loud screeching of truck and bus wheels, an interminable red bawling of sirens, the tooting of taxis, an occasional gunshot or scream, girlish laughter, boyish boasts, barking dogs, the whine of aggressive beggars, the yowls of the unsheltered insane, and, on many a street corner, the greased-lung exhortations of evangelists, ordained or self-proclaimed, warning all who pass that this could be the last April that God will ever grant, as if April were a kitten and God an angry farmer with a sack.
By July, the air in New York will be pumped up on steroids: brutish biceps will flex in the lungs of everyone who inhales it, and against the cheeks of the sensitive it will rake like stubble. On this April evening, however, the atmosphere is plainly feminine. The smog wears lace, the breeze is wrapped in maternity cottons, and the jaded urbanites, winked at and cooed to, have let their defenses down. Just before dusk, a slide rule of Canadian geese engineers over Manhattan, giving traffic a honking lesson that nearly drains its batteries. The necks of millions crane as one to follow the flight of the geese, and when the flock fades into the haze, an ancient intoxication seizes the collective brain. Everyone now is mildly drunk on wild goose wine.
Ellen Cherry senses the feminine wildness in the streets even before she leaves her apartment. From the eleventh floor of the Ansonia, neon signs look like smears of wet lipstick, and the jumbled noise that bounces up from Broadway has an underlying purr. Into the usual Friday night mix of commerce and culture, romance and crime, luxury and filth, there’s been stirred bud nectar, moon malt, and goose grog: Ellen Cherry can taste it when she cracks the window. She opens the window wider and takes a larger gulp. It’s a night of promise, a night when something delirious could happen, and suddenly she can’t wait to get out into it.
“New York’s swallowed a tambourine,” she says. She knows nothing about tambourines beyond what she’s recently been told, but she’s aware that this untamed female music box is scheduled to ring out tonight at Isaac & Ishmael’s, where she’ll be working the late shift, nine until three. As it turns out, her metaphor is apt, though she has forgotten it completely by the time she returns to the entryway closet to hang up the coat that she’s decided she won’t be needing (the extent to which the release from bulky winter clothing has contributed to the city’s light new mood should not be underestimated).
The instant that Ellen Cherry leaves the room, there’s unprecedented movement in the underwear drawer. The drawer is slightly ajar, and Spoon, too, has felt the tug and promise of the April night.
Daruma watches her. She’s shaking like a coke addict at a job interview. Upright, balanced on the tip of her handle, she periodically leaps in the air to a height where she can peer briefly over the lip of the drawer. She leaps, hesitates, trembles. Leaps, hesitates, trembles.
“Kamikaze,” whispers the vibrator.
“Kamikaze?”
“Divine wind.”
She leaps, hesitates, trembles. “Divine wind?”
“Go,” he says. “Go with wind. Go for broke. Nothing to lose. Go!”
Spoon goes.
Soundlessly, she lands on the bedroom rug. Rolls over. Looks around. Bounds toward the purse that Ellen Cherry has left on the floor by the door.
The last thing she hears as she dives down deep among the keys and change, Kleenex and Boomer letters, post-Jezebelian cosmetics and tattered old magazine photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, is the joyful lunatic laughter of the heathen dildo.
The average woman’s purse weighs approximately one kilo. The average woman’s heart weights nine ounces. The weight of a tambourine falls somewhere in between, a little closer to the heart than the handbag.
When Ellen Cherry returns to the bedroom, she snatches up her purse and rummages in it. Several times her right hand, the hand with the exiled wedding band, brushes against the spoon or pushes the spoon aside, without taking notice of it. Can a woman who does not know the contents of her handbag know the contents of her heart?
Ellen Cherry removes her keys, two subway tokens, and a vial of lip gloss. She secures these items in the flap pocket of her yellow jersey dress, the Betsey Johnson dress with the outsize zipper, and drops the purse on the bed. She is going to travel light on this spring-drunk night. Apparently, Spoon won’t be traveling at all.
Spoon waits in the purse until she’s positive that Ellen Cherry is out of the building. Then she squirms free, much to the envy of a plastic rain cap that’s been pining away for years in the bottom of the bag. “She’ll never w-wear me,” sobs the rain cap. “I won’t f-fit over all that h-hair.”
“Patience, dear,” Spoon counsels. “As my friend Can o’Beans says, ’the world is a very strange place, and the dice are always rolling.’”
After quoting the bean can, she would feel like a hypocrite climbing back in the underwear drawer. In truth, she feels hypocritical anyhow, advising patience at a time when she has lost much of hers. As the millennium winds down, are certain inanimate objects growing increasingly and uncharacteristically impatient? she wonders. And if so, is it a religious thing, or is it secular?
Spoon surveys the room. Moonrays are driving through the window like a fleet of white Cadillacs. Impulsively, she hops from the bed to the windowsill. “Oh my. Oh dear,” she gasps. She’s equally enchanted and terrified. Below her, far, far below her, the hard streets, surprised by April, are pulsating in a seizure of color and sound. The warm air washes over her like luxurious dishwaters she has known. The lights of the city ripple over her as well, enlivening her classic contours, giving her a different sort of bath. The cacophony disorients her. The height mak
es her freeze. She’s a motionless star in a spinning sky.
“Kamikaze!”
“Pardon, sir?”
Spoon turns to hear what the vibrator is calling to her from the drawer and, in so doing, slips and goes sliding off the ledge into the vast, noisy void.
Does an object’s life flash before it as it falls? Had not Galileo been an animate chauvinist, he might have addressed that question in his experiments at Pisa. On the other hand, it may be absurd to suggest that something inanimate, inorganic, has a “life” to flash. But what is it, then, that Spoon is seeing as she hurtles toward the pavement?
She falls past rough bowls carved from the wood of fever trees and decorated with images of pregnant beasts; past saucers of tortoise-shell, and compotiers fashioned from maidens’ skulls with alphabets hidden in their cheeks. Most assuredly, Spoon has never dipped custards from vessels such as these.
She falls past a black rooster tied to a bedpost, past a lizard and a robin drinking from the same ancient puddle, past brightly painted acorns, peyote furniture, and chandeliers dripping with the fat of igloo candles. In all of her travels from coast to coast, Spoon had never seen those things.
She is falling not through her own brain, as humans do, but through the room of the wolfmother wallpaper, and shreds of the wallpaper flap against her as she plunges. From a great distance, she thinks she can hear Conch Shell trumpeting her name. Then, it’s over. . . .
When she lands, it’s not with the hideous clang she expects but with a thunk. She bounces off something comparatively soft, puts a dent in it, makes an arc, and smacks the sidewalk at less than half the speed she was previously traveling. Several drops of blood land beside her.