by Tom Robbins
The reason that Bud put off bombing the Dome of the Rock (if you’re right and that’s what he’s got up his sleeve) is due to Israeli politics. Although the right-wing religious parties gained a lot of ground in the last election, it wasn’t enough to put them over the top, and Israel ended up with another coalition government in which the hard-liners in the conservative Likud party, which is friendly with the old boys on the far right, share power with the liberals in the Labor party. Now that was nearly four years ago, and everybody is saying that despite the concessions from the PLO and all, that in the election coming up in November the right-wing’s going to grab the whole pie, marang (sp?) and all. So Bud reckons he’ll have a heap easier time of it with the far right minding the store, and he’s looking to wait until they’re inaugurated next January before he commits his naughty act. You get the picture, honeysuckle drawers?
She did. And there wasn’t a rug in it anywhere.
THE AIR PRESSURE INSIDE a champagne bottle is almost identical to that inside a big truck tire: approximately ninety pounds, for the record, but there the similarity surely ends. There’re bound to be major differences in the ambiance department.
Most of the period that she had been in New York, beginning around the time of the sale of the Airstream turkey, Ellen Cherry experienced a sensation of internal pressure. While the force it exerted was constant, its character was not. The pressure could be tingly and giddy, or it could be crushing and dull. In other words, part of the time she felt like a bottle of champagne, the rest of the time like a truck tire.
Thanks to her unsettling experiences with the transitory spoon, as well as her unlikely and rather, ah . . . idiosyncratic affair with her boss, she’d been a magnum of bubbly most of that spring and early summer, and the gases that pushed against the walls of her container possessed enough sparkle to propel her to a phone to call Ultima Sommervell. Ultima would be closing shop and moving to the Hamptons soon, so if Ellen Cherry wished to quiz her concerning Boomer’s activities, she had to act immediately or wait until fall. She was no longer desperate, she told herself, merely curious, but she hastened to arrange a meeting. And she was bold enough to insist that they meet in the downtown gallery, aware that dogs such as Ultima’s seldom traveled south of Fourteenth Street.
On the day of the appointment, a day in early June when ozone coiled around every lamppost and sweat ran down to the sea, Ellen Cherry rode the Eighth Avenue express to Canal Street, then walked back up to Grand. The first thunderstorm of the season was in the dressing room, donning its black robes and its necklace of hailstones, strapping on its electrical sword. She glanced at the sky, wondering if she would make it home before showtime. She was wearing a pair of kiwi suede pumps with lime satin bows, a gift from her lover, and although their soles might risk eternity in a burning hell, she preferred that they not be baptized. Oh, Spike would sprinkle them soon enough, but she’d protect them, if she could, from total immersion.
Ultima would be annoyed that Ellen Cherry hadn’t brought her a painting or two, but she really hadn’t any to bring. She had destroyed the last of the landscapes when Boomer was granted his exhibition, and pictures of a bean can just wouldn’t do. For one thing, even though there were significant stylistic differences between them and Andy Warhol’s soup cans of decades past, they, nevertheless, would be criticized as derivative. Or so she thought. Imagine her surprise, then, when she walked into the prominent gallery to find its walls covered with blatant imitations of Jackson Pollock, Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, et al., as well as images appropriated directly, without personal embellishment of any degree, from TV, movies, and advertising. Everything about the show signaled a perverse denial of originality that must have been widespread, since it was a grouping of works by a dozen or more relatively successful younger artists and not the product of one failed imagination. She was staring at an ersatz Joseph Beuys when Ultima called to her from a balcony and invited her up.
Unlike the spacious, dog-inhabited suite at Sommervell’s Fifty-seventh Street gallery, the office at the SoHo branch consisted of a desk, a file cabinet, and three chairs, arranged informally on the open balcony. From her seat, Ellen Cherry could look down on the usurped art and puzzle over it as Ultima imparted what she could about Boomer’s rather mysterious project.
“It would seem,” said Ultima, “that Mr. Petway struck up a friendship with an Israeli sculptor by the name of Amos Zif.”
“Amos!” blurted Ellen Cherry. “So it’s a male!”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. Please, go ahead.” Out of nowhere, Ellen Cherry experienced a billowing of relief. In fact, her internal pressure, which, due to the proximity of Ultima and the cynically mimetic art, had begun to resume the personality of the acrid, dead air inside a tire, now took a turn toward Dom Perignon.
“This Zif chap was awarded a commission to create a monument, a piece of plaza plop we’d call it in New York, that’s to be plopped in a tiny square just west of the Old City, that noisy, smelly place in which, according to Mr. Petway, even Houdini would have suffered claustrophobia. I bloody well did. Directly outside of the Jaffa Gate, there’s an old Jewish neighborhood that was badly damaged in the 1967 war, and it’s in the process of being restored and reoccupied, rather modestly fancy in architecture and rather immodestly ethnocentric in tone. The project directors asked Zif to make a statue that would capture the essence of the land, both ancient and modern, secular and religious. It’s being paid for by some wealthy Americans, and that is what they specified. So, he was racking his wits trying to come up with something, and the residents of his kibbutz were feeding him ideas, when our Mr. Petway submitted a design of his own. It succeeded in offending the whole ’kibbutz and caboodle,’ as he put it, except for Amos Zif, who adored the idea, as well he might, since Boomer Petway is an American genius and nobody in Israel is making art worth crossing the street for, let alone the ocean. Israel is a Third World country, I might submit, yet too well educated to be innocently charming. There’s nothing worse than a backward sophisticate, at least when he comes to art.”
“Ultima, you honestly think Boomer is a genius?”
“Don’t you?”
Ellen Cherry shook her head. “Hardly, although I might go along with idiot savant.”
Ultima laughed a spitty British laugh. “Between you and me, I suspect you’re right. Don’t you dare tell anyone I said so. In any case, as you must have been informed, he left the kibbutz in the company of Zif, and the pair of them have been collaborating on the monument. It’s to be unveiled in January, and they’ve decided, jolly wisely I’d imagine, to keep its design secret until then. I, however, was allowed a preview of half of it.”
“Which half?”
“The bottom, naturally. To be precise, what I saw was the pedestal.”
“And?”
“And it was nothing terribly distinguished. There’s a large pile of rocks, which I suppose is appropriate, and from the rock pile there rises a vertical, three-dimensional map of Palestine, the ancient Palestine of biblical times, with cities that have disappeared and boundaries that are no longer recognized. The map is fashioned from steel rods, welded together, latticelike. It’s tall, perhaps six meters, and I’ve been led to believe that the statue that is to stand upon it will be of equal height.”
“Six meters. What’s that in feet?”
Ultima regarded her in the way that a Parisian regards a tourist who pronounces croissant as if the breakfast roll were an irritable female relative. “My dear,” she purred, “a meter is three feet plus three inches. Surely you can do the arithmetic.”
Kisser of small dogs! thought Ellen Cherry, but she held her temper. “This statue, then. You don’t have any clues about it?”
“Not even the U.S. backers have seen a sketch or a model. I do hope it’s neither lewd nor ludicrous. There’s scant sense of humor in that part of the world. Passion, yes. Humor, no. Anyway, the good news is that our chap is going to take off a bit and mak
e me a couple pieces for my group show in the fall.”
Ellen Cherry gestured toward the gallery below them. “Will these artists be included in the group?”
“Many of them, yes. Do I detect a note of disapproval?”
“I guess I just don’t get it. Half of them are ripoffs, and the other half are dull and bland.”
“No, you don’t get it, do you? My dear, you’re much too young to be so out of touch with the zeitgeist. Originality is a myth perpetuated by the naive, the romantic, and the unscrupulous. There has been no truly original art since prehistoric times. Every artist has simply reworked the art of his or her predecessors. My artists are unique in that they’ve owned up to the practice. They’ve taken it a step further by refusing to participate in the ruse. By simply appropriating the work of artists they admire, copying it and exhibiting it as their own, they are courageously honest—and tragically sad. Their admission of defeat is part and parcel of the melancholia that epitomizes our time.”
“Fraught with significance, eh?”
“You sneer at my artists for being passive and unaffecting, but you haven’t bothered to ask yourself why they’ve chosen this look. It is, after all, a purposeful choice. They choose to reject the decadent picture-making of the bourgeoisie. They choose to scorn the aura that surrounds high art, an aura of preciousness and rarity that actually has more to do with art as commodity than art as vehicle for social improvement.”
“The kind of art you show uptown.”
“Yes, my puppies and I have to eat. Uptown, the art is all aura, and collectors pay dearly to transfer that aura to their homes or offices. Here in SoHo, the art is simply object. It depreciates the whole regressive notion of glorification of culture. And why shouldn’t it? What is there in our culture to glorify? AIDS? Poverty? Violence? Corruption? Greed? The bomb? Every day there are reports from the Middle East that portend our destruction. It’s bad enough that they’re destroying themselves over there, but it could escalate to include the rest of us at any moment. It would be socially irresponsible for an artist to produce precious, pretty, elitist commodities in the shadow of Jerusalem.”
Ultima lit a pink cigarette and exhaled plumes of perfumed smoke through her fine nostrils. She seemed to be waiting for her little lecture to sink in. Maybe she suspected that it took awhile for information to be absorbed through all that hair. Eventually, she said, “Please don’t take my comments as a personal affront, my dear. There will always be a place for the landscapist. But as you leave, have a closer look at the artists that you’ve belittled. If they have a common message, it is: ’We concede defeat. We haven’t a chance against the masterpieces of the past, against the marketplace of the present, against the annihilations of the future, but, nevertheless, here we are.’ There’s something so poignant and brave and ironic about it that it sometimes makes me weep.”
“Yeah,” said Ellen Cherry, “I do have to get going. Big storm brewing out there.”
After descending the wrought-iron spiral staircase, however, she tarried for a full quarter hour in the gallery, waltzing with the imps that Ultima had let loose in her ivory tower. Hadn’t she, Ellen Cherry, also been defeated by art? But to whom had she confessed? Nobody. She had silently withdrawn. Slunk away, as it were. It had never occurred to her to make an artistic statement out of her failure. So, maybe Ultima was right, these artists were more honest, more courageous than she. It took guts to file for bankruptcy of the imagination. Anyhow, whoever said that to be an artist you had to invent? She supposed she had always accepted innovation as a precondition of important work, as if it were a law, but, of course, art didn’t have laws. That was precisely what was appealing about it. That was what, in her opinion, made art better than life. Or, if not superior, at least more interesting.
On the other hand, what was interesting about the exact rendering in oils of a subway map? How bleak, how unchallenging, how ordinary, how dumb. Now, if you applied a little eye game to it. . . . She started to blur her focus but quickly refrained. She needed to deal with the work on its own terms. And as far as she could tell, its terms were social, intellectual, and political, not aesthetic. This art existed for the purpose of conceptual argument, rather than for its impact on perception. She was surrounded by ideological propositions in which the ideology was visually static. In other words, the ideas were trapped in the art objects, themselves; from which, due to lack of expression, they could never break free to ride the retinal rails into the mystery tunnels of the psyche.
What these pictures are are tombstones, she thought. Maybe in their own cynical way they discover value in resignation, emptiness, and meaninglessness; maybe they perform a service in underlining the futility of trying to compete with mass media, but, hey, they’re really obituaries announcing the death of the magical power of art. And that announcement could be premature.
The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life.
Could it be done? Yeah, you pessimistic wimps, it could. Could she do it? Probably not, but she could give it a whirl.
She shot through the door. It wasn’t raining yet, but the sky was boiling like a pot of film noir potatoes. Looking at the sky was like looking through the porthole of a washer in a hipster laundromat. At least three black turtlenecks circled between Ellen Cherry and the sun.
It was barely three o’clock, but SoHo had its lights on. The day was as dark as Jezebel’s eyelids. The air was fresh and highly charged. People rushed about in it like apprehensive animals. A lot of the people wore turbans, a lot were wrapped in bedsheets. It occurred to Ellen Cherry that the whole city was starting to look like the bar at Isaac & Ishmael’s. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard English spoken on the streets of New York. On the boom boxes that she passed, each and every one turned to maximum volume as an act of legal aggression, the Spanish singers were rolling their r’s for minutes at a time as a result of prestorm static.
She should have gone straight home, unplugged appliances, shut windows, and docked her new shoes in a dry closet, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t. She had made up her mind that she was going to paint again; she didn’t know what, she wasn’t sure when, but inspired by the pessimism of her peers, guided by the strangeness of her experience with the spoon, and letting go of her bitterness in regard to Boomer, she definitely would be painting. And to both celebrate and reaffirm her decision, she thought she owed it to herself, storm or no storm, to pay a long overdue visit to Turn Around Norman.
Norman, Norman. Human pepper mill, grinding away with such breathtaking slowness at the ancient spices that once added the zest of the robust ecstatic to the thin broth of survival. Even if one were unmoved by his actual performance, the kind of concentration and integrity that Norman represented was a model not merely for artists but for. . . . Wait a blue-eyed minute! Where was he?
She had splurged on a taxi in order to beat the rain, and she’d won. The wind had picked up, and thunder was rumbling like a whale with a belly full of Jonahs, but not a drop had fallen, and Fifth Avenue was still relatively crowded. Yet that wasn’t Turn Around Norman by the steps of the cathedral, turning in the place where for years he’d turned without fail in all manner of weather; turned daily (except Wednesday afternoons), including Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday. That wasn’t Norman, that was somebody else.
Her disappointment changed to disgust. And then to fear. For the Reverend Buddy Winkler recognized her immediately after she recognized him, and he broke off his sermon in mid-admonishment to glare at her in the most hostile fashion. So twisted was his face with hate and anger that his boils squeaked like Styrofoam and his gold teeth nearly wrenched loose from his gums. In a flash, like the frog leg of lightning that kicked across the horizon, Ellen Cherry realized both what he was doing there and why he was glaring at her that way.
Two months prior, when Buddy left for Jerus
alem, she had notified the FBI and the Southern Baptist Convention of his presumed intentions. If the federal agents had acted on her tip in any way, she had not been privy to it. Moderate Baptists, however, had been hunting for an excuse to remove Bud from his long-time Sunday slot on the Voice of the Sparrow Network, and they quickly suspended him. By no means was he destroyed financially—his executive position with the Third Temple Platoon compensated him quite adequately—and he continued to make guest appearances on evangelical shows (Pat Robertson admired him for his jingoism, Jimmy Swaggart for his Italian slacks); but Buddy Winkler was a preacher who needed a regular pulpit the way a toilet needed a regular flush. So one day he announced that he was “gonna preach the gospel jest like Jesus done it,” and he took to the street. His decision to horn in on “that stupefied halfwit who’s probably on some kinda turn-around-real-slow drug” was intended as a small measure of revenge against Ellen Cherry. Now, she stood facing him, not twenty feet away.
“There!” he shrieked. “Brothers and sisters, there she is!” He was pointing at her with a long, bony finger, his voice sounding less like a saxophone than a car alarm. “It’s her! The Whore of Babylon of whose filthy fornicatin’ wickedness the prophets of God hat warned.”
Several pedestrians looked her over, albeit with the feigned air of utter disinterest that is customary among New Yorkers in public places, while a party of Japanese tourists fixed her in the viewfinders of their Nikons. Then, as the first fat raindrops spattered the pavement, he began to inch toward her.
“Jezebel!” he screeched. “Jezebel!”
Ellen Cherry was too shocked to move. “Jezebel!” She watched a raindrop bounce off the toe of her shoe. “Jezebel!” His eyes were murderous, his accusing finger shook like a lie-detector needle at a White House briefing. “Jezebel!”