by Tom Robbins
“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.
She got dressed in a hurry. She wasn’t sure why. A pair of panties was yanked from the drawer so fast it made Daruma’s head swim. He perceived it as a blur. “Satori ever fleeting. Clear light enter consciousness like hand of pickpocket. Om wooga nam.” His batteries began to hum. Ellen Cherry pulled on a pair of tights, stepped into a wool skirt, drew a bulky cotton sweater over her torso. It was not until she selected shoes, choosing from among those unsullied by sauce de Spike, that it dawned on her that she had dressed for the street rather than for the easel.
The gessoing was not resumed. Nor was the picture turned back to the wall. For the rest of that morning, when she wasn’t glancing anxiously out of the window, she stared at half a bean can. I guess I’m not ready, she thought. I’m not ready to paint. If I was ready, if I was in the mood, it’d take more than an incident like this to stop me. Nothing could stop me. Uncle Bud could be at the door with his britches off and a frog jig in his fist, I’d go right on painting. Thought I might be ready but I’m not.
Shortly past noon, the telephone harmonicaed. It was Abu. He and Spike were at the I & I, and they wondered if she would mind coming down. Her counsel was required. It wasn’t a restaurant matter, Abu explained, it was something else. Ellen Cherry didn’t care what it was. “I’ll be there before you can hang up,” she said, and exited so hastily that she forgot a jacket and had to return for it.
Passing through the lobby, she picked up the box of flowers. Presumed flowers. I’ll take it with me, she thought. Spike and Mr. Hadee will know what to do. The box was light. It didn’t tick. It smelled of refrigeration.
In the Middle East, sand is mixed in with the final coat of plaster. The sand adds texture
, but primarily it adds strength. Sand is to the plaster what erudition is to the heart. At Isaac & Ishmael’s, plasterers had followed the Levantine practice. It made the place seem more like Jerusalem. When they had knocked off at noon on Wednesday, however, one wall still lacked a final coat. The wall behind the bandstand remained sandless and smooth. “They will be back Monday morning to finish the job,” said Abu. “So we shall not be serving lunch on Monday. You, my dear, get an extra day off.”
“Fine. I think I like the smooth wall best, though. It’s friendlier, in a way.”
“That is why rough walls are more authentic,” said Abu.
“You want Mister Roger’s neighborhood, don’t go to Jerusalem,” added Spike. “Howdy Doodyville, Jerusalem is not.”
“Jerusalem is a city of deep friendships,” Abu explained. “But the trowel of history has left even affection a bit rough. In Jerusalem, people will risk their lives for you, but they will not tell you to ’have a nice day.’”
Normally, once started on Jerusalem, Spike and Abu would’ve had to have their tongues impounded before they’d stop. Today, however, as soon as they had conducted a brief tour of the fresh plaster, they hustled Ellen Cherry into the office, where on a desk there sat a brightly painted metal mock-up of what surely was the Petway-Zif collaborative monument.
Judging from the maquette, the base of the sculpture was just as Ultima and Boomer had described it: a pile of boulders from which rose a freestanding, three-dimensional, vertical map of ancient Palestine (or Canaan). Perched atop the map, its feet planted in a jaunty stance right above the northern city of Dan, was a colossal and altogether outlandish figure. Fashioned from welded steel and cast aluminum, painted in stinging hues, the figure could be said to have the body of a human and the head of a donkey, except that the body had a tail and the head was rather anthropomorphic. Its ears, one erect, one folded, were long and hairy; its eyes bulged crazily; the thick lips of its equine muzzle were parted in an insolent grin that revealed a domino set of protruding teeth, goofus teeth, buck teeth, teeth that would bend the pliers of Nitrous, Greek god of dentistry. This grotesque jackass had a well-proportioned human body, except that where its robe (patterned in Islamic green and Judean blue) hung open, one could see both the milk-swollen breasts of a woman and the relaxed, swinging penis of a natural man. On its left foot, the creature wore a high-heeled slipper, on its right the brogan of a working stiff.
“What do we got here?” asked Spike, “Horace Horsecollar on speedballs? Mister Ed goes to Denmark?”
“You are an artist,” said Abu, somewhat tentatively, for he had seen precious little evidence of her art. “What do you make of this cartoon hermaphrodite?”
Ellen Cherry examined the figure closely. Reading about it in Boomer’s letter and seeing it in the flesh, so to speak, were two widely different experiences. Not that he hadn’t described it accurately, but it was, well, much more vital than she had imagined it, much more dynamic and affecting, even in its reduced scale.
“Hmmm,” she said. “Hmmm.”
“Hmmm,” repeated Spike. “Our little artist lady only has ’hmmm’ to say?”
Ellen Cherry ignored him. She scrutinized the maquette awhile longer, shaking the windup toy of her hairdo, although whether in wonderment or exasperation they could not tell. Eventually, she said, “Well, whatever it is, it isn’t cartoonish. It’s really quite powerful, in both a kinetic and a totemic sense.”
“See?” said Spike. “What am I telling you? It takes an artist to hok a tchynik.”
“Then you do not know what it is, either,” said Abu.
“Oh, but I do,” Ellen Cherry corrected him. “Oh, but I truly do.”
The country of Palestine, which had been called Canaan, was named for Pales.
Pales was a deity. The ass-god. Or the ass-goddess. Usually he was male, but sometimes she was female, and sometimes its gender was a tad ambivalent.
The name Pales was Arabic, having come out of Libya, but the Hebrews loved the long-eared bisexual no less than the Arabs. Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote that the Semites fell into venerating the ass because had it not been for wild asses, they never would have survived in the desert. It was probably more complicated than that.
The ass was a savior who provided milk, meat, shoe leather, and transportation (what the Bible calls the “golden calf” was actually the golden ass, since there were never many cows in the Levant).
The ass was also obstinate, silly, and sexually crude.
Embodying all of those characteristics, Pales was trickster, fertility spirit, and sacred clown, presiding over humankind’s unruly passions, giving mortals what they needed, but not before having some fun with them.
Ellen Cherry explained all this to Abu and Spike, just as Boomer had explained it to her. “In the left hand there, the female hand with the long fingernails, that’s a pitcher of milk and a jar of honey. Those wavy white rods in the masculine hand are supposed to represent the hot desert wind. I guess they used to call that wind ’The Breath of the Ass.’ That wind always brought trouble.”
“How could something called ’The Breath of the Ass’ help but bring trouble?” said Abu. “Still, it’s musical. A little poem.”
“That wind I know already. In the Sinai, I felt it. Oy! Such a wind! It irritates the mind as well as the body.”
Having informed its financiers what or who the statue represented, Ellen Cherry went on to explain why it had been chosen. “Boomer says it ought to remind Arabs and Jews of their common roots, that once upon a time they worshipped the same deity and that a lot of stuff they still have in their religions can be traced back to their common cult. He says it should remind them that this land they’ve fought over so bitterly was named after a braying ninny. And that that ought to tell them something. Among other things, it should tell them not to take themselves so seriously. Ol’ Boomer and Zif hope that both Arabs and Jews can look at this creature, all goofy and vulgar, and maybe find some humor in their own folly. And that at the same time that they’re laughing at themselves and how they allowed a simple case of sibling rivalry to escalate into such a long-lasting, world-threatening mess, they can also reaffirm their original sexuality, which, Boomer says, means reaffirming their ties to nature. He says that one of the main problems in Palestine or Israel is that everybody, Arab and Jew, lives in the abstract, lives in political and religious ideology rather than living in physical bodies connected to the earth.”
She paused. “Well, there you have it. Personally, I don’t know donkey poop from oat bran when it comes to ass-gods, or any of that other National Geographic jive. But I do know what works on an aesthetic level, and as nutty as this piece is, as a work of art it ain’t bad. It ain’t half bad.”
Around and around the maquette, Spike and Abu walked.
“It has a certain élan,” admitted Abu. “A crazy throb of life.”
“It’s speaking to our fundamental unity,” said Spike. “That I like.”
“Yes,” Abu agreed. “But there will be misinterpretations. And there will be trouble.”
“Hoo boy! You said it. The Breath of the Ass.”
Around and around the model, Spike and Abu walked. Ellen Cherry went to the toilet. Coming and going, she paused to admire the smooth white wall behind the bandstand. When she returned to the office, the men were still circling the androgynous ass, trying to determine if they liked it or not.
“By the way,” Ellen Cherry inquired, “how did you get the maquette?”
“Rather mysterious,” replied Abu. “A messenger unexpectedly delivered it.”
“Oh. You’d intimated that Boomer or Zif or both might bring it over.”
“Yes. But a messenger delivered it.”
“Oh.”
There was a rum bottle on the desk, and Ellen Cherry helped herself to a shot. When it reached her stomach, she experienced an instant flash of heartburn, as if the rum was chemically antagonistic to some component of the shawarma. She burped. The
burp, though dainty and subdued, jarred something in her thinking process. “What did the messenger look like?” she asked.
“Sorry?”
“The messenger who delivered the model. What did he . . . ?”
“Now that you mention it, he was rather quaint. He was in full livery.”
“Did he have a beard?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? No goatee?”
“No. He was clean-shaven, was he not, Spike?”
“Like a matzo ball.”
“Well, was he wearing dark glasses?”
“Yes. Yes, he was. How do you know this?”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“No tan paper bag?”
“Why, yes, he did have a bag under his arm.”
“Yeah, and when he set down the model, a book fell out of it. It was the new best-seller by that guy Tom Clancy.”
“Well, I’ll be. . . . I thought I saw him limping when he left the Ansonia.”
“What is this, Cherry?”
Ellen Cherry whirled to the sofa and snatched up the florist box that she had forgotten there. She tore off the lid. Inside were a dozen red roses, their stems longer than the virile ears of a jackass. And there was a tiny envelope. And in the envelope, a card. In a cement-mixer scrawl, it read:
Love & Lust From
the Master of Disguise