Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  The first night that they met in the tower and lay on the rug (Switters never dared to test that floor with his feet), admiring a moon that looked as if it had been oiled by a Kurdish rifleman and pointing at the satellites that skittered from sky-edge to sky-edge like waterbugs crossing a cow creek, Domino confessed, with a minimum of embarrassment and no shame at all, that she had “a big crash” on him. Switters, ever the language man, was on the verge of correcting her English when it occurred to him that being infatuated with the likes of himself was, indeed, probably more akin to a “crash” than a “crush.”

  He reminded her, as she had once reminded him, that the very first time he laid eyes on her he’d blurted out that he loved her. He now had, he said, nothing to add to that declaration nor nothing to subtract. In all likelihood, he had been, as charged, out of his cotton-picking mind back then, and whether or not that condition had improved he was in no position to say. However—however—whatever he felt for her (and he could only describe the emotion as being as satisfyingly poignant as it was pesteringly agreeable), or she felt for him, it had been established—had it not?—that he was not her type, since he was a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace.

  “I may have been wrong about that,” she conceded. “You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world’s confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It’s all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than . . . ummph.”

  Although shutting her up was probably not his sole or even primary motive, he kissed her before she could define him further. He kissed her hard—and soft and long and deep and dreamily and urgently, and she kissed him back. In a sense, Domino’s kisses were rather like Suzy’s, which is to say, they were both eager and shy, adventurous and uncertain, yet there was a strength in them (or immediately behind them), a solidity that made him feel that this simple, oddish act of osculation, was somehow supported by and connected to each and every one of what Bobby Case’s ol’ Chinese boys called “The Ten Thousand Things.” Indeed, there was a sense in which a kiss was a thing as well as an act, and Domino’s kiss, inexperienced in terms of execution but seasoned in terms of foundation, might be compared to new spring growth on a venerable tree, or (despite Switters’s disrespect for pethood) a puppy with a pedigree. Moreover, being a thing in and of itself, her kiss, while undeniably a concretized expression of an emotional state, was not necessarily a mere prelude to other activity, the leading edge of a larger biological urge. He liked that about it: the self-contained, concentrated isness or kissness of it, though he would have been the last to maintain that it failed to encourage larger biological urges.

  As a matter of fact, he worked her chador off her shoulders, unhooked her bra, and bared her breasts. She didn’t object, though the breasts themselves, livid and alert, seemed almost to blink in astonishment at their exposure. He kissed them, licked and sucked them, rolled them in his palms, and squeezed their nipples between thumb and forefinger as if testing berries for ripeness or turning the knobs of a particularly delicate scientific instrument—and, actually, when he gently twisted the rosebud dials, it pumped up the volume of her breathing to a virtually orgasmic level. When he advanced his explorations and adorations to the lower half of her body, however, he was rebuffed. And, in truth, he didn’t mind. He had his hands full—and his mouth full, too—and he was content with that largess.

  After a while, they paused to see if the stars were still there. Domino fingered her own nipples, perhaps to calculate the difference between his touch and hers; or, just as likely, to facilitate a conversational segue. “Have you noticed,” she inquired, “that the grapes are becoming full on the vine?” She wondered if he might be persuaded to stick around for the harvest and for the winemaking that would follow. She thought it only fair, she said, that he help replenish their pantry since he had done so much to reduce it. Of course, she knew how anxious he was to get down to Peru, no doubt with good reason. . . .

  He interrupted to reveal that he’d always wanted to participate in a grape-stomping, longed to jump up and down on tubs of the fruit until his feet, including the spaces between his toes, were as purple as eggplants or 2-balls, and that he could never fully trust a person who didn’t find the prospect of squashing grapes in their bare feet irresistible; but, alas, he feared that stomping grapes on stilts would be neither very enjoyable nor very effective.

  “Silly,” she said. “We are not old shoeless peasants. We use a press.” Then, as if there was some doubt that he fully understood the meaning of the word press, as applied to separating articles from their juices, she unzipped his fly and reached into his pants. When she touched active flesh, she drew back, startled, as though, reaching for a rope, she’d grabbed a snake by mistake. Switters appreciated this, in that it mitigated her boldness and reestablished her innocence, but he also appreciated it when, more cautiously this time, she returned her fingers to the surrogate grape-bunch and gradually tightened her grip. They kissed. Domino squeezed. She squeezed rhythmically (instinctively?), relaxing and then increasing tension. And it wasn’t long before the winepress demonstration produced graphic results. Needless to say, nobody thought to bottle the Château de Switters Beaujolais Nouveau, but few would have disagreed that it was a vintage pressing.

  They spent the night in each other’s arms, sleeping only intermittently due to the novelty, the shock, of their romantic union. And sometime before the sun reclaimed their patch of Syrian sky, he agreed to stay on at the oasis until the end of October. They both knew full well that neither her request that he stay nor his consent to do so had anything especially to do with the actual harvesting of grapes.

  The supply truck came, bringing gasoline, flour, soap, cooking oil, sugar, toothpaste, and salt. It also brought magazines and mail. Included in the mail was a statement from the Damascus bank with which the Pachomians did business, and the bottom line was not encouraging. So few contributions had been deposited in their account (widows in Chicago and Madrid each sent them a hundred dollars, Sol Glissant appeared to have forgotten them altogether) that Domino instructed the driver to reduce their usual petrol order by half next trip and to deliver no toothpaste or cooking oil at all. They’d clean their teeth with salt and attempt to make their own oil from the walnuts that would be ripening soon. She also canceled magazines and papers: they could get their news from the Internet. She did order, on behalf of Switters and paid for with his deutsche marks, a five-pack of cigars, a ten-pack of razor blades, and a six-pack of beer. The driver, who had no idea that there was a man residing at the convent, gave her a funny look.

  Later, when the truck had gone and he’d come out of hiding, Switters said, “First purchases I’ve made in more than five months, and in that time not one person has tried to hypnotize, charm, cajole, mislead, or frighten me into buying their goods or services. You can’t appreciate how clean that feels.” No, having lived so long in an ad-free zone, she couldn’t really appreciate it, and she wondered if maybe he was not a bit of a tightwad. On the other hand, he had offered to pay what she considered an exorbitant sum for a pinch of hashish if only she would approach the driver about it. She refused.

  The mail delivery also contained an unsigned postcard, addressed to Abbess Croetine and postmarked Lisbon. Everybody guessed it was from Fannie, though they couldn’t remember ever having seen a sample of her handwriting. Its message read, in badly misspelled French, Your secret is safe with me. For now!

  Something was sorely troubling Masked Beauty, and it very well could have been that mysterious postcard. Or, it could have been that their dedicated daily tours of Net sites simply were not bearing fruit or producing results to her liking. More than likely, she was upset both by the card and the unsatisfactory data. In any case, she began gradually curtailing her appearances beside the computer and seeme
d, during that October, to have initiated an acceleration of the aging process. Her complexion, which heretofore had been unnaturally smooth, showed signs of cracking. Her pale eyes faded further, and her posture, formerly as upright with natural dignity as a flagpole with pompous sentiment, commenced to slump, giving the impression that, like Skeeter Washington, she’d spent too many nights hunched over a piano. Switters suspected that computers themselves could cause premature aging; and, obviously, the abbess had long been subjected to the tugs of earthly gravity, but something else was weighing on her, wrinkling her and pulling her down. Only her wart seemed unchanged and unaffected, a clod of red mud from the mean fields of Mars.

  As second-in-command at the convent, Domino must have shared Masked Beauty’s every concern, yet she struck Switters as more radiant, more vivacious than ever. It would be easy to credit love, and maybe that’s where credit was due, but neither she nor Switters was the type to let themselves be made over by Cupid. Undoubtedly, they were delighted, even thrilled by their amorous bonding, each thoroughly intrigued with the other, yet they were suspicious of the affair as well, and tended to regard it with a skeptical, sometimes mocking eye.

  While they displayed no affection in public, their affair was quickly common knowledge, and some of the sisters, most particularly the two Marias, were more than a little disapproving. As for Bobby Case, he was informed only that Switters had postponed for a month his return to the Amazon. Nevertheless, Bobby ventured a fairly accurate guess as to the reason for the delay, and he chided Switters for thinking with his little head instead of his big one. Bobby also chose that moment to transmit a photograph of his current girlfriend, an Okinawan cutie who looked not a day over fifteen. The fact that Domino was old enough to be the girl’s mother (almost, under the right circumstances, her grandmother), seemed not to faze Switters, if it registered on him at all.

  Every night between nine and ten, he leaned his stilts against the tower’s adobe wall and climbed the long ladder to what he had christened the Rapunzel Suite. There, he rolled onto the carpet, propped his feet on a cylindrical pillow, and, watching the stars slide by like lighted portholes in a luxury liner, awaited Domino’s arrival. She would appear promptly at ten, never out of breath from the climb, pull her chador over her head, and snuggle in naked beside him. Unlike some women he’d known, she could shed her clothing without shedding her mystery.

  It had been his experience that women of a certain age often tended to let themselves go. They became lax and dowdy. Switters supposed he couldn’t blame them: nobody had a greater disdain for maintenance than he. Undoubtedly, some of their frumpiness could be attributed to sheer laziness, to frustration, and to capitulation: they had given up on themselves, given up on life. All too often, however, they had simply been worn down, exhausted by having to serve too many children in addition to the helpless golfing goobers to whom they were bound by law. Was it because she’d been neither a harried wife and mother nor a steely career-chasing spinster that Domino’s spark continued to glow? Was it because she’d never compromised herself in the desperate, always illusional quest for security? He didn’t know. He didn’t very much care. “Never look a gift shoppe in the mouth” was his motto. Whatever she’d been like as a young woman, he suspected she had grown increasingly mysterious and alluring with age. She referred to herself as a “born-again virgin,” and one night near the end of his October extension, he learned that she meant it literally.

  She asked him if he celebrated Christmas, and he answered that there were very few days on the calendar that he wouldn’t celebrate, if given half a reason. She protested that Christmas was special, it being the presumed birthday of Jesus Christ—or was that one more thing in which he didn’t believe?

  “Um, well, it’s like this, Domino: I’ve always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That’s the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child’s purity is corrupted by society, that’s the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he’s being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.”

  She pondered that for a good long while, then eventually changed the subject. Soon after that, they were kissing, as was their custom, and when she turned aside his efforts to open her legs, a rejection that also had become routine, she—again, as usual—seized hold of the bulge in his panda-bear shorts. By this time, their behavior seemed almost scripted.

  Obviously, he wanted something more, but he neither pressured her nor complained. The French say that the best part of an affair is going up the stairs. Desire is almost always more thrilling than fulfillment. In all likelihood, he was caught up in the drawn-out yearning, in the kind of innocent nasty intimacy, the Suzyness, if you will, of their gropings, so when she inquired if he was content with her manual manipulations, he replied only that she was amazingly adept at them. “I feel like a baton in a homecoming parade,” he said.

  “I probably should not admit this to you,” she said, lowering her long lashes, “but in high school in Philadelphia, I was—”

  “A drum majorette?”

  “A what? Oh? No, not that. I was a one-woman petting zoo. Every boy in school was crazy to stick their fingers in the sexy French pie, and I cheerfully accommodated a great many of them. It did not take me long to learn how to please them without—how do they call it?—going all the way. Only Mr. Frederick, my basketball teacher, ever fucked me. Just once. I felt so guilty about it, this married man twice my age, that I—”

  He kissed her eyelids. “You don’t need to spill these kind of beans.” Something about it was making him uncomfortable, even as it titillated him.

  “But you’ve been so patient. I really must explain. When we moved back to France, I threw myself with whole heart into the arms of the Church. It was not just from girlish guilt, I want you to know. All my life I had loved Christ. And Mary. Especially Mary. I won’t bore you with details, but one thing led to another, and about the time that I decided to take up the cloth, I learned how my aunt came to have that wart on her nose. That gave me my own idea. I began to pray for the reinstatement of my virginity. Crazy, no? Such a silly girl. But I prayed and prayed. For years. And after a long while—it grew back.”

  “Grew back? You mean your maidenhead?”

  “My hymen. Yes. God gave it back to me. It is not an illusion. I have medical proof. More than one doctor has examined me and pronounced me complete. Okay, big cotton-picking deal! It’s nothing but a fold of mucous membrane . . .”

  “A thin sliver of sashimi.”

  “But as slight and expendable as it may be, it is my tangible link to Mary. And because of Mary’s unique oneness with humanity, which is her greatest attribute and appeal, it is a physical link, also, to the loving humanism that she represents. And that—that tiny tab of tissue . . .”

  “That petal from a salty rose.”

  “. . . is further proof of the power of prayer. To lose it for a second time, to squander a miracle, would be a major, dramatic thing for me. To permit that—that little . . .”

  “Nub of translucent bacon.”

  “. . . that petite . . .”

  “Paper tiger that guards the pearl pot.”

  “. . . to be pierced by even the finger of a man less important to me than my sacred vocation . . . well, it would be unacceptable.”

  In the unlikely event that Switters needed a reminder that the world was a woo-woo place, Domino’s story of cherry resurrection would have filled the requirement. After taking a moment or two to absorb it, and thinking it wise not to ask what kind of man might possibly be as important to her as her sacred vocation, he clasped the hand that continued to clasp his now somewhat droopy member and asked, “This, however, is acceptable?”

  “I don’t believe Almighty God is coincé. A prude. Didn’t he design these bodies for us to
enjoy? Mary is said to have remained always celibate, a virgin in partu; yet she and Joseph lived together in wedlock. She would have had to do something to relieve his sexual tension.”

  The image of Blessed Mother Mary as a hand-job artist, to use the coarse vernacular, was a bit startling, yet he was willing to expand the notion. Again, he squeezed her grip. “There are other options, you know; other, uh, practices in which they could have indulged.” He was pleased to observe that he could still lobster her up.

  Domino admitted that there were said to be other, uh, practices. Especially in the Middle East. Then, after a short pause, she returned to the subject of Christmas.

  “Just like Masked Beauty, I love and respect the desert. It’s the place where I feel closest to my breath and to the breath of God. The only time I’m discontent out here in the wilderness is at Christmas. I miss then so much the lights and the families and the cheer and the snow.” She talked about annual trips into the Alleghenies to cut a tree for their Pennsylvania house, about window displays in Philadelphia and Paris, the crowds, chocolate shops, candlelight masses at Notre Dame, and ice skating at Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. There was something, Switters noticed, very childlike about her as she reflected upon the joys of past Noëls.

  For some reason, she expected the coming holiday, the Christmas that was eight weeks away, to be particularly lonely and glum. Masked Beauty would arrange a lovely service, she always did, but this year even she seemed drained of energy and joy. Maybe it was the excommunication, maybe their financial situation, or maybe age had simply caught up with the blue nude, for she seemed in a blue funk. The Marias were getting old, too; Fannie was gone, and up to who knows what, and ZuZu and Bob were in a world of their own. Ah, but if Switters were at the oasis! If he were there, Domino knew he would find a way to make their bare desert Christmas as festive as the Champs-Élysées. For all of them, but especially for her. Certainly, he had his own agenda, he needed quite literally to get back on his feet, she appreciated that, but hadn’t Masked Beauty’s experience, as well as Domino’s own holy “wart,” shown him what prayer could accomplish? And anyway, it was only eight more weeks. Of course, he might be intent on spending the season with his grandmother, and . . .