by Tom Robbins
Braced against the November chill, hands in coat pockets, legs apart, Ellen Cherry found herself turning with Turn Around Norman, very gradually altering her position so that his back was always toward her. It may be best that he doesn’t see me, she thought. I wouldn’t want to make him self-conscious. Deprived of the ambivalent allure of his face—that plowed moon sewn with seeds of nettle and narcissus, that pink grapefruit carved with an assassin’s dagger—she was free now to concentrate on his feet, and she focused on his grubby Converses, sometimes separately, sometimes both together, alert to their position vis-à-vis one another, vis-à-vis a crack in the pavement. Yet, even as those positions shifted, she was unable to intercept a single signal from brain to muscle or to detect the slightest violation of skeletal freeze. They were like potentates of dirty ice, his sneakers, borne in a circle upon the backs of heated molecules, passengers aboard an imperceptible subhuman squirm.
As incredible as it was, one wouldn’t think it exactly compelling entertainment for a girl who’d grown up watching action-packed spectacles on screens large and small—not even for a girl who had transformed each and every show with her eye game and made it her own. In truth, it wasn’t what Norman did that bewitched her, but rather that he bothered to do it at all. Certainly, there was no demand for what he did, less demand than for her paintings. On those rare occasions when it dawned on passersby that Norman was performing, they shook their heads, muttered, and walked away, frowning or smiling, according to their character. Should anyone linger, it usually was to ridicule. The black youths who danced for coins in the area had taken to taunting him ("Why you dance so slow, fat boy? Where you music?"), sometimes poking him painfully in the ribs and stomach with fingers or unopened switchblades. Maybe they wanted his place on the street, maybe they simply didn’t know how else to respond to an exhibition that pure, that unmotivated by any ambition that they could share or comprehend. One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
But was he actually crazy? Ellen Cherry was in no hurry to find out. For now, she was content with the inspiration that he provided, and the oblique solace. This, she told herself, this, and not what’s happening tonight at Ultima Sommervell’s gallery, or any other gallery, this lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about.
The bustle of shoppers and tourists sometimes threatened to knock her off the steps and sweep her away into the jaws of this or that commercial transaction; and when the bustle finished with her, the bluster took over, for November had invaded Manhattan with troops of whirling crystal. Still, she stood there, hands in coat pockets, feet wide apart, until she sensed that the performance was abating, at which point she left abruptly, choosing, for once, not to make a donation. If she had offended him with her previous largess, she wished now to draw the sting out of the offense. Moreover, with no financial help from Boomer, who had sunk everything into his loft and his show, and with tips at the I & I almost as scarce as pearls in Cracker Jacks, she really couldn’t afford to be generous.
Departing, she fretted for a moment about his health (he wore a scarf, now, and woolen mittens, but no sweater or overcoat), then reasoned that he must have been on the street long before she knew of him and that it was highly presumptuous to assume that his survival in any way depended upon her. She crossed Fifth Avenue, heading for the Seventh Avenue IRT station at Fiftieth Street, and did not look back.
When she had disappeared into the grit and crystal that seemed to be grating against each other in the wind, Spoon and Can o’ Beans became mildly distressed. “Do not worry,” urged Conch Shell. “Patience, please.”
“Yes, Can o’ Beans,” said Spoon, “we really should be patient. What’s our rush? We’re objects, don’t forget. Besides, even if Miss Charles can help us get to Jerusalem, the last news we overheard from there had it torn by strife.”
“That was weeks ago. When we were in the suburbs. The radios that pass by here play nothing but rap music. Sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.”
“While shoving ’em both up a guard dog’s ass,” put in Dirty Sock.
In spite of him/herself, Can o’ Beans had to chuckle.
Spoon ignored the indelicacy. “Well, I’m sure conditions are still hazardous in Israel. I, for one, don’t relish getting caught in one of those violent demonstrations. I can wait. We’ve come a long, long way, and as our leaders say, we can use a good rest. You, especially, ma’am/sir.”
“Doubtlessly, you’re correct, Miss Spoon. Every indication is that the Third Temple is not yet on the drawing board, that it may be years, even decades away. Were it built and were we there, what would our role be, anyhow? We’re just along for the ride, you and Mr. Sock and I. Still, I’d hate to miss that ride.”
“We won’t miss a thing, silly. Trust our leaders. And relax.”
“You have my word,” said the bean can. Then, it pushed its misshapen bulk to the grate and looked anxiously, wistfully at the congested, cacophonous avenue where Ellen Cherry had vanished in the dusk.
Can o’ Beans knew something that Spoon did not. He/she knew that if worse came to worst, Conch Shell was capable of swimming the Atlantic Ocean; was capable, too, of towing her navigator behind her. She could tow Painted Stick, but not the rest of them. Therefore, it was the rest of them, the American objects, that were in danger of holding up progress. Since there was surely a limit to how long the stick might endure delay, there was a definite possibility that sooner or later the three of them might have to be left behind in New York. Can o’ Beans had been left once. He/she didn’t want to chew on that cold bone again. That was why he/she was anxious.
It’s a foolish being, a being without vision, who has not formulated a contingency plan, however, and Can o’ Beans’s contingency plan was this: should they fail to secure the aid they needed to cross the sea, should he/she be deprived of Jerusalem and the momentous events that were promised there, then as second choice, as compensation, and for whatever motive, he/she intended somehow, some way, to get back into the life of Ellen Cherry Charles. That was why he/she was wistful.
THE SUBWAY SPAT OUT Ellen Cherry onto the cement welcome mat of a neighborhood bar. Not wishing to insult Fate, which obviously had orchestrated the scene, directing the flow of the crowd to deposit her at that particular place and none other, she went dutifully inside and ordered a shot of Wild Turkey. That’s a good girl.
In the time that it took to sip that lone jigger, three different men tried to pick her up. Although she spurned their advances, she was grateful for them. They took her mind off the opening at the Sommervell Gallery, nudging it onto a sidetrack that was slightly less hazardous. Slightly.
Winking at her rejected suitors, she paid up and left without escort. She stopped off at a certain shop on Broadway and made a certain purchase. Five minutes later, carrying a small, plain brown paper bag, she entered the lobby of the Ansonia.
Raoul greeted her. “Hey, Miz Charl! You home from Jerusalem?” He grinned and tipped his immaculate hat.
Ellen Cherry paused and looked him over. Raoul was cultivating a mustache. Wispy little whiskers, as skinny and forlorn as African cattle, wandered the plain beneath his nose. She imagined how they might graze her lips, her nipples, her ticklish belly; how they might assemble at the salt lick that she could offer them. Before she knew it, she was undressing him with her eyes. She didn’t intend it, yet she couldn’t stop. And when, in her mind, she freed the skimpy Fruta del Telar briefs from the erection upon which they were snagged like a dishtowel caught on a railroad spike, she actually feared that she might swoon. She was so wet she felt as if she had sat on a tomato.
She was virtually at the point of reaching out for him, plastic “brass” buttons, porkpie hat and all, when he said, “Hey, I’m jealous, man.”
“Some rich movie star sending you flowers, man. This your birthday?” From behind the desk, he retrieved a long, green floral delivery box, bound with green twine. “You know this Romeo? Man, I’m so jealous.”
Ellen Cherry accepted the box. Barely locomoting, locomoting at a speed slightly faster than Turn Around Norman’s rate but slightly slower than Painted Stick’s, she moved across the black and white checkerboard tiles toward the elevator, opening a tiny envelope as she walked. The card read, “To our most favorite artist,” and was signed, “Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee.”
Oh, well. She glanced over her shoulder at Raoul. “Thanks,” she called. Then, patting her brand-new vibrator, sleek and subservient in its protective sack, she boarded the car—leaving Raoul on the verge of composing one of those trite romantic lyrics that, lacking the ivory flame of great poetry, nevertheless stay with a person forever, like a scar, a tattoo, or third-grade arithmetic.
The next morning started up like a fine German car. It was Ellen Cherry’s day off, and she slumbered late. When, at last, she was fully awake, motor purring, she wiped the vibrator with a damp cloth, kissed it, and secreted it in a drawer where cotton underpants lived simply but proudly, without envy of satin or lace. "Merci, mon capitaine," she said to the vibrator. “Thanks for a lovely evening.”
She prepared an authentic breakfast, the kind God intended for mortals to eat: eggs and bacon and grits and toast. Gone now were the chocolate doughnuts and cold pizza of breakfasts past, gone to the Bowery, where decadence could always find a parking place. Gone, too, the leban zabadi, the creamy Egyptian yogurt of recent morns—but the fact that she’d skipped leban zabadi at breakfast meant that she would likely have to eat it for lunch. Leftovers from the I & I were proving essential to her survival. Once, she’d even brought home baba ghanoug.
It was time to bathe, and she seriously considered inviting Captain Vibrator to bathe with her. “Maybe I should wait until I know him better,” she said to the vase of roses on the breakfast table, the roses that Spike and Abu had sent. She bathed with the roses, instead. They floated in the water around her, all one dozen of them, rubbing velvet faces against her, sometimes pricking her with their tiny thorns. “Acupuncture,” she said. “I needed that.” Petals came loose like pages from a magazine about aphid life-styles, only to be trapped in webs spun by spiders of soap. Ellen Cherry pasted wet rose petals on her nipples, plastered one under her nose like a comedian’s mustache. "Springtime for Hitler," she said. Outside, it was November, and the margarita glasses of the skyscrapers were salted with frost.
Sanitary now, and most casually attired, she wrapped the drowned roses in newspaper and laid them with the garbage. “They wouldn’t have lasted anyway,” she told herself, drying her hands on her sweatshirt. “Not for long. They were grown in a hothouse. Hothouse flowers wither fast, just like hothouse art.” She was referring to the art that was grown under the artificial lights of fad and fashion, overly fertilized with personal ambition and deprived of those weathers that evolve strong systems in the slow, hard garden of belief. Perhaps she was referring to the kind of art on display at that moment at Ultima Sommervell’s gallery. She didn’t expound. Rather, she shut the door on the roses, consigning them to oblivion beneath the sink, and set up her easel. Mr. Hadee was right: it was time to stop hurting and start painting.
Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering. The more suffering she witnessed—and the New York art world was wormy with it—the less she subscribed to it. Some pain came with the territory, of course, but most suffering artists were narcissists, she was starting to believe. Narcissistic artists seemed attached to agony, to the writhe and the whine, to the yowl, the howl, and the botched suicide; their fits of despair (preferably in public) carefully timed to impress the seriousness of their aesthetic upon critics and collectors. In the past, she’d embraced the suffering artist image, she supposed, but in her heart she had always considered artisthood more of a privilege than a curse, and those to whom the creative life brought only misery, she now invited to go into food service. The world could always use another waitress, another fry cook.
Upon the easel, she set the last canvas that she had completed, a reasonably realistic portrait of Boomer Petway, executed from memory two weeks earlier. Impulsively, with a loaded brush, she gave him the long, coiled tongue of a frog. She stepped back and squinted. And she saw that it was good.
In addition to the frog tongue, in whose banderole she painted a fly, Ellen Cherry gave Boomer the black, bumpy tongue of a chow dog. Then she rooted in his mouth the soda-straw tongue of a butterfly and the Y-flick tongue of a boa. She gave him a woodpecker’s tongue, arrowheaded and barbed; an ox tongue, muscular, broad, and hung with drool; and, finally, the shy, happy tongue that the porpoise employs to push the waves to shore. After the seventh tongue, she rested. Then she began to work on his ears.
There was nothing disrespectful in her alteration of the portrait. The tongues lacked any psychological or symbolic significance. It was a painterly act, a purely visual experiment. “Don’t take it personally,” she said to Boomer’s picture. “I’m just having fun.”
“Why didn’t you come to my opening last night?” Boomer’s picture said back to her.
Obviously, the picture didn’t speak. Even with seven tongues, it was mute, as all pictures are. However, so certain was Ellen Cherry that Boomer would be confronting her with that very question, perhaps before the day was through, that her unconscious mind forced the words from the picture’s mouth.
The words had an accusatory tone. After she heard them, after she imagined that she heard them, she couldn’t paint anymore. She laid down her brushes. A lot of leban zabadi would run under the bridge before she would pick them up again.
In the lobby of the Ansonia, there was a public telephone. To demonstrate her independence from Patsy, the newlywed Ellen Cherry had elected not to install a phone when she and her groom had moved into the apartment, and now she didn’t think that she could afford one. So, it was to the pay phone that she descended, bearing the coin of the realm. She was in her painting clothes, spattered and baggy. Thank Jesus Raoul isn’t on duty yet, she thought.
Boomer sounded sleepy. He must have been still a-bed. It was half past noon, but, then, he would have had a big night. She wondered if Ultima was lying there beside him.
“It’s me,” she said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I didn’t get to your opening.”
“No problem,” he said. “I didn’t really expect you.”
“You didn’t?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Well . . . let’s just not talk about it.”
He sounds strange, she thought. Strange and cold. Beyond hangover. Had his show been a total fiasco? It wouldn’t have surprised her. He was in way over his head, and no beret could hide it. “Why can’t we talk about it?”
“Why should we talk about anything important? Spoil our perfect record.”
She was taken aback. “You’re kidding. We’ve always talked.”
“Horseshit, Ellen Cherry. We never talked. We traded wisecracks. Wisecracking is not talking.”
She started to refute him, but couldn’t muster any ready evidence to support her objection. While she was trying to remember the last time they’d had a heart-to-heart, he broke the silence with an outburst. “You know how come we never talked? ’Cause you never believed I could talk. Not on your level. I couldn’t talk about art. I didn’t understand art. I didn’t, in fact, give a big rat’s ass about art. And in your opinion, that made me inferior, you know; some kind of second-class citizen like all those other clods in Colonial Pines. . . .”
“No! You were different. And I loved you.”
“You never loved me. You never. You loved to the left of me and to the right of me, maybe. You loved above me and undernea
th and in back of me somewheres. But you didn’t love me. You loved my biceps and my big ol’ welder’s cock, and the way I danced and the way I was looser and more free than you. That’s what the hell you loved. It turned you on that I could be uninhibited, because the only place you’re free is on a piece of canvas. In art, you can break loose of your restraints. Otherwise, you’re tight as the peel on a turnip.”
“Hey! Hold on, buster. I don’t know that you’re so uninhibited. Lot of things you wouldn’t do. It was you who wouldn’t call me ’Jezebel.’”
Boomer paused. He lowered his voice. “That’s another story, that is.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Another story entirely.”
“You can say that again.”
But she didn’t say it again. She didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did he. Then they spoke out at the same time, in ironic unison.
“The trouble with you—” she began.
“The trouble with you—” he started. His voice, being the stronger of the two, won the right to proceed. “Is that the only way you can communicate is through art. You’ve never learned to communicate your feelings to a man. You don’t even want to communicate in a relationship. You think if you open up to love, you’ll lose your independence or your self-expression or creativity or whatever you call all that passionate, wonderful stuff that makes you feel alive inside. Patsy warned me that you’d never wanna have kids, ’cause raising babies would siphon off that juice that makes your paintings go—”
“My mama never—”
“Oh, yeah, she did! You say you love me, and maybe in a peculiar way you do, but you don’t love me for myself. You never have. When I was just a welder, you looked down on me. You didn’t really want me till you thought you couldn’t have me, till you saw me climbing that ladder you thought was up against your wall. If I was to go back to being a welder, Ellen Cherry, if I was to come back uptown to you, you wouldn’t be thrilled with it for more than about two days. ’Cause after you got through having orgasms, you’d have to have a relationship, and that’s a sideline you don’t care to more than dabble in. You can’t be married to a man ’cause you’re already married to your art.”
