by Tom Robbins
They went in a taxi, its windows rolled down to receive the unseasonable warmth. The chaos and din of Day After shoppers flooded in with the weather. “It’s like Asia,” said Patsy, marveling at the multitudes, their gaily colored burdens, their amplified murmur. “It’s like—” said Verlin, unable to conceive of a continent, a country, any community of humans with which to compare this parcel-packing, fume-inhaling, elbow-throwing, traffic-dodging throng. “It’s like the coronation of the locust queen,” said Verlin finally. Patsy didn’t understand, and Verlin wasn’t sure that he did, either, although his cerebrum supported the frail memory of a plague documented on a wildlife show.
Understandably, Ellen Cherry had scant desire to see the turkey again, especially now that it was surrounded by art. Surrounded by art? The turkey was art. The art cardinals had ordained it so. Well, she would wager that it was the only work in the Modern Museum in which a couple had enjoyed a honeymoon, although, on second thought, there were several paintings in the collection that looked as if they’d been fucked over.
When they stopped by the Ansonia on the way to the airport—Patsy had to pick up her pie plates—her parents had little to say about the motorized turkey except that it looked “different, really different” parked inside a big, grand room. They did, however, chatter about another piece of Boomer’s, something the museum apparently had purchased out of the Sommervell show. It was, as they described it, a huge, welded steel coathanger, maybe six feet long. Folded over its bar was a flat, deflated skyscraper, sewn out of canvas, its windows, entranceways, and other architectural features painted on. The piece was hanging from the ceiling, and there was a card on the wall that listed Boomer’s name, the materials he had used, and the title. The title was Donald Trump’s Pants Come Back From the Cleaners.
“Obviously,” said Ellen Cherry, in a mock Ultima accent, “it’s fraught, simply fraught, with significance.”
Verlin was perplexed. “I see that stuff of Boomer’s on display in a famous museum, and I see them pictures of ol’ socks and cans and spoons that you’re making . . .”
“I’m still freaked out about that spoon,” said Ellen Cherry, glancing at the mantelpiece.
“Oh, honey, it’s not exactly in the poltergeist class,” said Patsy.
“. . . and I wonder who all’s crazy in this world and who’s sane.”
“Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.”
“That’s pretty language from a young lady.”
“I will say this, though: the looniest artist I ever met was normal as white bread beside Buddy Winkler.”
“You take your uncle Bud too serious. He’s mainly just talk. And some of that talk we sinners would do well to heed.”
“I hope for his sake it’s just talk, because if I ever find out he had anything to do with shooting Mr. Cohen . . .”
“Hush, girl! Don’t you be insinuatin’ stuff like that.”
“Okay, but . . .”
Ellen Cherry accompanied them to the sidewalk, where Pepe whistled them a cab. Raoul wasn’t on duty yet. After Patsy and Verlin had driven away to La Guardia, she went back upstairs, lay down on the sofa, and attempted to nap. Every time she started to doze off, however, she experienced the sensation that the spoon on the mantelpiece was watching her.
Eventually, although she felt ridiculous in doing so, she got up and stuck the spoon in her underwear drawer. Next to her vibrator. It would have been humanly impossible for her to imagine the conversations that were to ensue from that meeting.
After New Year’s (a toxically lonely New Year’s, on the eve of which she’d gone searching for Raoul, her diaphragm already in place, only to be informed by Pepe that Raoul and “his band” had up and split to Los Angeles, man), Ellen Cherry was switched to the dinner shift at Isaac & Ishmael’s. She had become, for all practical purposes, a cocktail waitress, since business at the I & I was largely confined to the bar.
The important thing was that there was business. When word of the huge, high-definition television spread through the neighborhood, men dropped in out of curiosity and stayed to drink, snack, chat, and watch sporting events. Many foreigners who were connected to the United Nations had developed a taste for American sports. To watch the contests on a mammoth screen while washing down familiar Mediterranean treats with their native beers, wines, thick coffees, or teas was an enticement hard to resist. Only a few complained about the bamboo. Some even brought their wives. On Super Bowl Sunday, when the bar was packed to overflowing, Greeks actually sat down next to Turks, Arabs next to Jews.
A Super Bowl kicker could have placed a field goal inside the smile of Roland Abu Hadee. Spike Cohen wore a satisfied smile, as well, although his green eyes, greener than the Egyptian beer freighted by the waitpersons, greener than the cucumber slices that garnished the dishes of baba ghanoug, eyes hooded now by a crooked arch of scar tissue; Spike’s eyes turned frequently to survey the street—and the nondescript black shoes of the two security guards, marching on the frosty sidewalk, to and fro, to and fro.
When Ellen Cherry and Boomer were turkeying across America, they frequently found themselves looking at the rear end of vehicles upon which bumper stickers or license-plate holders proclaimed publicly and rather plaintively, “I’d Rather Be Skiing.” Or, “I’d Rather Be Golfing.” Some of the discontented motorists would rather have been hang gliding, while others wanted everyone on the road to be advised that they would have preferred to have been spiking a volley-ball, climbing a mountain, sailing a boat, riding a mule, picking wild mushrooms, playing bridge, square dancing, or building the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks.
“I wonder what my sticker would say?” Ellen Cherry had mused. “I reckon it’d be, ’I’d Rather Be Painting.’” She took a long pull from a can of diet Pepsi. “How about you, hon? What would your sticker say?”
She suspected that he’d insist on “I’d Rather Be Engaged in Cunnilingus,” although she knew, and believed that deep inside he knew, that his proclamations of ungovernable sexual appetite were, like most males’, somewhat exaggerated. She wasn’t positive that he’d even heard her, for he had been scanning the roadside, counting cows, mentally welding broken hay balers, or something equally absorbing. Yet, Boomer hadn’t hesitated. He’d made a frown so sad and wide that it was reflected on the side of her athletically sweating Pepsi. And he’d said:
“They’re a right sorry admission of defeat, them signs are. If my life was that compromised, I sure wouldn’t advertise it. My sign would say, ’If There Was Something Else I’d Rather Be Doing, I’d Damn Well Be Doing It.’”
Ellen Cherry recalled that exchange as she subwayed to work. By the time she walked from the station to the I & I, the Super Bowl would be over, thank goodness, but there was bound to be a lot of cleaning up to do. She didn’t dread it, exactly. In fact, she was ambivalent to a degree that made her wonder how her bumper sticker would have read had one been affixed to her buttocks on that nippy January afternoon. Her life seemed deflated, vacuous, pointless, like Colonial Pines personified. But she couldn’t think of a single other thing that she’d rather be doing. At least nothing to which she was willing to admit.
SEVERAL BLOCKS AWAY, the objects were lined up at the window grate, wondering where everybody was. It wasn’t unusual for them to puzzle over the whereabouts of Ellen Cherry and Spoon. The objects—the can and the sock, at any rate—thought about Ellen Cherry and Spoon as frequently as a reformed cigarette smoker thinks about his little lost friends. Today, however, the population of Manhattan seemed to have disappeared as completely as their comrade and their potential benefactor. There was nothing moving on Fifth Avenue except Turn Around Norman, and he looked like the last strand of spaghetti to twirl out
of Pompeii.
The congregation at mass that noon had been untypically small, consisting primarily of elderly women, held upright by mahogany canes and the galvanizing glare of their diamonds. The few men among them had bolted the instant the service ended. Even the archbishop beat a hasty retreat, diving into his waiting limo and lashing his chauffeur with his rosary beads, like a jockey whipping a mount. What was the hurry? Where could everyone else be? Conch Shell tried to reassure Painted Stick that nothing momentous had transpired in Jerusalem. “The age that is to come has not yet come,” she said, but she wasn’t totally convincing. Those two had never heard of the Super Bowl, naturally, and the other two had forgot.
Eventually, an old sedan rattled up to the crosswalk, full of music, smoke, and rust. When the light changed, it pooted and tooted off in the direction of New Jersey, but not before the objects noted a sticker on its bumper that announced, “I’d Rather Be Partying.” Can o’ Beans imagined it an infraction of taste, if not of grammar, declaring, “You should never trust anyone who uses ’party’ as a verb.” He/she felt appropriately chastised, however, when Dirty Sock growled and shot back, “Uh-huh, and don’t trust anybody who’d rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.”
“Touché,” said the bean can. “Although in the age that is to come, the two needn’t be mutally exclusive.”
SOME OF THE SUPER BOWL fans stayed on for dinner. Alcohol must have made them very hungry or else very brave. Spike Cohen alone seemed to remember how dangerous the I & I could be. From his post behind the cash register, he kept one eye on the street, as if the street were a crocodile-skin shoe that might at any moment revert to its original state of being. When, around the corner on First Avenue, a truck backfired, thin electrical noises came out of his windpipe.
Spike’s jitters were for naught. Except for the fact they they ran out of chick-peas, the evening produced scant catastrophe. The next evening was positively humdrum. And the one after that was as bereft of disorder as a Heidelburg symposium on anal retention. In truth, the entire winter passed as peacefully and leisurely as a python digesting a Valium addict. The many enemies of the restaurant and its politics either shifted their attention to targets closer to the Middle East or else decided that the intractable Cohen and Hadee simply weren’t worth the trouble. In any case, Isaac & Ishmael’s first stint as the most famous restaurant in New York definitely was over.
Relatively speaking, Ellen Cherry Charles likewise spent an uneventful winter. About the only time that the needle bounced on her seismograph was when Boomer informed her, at the close of one of his increasingly infrequent letters, that if she would drop by the Sommervell Gallery, she could pick up a check.
It seemed that Boomer had been booted off the kibbutz for making what he called “an improper suggestion” (she had to grin as she wondered what the fool might have recommended), but he and his sculptor friend (still no mention of the sculptor’s gender: it could only be female) were “sharing a space” in West Jerusalem, where they were collaborating on a project of apparently monumental scale. “This here is a real sculpture,” he wrote. “Even you’d have to say so.”
Soon after Christmas, she had written and asked him point-blank about what duties he was performing for Buddy Winkler, and now in early February he wrote:
The only single thing I’ve done for Bud is buy some welding supplies and deliver them to a basement over near East Jerusalem. It was a right weird scene. There were three or four rabbis in long black coats, black hats, and woolly black beards sitting there in a cellar so dark you couldn’t read Braille with a blowtorch, and these old boys were knitting. Knitting away with them long clickety needles, just like your mama. I asked them if they was getting ready for a baby shower, but they couldn’t speaka the English, and the fellow who let me in explained they were the sacred knitters knitting the sacred garments that the high priests would wear once the Temple was rebuilt and open for business. I asked him when that might be and he patted me on the shoulder and said I understand you weld, and I said yeah, for a price. He smiled and showed me to the door and that was that. Bud ain’t said boo to me since.
I guess you been hearing about how bad things are on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It’s a sorry situation. Kids shot or beat up every day. Palestinians setting fire to the orchards. Jerusalem is as jumpy as a jitterbug in a blender. The word you hear most here is revenge. Arabs talking revenge, Jews talking revenge; old people, young people, everybody’s set on some kind of vengeance. I swear, they’d rather have them a mess of revenge than a big juicy steak and a roll in silk sheets with a movie star. Crazy folks, crazy town, but highly interesting. Wonderful amount of secrecy and intrigue. I feel like I’m somewhere being here. You know what I mean? Lot of places you go to, when you get there you feel like you didn’t really go anywhere, but not Jerusalem, not for a minute. There’s honeysuckle here, too, same as Virginia. Smells like the City of Heaven, all right. And the rent’s cheap. Which reminds me, I know the Ansonia’s a burden on you. If you’ll drop by Ultima’s, she’ll help you out with a check.
Love always,Boomer
I’d rather drink parasite soup than drop by Ultima’s, thought Ellen Cherry, but eviction was staring her in the face like a deviate on the subway, so on her next day off she braced herself and walked down to Fifty-seventh Street in the snow. There were as many art galleries on East Fifty-seventh as there were sushi bars on East Forty-ninth, but she tried not to notice. She hadn’t been eyeball to pigment since before Thanksgiving, unless you could count the paintings that leaned against every wall of her apartment, flaunting their blank backsides as if mooning David Hockney. Nor had she paid a visit to Turn Around Norman, an omission painfully clear to the objects beneath St. Patrick’s. Whether or not Norman was aware of her absence was anybody’s guess.
She expected Ultima to keep her waiting—gallery dealers made a practice of that in order to make themselves seem as busy as doctors and as important as lawyers—but the snowmelt had not completely evaporated from Ellen Cherry’s red vinyl boots when she was summoned. As she followed the saleswoman to Ultima’s office, she shielded her eyes against the Leon Golub lithographs on the walls. Artburn. She forgot the perils of art, however, when confronted by the perils of dog. Three dogs to be exact, three beribboned, perfumed, but untamed little hellhounds that came shooting across the room, howling, leaping, and baring their fangs. Ultima appeared in a cloud of silk and chic, and shooed two of them away. The third continued to snap at Ellen Cherry’s heel. She found herself thinking of Jezebel and protecting every part of herself except her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands.
“Baby Butts!” called Ultima in a stern but affectionate tone. “Naughty doggy!”
“Homicidal doggy,” said Ellen Cherry under her breath. She could swear she detected morbid suds in the corners of the doggy’s mouth.
Ultima squatted on the polished hardwood floor. The disproportionate weight of her bosom caused her to tilt forward, but she righted herself before she, too, took a bite out of Ellen Cherry’s boot. “Come on, Baby Butts, upsy me,” crooned Ultima, and the pooch, still frothing and snarling, leapt into her arms. “Give mums a smootch.”
Jesus weeping Christ! thought Ellen Cherry. Do you suppose Boomer kissed the mouth that licks that mad dog’s chops?
Although she was chilled from the long walk, Ellen Cherry refused coffee, tea, or sherry. She was cordial about it, but she obviously wanted to pick up her money and get out of there. Ultima obliged her. Cuddling Baby Butts while the other dogs tussled beneath the Frank Lloyd Wright desk, she pulled a check from a metal box and passed it to Ellen Cherry, who managed to snatch it away without losing any flesh. She did, however, lose color.
“Is something unsatisfactory?”
“Uh, well, aside from the fact that Baby Butts drooled on it, I guess I was expecting more.”
“More than seven thou?”
“The show sold out. It must’ve grossed a hundred grand.”
&n
bsp; “In excess of a hundred. But then there were deductions.”
“Your commission.”
“The gallery’s commission, yes. State and federal taxes. And Mr. Petway has had needs. I gather that steel is quite dear in Palestine. He’s making—”
“A big sculpture. Yeah, I know.” Does she think Boomer doesn’t write to me?
The women stared at each other for so long and with such will that Baby Butts began to whimper. He seemed surprised and hurt to learn that he hadn’t a monopoly on power in the room. Eventually, Ultima smiled and produced a second check. “Congratulations,” she said.
“What’s this?” Ellen Cherry took the bank draft slowly, deliberately, daring the pup to interfere. It was in the amount of eighteen hundred dollars.
“Two of your works sold,” said Ultima. “As you’re well aware, there’s been a rekindling of interest in the pictorial landscape. I mean, there’s so little of it left outdoors. Collectors have preferred, of course, naturalistic pictures, but the supply of first-rate oeuvre is running thin. In any case, I showed your paintings to a couple from Rochester who didn’t seem in the least put off by your, ah, excesses. So, congratulations, my dear, on your first New York sale. Perhaps you should fetch in several more.”
“Thanks,” said Ellen Cherry. “Thanks. Maybe I will.” Not wishing Ultima to be further entertained by how stunned she was, she excused herself and sailed for the door.
Trudging home in the snow, a check in each fist like Chinese hand warmers, she could only think, Now I have an excuse for Mr. Cohen why I can’t put any work in Ye Olde Art Shoppe in Westchester.
Ellen Cherry didn’t take any more paintings to the gallery, not even one of the Boomer nudes (oh, how she would have loved to see the look on Ultima’s face!), but she stewed about it for weeks. She lay awake nights debating the pros and cons of it.
