by Tom Robbins
Conch Shell had spent that third Friday in April—the day that spring tickled New York with the hardest of feathers—lying on her side on the ledge gazing through the grate. Long after Norman had completed his last revolution, she continued to gaze. Or, maybe she wasn’t gazing at all. The conch shell is the bride of Taurus, the sea-bull who surfaces each and every April to water the earth with his translucent semen; she is the bull’s herald, trumpeting his arrival, softening and arousing the land so that it might open up and receive his vital emissions. It’s conceivable, then, that Conch Shell was in direct communication with something in the season that New Yorkers vaguely sensed but couldn’t begin to identify. Certainly, the aura she broadcast was both wider and pinker than Can o’ Beans had seen it in a great while. “Miss Shell seems to be in deep longing,” he/she commented to Dirty Sock. “Poignant reverie.”
“So that’s what they call it at Bean Can College,” said the sock. “Do tell? What do you smarty-pants call what’s bugging our buddy here? If he weren’t a stick his own self, I’d say he had a stick up his butt.”
The sock’s ill-bred diagnosis was accurate to the extent that Painted Stick seemed more rigid than usual. For long periods, he would stand upright, perfectly still, on the basement floor below Conch Shell, looking up at her. That would be followed by equally long periods during which he would march to and fro, like a military commander awaiting news from the front. It went on in that fashion for hours, until, late in the night, or more precisely, early in the morning after the moon had set and human activity had flagged, the stick hopped up on the ledge beside the gastropodous undine and announced that he was going to the sea. Before Conch Shell’s protests could fully form, he was past her, forcing his way through the grate. A tight squeeze, the maneuver cost him a third of his remaining paint. Tiny shavings, colored by hands that had been dead three thousand years, peeled away and joined the soot and grit on the city sidewalk. Painted Stick took no notice, but moved brazenly to the curb and made a fix on the stars. When he was satisfied as to the location of the ocean, he set out for it at once, turning end over end at a speed that he hoped might render him barely visible to the human eye. When he had traveled several blocks without detection, a familiar, exultant power gripped him, and he wondered why he hadn’t attempted this before.
Painted Stick didn’t make it to the sea. The East River got in his way. For more than an hour, he perched on the revetment, about a hundred and fifty yards from Isaac & Ishmael’s, studying the current of the river and the shipping upon it. There would be a harbor downstream, obviously, and the open Atlantic beyond, but how far he couldn’t reckon. Still, it was in reach, and he was determined to lead his group there in the hope that they might stow away on a ship bound for Israel. Those modern vessels passing in the night were massive compared to the Phoenician boat in which he’d been transported to America, although they seemed slower in the water and not nearly as beautiful. The good news was, there would surely be places aboard to hide.
Shortly after four in the morning, the stick, turning like a vertical propeller, began retracing its route. It was only a short way up the street numbered forty-nine when it “heard” the timid, breathy “voice” of the American spoon “calling” its name. Painted Stick didn’t show surprise, he wasn’t the type, but Spoon could discern his excitement by all of the questions that he asked. She had never known him to be this effusive.
“Oh, sir, just help me get back to the cathedral,” she pleaded. “There’ll be plenty time for explanation. Are the others still there? Can o’ Beans?”
Painted Stick sent her on ahead. “You locomote slowly and can be easily intercepted. Just proceed at the supreme limits of your speed, stay in the gutter close to the curb, and know that I shall be guarding your flank.”
Indeed, that is the manner in which they ventured forth: Spoon scuttling along in the gutter between parked cars and the curb, Painted Stick half a block behind, on the sidewalk, whirling rapidly for the invisibility that was in it, but holding his forward progress in check. It seemed a workable system, but they hadn’t gotten far before there was a crisis.
The door of the Mel Davis Dog Boutique flew open, and a man in a T-shirt and jeans ran out. He was laden with dog collars, some studded with diamonds, others with rubies that glowed red under the streetlamp like the hypodermic wounds in his arms. He dashed to the curb as if to meet an accomplice in a vehicle and instantly spotted Spoon scurrying by. Instinctively, he squatted for a closer look, visions of an expensive remote-control toy in his mind. Spoon scuttled on. The burglar sought to pin her down by placing his foot on her. A torn, dirty sneaker was in the process of pressing her to the pavement when Painted Stick whirled up, rammed the fellow forcefully in the groin, then, as he doubled over in pain, poked him in both eyes. He toppled and rolled into the gutter, bejeweled dog collars strewn about him like trinkets about a pharoah’s mummy.
Never before had Painted Stick struck a human being. No other inanimate object, to the best of his knowledge, had, deliberately and of its own volition, struck a man. He felt as if he had committed a grave transgression, had violated fundamental rules of separation and domain, and that there might be dire consequences. What if a precedent had been established? What if he had rent somehow the fabric of universal order? At the same time that he, in dread and guilt, questioned the ethics of his rash deed, he felt empowered by it. He realized now that no person could safely impede his progress were he to lead his comrades to the sea.
It was a troubled but confident stick and a hysterically jittery spoon that continued down East Forty-ninth Street. But though the crossing of Lexington Avenue proved tricky—and nearly calamitous—they reached St. Patrick’s ahead of the dawn.
"Surely he shall deliver thee from the fowler’s snare
and from the deadly pestilence.
He shall cover thee with his feathers,
and under his wings shalt thou find refuge;"
THE NINETY-FIRST PSALM was dramatic and long, and Spike Cohen read it with quiet majesty. Ellen Cherry found herself thinking of how Buddy Winkler would have hammed it up. By the third verse, however, she had ceased to listen. Maybe it was the rum, maybe it was the hour, but she drifted into an involuntary eye game, optically mixing the patterns and hues of Spike’s clothing—the salad-green V-neck sweater, the violet and white polka-dotted shirt, the plum and olive windowpane plaid suit—until she felt as if she were being pistol-whipped with a kaleidoscope. As she continued to play, she remembered a previous game, the one that her eyes had played with the spoon, and how it had made her aware of another level of reality, a level, a layer that consensual reality veiled. That experience had had the effect of making the world seem larger to her. Yet, simultaneously more private.
In general, this whole business with the spoon had provided her with a secret point of reference outside the everyday order of things. It was like Turn Around Norman had been, only more personal. Spike had spent a quarter hour sweetly assuring her that there was a rational, simple explanation for the spoon’s appearance and disappearance, and that someday that which had seemed mysterious would wax mundane. Now, it occurred to her, in that event, she would feel cheated. Wasn’t there a surplus in life of the boring, the repetitive, the mediocre, and the tame? Shouldn’t she be glad, grateful for this intrusion of the unexpected and unexplained? And if she never understood it, why, so much the better. The surprise and shock of the extraordinary, even when embodied in so small a happening as the riddle around the spoon, could be a tonic, a syrup of wahoo, and she found herself wishing a dose—dangerous side effects be damned—for everyone she knew.
"With long life shall I satisfy him
and show him my salvation.”
Finished, Spike looked up from the page to see a grin cross Ellen Cherry’s face like the chicken crossing the road, although the grin more closely resembled the fireman’s red suspenders. “Hoo boy,” he said. “Maybe a dybbuk I’ve chased out of you, after all. Didn’t I tell you it�
�s a swell psalm?” He emptied his glass of its rum. “And the surrogate shofar what I brought is useful also, ha?”
Ellen Cherry consulted her glass, and giggled.
“So, you relax now, ha? You can be getting some sleep. Dream of beautiful things, except no wandering silverware, okay? What is this spoon, Jewish or something?” Spike got up from his chair, as if to exit. He glanced around the room. “Some other day maybe you can show me these pictures what some gonif is stealing into your apartment to monkey with.”
“Okay, maybe someday I will.” She felt a tad guilty that she hadn’t at least shown him the paintings of the spoon, since they apparently were involved in some way with the utensil’s departure. Holding her kimono closed around her, she, too, arose. “Right now, though,” she said, a whoopee cushion of mischief in her tone, “I think I’d rather show you some shoes.”
“Shoes?” Spike asked innocently, as if the subject of footwear was an alien motif.
“Uh-huh. I always wear flats to work, you’ve hardly ever seen my prime-time heels. I mean, hey, I’m no Imelda, but I’ve got three or four pair that could loot the treasury of a Third World country and make the natives say thank you. My hot pink Kenneth Cole ribbon pumps could fleece Manila in an hour.”
Taken unawares, Spike didn’t quite know how to respond. “I recall some red Cassinis what you wore to our reopening,” he said. His tone and manner were meek.
“Right. Those shoes could burn, but they couldn’t pillage. Let me show you a pair that takes no prisoners.” Ellen Cherry knocked back a slug of rum and vanished into her bedroom closet. When she reappeared, she was holding out in front of her, as if they were twin holy grails, a pair of pumps that seemed to have been fashioned from passion fruit and monkey entrails knotted together in posh bows; with cut-out insteps, ribbon ties, and spool heels, wider at the ends than in the middle. “Ta-da,” she said, softly and without emphasis. “Now aren’t these the shoes estrogen would wear if estrogen had feet? I call the color ’neon fox tongue,’ but that’s another story.”
“Oy, such a show! Very girly, very—I got friends, to be honest, what would complain these shoes are ongepotchket: overdone, garish, a mish-mosh, but me I like them.” Spike stepped back a step or two. “Yah, I think they suit you. They got . . . Hard to tell when you’re just holding them up. Can you . . .” He hesitated, and there was a subtle but discernible increase in the volume and velocity of his breath. “Can you maybe try them on?”
She smiled again and looked him over. She had acquaintances (at that point in her life she really had no friends) who would complain that he was ongepotchket, if they could define or pronounce it, but the artist in her approved of sartorial excess, and the woman in her saw past it. Still smiling, she said, “I’ll be right back.”
In her closet, she put on the shoes. And took off the kimono.
Her worry that Spike might be flustered, shocked, even repulsed, proved groundless. In the thirty years since his wife had decamped, he’d lain only with prostitutes, Upper West Side call girls, to be exact, so when Ellen Cherry appeared in the bedroom doorway naked—"nekkid,” rather—except for the Kenneth Cole shoes, he responded in a direct, systematic, and no-nonsense manner. Well, there was some nonsense, but it came later. And for the moment, she was completely content to dispense with conversation and foreplay. They just weren’t necessary.
With the same fluid motions with which he was said by Abu to serve a tennis ball and then backhand its return, Spike removed his clothing, every last ongepotchket of it. Then he led her to the bed, laid her down, spread her legs (to which the pink pumps were still affixed), and gracefully mounted her.
The cries of her initial orgasm resounded in the room almost immediately. In her underwear drawer, the panties tittered knowingly and teased Master Daruma, who rejoined with sagacity, “On hairy caterpillar there are many beads of dew.”
In the comparative lull that followed her second climax, a time when he was stoking her with slow but by no means dispassionate efficiency, and when, coasting, she was studying the dawn light reflected in the perspiration on his seesawing shoulder blades, she experienced a jab of guilt. Considering events of the past two years, it was absurdly irrational; yet there it was, a southern feminine conditioned reflex, handicapping her emotions and tarnishing the shine of her physical joy. Ah, but then she happened to remember that Ultima was flying to Jerusalem on Monday, and she returned to the fuck with renewed zeal.
She clasped his buttocks in her hands and pushed against him, not to force him into her more deeply—he was already in so deep she could almost taste him—but to give him more of her, to grant him as much of her pussy as was anatomically possible, without reservation, privacy, or shame. Great sea mammal sounds began to issue from them both: a groaning against the heavy pressure of the ocean, a squirty opening of mollusk shells, a slapping of wet flippers, an exhalation of salty and humid vapors, a blubberous explosion of moby dick.
Did she recoil when he withdrew to rub himself against her feet? Au contraire. Nor did she flinch when she felt the hot trickle between her toes or complain that he had transformed one of her chic new shoes into a gravy boat. No, Ellen Cherry in time would have some unusual requirements of her own, and she could tell that dear Spike Cohen was just the man to fulfill them.
She awoke at noon feeling that her luck had changed. Undoubtedly, it was a matter of attitude. When a person accepts a broader definition of reality, a broader net is cast upon the waters of fortune.
Sure enough, around one that afternoon, after she and Spike had taken another dolphin ride, the day doorman came to her apartment with an envelope that had been delivered by messenger. There was a check inside, and a note scribbled on rose paper with violet ink:
Forgot to mention last night (rather, this morning) that your remaining picture sold. To a Corning collector this time. My dear, they love you in the provinces! Upon my return from ghastly Jerusalem, you simply must fetch me over some new work.
“Maybe I will, Ultima baby,” said Ellen Cherry, scratching her bottom with simian luxury. “Maybe I will.”
Spike departed to meet Abu for tennis, whistling like a parakeet in a marijuana field, and she fell back asleep to dream of whitecapped waves. Probably they were sexual rather than creative waves, but later she recalled that just before she woke, a brush in her brain added a touch of naples yellow (patron saint of Neapolitan chain-smokers) to keep the whites from being stark.
Serpent à sonnettes. Rattelslang. Culebra de cascabel. Skallerorm. Klapperschlange. Rattlesnake.
Walking past the makeshift bandstand on her way to the kitchen to hang up her light jacket (she wasn’t about to repeat the chilly mistake of the previous night), Ellen Cherry’s foot accidentally brushed against Salome’s tambourine. It jingled and whirred, causing her instinctively to jump to one side, as if she had transgressed upon one of those vipers that vibrate their tails when disturbed. Abu witnessed this and laughed aloud.
Serpent à sonnettes
Rattelslang
Culebra de cascabel
Skallerorm
Klapperschlange
Rattlesnake
Separately or all together: musical. A little poem.
By mutual consent, Ellen Cherry and Spike intended to conceal the fresh facet that the diamond cutters of destiny had cleaved into their relationship. They studiously avoided giving each other meaningful glances, nor did they touch or smile when they passed. To further avert suspicion, Ellen Cherry planned to pay extra attention to Abu that evening whenever opportunity allowed. The attack by the tambourine gave her the first excuse. Patsy’s phone call gave her the second.
Since there still wasn’t a phone in her Ansonia apartment, Ellen Cherry’s parents called her, sometimes as often as once a week, at Isaac & Ishmael’s. Out of consideration for customers (in the past, that had been wishful thinking, if not a joke), they usually phoned early, just as she was beginning her shift.
“Mercy me, you’re sounding brigh
t-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
“I am?” Ellen Cherry was disappointed that her supposedly secret glee was so blatantly evident.
“Lord, yes, you are, honey. Now tell me: couldn’t be ol’ Boomer’s back in town, could it?”
“Why, no, mama, he’s not. Where’d you get that idea?”
“It wasn’t any idea. Just a stab in the dark, that’s all. Wondering what’d tipped your giggle box on its side. Leave it to ol’ prefeminist Patsy to think there was a blessed man involved.” Patsy paused. “Actually, I was kinda hoping Boomer was back over here. For more reasons than one.”
“And why is that?” Ellen Cherry asked, mainly to be polite. For the first time in many months, attracting that idiot welder to her side was not a top priority for her.
“’Cause,” said Patsy. “’Cause your uncle Buddy, as you’ve always known him, is fixing to go to Jerusalem. Leaving on Monday. Honey, I think he’s getting ready to pull off that deal he was talking ’bout at Christmas time. You know, that, uh, Dome of the Rock deal?”
“Yes, mama, I know what you’re speaking of. Mr. Hadee says it would touch off a world war.”
“I don’t know about that, but Bud told your daddy that he wants to strike at the mosque during some big religious festival that’s coming up, I believe, next month. He said that the Temple Mount would be really crowded then, so his ’strike’ would have more of an impact.”
“More people killed or hurt is how that translates. Makes my blood boil.”
“I wasn’t intending to spoil your good mood. I know you and Bud have fussed over this before. I just thought maybe you should get hold of Boomer someway, and, uh, I guess talk some sense to him or something, ’cause I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that Bud’s fixing to try to get Boomer mixed up in it.”
