Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  “At least six Palestinian youths were killed by Israeli army gunfire yesterday as demonstrations, strikes, and protests erupted anew in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip after a month-long lull in the uprising.

  “The casualty toll for twenty months of strife includes at least four hundred Palestinians dead and about a thousand wounded, according to official figures. Palestinian sources said there were six hundred additional dead and thousands more injured.”

  Ellen Cherry had programmed the clock-radio to wake her at three in the morning so that she might get up and brush her teeth, thus presenting Boomer with a fresh, minty mouth to kiss when he got home. Instead of music, however, the radio punctured her sleep with the foregoing report from a news service correspondent in Jerusalem.

  For some reason, she started wondering what time it was in Jerusalem, if there were wives there concerned about oral freshness, and whether Israelis and Palestinians used separate brands of toothpaste. She wondered if Jezebel had brushed her teeth on that fatal day when she “painted her face and tired her head” before going to the window. Ellen Cherry lay there wondering these things for a full half hour, but time proved to be of no essence because Boomer didn’t show up until quarter past five. By then, bacteria had returned to her scrubbed gums like bathers returning to the beach after a summer storm and were holding sour picnics there and fetid games of volleyball.

  Boomer came through the door like The Thinker on ice skates, moving fast, fairly gliding, yet pensive, distracted. Ellen Cherry, reawakened, was set to give her mouth another brushing (bikini-clad microbes could hear the rumble of distant thunder) but changed her mind when Boomer slid into bed with his jeans on.

  Optimistic, nonetheless, she snuggled up to him and ran her fingers through his chest hair. As she scratched his pelt, it gave off fumes of stale tobacco smoke so concentrated that they would have asphyxiated the Marlboro Man; but at least, thought she, he didn’t reek of Ultima Sommervell. Ellen Cherry had commenced to unbutton his fly when, staring at the ceiling, he asked, “How do people go about making pieces of art?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. How do you make art?”

  “You ought to know. Didn’t you make that ’significant’ turkey some famous museum bought and hasn’t paid for yet?”

  “You know as well as me that I didn’t start out to make anything significant.”

  “Artists hardly ever start out to make significant art. And if they do, it’s usually a flop. Help me with these buttons, hon.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “And you’re not going to get it if we don’t take your pants off.”

  “If artists don’t set out to make significant art, what do they do?”

  “Oh, Boomer.” She sighed, and abandoned his fly. “Maybe they do set out to make something significant, in a roundabout sort of way, but it’s not like setting out to make something practical or useful. For one thing, it’s more like play than work. On the other hand, they don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. The good ones make art because they have to make it—even though they probably won’t understand why until after it’s already made.”

  “But how do they know what to make?”

  “That’s dictated by their vision.”

  “You mean it comes to ’em like in a dream?”

  “No, no, it’s seldom that dramatic. Listen, it’s really pretty simple. If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.”

  “You paint landscapes . . .”

  “Right, but they don’t look like the landscapes that nature provides, and hopefully they don’t look like landscapes that any other painter has ever provided. If they looked like either one, then there would be no excuse for me painting them—except maybe to earn money or call attention to myself, and those are low motives that lead to low art. Not that artists can’t use money. Not that we couldn’t use a little around here. What did Ultima say about why that check didn’t come?”

  Boomer was quiet for such a long time that she thought he must have fallen asleep, but when she regarded his face in the dawn’s dairy light, she saw that his eyes were as wide as pinballs. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Just studying on what it is that I’d like a gander at but can’t see because the world don’t have it in stock.”

  A sudden icy wind razored through the persimmon branches. Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy.

  “Why, Boomer?”

  By the time he got around to confessing that Ultima wanted to market further examples of his art, half of Manhattan was at breakfast, and a persimmon famine was abroad in the land.

  Summer and the check for the turkey arrived on the same day, although in separate envelopes. The check so distracted the Petways that they momentarily forgot to sweat.

  (That same sweltering mid-June Friday had found the five pilgrims—who’d scooted, toddled, and bounced across the Rockies at the pokey pace of 4.2 miles per night—stuffed into a prairie-dog hole, taking shelter from a line of tornadoes that was coiled on the horizon like the bedsprings of Bluebeard. When an impatient Painted Stick ventured out to investigate, a twister snatched him up, lifting him more than a thousand feet in the air. According to Conch Shell, who had peeked at the whole thing, the stick beat the lightning right out of the funnel, poked the cyclone in the ribs so hard that it set him down not an arm’s length from where it had picked him up. “Goodness! If that had been Mr. Sock,” said a flabbergasted Can o’ Beans, “he would’ve blown all the way to Panama.” “How the hell do you know?” asked Dirty Sock.)

  The turkey had sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Ultima Sommervell scooped off exactly half of that (dealers had come to regularly charge artists commissions of fifty percent). Of Boomer’s half, the gallery withheld nearly forty percent for state and federal taxes. That left seventy-five grand. Boomer’s mother needed to be placed in a nursing home, so he contributed twenty thousand toward that. Over Ellen Cherry’s strenuous objections, he donated five thousand to the Reverend Buddy Winkler for some religious project that had yet to be adequately defined. He paid nine months’ rent in advance at the Ansonia, for the security that was in it: that amounted to eighteen thousand. He handed Ellen Cherry five hundred for art supplies and five hundred for new clothes. The remaining thirty-six thousand was deposited with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in a joint account. Most of it was slated for Boomer’s welding shop.

  By the end of June, every artist who could afford to, which is to say, every artist who mattered, had left town for Woodstock, Provincetown, or the shores of Maine. The dealers went to the Hamptons. The collectors went to Europe. There were no arty parties, no gallery openings. Artless, or at least, artistless, New York itself went on display, a kinetic sculpture fashioned from taxicabs, steam, and garbage. As the summer wore on, garbage climbing to the sun, steam wisping from each and every armpit, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish homeless mental patients from ordinary citizens driven by stench and humidity to howl in the streets. In the Ansonia apartment, the air conditioner raged like the ghost of Admiral Byrd, but Ellen Cherry hung limp and was often close to whimpering.

  One morning Boomer had gone out, ostensibly to check on some shop space that was for rent, only to return within the hour carrying a secondhand trench coat, a couple of yards of nondescript fabric, and a small bag of needles and thread.

  “I’m gonna make something,” he’d announced. “I’m not saying it’s art, but it’s something I’ve always had a hankering to see.”

  He worked daily, he worked diligently, he worked merrily, whistling as he
worked, the way Ellen Cherry used to do. Used to do. For now she found that she could not work at all. The more involved Boomer became with his project, his stupid sewing, the more alienated she became from her brushes. And from him.

  “What exactly’s eatin’ you, honey?” Patsy asked her.

  Ellen Cherry sighed into the heat-sticky phone. “I don’t know, mama. I can’t paint and I can’t fuck and I’m angry all the time. Now I know how a critic must feel.”

  While Ellen Cherry stewed, Boomer sewed. He sewed through the day, and he sewed through the night. He sewed through July, and he sewed through August. He sewed five hundred secret pockets into that trench coat, and in each pocket he hid a message, each message encoded in a different code of his own invention. It was the spy coat to end all spy coats, and when it was done, his grin was so wide he could have swallowed a Robert Ludlum paperback without bruising his palate.

  Ultima Sommervell returned to Manhattan shortly after Labor Day, whereupon Boomer showed her his spy coat with its five hundred secret pockets with their five hundred cryptic messages in five hundred different codes. Ultima found the spy coat fraught, simply fraught, with social significance. She found it a witty and ingenious commentary on the dangerous schoolboy shenanigans of superpower gamesmanship. She locked the coat in her vault and offered Boomer a one-man show the following autumn. The show would be mounted in her SoHo gallery, where all the action was.

  Ellen Cherry took the big news gracelessly. She, in fact, spun on her heel and fled the apartment. She walked to the bank, withdrew a thousand dollars, and flew, without toothbrush or a change of underpants, to Virginia. For two days, she cried on her mother’s shoulder. Then, fortified with Patsy-wisdom, she flew back to New York, prepared not only to accept Boomer’s success (as unfair as it might be) but also to assist him in every way possible during the year that he’d been allotted to prepare for his (undeserved) exhibition.

  In her hasty exodus, she had neglected to take a key. When there was no response to her knock, she had to get Raoul to let her into the apartment. Raoul was aware that Boomer had decamped, but he didn’t let on. Keeping time with his fingers to some inaudible rhythm, Raoul just looked at Ellen Cherry as if he could tell that her panties were dirty.

  There was no note, no forwarding address, no nothing. Nearly a month went by before she learned that Boomer had rented a loft in the Bowery and purchased a new Ford van. It didn’t take her anywhere near that long to learn that their bank account had been closed.

  When at last he turned up at the Ansonia, he was neither sheepish nor defiant. In even tones, and with no more than two or three tugs at his beret, he told her that he was sorry but that her good ol’ welder had found him some other fish that he must fry and that the aroma of their frying obviously had been making her sick. She could only agree, but suggested that she might grow accustomed to the smell and that she probably could be of service to him in filleting the fish. “Even if one of ’em is Ultima?” he asked. She bit her lip and shook her head no, but inquired if there might also be room in the pan for her. “If you shear off some of that hair,” he joked. She smiled, but she was still biting her lip.

  In the seasons that followed, they made several tenuous attempts at reconciliation. Over the winter and into spring, they “dated,” enjoying each other’s physical presence on the dance floor and in bed but rarely focusing on their problem. Perhaps Ellen Cherry was just too ashamed of her feelings to air them. As for Boomer, well, he had a new life—a life that was supposed to have been hers—and he was as protective of it as she was resentful. In their superficial conversations, the subject of art was strictly taboo, and when once they did broach it, in early May, the result was a bitter quarrel that put an end to the dating, sending Ellen Cherry to Isaac & Ishmael’s in search of a job and Boomer back to his Bowery loft in pursuit of something that scared him (or puzzled him) so badly he simply had to lock horns with it. And never, not once, did he reveal to her that the five hundred messages in the five hundred secret pockets all said the exact same thing in five hundred separate codes. They said, “Randolph Petway III loves Ellen Cherry Charles.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER . . .

  The invitation to Boomer Petway’s one-man show Ellen Cherry ripped into tiny pieces, which she let sift into a pile on the coffee table. When she threw herself upon the sofa to have a good cry, half of the pieces in the pile turned into snowflakes, half turned into sparks. The sparks melted the snowflakes, the snowflakes extinguished the sparks—and in the dynamics of their interaction, in the dialogue between snowflake and spark, in the exchange of energy between melt and extinguish, a scrap of wolfmother wallpaper was formed.

  The scrap was as silver-white as birch bark, it was tattered and curled at its ends like birch bark, and when a sudden draft blew through the tatters and curls, it made a sound like a war canoe moving downstream, like kites fighting, like shadow puppets mating, like a magician’s sleeve disgorging live doves and aces, like a pregnant scarecrow dragging her dugs through the corn, or more exactly, like veils being stripped from the gyrating body of a dancing girl and flung with studied abandon to the temple floor.

  Because of her bitter sobbing, Ellen Cherry heard none of this, and by the time she got things out of her system and extricated herself from her sofa of silly sorrow, the noisy scraps had turned back into pieces of shredded invitation. These she scooped up and carried to the garbage bag beneath the sink, where, without looking, she sent them fluttering down upon a surprised creature at the bottom of the sack, as if she had unintentionally sponsored a ticker tape parade to honor a cockroach astronaut: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind, eight itty-bitty speedy little steps for the first stowaway to the moon.”

  At work the next morning, Ellen Cherry seemed to be walking around with her head in a cud of licorice gum. So dark and sticky was her mood that Abu and Spike postponed their tennis date in order to keep watch on her. They sat at the corner table sipping sugary tea and conversing about Jerusalem, but their habitually vigilant eyes, different in magnitude and hue, monitored her every move—not that she had to make that many moves to oversee a luncheon crowd that could have fit into a rubber life raft and still have left room for the suppressed flatulence of a diplomat.

  It had been a fairly rough week in the environs of Jerusalem, a city that never has been a tub of laughs, a rough week for Arabs and Jews alike. When Israeli troops used excessive force to break up a nationalistic demonstration at a West Bank university, a Palestinian student retaliated by lobbing a fire bomb at a passing car, killing a woman passenger and critically burning her husband and three young children. Jewish settlers in the area responded with a vandalizing rampage through a Palestinian refugee camp that was already up to its brown eyes in misery.

  “I’m thinking it’s the stones,” said Spike. “So many stones in the Middle East, already! When you got that many rocks, it’s too easy to pick one up and throw it at your neighbor. In olden times, everybody bounced rocks off other people’s noodles. Nowadays, Molotov cocktails they throw. Throw, throw, throw. It’s a tradition, this throwing.”

  “From stones to Molotov cocktails to nuclear missiles. Yes,” agreed Abu, “it is a sad but logical progression. You know, the Jews’ most sacred place in Jerusalem was erected upon the Moriah rock. Today, we Arabs’ most sacred place is called ’the Dome of the Rock.’ And Jesus reportedly said of Peter, ’Upon this rock I will build my church.’ Could we say that in matters of religion we all have rocks in our heads?”

  “Hoo boy. By me you could say that.”

  “Do you ever wonder how the history of the region might have differed if its hills had been forested and green? With time and effort, a man can fashion a weapon from the wood of a tree, but a rock is a weapon to begin with. Palestine is nature’s own arsenal. No, Jerusalem is not caught between a rock and a hard place. Jerusalem is a rock and a hard place.”

  “Jerusalem is getting it in the neck from geology, okay. But, Abu, you tell me: the
re is a more beautiful city somewhere? You tell me you wouldn’t be full from joy what if this morning you could walk down its streets? Ha!”

  Spike received no argument there. “The light, Spike, remember the light?” Unconsciously, Abu tapped his radiant nose. “We can complain about rocks until the sheep come home, but it is the golden light of Jerusalem that holds us, that draws us back. Ah, to live in that glow is a religious experience all by itself. No wonder our brothers go crazy there. Even you and I have been made a little crazed by it. It is almost too intense for the soul to bear.”

  While the proprietors of the I & I were thus engaged, Ellen Cherry went about her duties in a solitary gloom. Every droop, every quiver, every scowl, every silent sigh of hers was registered by the two men, and when at last her shift was complete, they summoned her to their table.

  “Do you hear, darlink, what the new dishwasher wants to be called? An ’underwater ceramics engineer,’ already! Abu doesn’t believe his ears. He doesn’t realize what a big shot he used to be in the kitchen. Ha!”

  Ellen Cherry tried to laugh, but her chuckle was as thin as the cream on powdered milk. They sat her down, poured her a glass of Kuwaiti wine, and insisted that she explain why her aura looked like the ring around a coal miner’s collar. She told them everything.

  Without hesitation, Spike Cohen assumed personal responsibility for her suffering. He patted her hand, patted her shoulder, reached down where her legs were crossed and patted the shoe upon the foot that she was dangling. “Now that you tell me the reason behind your sourpuss, I’m going to be bringing the smiles to you, darlink. Plain talk: friends in the art business you need, friends in the art business I got! Okay? We’re talking wholesale, we’re talking retail. I’m getting for you your own gallery in what to be showing your nice pictures.”

  Abu Hadee was slower to respond. When he did, he said, “My dear, I think that you are looking at this all wrong. In regard to your estranged husband’s exhibition, you really ought to be more positive.”