Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  Had Raoul Ritz been wearing his porkpie hat, it would have absorbed much of the blow. His manager in Los Angeles considers the hat a dorky item, however, and has talked him into forsaking it, at least in public. When he approaches the Ansonia, intent on informing Ellen Cherry that the song he’d written for her (and which had enjoyed limited airplay on a couple of New York stations) is about to be released nationally, his bean is unfortunately bare.

  Gripping his head with both hands, Raoul circles himself erratically, like a bat with jammed sonar, caroms off a corner of the Ansonia, and collapses. Pepe, the new doorman, comes out to see what’s going on, finds Raoul unconscious on the sidewalk, and dials 911. Spoon’s instincts are to scoot for cover, but a small crowd has gathered.

  By the time an ambulance and a patrol car arrive, Raoul’s lights are back on, and he’s sitting upright. There’s a detective in the patrol car, being driven from a homicide scene. “What hit him?” Detective Shaftoe asks.

  “Spoon,” replies a witness. “This spoon here fell down on him.”

  “No kidding?” Shaftoe takes the utensil from the witness, examines it. It’s solid silver, heavy for its size. “Fell or was thrown?”

  The witness shrugs. Shaftoe steps out in the street where he can see all the way to the top of the Ansonia. Only one window is open on that side of the building. The detective counts the window rows to determine the floor. He’s a short, muscular man, black of skin and white of hair, with falcon eyes and a nose that’s been broken more often than a seducer’s promises. He’s played his share of football, though at considerable distance from the Super Bowl. “Who lives in that apartment?” he asks Pepe, pointing to the open window.

  “Not sure. I think it be Miz Charl.”

  “Miz Charl,” repeats Raoul. They’re the first words he’s spoken, and they sound as if they’ve been strained through an old nun’s bloomers. The medics try to convince Raoul to go to the hospital for an examination, but he argues against it. The police are consulted.

  “He’s a tough mother,” says Shaftoe. “Let him be. You want to waste Bellevue’s time and taxpayers’ money photographing the inside of that head? Besides, he don’t want word to get around he’s been knocked on his ass by a itty-bitty spoon.” Shaftoe grins, and so do some of the bystanders.

  “You got a key to that unit?” Shaftoe asks Pepe. “Good. I’m going up.” He turns to Raoul, who’s now on his feet. “You want to come along?”

  Raoul nods his headache. “Yeah, man, I better got wit’ you. Miz Charl so mad I go to L.A. and not fuck her, she throw her kitchen stuff at me, man.”

  “That a fact?” asks Shaftoe.

  “I don’t think she home,” says Pepe. “She go to work twenty minute ago.”

  “You sure it was twenty?”

  Pepe is right, nobody’s in the apartment. “It didn’t have to come from this unit,” says Shaftoe. “They could’ve shut their window.” Raoul seems disappointed, especially after the detective checks the kitchen drawers and finds no silverware that matches the piece that hit him.

  They’re about to leave when Shaftoe, who paints on Sundays in Central Park, turns one of Ellen Cherry’s canvases around. He wants to see how her work compares. When a portrait of a spoon—a spoon identical to the one in his hand—is exposed, he emits a long, dry whistle and helps himself to a seat on the sofa.

  On the way to Isaac & Ishmael’s, the patrolman at the wheel says, “I don’t get it. Guy gets clipped with a teaspoon, don’t even require stitches, and you’re conducting an investigation.”

  “Something . . . unusual here,” says Shaftoe. “Something weird.”

  “Hey, this is New York, sergeant, not some jerkwater Ohio. Besides, everything’s got a simple explanation, even in this town. Broad leaves a spoon on a windowsill, it slips off, clips a guy. So she and the guy know each other? Coincidence.”

  “What about all the paintings of this baby?” asks Shaftoe, waving the spoon. “And what about the paintings of bean cans? What if some guy gets brained with a bean can next? Some guy she’s pissed at ’cause he didn’t ball her? Right, buddy?”

  In the backseat, Raoul shrugs, touches his head tenderly.

  “Yeah, well, there was socks, too,” says the cop. “She can’t brain nobody with no sock. Anyway, she was at work.”

  “And where is it the lady works? The most dangerous restaurant in New York. Joint that’s mixed up in all kinds of heavy Middle Eastern political shit. No, I tell you, there’s big . . . unusualness here. There’s something in the air.”

  “Spring,” says the cop.

  Shaftoe says nothing, he just keeps rubbing his fingers over the spoon. Were a genie to pop out of it, his first wish would be to know the spoon’s story. No, no, he isn’t that much of a detective. His first wish would be to play ball again. Second wish: maybe world peace, maybe a cure for AIDS. Third . . . aw, it doesn’t matter. He glances over his shoulder. “This lady, Miss Charles, what’s she like?”

  “She a artist, man,” says Raoul.

  “No shit.”

  In front of the I & I, the driver lets the detective and Raoul out of the car. “You wearing a vest?” he asks.

  “Naw,” says Shaftoe, tapping his shirtfront. “I’ll have to dodge ’em. I hear the food sucks, too.”

  Entering Isaac & Ishmael’s, the bar is to the left, dining area to the right. They’re separated by a low, bamboo-covered partition, maybe a yard high. The bandstand, as it were, is at the rear of the barroom but is completely visible—and audible—to those in the dining room. Teddy, the maître d’, seats Detective Sergeant Shaftoe and Raoul Ritz in the dining area since it’s practically empty while the less spacious bar is nearly full. Ellen Cherry’s section is toward the front of the bar, so not only does she not wait on Shaftoe and Raoul, but they have to turn their heads in order to see her.

  “Man, she looking fine,” says Raoul.

  “That’s some kind of hair,” marvels Shaftoe.

  Their attention is directed to the bandstand, upon which a very young woman has just received a curt, perfunctory introduction from the bandleader. When the band strikes up again, the girl administers her tambourine a resounding whack and begins to dance. Instantly, Shaftoe knows what his third wish would be. Raoul’s headache leaves through his mouth, which has fallen open. Every conversation in the I & I ceases, many in midsentence. The audience is transfixed. Some men raise a hand to clutch at their hearts, but most are paralyzed, pinned like butterflies to a wall of passion. Cooks and dishwashers are drawn out of the kitchen, security guards desert their posts on the sidewalk. The tambourine bangs, the tambourine jingles; the girl—awkwardly, self-consciously—dances, and the audience senses the weight, the weave, the odor of an ancient blanket that has been thrown over it, perhaps the blanket upon which Abraham spread the legs of Sarai and Hagar.

  The night has cooled, as April nights will, but by the time the dance is done, the I & I is awash in sweat. Men applaud, pause to wipe their brows, applaud some more. They whistle and stamp their feet. It’s been awhile since Shaftoe has experienced such a quickening of the loins. Raoul is muttering aloud in Spanish, something to the effect of, “I write a song for her, man. I write ten songs.” Raoul has forgotten all about Ellen Cherry. So have the Greeks and Syrians, the Turks and Algerians, the Cypriots, Kuwaitis, and Israelis who’ve been flirting with her for months, and from among whom she’s been expecting, despite her ethnic prejudices, to choose a lover in the near future.

  Ellen Cherry must intuit her abandonment, for when a sweat-soaked Abu and a wild-eyed Spike ask her, in breathless succession, “What do you think of that tambourine girl?” and “So what’re you thinking of our little Salome?", she pokes out her lower lip so far she could set a potted plant on it and replies, “Her legs are skinny. For a belly dancer, she’s sure got skinny legs.”

  In a minute or two, the music starts up again, and once more the I & I is transformed into a savage sexual steam bath by the bashful young dancer, skinny le
gs and all. Absentmindedly, Shaftoe removes the spoon from the pocket of his Kmart sport coat and drums out a rhythm with it on a bamboo place mat. Spoon is mortified. So shamed is she by the indecent display that she fails to recognize the room as the place where she and Ellen Cherry were reunited five months prior, and she finds herself wishing she had been broken to bits by the fall from the window ledge. She’s taken the advice of a depraved, heathenish instrument of onanistic pleasure, and this is where it’s led her. The dancer, abdomen jiggling, buttocks rotating, executes a leaf shimmy followed by a double hip bump. Shaftoe rat-a-tats Spoon against his beer glass. “Oh, dear!” she cries. “Mother Mary, release me.”

  Spoon’s prayer is answered. The patrolman enters the I & I, pushes Teddy aside, and strides up to Shaftoe. He speaks into the detective’s cauliflower ear. “Captain wants you uptown fast as you can get there.” Shaftoe grumbles, slaps five dollars on the table, and backs out of the restaurant, his eyes pasted to Salome. He hasn’t wasted any breath offering Raoul a lift.

  Once outside, the patrolman says, “When I told the captain where you was, he like to had a stroke. When I told him what you was doing in there, I could hear the dispatcher giving him CPR.”

  Shaftoe spits. “Motherfucker see what I’ve seen tonight, it’d take more than CPR to revive his ass.”

  Reluctantly, Shaftoe turns his back on the I & I, follows his driver around the corner to Forty-ninth, where their car is parked. He pauses at a litter basket. Pensively, he looks from the spoon to the basket and back again. He shakes his head, shoves the spoon in his pocket. He’s walked only a couple of steps, however, when he stops again, removes the household article, inspects it one more time in the moonshine. When he sighs, it’s as if he’s been taken out of another game, as if something in his sighing mechanism remembers the fumble that ended his tryout with the Buffalo Bills. He tosses Spoon in the trash.

  The cop has watched all this. “Forget about it, sergeant,” he says. “There’s a million stories in the Naked City.”

  It’s the third Friday in April, and the moon is setting. When the moon goes, the odalisque goes with it. They take their minty ambrosias, their odes, their hormones, their honker chardonnay. (Soon, present tense will follow them.) They leave the AIDS baby to shiver in the hard, sharp air. The buds on the trees, the vagabonds and cripples in the streets shiver, too.

  Salome quits dancing at midnight. “She is just sixteen,” the bandleader explains. Spike offers to drive her home, but she’s already left, by the way of the rear courtyard that the I & I shares with the East Indian restaurant next door. The band plays on until two, although long before then the crowd dwindles to practically nothing.

  “You see?” says Abu. “Everybody prefers the tambourine.”

  “Right,” says Ellen Cherry. “Tambourine.” She, too, departs via the courtyard, thus missing Raoul, who, having failed to locate Salome outside, returns to the restaurant to at last inform Ellen Cherry of his song, his desire, the lump on his head.

  It doesn’t take Ellen Cherry long to regret her coatless condition. Deciding that the night is too chilly and too dark for her to walk to the subway station, she hails a taxi. As the cab pulls away, Raoul staggers out of the I & I. “The little tambourine lady will be back here tomorrow night,” Abu calls after him.

  Raoul spins to glare at the tall, distinguished Arab. “Man, I’ll be in fucking L.A., man,” he says, with considerable irritation.

  At the Ansonia, Pepe has gone off duty, leaving Ellen Cherry no word of the early evening’s excitement and how it involved her apartment. Therefore, she’s astonished, and a trifle frightened, when she enters to find most of her paintings staring her right in the eye. For some reason, perhaps having to do with the promise of spring, she suspects that it is Boomer who’s been in her apartment. There’s nothing vandalized or missing, and who except Boomer, or maybe Ultima Sommervell, is curious about her work?

  She’s wrong, of course, about there being nothing missing. After she’s decided that even if Boomer has come home unexpectedly from Jerusalem, even if he’s been by to spy on her art, she isn’t likely to be seeing him that night; after she’s showered off the smoke and grease from the I & I and applied moisturizing lotion to her face and body, she opens the top drawer of her dresser and reaches for her vibrator. All that horniness at the I & I tonight must have rubbed off on me, she thinks.

  When she notices that the spoon is not where she left it, where she saw it only hours before, her spinal column draws as tight as Euclid’s jockstrap, and a tropical hotel could cool its rooms with her blood.

  It has been estimated that during the course of a lifetime, a person spends one year searching for lost objects. Ellen Cherry suspected that she could use up her allotted year and still not find that spoon, but she looked anyway. In a state of near panic, she didn’t know what else to do. It took so little time to ransack the apartment that she ransacked it twice.

  She struggled into a silk kimono—her goose bumps were so huge that the kimono barely covered them—and took the elevator to the lobby, glancing over her shoulder all the while and jumping at every sound and shadow. She dialed a number that she’d sworn she would never call, and experienced nausea when she heard it ringing in Ultima Sommervell’s townhouse.

  “Yes?” In the background, faint barking noises could be detected.

  “Sorry. This is Ellen Cherry Charles. Can you just tell me if Boomer’s back in town?”

  “My dear, it’s four bloody A.M. You must have had an upsetting dream. No, no, unfortunately he’s not. As a matter of fact, I’m flying to Israel on Monday to persuade him to return. He’s becoming another Jean-Michel Basquiat, foolishly sabotaging his own success.”

  “He’s not back?”

  “You don’t sound well. Perhaps you should take something.”

  “Thanks. Sorry.” She hung up and immediately phoned Spike Cohen. “So sorry to bother you at this hour, Mr. Cohen. This will probably sound silly to you, but there’s been somebody in my apartment and . . .”

  As the story spaghettied out of her, it did, indeed, strike Spike as rather silly. Nevertheless, he was quick to comfort and humor her. “Don’t worry, darlink. Right away I’ll be there. If it’s a dybbuk what is haunting you, I know what can chase it out.”

  By the time Ellen Cherry found dybbuk in the dictionary—she wasted ten minutes looking under the di’s—Spike arrived at the Ansonia bearing a copy of the Ninety-first Psalm and a quart of rum. She had already admitted him when she realized that she was wearing her thin, flowered kimono and nothing else except a rapidly evaporating layer of moisturizer. She tried to appear nonchalant, he tried not to stare.

  “To get rid of your demon I have to read aloud the Ninety-first Psalm. If that doesn’t do the trick, then I got to blow the shofar, the ram’s horn. The shofar works every time. Oy! Too bad a shofar I don’t have, so I’m bringing a bottle of rum instead.”

  “Mr. Cohen, you don’t really think there’s a dybbuk involved. . . .”

  He smiled. His teeth were even, and as white as laundry flakes. “No, no,” he said. “Of course not. No self-respecting dybbuk would bother a shiksa. But it’s a lovely psalm, and the rum is also nice.”

  Spike poured them each three fingers of dark Bacardi. “Now,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “you tell me about this spoon what is going and coming, going and coming.”

  As Ellen Cherry was relating the facts of the matter, Spoon, herself, was gathering the courage to peer out from the sheet of dirty newsprint in which she had concealed herself. It happened to be the editorial page of a New York newspaper. The lead editorial defended the stockpiling of poison gas, chemical bombs, and long-range missiles by both sides in the Middle Eastern conflict on the grounds that if the arsenals were equal in size and capability, they would cancel each other out. It went so far as to quote the unforgettable logic of Henry Kissinger: “We have to have more missiles in order to get rid of missiles.” Spoon wasn’t cognizant of the paper�
��s content. She was too occupied with hiding under it to read it (even if she could read), just as none but the most conscionable human beings ever question the true nature of the institutions that are theoretically protecting them.

  Ascertaining that Forty-ninth Street was empty, she squirmed to the top of the trash basket and leaned against its rim. Up and down the street she gazed, wondering in what direction St. Patrick’s lay and at what distance. It was awhile before she realized that she was chanting in the manner of that unspeakable device and his lingerie disciples, except that instead of “Wooga go nami ne,” Spoon was endlessly repeating. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.” She hushed herself—and then immediately cried, “Oh dear.” What was that coming down the street?

  It resembled a wheel, turning so rapidly that it was no more than a rolling blur. As it whirled closer, Spoon could make out that which an organic eye was probably incapable of perceiving: the blur was Painted Stick.

  Had the intoxicant vagrancies of the spring night aggravated the stick’s restlessness and lured it, at no slight risk, out of hiding and into the streets? Spoon had been gone for five months, and while in ordinary object time that span was the briefest of moments, neither these objects nor their circumstances were ordinary. It was well known among them that Painted Stick was anxious to strike out for Jerusalem by whatever means. He was contemptuous of this land, America; convinced that not one of its citizens, with the possible exception of Turn Around Norman, was wise enough in the ways of the universe to facilitate his return to Jerusalem. How could they be when they were stupefied by a violent fear of Yahweh and corrupted by a violent love of money? If Conch Shell was more tolerant, more resigned than he, it was the shell, nonetheless, that, in league with the full moon, had influenced his flight from the cathedral.

  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.”