Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  “She is of need to prepare herself,” the bandleader said. There was no enamel in his mouth to stand in the way of his saying it.

  Management hadn’t planned to reveal it right away, but word leaked out faster than radiation from a government reactor, and by showtime on Saturday, the whole restaurant, from kitchen to admission line, was squeaky with Seven Veil helium. Nearly everybody had the date wrong, however, and those few who pinpointed the day set the hour anywhere from dawn to midnight. So, Abu borrowed the microphone from the bandleader and, standing tall and dignified, his nose a fluorescent traffic cone in the spotlight, he cleared his throat and began, “Ladies and gentlemen, Isaac and Ishmael’s, your home for the multicultural cuisine of Jerusalem, is proud to announce . . .”

  He closed to a glove factory of applause. Even the hip refugees from Payday and Nell’s, people who prided themselves on never expressing enthusiasm for anything (unless alone in front of a mirror), slapped one damp palm against the other, although they were careful not to emit a hoot or whistle. The place was so noisy that only those near the front of the bar heard Detective Shaftoe when he exclaimed, “There’s a catch!”

  Among those who did hear him were Spike and Abu, the Greek delegate, the Egyptian doctor, the Cypriot economists, and a table of Israeli regulars from the Peace Now organization. Each of them looked at Shaftoe expectantly, a little anxiously.

  “There’s a goddamn catch to it!” he repeated. There was a note of betrayal in Shaftoe’s voice, a note of helplessness and skepticism, as if even he couldn’t believe what his police-trained memory was telling him was true.

  The Super Bowl.

  The Super Bowl.

  The Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl.

  By innocent coincidence or diabolical design, Salome had scheduled the Dance of the Seven Veils to commence simultaneously with the kickoff of the Super Bowl game.

  CONFLICTS FLARED ALMOST instantaneously. On the one side, there were those for whom the legendary Dance of the Seven Veils had taken on the proportions of fabulous personal fantasy—romantic, erotic, opulent, mysterious; resonant with long-lost exotica, secrets of the Bible and secrets of the East: they would have crawled ten kilometers on a carpet of dog poop and razor blades to witness it, were it the genuine article; and with this devastating nymph who called herself Salome, there was no question of authenticity. On the other side were those for whom the Super Bowl was the most anticipated event of each and every year, the culmination of five months of thrills, endless statistics, ego boosts, and severe disappointments; a major holiday, no, the major holiday, a day when routine and care were suspended; when the nation, the world, came together as one; a festival that cut across national, racial, and religious boundaries; a ritual during which no time existed except the artificial time on the game clock, a symbolic battle in which only token blood was shed and for the duration of which the grip of death on the human psyche was relaxed and put aside: Isaac & Ishmael’s still had the biggest, sharpest television screen in midtown Manhattan, and this group had every intention of watching the game on it.

  It was not, however, a matter of two warring camps, the one demanding Salome, the other, the Super Bowl. At least, not at first it wasn’t. In the beginning, the majority of the I & I’s regular patrons straddled the fence. They wanted the game and the dance. Sgt. Jackie Shaftoe, for example, couldn’t even conceive of having to choose between them.

  To their credit as humanitarians, Spike and Abu acted to nip the divisiveness in the bud. That very night, seven weeks before the twenty-third of January, they sought to avert conflict through compromise.

  Salome’s ride was late that night, so she waited in the office for her chaperon to come through the courtyard and fetch her. That is where they approached her. She was breathing hard from the exertion of the performance, and her body was so bathed in sweat that her clothing stuck to her, causing her thighs to present themselves like mackerel fillets on a platter, and her nipples to protrude like rubber erasers through wet Kleenex. A pearly mustache of perspiration accentuated the ripeness of her mouth, making it appear as if it had been sucking on a peach, and her hair was plastered against her neck as if she had just emerged from a bath—or a wedding bed. To Spike’s and Abu’s great relief, she’d covered her marquise au chocolat eyes with thick spectacles, through which she was busily reading an Uncle Scrooge comic book. Had it not been for the glasses and the funnies, they might not have been controlled enough to approach her at all.

  As it turned out, it was futile anyway. In her dewy lisp, she told them politely, “My schedule is fixed, sirs. It’s in the stars. I dance then or never.”

  What could they do but assure her that the date was fine, was perfect, was hunky-dory, was resplendent with lucky omens, and wore a carnation in its buttonhole? They waved meekly as she slipped into a heavy wool coat and, glasses steaming over, vanished into the courtyard on the arm of her protectress.

  Over the next couple of days, Salome’s decision was relayed to the regular clientele, who now numbered between thirty and forty men and a half dozen women, where it was generally accepted, though not without grumbling and grousing.

  “She could do that dance any old time she pleases. Right? So why does she have to do it while the game is on? What’s the deal?”

  “As zee inspector says, it ees a catch. A treek of some kind. She ees sabotaging zee football.”

  “No, no, come on. There’s no hidden agenda. She just doesn’t care, that’s all. She’s a chick.”

  “I resent that. Millions of chicks watch the Super Bowl. Someday we may be playing in it.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “When the apricots bloom.”

  During Salome’s performances the following weekend, several patrons yelled relevant comments at her, some of them pleading, some openly resentful. She paid them scant attention. In fact, she was dancing better than ever, with more vim, more daring, more open-heartedness.

  “She must be working up to the Seven Veils,” said a fan.

  “Naw,” the bartender disagreed. “The bandleader says that she just gets off dancing in front of that painting.”

  SALOME AND SERGEANT SHAFTOE weren’t quite the only living souls to respond enthusiastically to Ellen Cherry’s mural. An artist, a collector, and a trio of gallery poufs took their eyes off the shim-sham-shimmey long enough to hurdle along the starlit obstacle course of Ellen Cherry’s creation, sliding on a sheet of pure color here, banging against the shadowy edge of a rectangle there, in pursuit of her elusive organic forms. They were impressed enough to later discuss the mural down in SoHo, presumably within earshot of Ultima Sommervell, because one noon the dealer showed up at the I & I for lunch.

  “Darling, how simply interesting. I daresay this is your finest work. It is. It’s a breakthrough, don’t you think?”

  “It’s pretty much the same as I’ve always painted.”

  “Oh, but scale can make a difference. Size is important, no matter what our apologist sisters say.” Ultima laughed a spray-the-roses, there-will-always-be-an-England sort of laugh. “It’s more than the large format, though. It’s your syntax. The way in which you’ve orchestrated a structural quarrel between the metaphoric and the metonymic. What is this I’m eating?”

  “It’s called baba ghanoug.”

  “Jolly well named.” With her fork, she pushed the puddle of beige stuff aside. “In terms of content, you seem to cross, recross, and sometimes erase the boundaries between interior and exterior, between past and present, between the abstract and the concrete. Without resorting to the cheap theatrics of surrealism, you’ve painted a portrait of nighttime consciousness, which is to say, of the feminine side, of the right brain, of intuition.”

  “Well . . . this picture is more out of my intuition than out of my experience,” Ellen Cherry conceded. “Say, maybe you’d like to sample some—” But try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything more horrific than the
baba ghanoug.

  It wasn’t that Ellen Cherry was unappreciative of Ultima’s hoking a tchynik. The dealer had eyes, no doubt about it. But Ellen Cherry hadn’t analyzed the painting, and she was less than eager to entertain anybody else’s analysis. On a conscious level, she wasn’t sure what the painting meant or even where it had come from, she knew only that it was a work of complicated and unexpected beauty and that she was somehow responsible for it. Beauty! Wasn’t that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, “beauty” smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry’s answer was that if one didn’t cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn’t be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed “No!” at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macramé plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn’t required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it. Even more than virtue, it was its own reward. To be sure, there were those who maintained that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and there were beholders who thought her mural was the print of the paw of the pukemaster, but those guys could just kiss her feisty fanny, which everybody agreed was beautiful.

  NEIGHBOR AGAINST NEIGHBOR, countryman against countryman, brother against brother, boss against employee, husband against wife. If conditions at Isaac & Ishmael’s sound like civil war, then those are the boots it must wear, because as the year flipped from old to new on its solar hinge, those were how conditions were.

  Instead of Fort Sumter, it was a none-too-posh cocktail lounge; instead of a garrison, it was a motley crowd of Americans and foreigners watching TV; instead of a cannon, the shot that touched it off was fired from a timekeeper’s buzzer. It happened on a weekend afternoon, the day that a National Football League team from New York City—whether the Jets or the Giants isn’t really important—won the playoff title in its conference (the first time that had happened since 1986) and the right to play for all the marbles in the Super Bowl game.

  “New York’s in!” screamed one of the locals. “Now, by God, we got to watch the game.”

  “Absolutely. Salome must drop her veils some other day.”

  “Well, she’s not going to change her time and that’s final. So maybe you should watch the game some other place.”

  “Some other place?” The fellow was incredulous.

  “Perhaps she should stage her sleazy striptease some other place.”

  “She dances here, not some other place.”

  “Well, I watch football here, not some other place.”

  “So it is a ’sleazy striptease’ now, is it?”

  “You guys got pussy on the brain.”

  “And you gentlemen have zee football on zee brains.”

  “It’s not football, damn it! It’s the Super Bowl!”

  “It’s not zee pussy, it’s zee Dance of zee Seven Veils.”

  “Come on. Smarten up. The Super Bowl is the pure spirit of America. It sums up this country, it’s what we’re all about. You miss the Super Bowl, you miss the whole point of being here, jack.”

  “Ha! You think we are in this country to watch wealthy gorillas play schoolyard games?”

  “No, I guess you must be here to watch teenage pussy shake a tambourine.”

  “Dickhead!”

  “Your English is improving, frog mouth.”

  “I was under the impression,” said Dr. Farouk, “that this was a democracy.”

  “Fuckin’-a, it’s a democracy.”

  “Then we must vote.”

  At that point, Spike and Abu stepped in. “Okay,” said Spike. “Okay. We’ll have an election, already.”

  “But not today,” put in Abu. “There must be time to weigh the issues, time for each side to make its case. Think about it, discuss it, and in two weeks you shall vote. Mr. Cohen and I shall remain neutral. We shall tally your votes and declare a winner.”

  All agreed that that was fair. All but one, that is. “It isn’t going to work. You can vote between money for schools or no money for schools, you can vote between Jesse Jackson or some jive-ass Republican, but can’t nobody with a drop of juice in ’em vote between the Dance of the Seven Veils or the Super Bowl.” As usual, Detective Shaftoe was correct.

  As was customary in modern election campaigns, fair play was shunned from the start. Spike and Abu were forced to waste an inordinate amount of time working to insure an honest poll. Their efforts were about as effective as Mother Hubbard’s pet care. Proponents of both sides were bringing in relatives, friends, and casual acquaintances, and trying to palm them off as eligible voters, which is to say, regular patrons of the I & I. It was difficult to sort them out, for to Spike most Arabs looked alike, and Abu had the same problem with Jews. Race or national origin had little to do with which side people took, however. There were North Africans who compaigned diligently for football, Americans who passionately endorsed the dance. And vice versa. Straight women and male homosexuals were solidly behind Salome. Lesbians supported the Super Bowl.

  In the flush of excitement that followed New York’s victory in the playoffs, the majority leaned decidedly toward the ball game. Then came Friday night, upon which Salome, though as pouty and uncomfortable as ever, danced as if she were bareback on a bucking python, danced like a police whistle in a raid on a bordello, danced like a self-winding watch on the wrist of Saint Vitus. The pendulum swung.

  “But I just don’t see how I can deliberately miss the Super Bowl,” said one perplexed gentleman. “It seems . . . unnatural.”

  “Consider this, my friend. When was the last time you saw a Super Bowl that wasn’t as dull as bouillon?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Be honest. Ninety percent of the games have been boring.”

  “Lots of important things are boring. Church is boring. That’s no excuse for not going. The UN is boring.”

  “Salome is not church, and she’s not the UN—”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Right you are.”

  “—and the Dance of the Seven Veils will never be mundane.”

  “Couldn’t be.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Yeah, but still . . .”

  As election day drew near, Spike and Abu carefully calculated the outcome. After much observation, private polling, and scientific conjecture, they concluded that twenty-five percent of eligible voters favored the game, thirty percent favored the dance, and the remaining forty-five percent not only were undecided, they were so ambivalent, so torn, that they probably wouldn’t vote at all.

  “Any way we dismember this chicken,” said Abu, “it is going to be an unhappy bird.”

  “Oy!” exclaimed Spike. “Palestine it’s resembling.”

  Ellen Cherry had watched the fluxions, the dirty tricks, the acrimony and confusion with detached amusement. Personally, she wanted the dance, but only out of curiosity, and she was curious only because she’d learned that her mural had influenced Salome’s decision to perform it. Of course, she had never been especially attracted to athletics. One of the few things she had always admired about Boomer Petway was how he’d lain down the shot put and taken up the tango.

  One day she had asked some men at the bar, “What would happen if God snatched your balls away? You know the balls I’m referring to. Suppose a spaceship flew
into our atmosphere and beamed up every ball on the planet. Every last football, baseball, tennis ball, basketball, volleyball, golfball, shot put, softball, squash ball, soccer ball, pool ball, bowling ball, even croquet and polo balls, all of them. What would happen? Would the male population go slowly berserk? Would blood flow in the streets? Would you boys just curl up and die? Or would it expedite the evolution of a higher species of mammal?”

  A few of them had looked at her sheepishly, the others as if she were dangerously dumb.

  “Spaceships do not exist,” said the Egyptian doctor dryly.

  “They better not beam up no goofballs or you in big trouble,” warned Shaftoe. Those who were familiar with the expression had a hearty laugh.

  FOR WEEKS THE CONTROVERSY had raged around her, yet if Ellen Cherry found it impossible to ignore, she found it entirely possible to belittle. There were more primary concerns snapping off of the synapses beneath her pecan and chicory curls, not the least of which was Patsy’s impending arrival, bag and baggage; lock, stock, and barrel; hook, line, and sinker; bell, book, and candle; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, Smith and Non Sequitur.

  In preparation for her mama’s Christmas Eve entry into the nonstop espresso machine of Manhattan, she had whited out with gesso all the nude portraits of Boomer Petway. That operation had served the dual purpose of concealing her artistic adoration of Boomer’s heavy equipment (although she had every reason to suspect that Patsy’s captivation with the manly apparatus exceeded her own) and of providing her with fresh blank surfaces upon which to paint. She was cramping and bloating with the urge to paint, a kind of PMS, and one of her fears was that with Patsy in the apartment she would lack both the privacy and the space.

  She’d then proceeded to white-over the pictures of the dirty socks and the bean cans, including the half-can that remained from her last foray into gesso. (Thousands of miles away, a deformed, barracuda-bitten, and thoroughly naked Can o’ Beans—the last remnants of his/her identifying label having dissolved in the tepid waters of the eastern Mediterranean—issued a sudden groan, as if telepathically receiving the news. “Hold on awhile longer, you must, you must,” commanded Conch Shell, who even then could detect the sonic vibrations that advertised the surf smacking a pier in Tel Aviv.) Next, Ellen Cherry had turned to the spoons. One by one, she covered them up, trembling all the while, until there was but a single spoon portrait remaining. That one she had half a mind to preserve as a reminder of the bewildering impact upon her life of the spoon’s enigmatic appearances and disappearances (she still suspected that Secret Agent Petway was somehow responsible) and, just as significantly, of the oceanic rapture and arcane knowledge with which the spoon had rewarded her when she had subjected it to the eye game. Upon reflection, however, she’d decided that there were things in this world upon which it was best not to dwell lest they attach themselves to one’s keel like barnacles, and slowly cause one to leak, to list, and eventually to sink. She had regained much of the equilibrium she’d lost since moving to New York and didn’t wish to risk being thrown off balance again by the weight of a weird dessert spoon. But wait a moment! There were ways in which that spoon, the very weirdness of that spoon, had assisted her in righting herself. Hadn’t the spoon pierced, as if it were a fork, the rigidity of her ego, and wasn’t a tight ego the source of many an individual’s misery; and, furthermore, hadn’t she intuitively painted a spoon into her mural at the I & I? In the end, she chose to save the one spoon picture, but to keep it safely turned to the wall.