Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  “How can one speak of stone when there is flesh at hand?” A’ben asked. He drew her more tightly against him.

  “Take it easy, darling. Don’t be in such a hurry. Meat won’t melt. I want to hear about the limestone.”

  “Okay, there is the good news, finally. The ship she passes through Suez at this hour. Should to be arrival here before two day.”

  “Ohh!” Leigh-Cheri squealed with happiness. “I’m so glad. Aren’t you glad? Maybe we’ll even finish on schedule. Do you think so?”

  “You tell me take it easy. Now I tell you take it easy. Stone she not melt. Pyramid never melt. Pyramid will be here on earth long after this is in heaven.” His fingers, dripping with jewels, closed around her groin.

  “Mmmm. This is in heaven already. Or it soon will be.” With a movement like a raccoon picking a fruit, like an outlaw striking a match, she unzipped his trousers.

  77

  WHAT HAD DISTURBED LEIGH-CHERI most about Bernard’s note was its evidence of how poorly he knew her. Like women in general, like Aries women in particular, like redheaded Aries women in greater particular, she loathed to be misunderstood. Injustice against others outraged her, injustice against herself set her to boiling like brimstone soup. After the sacrifices she had made, after the extremity of her commitment, to then be scolded like an errant tot, to be lectured condescendingly, to have her love, their love regarded frivolously was simply intolerable. The one man who might know how to make love stay—or so she’d thought—had behaved as if the moon were his personal wheel of cheese, and once again her heart’s natural inclination to contemplate romantic grandeur had been interrupted by the mundane, betrayed by the egotistical. Never again, by Jesus! Inside her, something had snapped. She couldn’t say that she no longer cared about Bernard, but she could say loudly and clearly that no longer would she be victimized by caring. She was a princess, a very special entity with very special graces, and from now on, when it came to men, she would call the shots.

  It occurred to her that in every relationship in which she had participated, in every union older than a year that she’d observed, imbalance existed. Of a couple, one person invariably loved stronger than the other. It seemed a law of nature, a cruel law that led to tension and destruction. She was dismayed that a law so unfair, so miserable prevailed, but since it did, since imbalance seemed inevitable, it must be easier, healthier to be the lover who loved the least. She vowed that henceforth imbalance would work in her favor.

  She vowed also, caressing the warped Camel pack as she vowed, to enlarge and explore what she’d come to call her “theory.” She viewed herself as some kind of Argonian link, and the vision that she’d had in that stuffy, silent attic was to be the foundation of her new life’s work.

  To these ends, she sent for A’ben Fizel.

  When he was courting her, upon her return from Hawaii, Fizel had been a gallant but unattractive companion. Excesses of liquor and rich foods had given him bulbous jowls and a greenish complexion. He rather resembled a tall toad. But when she sent for him, suggesting that she might consent to become his wife, an amazing transformation took place. Putting aside his playboy ways, Fizel checked into a North Dakota health ranch where he was assigned a diet of grapefruit and raw garlic cloves and made to walk twenty miles a day. At the end of thirty days, he knocked on the door at Fort Blackberry a slim and handsome figure, reeking only moderately of garlic. Leigh-Cheri was amazed. Nothing the approval in her eyes, Fizel got right to business. He presented her with a diamond as big as a Ritz cracker. The Princess was not to be rushed, however.

  “What do you think about the future of pyramids?” she inquired.

  78

  IT HAS BEEN ESTIMATED that it would require six years and a billion dollars to construct the Great Pyramid of Giza with modern technology. To duplicate the Great Chicken of Itza would take even more time and money—but that was Col. Sanders’s problem. Leigh-Cheri’s scheme was not quite so ambitious. A pyramid one-third the size of Giza would still be an enormous structure and would suit her purposes just fine.

  “Your country practically borders Egypt and has much the same terrain,” the Princess reminded A’ben Fizel, “but tourists never visit you because there’s no attraction. In fact, when your country is mentioned, most people draw a blank. If anything comes to mind, it’s oil wells, excessive profits, religious fanaticism, and vulgar taste. Suppose you were to erect the first full-sized genuine pyramid in the Levant in more than three thousand years. Not only would it attract tourists from all over the world, it would serve as a popular symbol and give your nation an identity. The pyramid could become a showplace for your culture. In addition to bringing in revenue, it would be great public relations. Folks wouldn’t be so quick to think of you guys as nouveau riche barbarians with petroleum under your nails and sand between your ears.”

  Fizel flinched at these words, but he was fascinated nonetheless. Her proposal made some sense to him as a businessman and a patriot. The icing on the pyramid-shaped cake was that she promised to marry him when the structure was complete. His pyramid would be a celebrated monument to his love for her just as the Taj Mahal was a monument to the love of Shah Jahan for his favorite wife. Fizel was one of the few men on earth who could affort to express affection in such grandiose terms.

  Following a fortnight of deliberation—and consultation with his dad—A’ben agreed. Before slipping the diamond on the Princess’s finger, however, he made a stipulation of his own. It was practically common knowledge that his bride-to-be was no virgin. Fizel demanded, therefore, that while the pyramid was being built, she reside in his country, near the Fizel palace, and that one night a week she admit him to her chambers.

  Since she had every intention of supervising the construction of the pyramid and since it behooved her to put distance between her and McNeil Island, Leigh-Cheri was quite willing to move to A’ben’s land. As for his demand to trespass weekly in her boudoir, she put it to a vote. Her heart said no, the peachfish said it was about damn time. Ambivalent on the subject, her brain finally decided to vote with the peachfish. Thus was the betrothal announced.

  79

  THERE WERE MOMENTS before her mirror, brushing the hair that flowed like creeks of lava, that trailed like the woven trails of red-hot comets, when she would see a whore’s face looking back at her. At those moments, she felt hard and dirty, and she’d spatter the mirror-face with tears, mourning girlish innocence, romantic dreams, the dimming of the moon. But in the square beneath her Moorish windows, real camels chewed their cuds, when she parted the brocade draperies, she could see domes, minarets, and date palms strikingly similar to those on the cigarette package, and on the far horizon, a pyramid—her pyramid—was swiftly rising.

  It would continue to rise until reaching a height of 160.6 feet. It would spread until it covered 4.4 acres. Its four triangular faces were designed to incline at an angle of 51 degrees, 52 minutes to the ground, precisely the same as Giza’s. Naturally, the pyramid would be accurately aligned to the cardinal points, while consultants from Cambridge’s astronomy department were assuring that it would have solar, lunar, and stellar alignments, as well. Its outer chambers would be given over to cafes, bazaars, and nightclubs, all of highest quality, to a trade exhibit and to a small but important museum of Levantine archaeology. The inner chambers were Leigh-Cheri’s alone. In them, she would oversee and conduct exhaustive experiments in pyramidology. Pyramid power, that energy frequency that preserves corpses, sharpens razor blades, amplifies thought forms, and increases sexual vitality, would be studied by the best scientific minds until it was thoroughly understood, and then every effort would be made to put it to the uses that the Argonian masters intended. Perhaps through the impetus of her pyramid, the Red Beards somehow could be retrieved from exile, or a new race of modern Red Beards would be spawned and eventually regain control over solar forces.

  When she thought of things pyramidal, which was most of the time, it no longer distressed her that
she was using A’ben Fizel or allowing him to use her. Then, she would look in the mirror shamelessly. She’d brush her hair as if it were the aurora of a permanent moonrise. And sometimes she’d lift the Camel pack, crinkled and bent, from her dressing table and hold it up to the looking glass, smiling at how the great word CHOICE once more defied the inversions of normal reflection. She had freely chosen the life she now led, and if it had unsavory aspects, well, she must be brave and bear the taint. Not that the liaisons with her fiancé were ordeals for her. Au contraire. Oh, very au contraire.

  80

  THE FIRST TIME that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist. Clouds of dread, doubt, resentment, guilt, and sentimentality combined to shadow the faintest ray of pleasure. Eyes squeezed shut, she tried to imagine that it was Bernard inside her, but this new man felt so different, so strange that the fantasy never solidified. In the weeks that followed, she relaxed somewhat, primarily as a result of his unexpected gentleness. Eyes still tightly closed, she’d move against him as if he were a device from a sex shop, mechanically churning herself to the creamy brink of aloof orgasm. When she finally went over the brink, one twilight when incense burners were smoking up the flat and camel bells tinkled in the square below, she relaxed far more. The next time he undressed at her bedside she kept her eyes wide open—and saw what she’d been missing.

  Although A’ben had resumed an active nightlife—giving the discos one last whirl before marriage, he claimed—daily workouts in the family gymnasium were keeping him trim. His Semitic beak had a strong masculine contour, the teeth that armed his shy smile were brilliant and regular (especially in comparison to Bernard’s yellow wrecks), and there was a generous light in his chocolate eyes. His phallus was long, slender, and slippery, and as curved as a Phoenician eyebrow. Aroused, it stood politely on end, but bowed backward so that its head, as smooth and purple as eggplant, almost touched his belly. Even before A’ben could climb into bed, she was stroking that exotic fixture, marveling at its natural lubricity, rubbing it against her nipples, holding it against her flushed cheeks. The poor man barely got his feet off the floor before she had him in her mouth. As he throbbed in her throat, pumping jet after jet of that steamy translucent mucilage with which Cupid tries to glue the world together, she felt as if she were gulping concentrated ecstasy, and it made her blood croon. Later that evening he focused on her clitoris with unusual sensitivity, and as he was leaving to return to the palace, she hinted that one meeting a week might be shortchanging Aphrodite. “After all, you’re a sheik, and I’m a redhead,” she whispered. From then on, he visited her on both Wednesdays and Saturdays, and they fucked the night away.

  More than once, Leigh-Cheri tried to convince herself that she’d fallen for him, but she knew that she was only in love from the waist down. No matter how ardently the peachclam might gush over him, her heart was unmoved. On those occasions when the peachfish was most ebullient, her heart would grow moody, turn up the collar on its trench coat, pull down the brim of its hat, dangle a cigarette from its sullen lips, and go walk for hours on the poorly lighted streets of the waterfront. If a heart won’t listen to a vagina, what will it listen to? The question went unanswered—but Wednesday and Saturday evenings passed in physical rapture, and until there arose a difficulty procuring Tura limestone for its facing, the pyramid proceeded ahead of schedule.

  81

  MORALITY DEPENDS ON CULTURE. Culture depends on climate. Climate depends on geography. Seattle where the clams were singing, Seattle where the trolls were hiding, Seattle where the blackberries were glistening, Seattle where the bloomers of the sky were drooping, Seattle the city that washed its hands with the incessancy of a proctologist, Seattle was far behind her, at memory’s rest on a dank, deep mossy bed. Now the Princess lived at the edge of a vast desert, under the seal of the sun. The change in interior geography was just the opposite. Indoors, she had traded the barren attic for a lavish flat. Her outside world and her inside world had swapped places. Had there been a corresponding psychological shift? And had its effects edited her moral code?

  Perhaps. Slightly. But something had happened in the intimate immensity of the attic that, if not negating that alteration, had rendered it trivial. She had become sensitized to objecthood.

  Thanks to the Camel pack, Leigh-Cheri could no longer snub an object. Thanks to the Camel pack, she had been cured of animate chauvinism. Among her acquaintances at the university, among the enlightened delegates to the Care Fest, those who railed most liberally against racism, sexism, and ageism discriminated hourly against the inanimate objects around them, denying them love, respect, and even attention. But though she’d reached no conscious conclusions on the matter, Leigh-Cheri had come to consider the smallest, deadest thing as if it had some life of its own.

  During the day, out at the pyramid site, she’d find herself regarding the tools of the workmen with at least as much admiration as she regarded the workers themselves. Her grip lingered on doorknobs much longer than necessary. She patted the big granite blocks with the casual affection others might spend on a passing pooch, treating the stones as though they had individual personalities, while the wooden canteen from which she quenched her thirst became a special friend; she treasured its mouth against her mouth, was prepared to defend it against adversaries. In the evening, after she’d soaked off the desert dust and applied a fresh coat of zinc oxide to the blaze of her nose (redheads burn easily), she’d stroll through the flat (provided it wasn’t Wednesday or Saturday, of course), randomly picking up ashtrays, music boxes, coffee cups, letter openers, artifacts, or candies, boring into them until each expanded into a limitless world, every bit as rich and interesting as that other more physically mobile world about which she remained curious but from which she was once again isolated.

  In a society that is essentially designed to organize, direct, and gratify mass impulses, what is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? Religion? Art? Nature? No, the church has turned religion into standardized public spectacle, and the museum has done the same for art. The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so much that they’ve become effete, sucked empty by too many stupid eyes. What is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? How about a cold chicken bone on a paper plate at midnight, how about a lurid lipstick lengthening or shortening at your command, how about a styrofoam nest abandoned by a “bird” you’ve never known, how about a pair of windshield wipers pursuing one another futilely while you drive home alone through a downpour, how about something beneath a seat touched by your shoe at the movies, how about worn pencils, cute forks, fat little radios, boxes of bow ties, and bubbles on the side of a bathtub? Yes, these are the things, these kite strings and olive oil cans and Valentine hearts stuffed with nougat, that form the bond between the autistic vision and the experiential world; it is to show these things in their true mysterious light that is the purpose of the moon.

  One Wednesday evening, lying beside A’ben Fizel, at rest after a four-quarter, double-overtime copulation, Leigh-Cheri startled both herself and her intended by sitting up suddenly in bed, grasping the Vaseline jar that she’d been watching in the moonlight, and asking aloud, “Whatever happened to the golden ball?”

  82

  IN TIME, Leigh-Cheri became intimate with most of the inanimate objects in her environment, including that inanimate object that controls the reproductive cycles of all living creatures, that inanimate object that choreographs the tides, that inanimate object that influences sanity, that inanimate object to which J. Isaacs was referring when he wrote, “… the history of poetry in all ages is the attempt to find new images for the moon.” (The moon is the Empress of Objects, and as a practitioner of lunaception, Leigh-Cheri was in its league). There was one object in her domain, however, which she pointedly ignored, even though that object was particularly enlivened by moonshine. It was her engagement ring.

  More than likely, she was afraid o
f what the ring signified. She had fully accepted A’ben Fizel as a lover, yet to contemplate their marriage made her shiver and sweat. Whenever she tried to imagine herself his lifelong bride, she grew immediately morose and set to thinking about the pyramid instead, even though the day of the pyramid’s completion and her wedding day were the same.

  In Fizel’s country, it was taboo for an engaged couple to appear together in public, so except for slippery Wednesday evenings and slishy Saturday nights, she rarely saw him. A’ben procured materials for pyramid construction and organized the labor force. At this he was so efficient that the project, which should have taken a minimum of two years, looked as if it would be done in twenty months, the delay in delivery of limestone facing notwithstanding. But A’ben seldom appeared at the building site. An inveterate night-clubber, he frequently flew to Rome or Mikonos for a single evening’s revelry, only to sleep away the mornings and devote afternoons to strenuous gymnastic sessions and meals of grapefruit and raw garlic. He had leased a satellite to relay telecasts of every game played by the American professional basketball team whose franchise he owned, and presumedly sports biz consumed a fairly large portion of his attention.

  The week that Leigh-Cheri arrived in his country she was honored with a reception at the family palace, where she met the patriarch, Ihaj Fizel, one of the most financially powerful men alive. She also was introduced to A’ben’s two brothers. The mother made a brief appearance, the sisters weren’t seen at all. When Leigh-Cheri asked about the women, A’ben shrugged. “Is unimportant,” he said. Leigh-Cheri got the impression that females counted for little in the land of the Fizels, and that, doubtlessly, was one reason she looked at the diamond ring with no more enthusiasm than most people looked at cigarette packages—looked but chose not to see.