Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (27 page)

Although he pressed down harder on
the chair arms, however, although he raised his buttocks higher and waggled his
toes faster, he remained a quarter centimeter from actual contact with the
floor. Chickpeas of sweat popped out on his brow, arteries popped out in his
eyeballs. His Adam’s apple turned into an Adam’s grapefruit, and the ringing in
his ears sounded uncomfortably like the whine Potney Smithe emitted immediately
before keeling over.
Whew!

His biceps started to quiver—perhaps
he had misjudged the extent to which they’d recently firmed up—and his right
leg quivered, too. Yet, like a model threatened with loss of employment, he
held the pose.

The thing about death, though, is
that it eliminates so many options. At least, in terms of the personality game.
As long as I’m alive, there’s always a chance that something extremely
interesting will develop from all this. Who can guess where it might eventually
lead or what I might learn from it? Doesn’t the infinite emerge from the
fiasco? And any time I want to test it or bring it to resolution, that option
is only two inches away. What’s the big hurry? There may be red-eye gravy for
dinner.

And there may be other ways to woo
the darling Suzy.
Indeed, no sooner had he relaxed his posture and settled
back into his seat, with a long breath and a frangible whimper, than he began
to formulate . . . well, if not a cunning strategy at least a fresh approach.
He would, he told himself, concentrate his energy upon assisting her with her
term paper. In the process, he’d open the charm taps, let her see how vigorous and
entertaining he could be, treat her to displays of pith and pluck that would
gradually dispel any image she might have of him as sickly or incomplete. He’d
turn her pity inside out, kick it off its ivory perch, feed it to the foxes of
ecstasy, and, while he was at it, feed Brian baby to the pterodactyls of
oblivion. And if that course went awry, if it backfired, if the fact that he
was no longer pantingly petitioning for consensual copulation succeeded only in
confirming to Suzy that his “injuries” had rendered him feeble and fruitless,
then he would consider telling her the truth. All of it: Sailor Boy to penis
poke.

He sighed again, massaged his arms,
and, like a railyard dick chasing hobos off a flatcar, swept the beans of sweat
from his brow.

After dinner, under the semiwatchful
eye of his mother, her stepmother, Switters and Suzy huddled in the den to
discuss her paper, the subject of which was to be Our Lady of Fatima. Since
there was a gap in Switters’s erudition where this particular virgin was concerned,
Suzy filled him in.

It seems that on May 13, 1917, three
shepherd children from Fatima, Portugal, were visited (
allegedly
visited, though Suzy did not qualify it thusly) by a woman (Suzy said
lady
)
in a white gown and veil while tending their sheep in the hills outside of the
village. The children said that the woman—the
vision
of the woman—told
them to return to that place on the thirteenth of each month until the
following October, at which time she would reveal her identity. The kids
complied, she dropped in on them briefly each month as promised, and on October
13, she spoke dramatically and at some length, disclosing, among other things,
that she traveled under the name of the Lady of the Rosary. She bade the little
sheepherders to recite the rosary every day and asked that a chapel be built in
her honor. Switters suggested that this last smacked of raw egoism, but Suzy
only frowned at him and went on.

Although the Roman Catholic Church
never officially proclaimed the children’s rosary-touting visitor to be a
reappearance on earth of the Virgin Mary, it authorized devotion to her in
1932, and had a shrine with a basilica erected at Fatima, to which thousands of
pilgrims were still attracted each year. “Maybe that’s where I’ll take you on
our honeymoon,” whispered Switters, and for a second he could have sworn he saw
a flicker of excited expectation in her eyes.

The best was yet to come. At some
point during the October visitation, the Fatima Lady issued to the children
three sets of predictions and warnings, two of which she urged them to
immediately make public. “Warnings! Predictions! This is more like it,” said
Switters. “You be nice and listen,” said Suzy.

There wasn’t a great deal more to
hear, as it turned out. Regarding the Fatima Lady’s prophecies, Suzy was short
on detail. “Wars and big floods and, uh, famines and earthquakes and stuff.”

“That figures.” Switters nodded.
“Death and destruction are a prophet’s bread and butter. Nobody ever grabbed
much ink predicting bountiful harvests, lovely spring weather, or that a good
time would be had by all. Even the Second Coming is billed as ‘Doomsday.’ “

“She said that some great war was
going to end in the next year.
That
was nice. But that if people didn’t
heed her words, another greater one would come along soon.”

“Those would have been World Wars One
and Two.”

“Whatever. She was right, wasn’t
she?” In the Early American rocker angled next to his wheelchair, Suzy
maneuvered a bare shin beneath the other knee so that she was balanced, more or
less, on one of her lean, tanned legs, a position that thrust her upper body
slightly forward until he could feel her breath upon his neck. She smelled both
clean and dirty, sour and sweet, like a child. The reverie of childhood—its
seamless daydreams, its gamelife and toylife, its timeless aura of magic
happiness—was there in her aroma. Whatever that little bastard Brian might be
doing to her (or she to him), she still smelled like the punch line in a
nursery rhyme. “She
couldn’t
be wrong,” Suzy continued. “She was Mother
Mary.”

The precise logic of that declaration
eluded Switters, but he thought he knew where it was coming from. Many human
females, as they approached puberty, as the first hormonal waters—the precursor
of the adolescent geyser—began to bubble up through their private earth, became
enamored, to greater or lesser degrees, with horses and/or the Virgin Mary.
Unlike human males, whose fixation on sports figures, explosions, horsepower,
and vulgar comedy could muddle their minds into early middle age, and in hard
cases, even beyond, the equine and Marian fantasies of healthy girls tended to
wane and then peter out (so to speak) altogether once they became sexually
active. The most cursory familiarity with Freudian psychology could explain the
girlish preoccupation with horses; the infatuation with Mary, particularly on
the part of non-Catholics, was more complicated, although he guessed it could
be attributed to her status as Super Virgin: she conceived without coitus, gave
birth without pain, commanded the affection and admiration of men without being
corrupted by them; which was to say, she triumphed gloriously over the terrors,
dangers, and uncertainties facing young females as they came “of age.” The fact
that Mary broadcast a monstrously mixed message—motherhood is divine, sex a
sin—could not be underestimated for the damage it was capable of inflicting on
a developing psyche, but given the discrepant nature of reality, the myth of
the Virgin Mother might be said also to provide basic training in the
acceptance of life’s contradictions; and most girls did eventually escape her
misogynistically generated web, though frequently secretly scarred.

That Suzy was bright and spunky, that
she had an open heart and generous spirit, that she was physically attractive
and therefore did not have to retreat into doctrine as a form of compensation,
all indicated that she would soon outgrow Marianism. For the time being,
however, especially as they prepared her term paper, he would accept it just as
he accepted her limited vocabulary and imprecise speech. Hey, Mary might have
been his own patron saint had not her innocence been commandeered as a front
for a rapacious institution. He tried to picture what Mary (known then as
Miriam or Mariamne) must have been like before she was hijacked and haloed by
the patriarchs, back when she was Suzy’s age, a dusty-footed, chocolate-eyed
Jewish filly, swelling with a fetus of suspect origin—but the Virgin that
unexpectedly filled his mind’s eye was the
Little Blessed Virgin of the
Starry Waters
, a scruffy dory bearing him ever farther up a steaming jungle
river toward a destiny almost too queer to comprehend.

He shook it off. “Very well,
cupcake,” he said, “here’s what we must do. First, we’ll take the broad overall
view. Research the subject generally but thoroughly. Then, we’ll narrow our
focus down to something manageable and particular and original. For example,
the significance of the number thirteen in the Fatima visitations. We’ll
research that specific area with even greater thoroughness. Then we’ll organize
our material, make an outline of the salient points we want to cover. After
that, we’ll write a first draft. Submit it to ruthless scrutiny. Edit it to
perfection. And bingo! Final draft. An A-plus paper. Scholarship to Stanford.”

“Wow! Hello? Sister Francis didn’t
tell us all that. Sounds like a lot of work. Are you sure that’s how people
write term papers?”

“Absolutely. Some novelists even
write books that way. The more dronish ones.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “You’re the
brain.”

“You’ve got a brain, too, and don’t
forget it. If you develop it, it’ll be around to enrich your life long after
your tits and ass have declared bankruptcy.”

“Switters!” His mother looked up from
her fashion magazine and shook a crimson-nailed finger at him.

“It’s cool,” Suzy assured the older
woman. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s, like, the smartest person
anywhere.” She planted a vigorous kiss that very nearly slid off his cheek and
onto his lips.

“I don’t know about that,” grumbled
Eunice, although whether the source of her uncertainty was Switters’s intellect
or Suzy’s kiss remained unclear.

Cranking up the search engine on the
family computer, they commenced their investigation that very evening,
discovering, to their mutual astonishment, twenty full pages of entries
relating to
Fatima
. They failed to make a dent in the list, however,
because when Suzy noticed that her Tweety Bird wristwatch read ten o’clock, she
insisted that Switters go to bed. He protested energetically. “I was riding
herd on these domesticated electrons before you were potty trained,” he said.
“As much as I loathe computers, I can drive them all night long. I mean it. I’m
good until dawn.”

“No, you’re not,” she responded. “You
need lots of rest and stuff. I’m in charge here. I’m the nurse, and I’m going
to take care of you, no matter what you say.” She switched off the computer.
“We can, like, do this tomorrow.”

“All right, then, Nurse Ratchet. As
long as you’ll come straight home from school.”

She frowned at this but agreed.

“Are you sure you can’t tell your own
family what’s wrong with you?” his mother asked, not for the first time.

“He can’t,” snapped Suzy. “It’s a
governmental secret.”

“That’s correct, Mother. And if you
don’t quit prying, I’m going to suspect you of being in the pay of a foreign
power. I’ll bet Sergi is putting you up to it.”

“Don’t you dare mention that name in
this house,” she said, reddening. Sergi was one of her previous husbands.

Suzy pushed him out of the den. In the
hall she asked, “Switters, there really is something the matter with you, isn’t
there? It’s not some kind of, like, CIA trick?”

Oh, God! Here’s my chance. I can
just give her the whole story and be done with it.
But he didn’t. “It’s no
trick, darling,” he said, agonizing as he said it.

“You promise you can’t stand up and
walk?”

Come on. Tell her the truth. Or
have you worked for the company so long you’re only comfortable when you’re
lying?
He clenched his fists. He bit his tongue. “I promise,” he said.

She rolled him into the bathroom.
“Get ready for bed,” she ordered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Not being in the right frame of mind
for prolonged maintenance, he was already in bed when she returned, bearing a
glass of milk and a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Having had his sweet tooth
shattered by a rifle butt in Kuwait, he’d left her earlier delivery of brownies
virtually untouched on the bedside table, but she pretended not to notice.

Suzy smoothed his covers. Then, very
gingerly, so as not to disturb his “injuries,” she lay down on top of him.
“Here’s your good night kiss,” she said, but instead of one kiss there was a
series, a staccato series, repeatedly stabbing, as it were, his mouth with the
wet pink dagger of her little tongue.

Through the Early American patchwork
quilt, through the floral patterned sheet, he could feel her rosy biological
heat, a smokeless fire that enveloped the vestigial dollhouse and charred the
residual mud pie; a soft, ancient, mindless burning emanating from a source oblivious
to cultural conditioning; that neither knew nor cared that “civilized” girls no
longer married at twelve, that unscrupulous older males might take advantage of
its urgings, or that shrill neurotic voices might rage against it. Broiled by
it, Switters centered himself and lay motionless, except to rest a cautious,
non-probing, non-squeezing, rather avuncular hand lightly on her small, ripe
rump.