Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (30 page)

Switters went back indoors and rolled
about the house for a while, maneuvering around utterly obsolete churns and
spinning wheels and uncomfortable wooden rocking chairs. Were he ever offered a
voyage in a time machine, Colonial America would be far down his list of
preferred destinations, although he suspected that Jefferson, Franklin, and the
lot would be worthy drinking companions, maybe even deserving of C.R.A.F.T.
Club membership, which was not something one could say of a single governmental
leader of the past hundred and fifty years.

In contrast to the harsh pragmatism
of the Early American decor, the contents of his mother’s closets, which he examined
now in some detail, were stylish and luxurious. Hanging there, bereft of the
flesh whose silhouettes they mimicked, were soft, powdery pantsuits, slithery
black cocktail dresses, and matte suede jackets trimmed with lamb, each flying
an inconspicuous but haughty little flag emblazoned with an Italian name (Oscar
de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana) that he’d have recognized if he read
Vogue
or even
Newsweek
instead of
Tricycle
and
Soldier of Fortune
.
Eunice did them justice, too, he had to admit, though he failed to find her, at
fifty-seven, hair in a hennaed bun, face in a brittle tuck, to be as buzzy with
allure as he remembered her mother, Maestra, to be at that age. Dwayne’s
closet, which he also examined, was filled with goofy golfing garb and shiny suits
Switters wouldn’t have worn to a Chiang Mai cockfight.

Gradually he made his way to the door
of Suzy’s room, but although he went so far as to grasp the knob, he just could
not allow himself to violate its sanctity. He’d never been
that
kind of
spy. He sat there for a long time, however. Thinking.

Suzy doesn’t merely want to feel,
she wants to know.
She yearned to concretize the unsubstantial image of the
“real” life that awaited her; to prepare herself, perhaps, for the
transfiguration, the metamorphosis that would split her dreamy cocoon,
discharging her, a wing-damp, unsure butterfly, into the leafy gardens of
wifedom and motherhood. Well, would he not be the perfect teacher? He not only
had the experience, he also had the devotion, the caring. If the male erection
was the compass with which so many women, for better or worse, must get their
bearings in the world, what finer instrument than his own?
Why, if Amelia
Earhart had had my peepee on board. . . .
He recalled Bobby’s story of how,
in olden times, the uncles had initiated—

But no. He couldn’t sell it to his
conscience. The bedroom was not a classroom. There were some skills (if
skill
was the right word) that a person needed to develop, through trial and error,
on their own. To “teach” Suzy about sex, from his well-burnished lectern, would
be to deprive her of the follies and fumbles of teen romance: the embarrassment
and awkwardness, worry and wonder, telltale stains and tangled-up limbs—all the
gawky ecstasies and sticky surprises that jack out of the box of neophyte lust.
What right did he have to streamline that process? What right to teach her
anything?

He asked that question again late in
the afternoon, when, after completing an outline of the Fatima story at the
family computer, he found himself adding to it the following provocation:

The Virgin Mary, in her Lady of
the Rosary guise, appeared to the kids at Fatima six times in 1917. Way back in
1531, she chose Guadalupe, Mexico, for the first stop on her tardy comeback
tour, imprinting her image, so it’s said, on a poor Indian’s poncho and
instructing him to have a church built outside of Mexico City. Next stop,
Paris, three hundred years later (God’s time is not our time), where a novice
spied her twice in a chapel. This time, she wanted a medal to be cast with her
image and regular devotions said to her. She was back in a relative flash in
1858, appearing no less than eighteen times in a grotto down the road at
Lourdes and referring to herself as the Immaculate Conception. She must have liked
the neighborhood because she turned up next before four children in Pontmain,
France, and succeeded in getting another church constructed in her honor. In
1879 she hovered above a village chapel in Ireland; in the 1930s she did
Belgium big time, appearing to various youngsters no fewer than forty-one times
in several locations, referring to herself at Beauraing as the Virgin of the
Golden Heart, and at Banneux as the Virgin of the Poor. It was in Amsterdam
between 1945 and 1959 that she took off the velvet gloves, calling herself the
Lady of All Nations and demanding that her contact petition the pope to grant
her the titles Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate. Starting in 1981, she
touched down in two of the most screwed-up places on earth, Rwanda and Bosnia,
wanting to be known as Mother of the World, no less, and Queen of Peace. And
speaking of bad locations, her image affixed itself to the side of a finance
company office in Florida a couple of years ago, though she didn’t apply for a
loan.

So, my steamy little kumquat, I’m
forced to ask: where has Jesus been during all this? Mary makes multiple
appearances, demands increasing recognition, assumes ever more grandiose
titles, and insists on equal billing as the Co-Redeemer. Yet over those five centuries,
and the fifteen that preceded them, not a peek of Jesus or a peep from him.
What’s going on here? In his time on earth, he didn’t seem all that shy. Notice
how Mary never mentions him in any of her pronouncements? God, yes, but not
Jesus. She herself is hardly mentioned in the Gospels, and on those few
occasions when she does make the scene, Jesus is less than enthusiastic about
her, going so far, in Matthew, I believe, as to snub her, asking, “Who is my
mother?” and answering that anyone who does God’s bidding qualifies as his
mother. Could there be a revenge motif here? Could Jesus be under house arrest,
chained up in his mother’s basement? Does she have something on him, is he
being blackmailed? I suppose we could perceive all this Mary activity as a
natural resurfacing of the feminine principle in society, a welcome reemergence
of the goddess as the dominant religious figure. But might it also signal a
palace coup of the sort that cost the brilliant upstart Lucifer his No. 2
position in Heaven—or else a public airing of a nasty little family feud?

As Switters read, then read again,
the preceding two paragraphs, his forefinger hovered over the
delete
key
like the meatless digit of the Reaper pausing above his black eraser. What
right did he have to provoke her sweet mind, to litter with funky horse
blossoms of doubt the aseptic, uncracked sidewalks of her street of bliss?

“Every right in the world,” he heard
a voice within him say. “Not only a right but a duty.”

Around sunset, as a geranium and satsuma
luminescence turned the adjacent golf course into the playboard of a pinball
machine, an onslaught of nervousness sent Switters to the garage refrigerator
where Dwayne maintained a supply of beer. He drained a can of Budweiser, popped
open a second, stuck a couple extras in the wheelchair saddlebag. Then he
propelled himself about the house some more, grimacing at the hurricane lamps
and clunky tin candlesnuffers. At one point he announced loudly, as if to a
straggling duffer out on the seventeenth hole, “This home has bad
feng shui.
I can sense it.”

He’d had a similar feeling once about
his apartment in Langley, and, as he was later to e-mail Bobby Case (with
apparent embellishment), “I went to call some
feng shui
geomancers to
take care of the problem, but I dialed Sinn Fein by mistake, and a bunch of
Irishmen showed up with automatic weapons.” To which Bobby responded, “You’re
just lucky you didn’t dial Sean Penn.”

As the daylight vanished, his
agitation increased. He pictured banks of halogens winking on at the parochial
school stadium, the zit-bejeweled gladiators (he was one once) lining up for
kickoff; the high, thin squeals from the students in the bleachers, the
coldness and hardness of the narrow boards beneath their buttocks, the shrill
whistle of referees and cheesy deep-fried echo of the P.A. system; the spilled
cola and missquirted mustard, puffs of dust and puffs of quicklime, the
pumped-up adolescent wonder of it all. And then the first quarter drawing to an
end . . . the sophomore cutie stealing away. . . .

Switters had been Siamese-twinning it
most of his life, but for the dichotomy that bedeviled him now he was not quite
prepared. For the spider bite of guilt, yes, but not the ice hook of doubt. One
moment he craved to give her a bath in his semen, to rub it, warm and pearly,
into her navel, her lips, the nipples that in his mind evoked the candy-coated
lug nuts on Cupid’s pink Corvette. The next, he wished simply to kiss her toes.
No, no, not the toes: much too erogenous! To kiss her heel or, better yet, her
left elbow. In its cotton sleeve. To kiss once, lightly, the top of her sweet
head—and then to shield her, with every means at his disposal, from the slings
and eros of adult rage and fortune; to deflect the poison bullets of the “real
world,” which is to say, the marketplace, so that not one would ever blast a
hole in the magic tutu of her childhood.

Damn! Switters had always been a
shade contradictory, but he’d never been neurotic. Like many robust people, in
fact, he held neurosis in contempt. Yet, here he was, a fever flaming in his
veins, a thunder in his pulses; his lungs ballooning, then deflating, his
thoughts all over the map like a fast-food chain. And the alcohol, as was its
evil genius, was only egotizing and adrenalizing matters, making them worse.
Better the silly genius of hemp.

He proceeded to his room, where he
raised a window for ventilation and then lit a joint. Following a husky toke or
two, a semblance of calm was restored. He toked further, nodding, closing his
eyes. Ahhh. His vision of the football game took on a softer focus now. Rather
than a ritual parody of the primate territorial imperative, complete with
nonlethal but often painful violence, colored at its margins with decidedly
sexual overtones, and fouled in recent years by the stink of commerce, it
became . . . well, no, it was still all that, but there was an innocent oomph
about it, too, a playful, high-spirited, savage zest, and he envied Suzy being
there and, moreover, wished he could have been on the field, performing for
her, flattening running backs and cracking wide receivers nearly in half.

Seconds later, he giggled at the
dumbness of that fantasy, and, slumping low in the wheelchair, soon forgot
about the game altogether. Other, seemingly more profound, thoughts took over
his brain, thoughts such as,
To what extent would a given quantity of catnip
have affected quantum mechanics in Schrödinger’s theoretical catbox?
and,
Why
was
C
selected to symbolize the speed of light when
Z
is
obviously the fastest letter in the alphabet?

The chiming of two of Eunice’s three
ridiculously oversize, depressingly ugly grandfather clocks interrupted his
reverie. He thought he counted eight
bongs
, and his wristwatch confirmed
it. Hell’s bells! The first quarter would have ended long ago. Suzy wasn’t
coming. She warned that she might not. She had her own set of fears, including
her kind concern that a physical assertion of their love might compromise his
“delicate condition.”

She wasn’t coming after all. So be
it. It was for the best. He lit another joint and partway through it, realized
he was famished. A classic case of the cannabic munchies. (If manufacturers of
chocolate and peanut butter were half smart, they’d lobby relentlessly for
decriminalization.) He was so hungry he reached under the bed and retrieved the
plates of brownies and cookies he’d hidden there so as not to hurt her
feelings. They were by this time entering the early stages of
fossilization—crusty, dry, and stale—but he devoured them as though they were
bootleg ambrosia.

Sucrose sugars from the baked goods
linked arms, singing, with dextrose sugars from the beer, to form a
near-riotous rabble in his bloodstream, a chemical mob whose march on his
cerebral ramparts was mollified but not diverted by the more gentle,
introspective (though hardly staid) tetrahydro-cannabinols from the marijuana.
Provoked by these energies, he found himself rummaging in the secret
compartment of his crocodile valise for his disk of Broadway hits, and when,
moments later, the sailors’ chorus from
South Pacific
began to belt out
“There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” he was moved to dance.

He rolled to the bed and vaulted up
on it. Dancing on a bed has intrinsic limitations, and his preliminary steps
quickly evolved, or devolved, into ungainly bounces. Rather than fighting it,
he went with it, and by the time “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” from
Oklahoma
blared on (he’d cranked the amps to full volume), he was bounding like a
rambunctious kid on a bedtime trampoline, the fritter-colored curls at the dome
of his skull almost brushing the ceiling. The exertion provided a much-needed
release. His wahoo was rapidly rising.

Midair, during one of the higher
bounces, he thought he heard a voice in the hall exclaim, “Good God! What is
that
sucky
music?”

He landed. Springs depressed, then
recoiled, and without breaking his rhythm, he catapulted ceilingward again, and
as he elevated he saw her. Standing now in the doorway. She’d rouged her mouth,
a bit too thickish, and shadowed her eyes, a shade too bluely, and she was
wearing one of Eunice’s party dresses, a slinky charcoal sheath that he
recognized from his recent inspection of his mother’s wardrobe. It was a
sophisticated little number, but although she and Eunice were approximately the
same height now, it hung loosely on her, its effect anything but chic. It was
Suzy’s objective, apparently, to look womanly and seductive. In actuality, she
looked like a child playing dress-up in her stepmother’s clothing (which, to
some extent, she was), an impression reinforced by the fact that she was
barefoot. To the extent that the effect was comical, it was also overwhelmingly
erotic.