Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (43 page)

“No, on the contrary, it struck me as
rather tasty. But, then, I have an appetite for bold gestures and burned
bridges.” To himself he added,
And blue nudes
. “I don’t much savor pain,
however, and I detected a sharp hickory of hurt in the fumes from your little
barbecue.”

She looked him over slowly, as if
seeing him in a new light. “You are not an entirely stupid fellow,” she said,
and she smiled.

“Thanks, Sister,” he replied. “Your
own mental prowess has also proven to be significantly superior to that of the
average pecan. Nevertheless, what I am most taken with are your eyes.”

“Ooh-la-la,” she protested, brushing
her fingers across her lids. “Tonight they are ruined. But as a rule, they
are
my nicest feature.”

How refreshing,
he thought.
A
woman who knows how to accept a compliment.
“It’s like they were congealed
from nitroglycerin and mother’s milk. I can’t tell if they’re about to nurture
me or crack my safe. And your mouth has a sneaky habit of getting them to do
most of your smile-work.”

“Yes, I admit it. I have such a round
face that my father told me when I make a big grin, I look like a, how do you
say, jack-in-the-lantern.”

“Nonsense,” he objected. “I know my
pumpkins, and you’re not of their race. If your cheeks are a little full, it’s
because they’re packed with secrets and mysteries, like the moon.”

Domino snorted, and her snort sounded
surprisingly like Maestra’s
Heh!
—an exclamation that usually suggested
that what he’d just uttered was a load of bunkum, though a not uninteresting
load of bunkum as loads of bunkum go. “I warned you, Mr. Switters, don’t be
trying to butter me off.” She then left the room so abruptly he wondered if she
might actually be peeved.

When she returned the next morning,
however, she wore a starched white dress, an affable aspect—and a sprig of
orange blossoms behind her ear.

Switters, for his part, was freshly
shaved, brushed, and dressed in a yeast-colored linen suit (the one he’d soaked
in the landing on Jonah’s beach) over a black T-shirt with the discreet
C.R.A.F.T. Club emblem above the left pectoral. The cologne that he liked to
call Jungle Desire, but which, in fact, was simply Old Spice, had been splashed
recklessly about his face and neck. He sat, for the first time in more than a
week, in his starship, and she seated herself on the stool opposite him.

“Mmm. Mr. Switters. You clean up very
nice.”

“Don’t be trying to butter me off.”

She didn’t mind that he mocked her
but, rather, seemed amused by it, though she put on an insulted face. He liked
it that she was amused, and he liked it that she pretended otherwise. There was
something of Maestra in her, and something of Suzy, as well, but he didn’t
dwell on those similarities. No heart-shaped blip could be said to have formed
on his radar screen. Sister Domino was as charming as she was kind, as fresh as
she was wise, but she was too old and too religious, and, besides, he’d be gone
in two or three days: whenever the supply truck showed up. Meanwhile, he had an
industrial-strength curiosity to satisfy.

“This woman you call Masked Beauty—”

“Yes,” Domino interrupted. “We should
begin with her, because everything that we are in this place is a result of
her. I’m unsure what you know of nuns. . . .”

“Well,
nun
comes out of Egypt,
an old Coptic Christian word meaning
pure
.”

“There’s much disagreement over that,
but I’m pleased and impressed that you’ve connected the nun to the Middle East,
to the desert. That’s very important to us here. But let me go on to Masked
Beauty, who is our founder and leader, and who, in the secular realm, also
happens to be my aunt. Before I can say much about her, however, I must say a
little about the famous French painter, Henri Matisse.”

Like the helmeted heads of an
itty-bitty army springing from the trenches, goosebumps appeared along the
length and breadth of Switters’s epidermis, where they marched in place, as if,
intent on pillage, they were preparing to advance on his brain.

Although Domino might have been
loath to make such a claim, Switters gathered from her description of Matisse
that he owed much of his greatness as an artist and as a man to the fact that
he was simultaneously epicurean and pious, hedonistic and devout; that he made
little or no distinction between his love of wine, women, and song and his love
of God—an attitude that struck Switters as entirely sensible.

At any rate, as Domino’s account
went, Matisse, in the early 1940s, had painted several large pictures of his
nurse at the time, a Dominican novice named Sister Jacques. Matisse loved to
paint the contours of the female body, lush, rhythmic volumes that were shown
to their best aesthetic advantage when undisguised by garb. Naturally, Sister
Jacques could not pose nude. However, knowing the genius to be honorable,
ailing, and elderly (in 1943, Matisse was seventy-four years old), and hoping
to persuade him to decorate a chapel (which he did for her in 1948 at Vence),
she didn’t mind encouraging another girl to sit for him.

For generations, Domino’s family had
been deeply involved in both French art and the Roman Catholic Church, so when
Sister Jacques set out to find Matisse a suitable model, the logical first
choice was that family’s voluptuous seventeen-year-old Croetine, the girl who
would, at Domino’s birth slightly less than a decade later, become her aunt.

Switters whistled. “Well, boil my bunny
in carrot oil!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe it.”

“You can’t believe
what
?”

“That I’d wander into the middle of
goddamn nowhere and stumble upon my actual, original, flesh-and-blood blue
nude.”

“Matisse painted a variety of blue
nudes,” she cautioned, “dating back to 1907. And what do you mean,
yours
?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine.
But she’s the one, all right. You’ve got to let me meet her.”

Domino would agree to nothing until
he’d explained, and even after he had, she informed him that Masked Beauty was
not receiving visitors. Moreover, while she found the blue nude coincidence
remarkable—Domino couldn’t help but be amazed that he’d grown up around that
particular painting—she saw no need for Switters to get so carried away. Maybe
she was right. More than she might realize. A man immobilized by a
pyramid-headed Indian’s curse was not a man who ought to be overreacting to a
dollop of synchronicity, even when it involved an object of much sentimental
wahoo.

“Okay,” he said. “Forget it. I’ve been
ill. Get on with your story. Excuse me. I mean,
please
get on with your
story.
S’il vous plaît.
” At the same time, however, he was vowing to
himself that he would not leave the oasis without having met Masked Beauty, and
thinking, also, what a kick it was to be sitting there listening to the blue
nude’s niece.

Croetine posed for Matisse for more
than two years, at Cimiez and later at Vence, and having fallen in love with
the artist’s paintings, photographs, and souvenirs of Morocco, made plans to
accompany him there as soon as the war was over. When V-E Day arrived, however,
Matisse was not hardy enough to travel, and at the encouragement if not
outright insistence of her uncle, a well-known archbishop, Croetine made the
decision to enter a convent.

Because of her background as a nude
model, Croetine was forced to spend an extraordinarily long time as a novice
before being allowed to proceed to final vows. Her physical beauty was so
unnerving to the Church fathers that her uncle advised her to find ways to make
her face and figure more godly, which, assuming that God is inclined toward
plainness, she did, stopping just short of grotesque disfiguration. By the time
she was finally permitted to formally “marry” Christ, an ovule of rebellion had
been planted deep in the sod of her sanctimony.

The solemn vows were still rippling
in her saliva when she began to petition for assignment to Morocco. Not wishing
to be too accommodating, they sent her to Algeria, instead. She worked in a
mission there and liked everything about it; liked it so much, in fact, that
her mother superior feared she was going native, and, citing such disturbing
activities as “long solitary walks in the desert,” had her transferred back to
France. It was in Paris in the mid-to late fifties that she formulated and
promoted her ideas for the Order of St. Pachomius.

“Since I have a snakelike fascination
with examples of extreme human behavior,” said Switters, “I really ought to
have paid more attention to the lives of the saints. But I confess I’ve never
heard of good St. Pachomius.”

“Pachomius was an Egyptian Christian
ascetic. Around the year 320, he founded the first religious community for
women, the very first convent. He built it out in the desert. So, Pachomius is
the father of all nuns, and nuns had their beginnings in the desert. Today, the
Middle Eastern desert countries are Islamic, and while there are small
Christian minorities in these lands, those are almost exclusively Eastern
Orthodox. It was my aunt’s idea, back when she was Sister Croetine, that an
order of desert nuns be formed that would both honor St. Pachomius and give the
Roman Church at least a token presence in the region. Pretty smart, don’t you
agree?”

The Vatican had agreed. Up to a
point. Which is to say, it liked the general idea but was sorry that it had
come from Croetine, who not only had once posed for naked pictures but who, on
at least two occasions, had openly expressed reservations about Rome’s
prohibition against birth control. The Church never rejected the Pachomius
idea, it simply dragged its velvet slippers when it came to implementing it.

“Then, something happened. I can’t
tell you what it was. It was in 1961, and Croetine’s uncle—my great-uncle—had
been appointed to a cardinalship and was then stationed at the Vatican. He had
come into the possession of an item—a document, let us say—that he wished to
conceal in the safest way possible. So, our cardinal used his influence with
Pope John the Twenty-third to get the Order of St. Pachomius approved. Quarters
were procured for it in Jordan. Croetine was named as its acting abbess, and
when she went to the desert, she took the cardinal’s secret document with her
to safekeep it there.”

“What kind of document?”

Domino shook her head, causing her
cheeks to wobble like puddings on a pushcart.

“Does she still have it? Are you
privy to it?”

“You’re pretty cotton-picking nosy,
Mr. Agent Man.”

He touched her wrist. “You know,
Domino”—it was difficult to call her “Sister” when she was in white lace and
orange blossoms—”you know, Domino, I hate to have to tell you this, you trying
so hard to be hip American and all, but the euphemistic expression,
cotton-picking,
left the idiom about the time you left Philadelphia. Or even sooner. Nobody
says
cotton-picking
anymore.”

Domino looked as if a scorpion had
stung her, and Switters felt as low and venomous as any one of those arachnids.
However, she quickly recovered her composure. “If
I
say it,” she
announced haughtily, “then somebody still says it.”

And as she took a sip of tea before
resuming her story, Switters thought,
Now here’s a woman who would stick to
your ribs.

When it had been proposed that
Abbess Croetine be permitted to personally choose the nuns who’d serve with her
in Jordan, one prelate objected on the grounds that she might stock the new
order with those who shared her radical views. “Of course she will,” said
another, “and what better way to get them out of our hair.” The area of Jordan
where the convent was to be located was not only remote but also dangerous.
Moreover, it was chartered as an
enclosed
convent, one in which the
sisters, fully isolated from the outside world, would be expected to seek their
salvation and that of others through a regimen of worship, prayer, and
contemplation, rather than providing health care, education, or social
services.

For several years, while they
adjusted to the enclosure and the climate, the Pachomians stuck to that
blueprint, but eventually Croetine and her twenty-two hand-picked sisters
began—through epistolary campaigns and journal articles—to take public issue
with the Holy See’s inflexible stand against birth control. From the peeling
wastes east of Az-Zarq¯a, there came a faint but persistent cry, a cry to dam
the flood tides of semen, to leash the sperm packs running wild in the sheets,
to zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt, to garrote
the gullible glorification of gamete, forsake the foolish fidelity to
fecundity, and wrest free from a woman’s shoulders the boa of spermatozoa that
the Church had draped there like a weighty shawl and that pulled her ever
downward into sickness and servitude, while at her skirts her too-many children
went hungry, went bad, or just went.

“Rome tolerated it for quite a
while,” said Domino, “but after Croetine’s uncle died in 1981, they finally
erupted against her.”

“Naturally,” said Switters. “Isn’t it
the sacred duty of the Catholic masses to increase geometrically the number of
true believers in the world, just as it’s a secular duty to provide merchandisers
with more and more little consumers?”