Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (57 page)

Later, when the truck had gone and
he’d come out of hiding, Switters said, “First purchases I’ve made in more than
five months, and in that time not one person has tried to hypnotize, charm,
cajole, mislead, or frighten me into buying their goods or services. You can’t
appreciate how clean that feels.” No, having lived so long in an ad-free zone,
she couldn’t really appreciate it, and she wondered if maybe he was not a bit
of a tightwad. On the other hand, he had offered to pay what she considered an
exorbitant sum for a pinch of hashish if only she would approach the driver
about it. She refused.

The mail delivery also contained an
unsigned postcard, addressed to Abbess Croetine and postmarked Lisbon.
Everybody guessed it was from Fannie, though they couldn’t remember ever having
seen a sample of her handwriting. Its message read, in badly misspelled French,
Your secret is safe with me. For now!

Something was sorely troubling
Masked Beauty, and it very well could have been that mysterious postcard. Or,
it could have been that their dedicated daily tours of Net sites simply were
not bearing fruit or producing results to her liking. More than likely, she was
upset both by the card and the unsatisfactory data. In any case, she began
gradually curtailing her appearances beside the computer and seemed, during
that October, to have initiated an acceleration of the aging process. Her
complexion, which heretofore had been unnaturally smooth, showed signs of
cracking. Her pale eyes faded further, and her posture, formerly as upright
with natural dignity as a flagpole with pompous sentiment, commenced to slump,
giving the impression that, like Skeeter Washington, she’d spent too many
nights hunched over a piano. Switters suspected that computers themselves could
cause premature aging; and, obviously, the abbess had long been subjected to
the tugs of earthly gravity, but something else was weighing on her, wrinkling
her and pulling her down. Only her wart seemed unchanged and unaffected, a clod
of red mud from the mean fields of Mars.

As second-in-command at the convent,
Domino must have shared Masked Beauty’s every concern, yet she struck Switters
as more radiant, more vivacious than ever. It would be easy to credit love, and
maybe that’s where credit was due, but neither she nor Switters was the type to
let themselves be made over by Cupid. Undoubtedly, they were delighted, even
thrilled by their amorous bonding, each thoroughly intrigued with the other,
yet they were suspicious of the affair as well, and tended to regard it with a
skeptical, sometimes mocking eye.

While they displayed no affection in
public, their affair was quickly common knowledge, and some of the sisters,
most particularly the two Marias, were more than a little disapproving. As for
Bobby Case, he was informed only that Switters had postponed for a month his
return to the Amazon. Nevertheless, Bobby ventured a fairly accurate guess as
to the reason for the delay, and he chided Switters for thinking with his
little head instead of his big one. Bobby also chose that moment to transmit a
photograph of his current girlfriend, an Okinawan cutie who looked not a day
over fifteen. The fact that Domino was old enough to be the girl’s mother
(almost, under the right circumstances, her grandmother), seemed not to faze Switters,
if it registered on him at all.

Every night between nine and ten, he
leaned his stilts against the tower’s adobe wall and climbed the long ladder to
what he had christened the Rapunzel Suite. There, he rolled onto the carpet,
propped his feet on a cylindrical pillow, and, watching the stars slide by like
lighted portholes in a luxury liner, awaited Domino’s arrival. She would appear
promptly at ten, never out of breath from the climb, pull her chador over her
head, and snuggle in naked beside him. Unlike some women he’d known, she could
shed her clothing without shedding her mystery.

It had been his experience that women
of a certain age often tended to let themselves go. They became lax and dowdy.
Switters supposed he couldn’t blame them: nobody had a greater disdain for
maintenance than he. Undoubtedly, some of their frumpiness could be attributed
to sheer laziness, to frustration, and to capitulation: they had given up on
themselves, given up on life. All too often, however, they had simply been worn
down, exhausted by having to serve too many children in addition to the
helpless golfing goobers to whom they were bound by law. Was it because she’d
been neither a harried wife and mother nor a steely career-chasing spinster
that Domino’s spark continued to glow? Was it because she’d never compromised
herself in the desperate, always illusional quest for security? He didn’t know.
He didn’t very much care. “Never look a gift shoppe in the mouth” was his
motto. Whatever she’d been like as a young woman, he suspected she had grown
increasingly mysterious and alluring with age. She referred to herself as a
“born-again virgin,” and one night near the end of his October extension, he
learned that she meant it literally.

She asked him if he celebrated
Christmas, and he answered that there were very few days on the calendar that
he wouldn’t celebrate, if given half a reason. She protested that Christmas was
special, it being the presumed birthday of Jesus Christ—or was that one more
thing in which he didn’t believe?

“Um, well, it’s like this, Domino:
I’ve always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the
world. Okay? That’s the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that
child’s purity is corrupted by society, that’s the meaning of the Crucifixion
story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its
surrogate, he’s being born and put to death again and again, over and over,
every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the
twenty-fifth of December.”

She pondered that for a good long
while, then eventually changed the subject. Soon after that, they were kissing,
as was their custom, and when she turned aside his efforts to open her legs, a
rejection that also had become routine, she—again, as usual—seized hold of the
bulge in his panda-bear shorts. By this time, their behavior seemed almost
scripted.

Obviously, he wanted something more,
but he neither pressured her nor complained. The French say that the best part
of an affair is going up the stairs. Desire is almost always more thrilling
than fulfillment. In all likelihood, he was caught up in the drawn-out
yearning, in the kind of innocent nasty intimacy, the Suzyness, if you will, of
their gropings, so when she inquired if he was content with her manual
manipulations, he replied only that she was amazingly adept at them. “I feel
like a baton in a homecoming parade,” he said.

“I probably should not admit this to
you,” she said, lowering her long lashes, “but in high school in Philadelphia,
I was—”

“A drum majorette?”

“A
what
? Oh? No, not that. I
was a one-woman petting zoo. Every boy in school was crazy to stick their
fingers in the sexy French pie, and I cheerfully accommodated a great many of
them. It did not take me long to learn how to please them without—how do they
call it?—going all the way. Only Mr. Frederick, my basketball teacher, ever
fucked me. Just once. I felt so guilty about it, this married man twice my age,
that I—”

He kissed her eyelids. “You don’t
need to spill these kind of beans.” Something about it was making him
uncomfortable, even as it titillated him.

“But you’ve been so patient. I really
must explain. When we moved back to France, I threw myself with whole heart
into the arms of the Church. It was not just from girlish guilt, I want you to
know. All my life I had loved Christ. And Mary. Especially Mary. I won’t bore
you with details, but one thing led to another, and about the time that I
decided to take up the cloth, I learned how my aunt came to have that wart on
her nose. That gave me my own idea. I began to pray for the reinstatement of my
virginity. Crazy, no? Such a silly girl. But I prayed and prayed. For years.
And after a long while—it grew back.”

“Grew back? You mean your
maidenhead?”

“My hymen. Yes. God gave it back to
me. It is not an illusion. I have medical proof. More than one doctor has
examined me and pronounced me complete. Okay, big cotton-picking deal! It’s
nothing but a fold of mucous membrane . . .”

“A thin sliver of sashimi.”

“But as slight and expendable as it
may be, it is my tangible link to Mary. And because of Mary’s unique oneness
with humanity, which is her greatest attribute and appeal, it is a physical
link, also, to the loving humanism that she represents. And that—that tiny tab of
tissue . . .”

“That petal from a salty rose.”

“. . . is further proof of the power
of prayer. To lose it for a second time, to squander a miracle, would be a
major, dramatic thing for me. To permit that—that little . . .”

“Nub of translucent bacon.”

“. . . that petite . . .”

“Paper tiger that guards the pearl
pot.”

“. . . to be pierced by even the
finger of a man less important to me than my sacred vocation . . . well, it
would be unacceptable.”

In the unlikely event that Switters
needed a reminder that the world was a woo-woo place, Domino’s story of cherry
resurrection would have filled the requirement. After taking a moment or two to
absorb it, and thinking it wise not to ask what kind of man might possibly be
as important to her as her sacred vocation, he clasped the hand that continued
to clasp his now somewhat droopy member and asked, “
This
, however, is
acceptable?”

“I don’t believe Almighty God is
coincé
.
A prude. Didn’t he design these bodies for us to enjoy? Mary is said to have
remained always celibate, a virgin
in partu
; yet she and Joseph lived
together in wedlock. She would have had to do
something
to relieve his
sexual tension.”

The image of Blessed Mother Mary as a
hand-job artist, to use the coarse vernacular, was a bit startling, yet he was
willing to expand the notion. Again, he squeezed her grip. “There are other
options, you know; other, uh, practices in which they could have indulged.” He
was pleased to observe that he could still lobster her up.

Domino admitted that there were said
to be other, uh, practices. Especially in the Middle East. Then, after a short
pause, she returned to the subject of Christmas.

“Just like Masked Beauty, I love and
respect the desert. It’s the place where I feel closest to my breath and to the
breath of God. The only time I’m discontent out here in the wilderness is at
Christmas. I miss then so much the lights and the families and the cheer and
the snow.” She talked about annual trips into the Alleghenies to cut a tree for
their Pennsylvania house, about window displays in Philadelphia and Paris, the
crowds, chocolate shops, candlelight masses at Notre Dame, and ice skating at
Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. There was something, Switters noticed, very childlike
about her as she reflected upon the joys of past Noëls.

For some reason, she expected the
coming holiday, the Christmas that was eight weeks away, to be particularly
lonely and glum. Masked Beauty would arrange a lovely service, she always did,
but this year even she seemed drained of energy and joy. Maybe it was the
excommunication, maybe their financial situation, or maybe age had simply
caught up with the blue nude, for she seemed in a blue funk. The Marias were
getting old, too; Fannie was gone, and up to who knows what, and ZuZu and Bob
were in a world of their own. Ah, but if Switters were at the oasis! If he were
there, Domino knew he would find a way to make their bare desert Christmas as
festive as the Champs-Élysées. For all of them, but especially for her.
Certainly, he had his own agenda, he needed quite literally to get back on his
feet, she appreciated that, but hadn’t Masked Beauty’s experience, as well as
Domino’s own holy “wart,” shown him what prayer could accomplish? And anyway, it
was only eight more weeks. Of course, he might be intent on spending the season
with his grandmother, and . . .

She was getting slightly worked up,
and Switters was enjoying listening to her tizzy. Misinterpreting his silence,
she thought the moment had come to play her ace. “If you will spend the Noël
with me,” she whispered conspiratorially, as if the stars had ears, “I will do
something special for you.”

Misinterpreting her offer, he said,
“Are you trying to bribe me?”

She smiled. “I will open up for you
something only thirteen people on the earth—”

“Thirteen? That’s quite a lot.
Listen, honey cake, if you wanted to open the pearly gates for me out of
affection, or even out of wanton lust, I’d gratefully accept. But as payment
for helping you fend off holiday depression . . .”

“You imbecile!” She rolled away from
him. “
Imbécile
. You think for to have a Bing Crosby Christmas I would
sacrifice my—I forget all your poetic names for it. No, jerko, I was talking
about something altogether else.”

“Calm down. You’re losing your
English.”

She did calm down. She even laughed.
Sailor Boy would have approved. “It’s true, I suppose, that if you delay your
departure, I might eventually find myself willing to experiment with one or
more of those ‘other practices’ about which you were referring, but my bribe
happens to be just this: on Christmas Eve, I will open up for your eyes the
secret document that it has been the Pachomians’ fate to conceal and protect.”