Skinny Legs and All (26 page)

By the end of June, every artist who could afford to, which is to say, every artist who mattered, had left town for Woodstock, Provincetown, or the shores of Maine. The dealers went to the Hamptons. The collectors went to Europe. There were no arty parties, no gallery openings. Artless, or at least, artistless, New York itself went on display, a kinetic sculpture fashioned from taxicabs, steam, and garbage. As the summer wore on, garbage climbing to the sun, steam wisping from each and every armpit, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish homeless mental patients from ordinary citizens driven by stench and humidity to howl in the streets. In the Ansonia apartment, the air conditioner raged like the ghost of Admiral Byrd, but Ellen Cherry hung limp and was often close to whimpering.

One morning Boomer had gone out, ostensibly to check on some shop space that was for rent, only to return within the hour carrying a secondhand trench coat, a couple of yards of nondescript fabric, and a small bag of needles and thread.

“I’m gonna make something,” he’d announced. “I’m not saying it’s art, but it’s something I’ve always had a hankering to see.”

He worked daily, he worked diligently, he worked merrily, whistling as he worked, the way Ellen Cherry used to do.
Used
to do. For now she found that she could not work at all. The more involved Boomer became with his project, his stupid sewing, the more alienated she became from her brushes. And from him.

“What exactly’s eatin’ you, honey?” Patsy asked her.

Ellen Cherry sighed into the heat-sticky phone. “I don’t know, mama. I can’t paint and I can’t fuck and I’m angry all the time. Now I know how a critic must feel.”

While Ellen Cherry stewed, Boomer sewed. He sewed through the day, and he sewed through the night. He sewed through July, and he sewed through August. He sewed five hundred secret pockets into that trench coat, and in each pocket he hid a message, each message encoded in a different code of his own invention. It was the spy coat to end all spy coats, and when it was done, his grin was so wide he could have swallowed a Robert Ludlum paperback without bruising his palate.

Ultima Sommervell returned to Manhattan shortly after Labor Day, whereupon Boomer showed her his spy coat with its five hundred secret pockets with their five hundred cryptic messages in five hundred different codes. Ultima found the spy coat fraught, simply fraught, with social significance. She found it a witty and ingenious commentary on the dangerous schoolboy shenanigans of superpower gamesmanship. She locked the coat in her vault and offered Boomer a one-man show the following autumn. The show would be mounted in her SoHo gallery, where all the action was.

Ellen Cherry took the big news gracelessly. She, in fact, spun on her heel and fled the apartment. She walked to the bank, withdrew a thousand dollars, and flew, without toothbrush or a change of underpants, to Virginia. For two days, she cried on her mother’s shoulder. Then, fortified with Patsy-wisdom, she flew back to New York, prepared not only to accept Boomer’s success (as unfair as it might be) but also to assist him in every way possible during the year that he’d been allotted to prepare for his (undeserved) exhibition.

In her hasty exodus, she had neglected to take a key. When there was no response to her knock, she had to get Raoul to let her into the apartment. Raoul was aware that Boomer had decamped, but he didn’t let on. Keeping time with his fingers to some inaudible rhythm, Raoul just looked at Ellen Cherry as if he could tell that her panties were dirty.

There was no note, no forwarding address, no nothing. Nearly a month went by before she learned that Boomer had rented a loft in the Bowery and purchased a new Ford van. It didn’t take her anywhere near that long to learn that their bank account had been closed.

When at last he turned up at the Ansonia, he was neither sheepish nor defiant. In even tones, and with no more than two or three tugs at his beret, he told her that he was sorry but that her good ol’ welder had found him some other fish that he must fry and that the aroma of their frying obviously had been making her sick. She could only agree, but suggested that she might grow accustomed to the smell and that she probably could be of service to him in filleting the fish. “Even if one of ’em is Ultima?” he asked. She bit her lip and shook her head no, but inquired if there might also be room in the pan for her. “If you shear off some of that hair,” he joked. She smiled, but she was still biting her lip.

In the seasons that followed, they made several tenuous attempts at reconciliation. Over the winter and into spring, they “dated,” enjoying each other’s physical presence on the dance floor and in bed but rarely focusing on their problem. Perhaps Ellen Cherry was just too ashamed of her feelings to air them. As for Boomer, well, he had a new life—a life that was supposed to have been
hers
—and he was as protective of it as she was resentful. In their superficial conversations, the subject of art was strictly taboo, and when once they did broach it, in early May, the result was a bitter quarrel that put an end to the dating, sending Ellen Cherry to Isaac & Ishmael’s in search of a job and Boomer back to his Bowery loft in pursuit of something that scared him (or puzzled him) so badly he simply had to lock horns with it. And never, not once, did he reveal to her that the five hundred messages in the five hundred secret pockets all said the exact same thing in five hundred separate codes. They said, “Randolph Petway III loves Ellen Cherry Charles.”

SIX MONTHS LATER . . .

The invitation to Boomer Petway’s one-man show Ellen Cherry ripped into tiny pieces, which she let sift into a pile on the coffee table. When she threw herself upon the sofa to have a good cry, half of the pieces in the pile turned into snowflakes, half turned into sparks. The sparks melted the snowflakes, the snowflakes extinguished the sparks—and in the dynamics of their interaction, in the dialogue between snowflake and spark, in the exchange of energy between melt and extinguish, a scrap of wolfmother wallpaper was formed.

The scrap was as silver-white as birch bark, it was tattered and curled at its ends like birch bark, and when a sudden draft blew through the tatters and curls, it made a sound like a war canoe moving downstream, like kites fighting, like shadow puppets mating, like a magician’s sleeve disgorging live doves and aces, like a pregnant scarecrow dragging her dugs through the corn, or more exactly, like veils being stripped from the gyrating body of a dancing girl and flung with studied abandon to the temple floor.

Because of her bitter sobbing, Ellen Cherry heard none of this, and by the time she got things out of her system and extricated herself from her sofa of silly sorrow, the noisy scraps had turned back into pieces of shredded invitation. These she scooped up and carried to the garbage bag beneath the sink, where, without looking, she sent them fluttering down upon a surprised creature at the bottom of the sack, as if she had unintentionally sponsored a ticker tape parade to honor a cockroach astronaut: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind, eight itty-bitty speedy little steps for the first stowaway to the moon.”

At work the next morning, Ellen Cherry seemed to be walking around with her head in a cud of licorice gum. So dark and sticky was her mood that Abu and Spike postponed their tennis date in order to keep watch on her. They sat at the corner table sipping sugary tea and conversing about Jerusalem, but their habitually vigilant eyes, different in magnitude and hue, monitored her every move—not that she had to make that many moves to oversee a luncheon crowd that could have fit into a rubber life raft and still have left room for the suppressed flatulence of a diplomat.

It had been a fairly rough week in the environs of Jerusalem, a city that never has been a tub of laughs, a rough week for Arabs and Jews alike. When Israeli troops used excessive force to break up a nationalistic demonstration at a West Bank university, a Palestinian student retaliated by lobbing a fire bomb at a passing car, killing a woman passenger and critically burning her husband and three young children. Jewish settlers in the area responded with a vandalizing rampage through a Palestinian refugee camp that was already up to its brown eyes in misery.

“I’m thinking it’s the stones,” said Spike. “So many stones in the Middle East, already! When you got that many rocks, it’s too easy to pick one up and throw it at your neighbor. In olden times, everybody bounced rocks off other people’s noodles. Nowadays, Molotov cocktails they throw. Throw, throw, throw. It’s a tradition, this throwing.”

“From stones to Molotov cocktails to nuclear missiles. Yes,” agreed Abu, “it is a sad but logical progression. You know, the Jews’ most sacred place in Jerusalem was erected upon the Moriah
rock
. Today, we Arabs’ most sacred place is called ’the Dome of the
Rock
.’ And Jesus reportedly said of Peter, ’Upon this
rock
I will build my church.’ Could we say that in matters of religion we all have rocks in our heads?”

“Hoo boy. By me you could say that.”

“Do you ever wonder how the history of the region might have differed if its hills had been forested and green? With time and effort, a man can fashion a weapon from the wood of a tree, but a rock is a weapon to begin with. Palestine is nature’s own arsenal. No, Jerusalem is not caught between a rock and a hard place. Jerusalem
is
a rock and a hard place.”

“Jerusalem is getting it in the neck from geology, okay. But, Abu, you tell me: there is a more beautiful city somewhere? You tell me you wouldn’t be full from joy what if this morning you could walk down its streets? Ha!”

Spike received no argument there. “The light, Spike, remember the light?” Unconsciously, Abu tapped his radiant nose. “We can complain about rocks until the sheep come home, but it is the golden light of Jerusalem that holds us, that draws us back. Ah, to live in that glow is a religious experience all by itself. No wonder our brothers go crazy there. Even you and I have been made a little crazed by it. It is almost too intense for the soul to bear.”

While the proprietors of the I & I were thus engaged, Ellen Cherry went about her duties in a solitary gloom. Every droop, every quiver, every scowl, every silent sigh of hers was registered by the two men, and when at last her shift was complete, they summoned her to their table.

“Do you hear, darlink, what the new dishwasher wants to be called? An ’underwater ceramics engineer,’ already! Abu doesn’t believe his ears. He doesn’t realize what a big shot he used to be in the kitchen. Ha!”

Ellen Cherry tried to laugh, but her chuckle was as thin as the cream on powdered milk. They sat her down, poured her a glass of Kuwaiti wine, and insisted that she explain why her aura looked like the ring around a coal miner’s collar. She told them everything.

Without hesitation, Spike Cohen assumed personal responsibility for her suffering. He patted her hand, patted her shoulder, reached down where her legs were crossed and patted the shoe upon the foot that she was dangling. “Now that you tell me the reason behind your sourpuss, I’m going to be bringing the smiles to you, darlink. Plain talk: friends in the art business you need, friends in the art business I got! Okay? We’re talking wholesale, we’re talking retail. I’m getting for you your own gallery in what to be showing your nice pictures.”

Abu Hadee was slower to respond. When he did, he said, “My dear, I think that you are looking at this all wrong. In regard to your estranged husband’s exhibition, you really ought to be more positive.”

“But, Mr. Hadee, it isn’t fair!”

“And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe—and go on about our tasks. . . .”

“Abu, you know from nothing. Such injustice—”

“Quiet, Spike. What does Boomer’s success, or lack of it, have to do with Ellen Cherry’s art? Forgive me, but she reminds me of those crybabies—professional athletes and entertainers are the worst—who are always whining because somebody else in the same position is earning more money than they are. Greed compounded by egomania. It should not concern us what rewards others may reap.”

“Okay, but it isn’t a question of Boomer getting more recognition or a better show than me. I haven’t got recognition or a show at all.”

“Only last week you informed me that you have hardly painted since you arrived in New York. Perhaps you need to pay less attention to Boomer’s business and concentrate on your own. Rejoice that someone about whom you care has done well. If his work is inferior and undeserving, then let that inspire you to do even better. Take it as a challenge, not an insult. As my father used to say, ’Do not turn slights into bedsores.’ A little poem, eh? Rejoice! Paint pictures! Paint, perhaps, something to cover this affliction of bamboo that causes our Middle Eastern restaurant to resemble the hut where Confucius composed fortune cookies. Scenes of Jerusalem would fit the bill.”

Between the sympathy of Cohen and the exhortations of Hadee, Ellen Cherry gathered enough traction to spin her tires out of the mud. She thanked her employers, squeezed them, and then set a course for Fifth Avenue, where she suspected the example of Turn Around Norman might give a jet assist to her creakily rising mood. Could she have imagined what other examples were lurking there, there’s no predicting at what speeds or in what directions her mood might have spun.

As it was, passing the Japanese restaurants along East Forty-ninth Street, she was reminded that disposable diapers had been invented by Eskimos. It was true. They made them out of seaweed.
Someone with a good seaweed supplier ought to open a combination diaper service and sushi bar
, she thought.
It would be only appropriate for the menu to stress bottom fish, but good taste might preclude the listing of yellowtail.

SPOON WAS THE FIRST
to recognize her. “Look!” she squealed. “Look there! It’s
her
.”