Skinny Legs and All (45 page)

“Jezebel. Jezebel. Painted Queen of Israel. I am praising thee, O Queen of Israel. Whore of the Golden Calf. Strumpet of Baal. Jezebel. Slut of Samaria. Our queen whom the dogs are eating. The watercourse of the Jews is flowing through thee. Jezebel. My Queen. Whose daughter is ruling in Jerusalem. From whose womb is pouring the House of David. Mmm. Jezebel. Priestess of Fornication. Mmm. Queen of Spades. Queen of Tarts. O Jezebel, you are my queen, I exalt thee and praise thy sandals.”

On and on in that manner until the guard clasped his crucifix and fled to the street.

On and on in that manner until, blocks away, Conch Shell and Painted Stick were drawn to their rusty window grate as if a magic magnetism was in the air.

On and on in that manner until Ellen Cherry’s new shoes were launched into the river of life, amidst a blind boogie-woogie of tadpoles.

ON THE LIST OF
the world’s greatest inventions, the mirror is surprisingly high. As invention goes, the genesis of mirrors didn’t exactly require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond-surface, made portable and refined. Yet, because it is consulted with such frequency and anticipation by the three billion souls who animate our ball of clay, consulted almost as if it were a powerful deity that can grant favors or take them away; because, whereas most matter absorbs light, the mirror returns light to the world (it arrests light but does not book it, releasing it on its own recognizance); because it also returns, however briefly and superficially, the individual identity that people are prone to surrender to the orthodoxy of the state and its stern gods; because it never fails to provide us with someone to love and someone to hate; the mirror, on the list of great inventions, is rated higher than the thermos bottle, though not quite as high as room service.

“I realize, sir,” said Can o’ Beans to the mirror, “that the angle of reflection is always equal to the angle of incidence, but
why
? Can you explain it?”

“?ti nialpxe uoy . . .”

“And a further thing, Mr. Mirror,” the can went on. “Since you reflect chaos and instability as objectively as you reflect order, since you reflect the novelty and variety that humankind’s institutions seem designed to suppress and deny, are you not a dangerous agent of truth? I mean, I know that magicians employ you in their trickery, but isn’t uncompromising realism your forte? If humans erect institutions to conceal the unruly aspects of their own minds, aren’t you mirrors sort of like holes in the fortress walls? Are you not signposts pointing away from rationality and standardization? Because you chaps show it
all
—good and evil, beauty and ugliness, balance and disarray—with equal emphasis. Or am I making you out to be subversive when actually you’re only blasé? No offense intended, sir, in either case.”

“.esac rehtie ni, ris, dednetni . . .”

Oh, it was pointless trying to hold a civil conversation with a mirror. No matter what anybody said to them, they just turned it around.

This particular mirror, the badly scratched one that leaned against a dank wall in the cellar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, had once been a fixture in a men’s toilet upstairs off the apse. In its heyday, it had held in its flat hands many famous faces. Politicians, tycoons, Broadway stars. John F. Kennedy, Truman Capote, Rudolf Valentino, and countless others as glamorous or mighty. Now, alas, it reflected a can of pork ’n’ beans. And a sorry can of beans it was, too; a misshapen, savagely scarred plop of metal from which a few scraps of label hung like tassels from a burlesque queen’s nips.

If the bean tin was dismayed by its image, it did not let on. In fact, it seemed upbeat and full of itself. The reason for its lofty spirits, despite its pitiful condition, lay in its knowledge that four or five portraits of it existed, splendid oil paintings that captured it in its prime. “What other bean can has been preserved thus for posterity?” Can o’ Beans asked rhetorically. “And should my portrait lack the glitter, the chic of traditional society portraiture, so much the better. I am a modern, proletarian icon, and it is fitting that I should be depicted in a brash and modernist style.”

In the weeks since he/she had learned of his/her portraits, Can o’ Beans had gone to the mirror time and time again, whereas previously he/she had avoided his/her reflection altogether. “It doesn’t matter anymore that I’m a wreck,” he/she told the looking glass. “I’ve been immortalized.” Then, because he/she was sensitive, he/she would add, “So buck up, dear fellow, and forget your cracks. You, too, may be resurrected in some unexpected way.”

Like Spoon, Can o’ Beans believed that Ellen Cherry’s decision to paint them was indicative of some special insight, some auspicious affinity. “If we can’t turn to Miss Charles,” he/she said, “then I daresay we can’t turn to anyone.”

Dirty Sock didn’t buy it for an instant. He was impressed neither by news of the paintings nor by Spoon’s description of how Ellen Cherry had held her up and studied her with incredible concentration. “The bimbo’s just touched in the ol’ potato,” said Dirty Sock. “All artists are touched in their potatoes.”

Ordinarily, Can o’ Beans might have launched into a discourse on the notorious thin line between genius and madness, a boundary as much in dispute as any in the Middle East, but that day he/she had had a different point to make. “On the other hand, I fail to comprehend why our venerable leaders persist in believing that human assistance is desirable or necessary. With all respect to Miss Charles and Mr. Norman, it’s always seemed iffy to me, and now that Mr. Stick has found us a route to the sea . . .”

“Ever since he whipped that junkie’s ass, ol’ Stick’s been acting like he’s touched in
his
potato.”

Ordinarily, Can o’ Beans might have complained about the stocking’s slang, pointing out that a potato was a vegetable and nothing else, a truism to which Dirty Sock might have responded, “Guess it takes one to know one.” On that day, however, pedagoguery gave way to concern. “True, Mr. Stick has devoted several weeks to the contemplation of his all too manlike deed,” the can agreed, “but he’s apparently resolving the matter. At least he’s quit lying in the window all day, scanning the horizon for signs of cosmic repercussion, and, of course, seeing precious little except the sides of passing buses. He and Miss Shell are plotting again, and that’s what worries me. Why don’t we just locomote down to the ships and be done with it? Miss Spoon—doesn’t she look pretty now that she’s been polished?—Miss Spoon lives in mortal terror that they’re going to send her out again, another try at infiltrating the private life of Turn Around Norman. It’s for our dear Spoon that I’m concerned.”

“Come on, perfesser, you mean to tell me you’re not scared about lighting out for the waterfront to sneak aboard some big foreign boat?”

“Me? Fear? What do I have to lose? I was already the luckiest bean can that ever was. And now I will live forever, enshrined as I am on canvas for future generations to meet and to judge.”

“Right,” growled Dirty Sock. “You and ol’ Moaning Lisa.”

Spoon’s fears were not ill-founded. The stick and the shell were, indeed, considering dispatching her to have another go at Norman’s donation box. It wasn’t that the Middle Eastern relics were unappreciative of Ellen Cherry’s potential friendship, as expressed in her paintings, her eye game, and her erstwhile fascination with the gentleman who turned around for his supper. No, it was that the relics knew something that the others did not.

What they knew was that they were trapped.

That is, two of their company were trapped.

Originally, they had entered Manhattan very late on a rainy, foggy, autumn night. They had lain for days in a culvert near the Jersey-side entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, waiting for precisely those meteorological conditions. Even at three in the morning, in thick drizzle, however, undetected travel proved more problematic than they had anticipated, and when, on their blind path to the Atlantic, they’d chanced upon the open doors of a holy place, they decided to seek temporary asylum inside.

A van had been parked in front of the cathedral, and a long plastic accordion hose of large circumference ran from the vehicle into the church, as if the serpent of Eden, grown immense and vengeful, had returned to eat up all the world’s communion wafers. The truth was, St. Patrick’s was having its carpets washed: the hose was funneling a detergent foam. At any rate, the objects had followed the hose through the main door, and, then, having seen cleaners at work in the nave, they had scooted, toddled, and slithered down the narrow staircase that descended from the narthex. In the basement, which had been left open by the janitors, they’d found yet another door, slightly ajar. Painted Stick pried it wide enough for them to slip through and descend a second set of steps.

The doors of the ancient world, to which Painted Stick was accustomed, generally swung freely on their hinges, unless manually bolted or latched. When the door to the sub-basement swung closed behind them, however, there had been an ominous click. Modern doors had catches, it seemed, that engaged automatically. The catch was controlled by a brass knob, round and slippery, and it was quite impossible for the stick, by far the most dexterous of the inanimates, to manipulate it: he had tried on several occasions while his comrades were otherwise occupied. Unless a custodian were again to leave the door ajar, and that hadn’t happened in a year and a half, there was no way that the objects might exit through it.

Now, Spoon, Dirty Sock, and, if he didn’t mind losing a little more paint, Painted Stick could escape through the window grate. But Conch Shell and Can o’ Beans were much too broad to negotiate its grid. Those two were trapped.

Well, the objects had needed some time in which to rest and make plans, and Conch Shell had convinced Painted Stick that the Third Temple of Jerusalem was yet to be manifest, a fact corroborated by Spoon, who had repeated Buddy Winkler’s account of the Dome of the Rock. But Temple or no Temple, all of them were itching now to get on with their journey, and the only way they might proceed was if a human being opened the doors or else took a crowbar to the window grate.

Miss Charles had been a likely candidate, but it had been months since she’d stood out front of the cathedral, and Spoon hadn’t the faintest idea how to locate her apartment. That meant that they must resort to Turn Around Norman. Or something altogether different.

It was destined to be something altogether different, for the simple reason that one afternoon in midrevolution, Turn Around Norman suddenly scooped up his donation box, flashed his fatal blue eyes, flared his swan-perfect nose, fired a spitty projectile from his bardic mouth, spun on a soiled sneaker, and left the Fifth Avenue stage, never to return.

So abrupt was the performer’s departure that it caught the objects completely off guard, although in retrospect they realized that they should have seen it coming. As the weather had warmed that spring, there had been an influx of preachers onto Fifth Avenue, a scattered flock of rackety birds migrating in from some dark, harsh land. At least four of them had settled within earshot of St. Patrick’s, and at all hours of the day the objects could hear their magpie cries. “Praise the Lord!” “The Rapture is coming!” “Repent, for the end is near!” “Ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”

As the warnings escalated in volume and frequency, Conch Shell had to reassure Painted Stick that they were standard rhetoric and not bulletins from Jerusalem. To reinforce her assurances, Can o’ Beans pointed out that the voices were only reciting biblical verses or parroting shopworn slogans. It hadn’t occurred to any of them that the increase in sidewalk evangelism might be bothering Turn Around Norman, disrupting his timing, cracking his concentration, or tipping the gyroscope that was his heart. After all, that stretch of Fifth Avenue was habitually clamorous. Moreover, in the past, neither competition from other street performers nor the taunts of the cynical had fazed him.

In late May, summer had come to sit on New York’s face; hot, moist, sticky, pungent, and oppressive; and with the warmer weather had arrived a warmer preacher, a gaunt man in an expensive-looking suit. His mouth gleamed with golden teeth, his hungry face was tortured with pustules, and his voice was reminiscent of a sad and smoke-filled horn. This man was not given to amateurish sloganeering, but, rather, preached full-blown sermons, elaborate, histrionic, and deceptively slick. Most significantly, he had, with obvious deliberation, stationed himself in front of St. Patrick’s, practically shoulder to shoulder with the poignant cherub who oscillated with such supernatural slowness in the street.

For the greater part of a week, Turn Around Norman had gone on with the show, exhibiting not the slightest indication that the intruder had broached his interior shell. Then—presto!—he was gone, leaving the objects stunned. And stranded, in more ways than one.

“We should have seen it coming,” said Can o’ Beans.

“’Tis true,” Conch Shell agreed. “Pious dogma, if allowed to flourish, will always drive magic away.”

ELLEN CHERRY HAD WRITTEN
to Boomer, advising him of Buddy Winkler’s intentions. Being less certain of Ultima Sommervell’s intentions, she avoided any mention of the art dealer. It was not until Boomer wrote back a month later that she learned that Buddy had remained in Jerusalem only ten days, and Ultima half that long. About their visits, Boomer’s letter had this to say:

In Jerusalem I get the feeling that I’m leering at the panty outline of history. Something important is taking shape right under the surface, at the crotch of the world, and if the light is right you can detect its general outline, although you don’t have a clue what color the thing is or whether it’s made out of silk or cotton or rubber or a burlap sack. Anyways, it appeals to the operative in me, and I’m sitting here straining my eyes trying to see the panties better or see all the way through them like they was a veil covering up some fabulous twat, a pussy made out of gold or something, when Bud shows up and he’s even more intrigued with the outline than me. He’s excited and worked up and talking a mess of double-talk, acting like he’s got more secrets than a mongrel’s got fleas. He’s got a caper on the burner and wants me to help him with it, only he won’t say what it is. He indicates that I’ll have to use my torch equipment, only not to weld something together but to cut through it, he indicates that me and several other dudes that I’ll be bossing will be burning into a place that’s got metal gates or bars around it. I hadn’t gotten your letter yet, so I couldn’t guess what the place might be. I mean he obviously wouldn’t be robbing a bank in the name of the Lord Jesus, so I tell him yeah maybe I’ll do it, so long as it doesn’t interfere with my sculpture. Of course at that point he gives me a sermon about creating graven images.