Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (46 page)

“Wow!” said Switters.

“Non!”
said Domino.

“You strap these to your legs,” said
Pippi, “so that you don’t need to hold on to poles. But it takes good balance.”

“My balance is unequaled,” boasted
Switters, and he used the shorter stilts to boost himself onto the low rear end
of the carpentry shop’s slanted roof. With Pippi and Domino holding the
superstilts steady, he climbed aboard—and for a few breathtaking seconds, he
jiggled, tilted, leaned, and swayed in slow motion, like a dynamited tower so
in love with gravity it couldn’t decide which way to fall. After he took a few
steps, however, he gained stability, and Domino removed her hands from her
eyes. For her part, Pippi shouted instructions and beamed with approval as,
over and over again, he circled the carpentry shop. Confident now, he was about
to strike out across the compound when Pippi stopped him. Seemed she had
another surprise.

A couple of years before, Domino had
purchased cheaply in Damascus a bolt of red-and-white checkered fabric. The
idea had been to make tablecloths for “Italian night,” the once-a-month
occasion when the sisters enjoyed spaghetti and wine as a festive break from
their plain Middle Eastern fare. For some reason, the cloth had been shelved
and forgotten—by all, that is, except Pippi, who’d snipped off a substantial
portion of the bolt and stitched from it a ridiculous pair of skinny trousers
whose legs were a good seven feet in length.
“Voilà!”
she exclaimed, and
Switters instantly recognized and approved her intent.

Once the checkered pants had been
pulled over the stilts and fastened about his waist, and a tin funnel
appropriated as a hat, he set off, head higher in the air than a streetlamp. It
was so much like a one-man circus parade that he had little choice but to break
into a booming, up-tempo rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

The sisters abandoned their duties to
line up and cheer the funny giant. Even dour Maria Deux had to grin. And each
time he staggered past the chapel, he glanced down to see a face pressed to an
uncolored pane in the stained-glass window.

Switters paraded. He pranced. He
teetered. He waved. He sang. And everyone seemed enchanted. Everyone, that is,
except Domino Thiry.

By the time Switters relinquished
the stilts, dusk was settling onto the oasis like a purple hairnet through
which a few stray strands of blondish daylight curled. After Pippi congratulated
him on his performance, she hurried off to crank up the generator. Domino
pushed him back to his room, through an archaic pastoral gloaming: cuckoos
cooing themselves to sleep in the willows, chickens marching dumbly to the
roost (one young hen lingering behind as if wanting to stay up past her bedtime
and watch chicken MTV); the comforting, almost touching sight of people quietly
performing their evening chores; the pappy air quickened by the fairgrounds
smell of frying onions; everywhere a winding down, an innocence, a rhythm, a
timelessness, an anticipation of stars, a secret fear of midnight.

The pair didn’t speak. Switters was
exhausted, undoubtedly, and Domino seemed in a bit of a pique. In silence they
let themselves be swabbed by the curative sheep tail of bucolic twilight. Were
they a normal couple in such a setting, they might be looking ahead to supper
and wine and parenting and sex and prayers and dreams. As it was, Switters was
imagining the possibilities that stilt walking might hold for him (between then
and the autumn when he would return to Amazonia), and Domino was wondering how
the hell he could walk on stilts in the first place.

That was the very question she fired
at him—arms tightly folded, face all aglower—once she had shoved his chair
across the threshold with just enough extra force so that he’d been obliged to
brake to keep from crashing into the opposite wall. He turned slowly to stare
at her, fatigue and just a touch of merriment tempering the fierceness that
might otherwise have kindled his eyes.
“Un moment,”
he croaked, so
parched and hungry he could scarcely speak. He tipped the water pitcher,
drinking from it directly and not stopping until it was dry. Then he rolled to
the crocodile valise, from which he withdrew a half-stale Health Valley energy
bar, which he devoured in four mighty chomps. During the time he took to
refresh himself, she changed neither position nor expression.

Wiping his mouth with the torn sleeve
of his jacket, he turned to her once more. “Okay, Sister—if I may still call
you that. . . .”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you
just say
Domino
!?” She must have surprised herself with the heat in her
voice because she immediately softened her face and her tone. “In the Middle
Ages, a
domino
was a black-and-white mask that people wore during
carnival. So, you see, my name connects me to my aunt in still another way.”

“Okay. Cool. Did you notice,
Domino,
that each and every time I fell off the stilts, no matter how hard I fell or in
what position I landed, I managed to bend my legs so that my feet never touched
the ground? No? Yes? You’re not quite sure? Well, I did, and they didn’t. You
are now about to find out why.”

After the painful experience with
Suzy, it was unthinkable that he would lie to Domino. (Maybe he couldn’t lie to
the Devil
or
God.) Nor was he inclined to offer her the abridged version
that he’d related to Maestra and Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. No, he gave her,
as she stood transfixed in the doorway, the full account, complete with Sailor Boy
stew and penis-jab, although he did first warn her, much as he had Bad Bobby,
that what she was about to hear was so unbelievable that he scarcely believed
it himself. And he left purposefully vague the precise outlines of Today Is
Tomorrow’s head: there would be limits to her credulousness.

The telling took the better part of
an hour, and when at last he slapped his now permanently soiled trouser legs as
if to punctuate the end of the story, Domino seemed, well, not so much
perplexed as hypnotized, not so much stunned as drunk, her customary radiance
restored, even intensified, like the sultan’s chronically sick wife who was
miraculously restored to health by the stinking beggar’s fairy tales. She said
little, however; just looked kind of goofy in a dignified way and then excused
herself to try to digest the strange and perhaps tainted ambrosias he’d just
fed her.

“I’ll be packed,” he called after
her. “In case the truck to Deir ez-Zur comes in the morning.” And to himself:
But
I’ll be damned if I’ll blow this falafel stand without having a peek at Masked
Beauty.

As it turned out, however, by 7:30
A
.
M
., when Domino
knocked with his breakfast tray, something had happened that put a
spin—positive or negative, he honestly couldn’t say which—on his desire to meet
the once blue nude. Life was
Finnegans Wake,
to be sure, except for
those times when it was Marvel Comics.

“Look at this,” Switters muttered,
barely glancing up from the computer over which he was hunkered, and on the
screen of which a message from Maestra dully shimmered in a state of inkless,
bloodless, ephemeral, somehow untrustworthy electronic quiddity. Squinting,
Domino read over his shoulder, slowly extracting the salient facts from the
hard-nosed rococo of Maestra’s prose.

It appeared that the Matisse oil that
had hung for so many years over Maestra’s living room mantel; the painting that
had enlivened certain of Switters’s boyhood fantasies and that briefly had
seemed destined to become his own; the ace up his grandmother’s filmy financial
sleeve; the innovative razzmatazz ramble of flattened pigment inspired by the
naked body of Domino’s aunt, was, in a word—in two words, to be exact—stolen
property.

And when the painting was reproduced
in the auction house catalog, its rightful owner had come forth.

In January 1944, five months before
Allied troops landed at Normandy, the last prominent Jewish family left in the
south of France had been finally discovered and arrested. Their hiding place,
an abandoned mill, was comfortably, even elegantly furnished, and among
articles confiscated there by the Nazis were artworks that the cultivated
fugitives had continued to accumulate, even in their time of peril. A few weeks
later, Matisse’s
Blue Nude 1943
was loaded aboard a train that departed
Nice, bound, presumably, for Berlin. That was the last that the family,
imprisoned and tortured, or Matisse, aging and forgetful, was to hear of it.
Until, that is, it turned up at Sotheby’s just now, where it attracted the
attention of the lone surviving member of that persecuted family, who
immediately laid claim to it.

The good news for Maestra was that
the grateful owner was presenting her with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar reward
(a fraction of its worth) for having “protected” the painting for all those years
and for surrendering it without a legal battle. The interesting news for
Switters was that the owner turned out to be Audubon Poe’s patron, the
Beirut-based businessman, Sol Glissant.

“That is interesting to me, as well,”
said Domino. “Not only because of the picture and its connection to my aunt but
because Sol Glissant happens to be the benefactor who donated to the Pachomian
Order this oasis!”

“Are you jiving me? Enough, already!
If the world gets any smaller, I’ll end up living next door to myself.”

“Oh, but I am beginning to find these
. . . these coincidences involving you and Masked Beauty and the painting and
all of us to be exciting, to be meaningful. Suppose they are omens? Operating
instructions from the Almighty? This news from your grandmother, it only makes
me more confident that what I am about to propose to you is the correct
decision.”

She had his full attention then.
Clicking off the computer, he gazed at her directly, finding her at that
instant more than usually vivacious.

“We spoke of you last night after
dinner and again this morning, all of us, including Masked Beauty, and we have
decided to ask you to stay on with us here at—at the convent. If I may still
call it that.”

Switters felt something subtle
slither out of his nether regions and up his spine, but he would have been
hesitant to label it kundalini. Even before she revealed the reasoning behind
this surprising request, he could sense his vision of getting Seattle’s Art
Girls involved with stilts—stilt-making, stilt-racing, stilts for stilts’
sake—fading into vacancy.

Domino’s reasons were both practical
and philosophical.

Switters excelled at languages. He
had advanced computer equipment and a satellite telephone. He was adept in
their use. Isolated more than ever from the world at large, the sisterhood
would benefit in numerous ways from establishing electronic and
telecommunicative links with those it wished to influence, assist, save, or
solicit for funds. Because of his experience in the CIA, he might also be
helpful in dealing with Middle Eastern political situations and the
never-ending whirlpool of Vatican intrigue. He would become their
communications expert, office manager, and security chief. He’d put the thorn
on their rose and the skin on their drum.

Quite aside from that was his gender.
The nine Eves had judged that it might be a good idea, after all, to admit an
Adam to their little Eden. No longer bound, except by choice, to their vows,
some among them had suggested that it was not merely elitist but cowardly to
shun all masculine contact. What were they afraid of? Did they lack confidence
in their choices? They were feminists of a sort, but well aware that reviling
half the human race was a component neither of true feminism nor the Christian
faith. Wasn’t Jesus a man? (They weren’t so sure about God.) Hadn’t men (St.
Pachomius, their fathers) begat them, figuratively and literally? They were in
general agreement that they could use a dose of healthy male energy in their
lives. It had to be said that Domino, for one, was not entirely convinced that
Switters was a
healthy
manifestation of male energy, but that question
would resolve itself in time.

Meanwhile, she, personally, was
fascinated by his Amazonian escapade, by the so-called curse upon him. She
believed that she, through prayer, Christian ritual, and modern psychology
could break the spell he believed himself to be under. Jesus was known to have
cast out
beaucoup
demons, and over the centuries quite a few priests had
followed his example. She saw no need for Switters to venture back into that
dark, damp, teeming jungle—he was at heart a desert person, just like her. She
was sure she could help him. It was her duty.

Switters tugged repeatedly at one of
the more springy of his barley-colored curls, as if it were a cheap plastic
ripcord and he in Mexican freefall. “How long do I have to think it over?”

“Oh, somewhere between twenty-four
hours and twenty-four minutes. It depends upon the truck.”

He tugged some more, he furrowed his
brow. The small scars on his face seemed to furl into nodes. “Do you suppose I
might lubricate my cognitive apparatus with some squeezings from your swell
vineyard?”

“But you haven’t eaten your
breakfast. It’s not yet eight o’clock in the morning.”

“The wine doesn’t know that. Wine
only recognizes two temporal states: fermentation time and party time.”