Skinny Legs and All (20 page)

Two weeks later, Ellen Cherry was unemployed. On the phone to Colonial Pines, she had said, “If Uncle Buddy’s behind this, he owes me bucks.”

“Your daddy says no blessed way would Bud go that far,” Patsy replied. “Your daddy says terrorists did it.”

“What does my mama say?”

“Ha! Don’t nobody listen to your mama. ’Less she’s offering ’em fried chicken or a piece of you know what.”

“Piece of what, mama?”

“Never you mind.”

“Piece of what?”

“Hush. I’m not gonna say it.”

Ellen Cherry hadn’t been overly concerned about being blasted out of a job. That was back in June, when she still believed things would work out with Boomer. Now, with the weasel fart of impending divorce hanging in the air, she needed the income. Boomer promised a generous settlement if his show went well, but she would sell her hair to a museum of natural history before she’d accept a crumb from
that
foul loaf. In her darker moments, she imagined her hair in a display case alongside a woolly mammoth. Schoolchildren on field trips would compare them in essays and scare their little brothers and sisters with slightly exaggerated descriptions. “In the Ice Age, things had to be real hairy,” they’d explain, brandishing garish postcards.

She was one of the few employees to return to the I & I for its second incarnation. Most of the others had found work elsewhere or built personal bomb shelters. As the new staff arrived for the grand reopening, Ellen Cherry could tell there wasn’t a food-service professional in the lot. Mainly, they were youthful idealists. Some signed on at the I & I because it made them feel important. Others, she suspected, had suicidal tendencies.

“Should I check the setups, Mr. Cohen?”

“No, no, no. Teddy’ll take care of that.” Teddy was the dinner maître d’. “Relax already. Have a little drink, enjoy.”

“I’ve noticed you looking at my feet, sir. Are these shoes too . . . too loud for here?”

“No, no, no. Very attractive, very nice. Cassini. I hope you got a bargain. You need more Cassini. I get them for you wholesale.” Spike handed Ellen Cherry an empty glass and nodded at an ice bucket. “You got to admit, though, those shoes of yours are as bright as Hadee’s schnozz.”

Ellen Cherry laughed politely. She filled her glass. It was the same brand of champagne with which Boomer had surprised her at the Montana drive-in movie. She winced. Sentimental memories were like sugar-water icicles. Was she to be poked in the heart the rest of her life?

Outside on United Nations Plaza, the water was softer, if more sour. The rain was the color and flavor of toad sweat and had been all day. It vinegared the mobile TV units that were beginning to vie for parking spaces near the corner of Forty-ninth Street.

Media coverage of Isaac & Ishmael’s reopening was even more extensive than it had been at the initial debut. A restaurant dedicated to Jewish-Arabic brotherhood might be good feature material, but a restaurant that could be blown to sesame seeds on camera was potentially hard news.

Simultaneously with the newsmen, as if choreographed, protesters arrived: small ragtag groups of extreme Zionists and Palestinians. Police officers made sure they kept well apart, although when the colors began to run on their rain-dampened placards, only by their headgear could you tell which was which. “Notice how similar their shoes,” said Spike. “Yes,” agreed Abu, who had been drawn out of the kitchen. “To a bird in the air, it’s beanies versus dishcloths. To a bug on the street, both groups are the same.”

Then, moments before the doors opened at seven o’clock, a chartered bus pulled up and disgorged a well-groomed mixture of Jews and Aryans, mostly in Burberry raincoats. They were equipped with amplified bullhorns, and the “Redemption Now!” banners their members bore were executed in waterproof paints.

Through the fogged windows of the I & I, Ellen Cherry thought she recognized her “uncle” Buddy. The man was ordering people about and chatting it up with the cops. As haggard as a prisoner of war, he was a scarecrow whom no amount of Burberry tailoring could make distinguished. It had to be the Reverend Buddy Winkler. When at last he spoke into his bullhorn, broadcasting his vocal saxophone to the neighborhood and, through network mikes, to the nation, identification was positive. At once brutish and soothing, the heavy-toned chords vibrated slowly, turning over in the rain like an Italian stallion turning over in bed.

Keeping her distance from the doorway, lest Buddy glimpse her, Ellen Cherry, nevertheless, could hear his words. He kept advocating ejection, by force, of Moslems from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount so that the Messiah could come. She had only the slimmest notion of what he meant, but his voice made her so horny she could barely keep from squirming, crossing her legs, or hopping about, like a little girl who had to go to the bathroom.

On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz. As a matter of fact, she did believe “Birdman of Alcatraz” to be Charlie Parker’s nickname in prison. In her favor, it might be reported that, despite similarities in the crowds they flocked with, she did not confuse the Alcatraz Birdman with St. Francis of Assisi.

One of the Egyptian gods had had the head of a bird. With his great scarlet beak, Roland Abu Hadee somewhat resembled him. When Abu came out of the kitchen (the dishwasher had threatened to quit if Abu didn’t stop looking over his shoulder) to join Ellen Cherry at a corner table, she was as pleased as a priestess of the Nile might have been had she been visited by the hawk-headed deity. Abu could distract her both from the buzz of her clitoris (an organ unattended for the past six months) and the chaos out on the sidewalk, where the milling mobs of Moslems, Jews, and Christians, shouting slogans and shaking fists, now had been joined by a gentle delegation of New Age doom-sayers who had seized this opportunity to quietly advertise the latest in a chronic if not insipid series of cataclysms (earthquakes, comets, planetary alignments, etc.), which either failed to materialize or to produce the hoped-for alterations in social consciousness.

It was much noisier outside the restaurant than within, for the protesters, prophets, cops, cameramen, reporters, and curiosity-seekers outnumbered diners at least twenty to one. A number of celebrities had been invited to eat free at the grand reopening, but among the notables who had appeared at the original opening, only Norman Mailer had had the guts to return. Mailer and the couple dozen other guests seemed to be shunning their dinners in favor of the Egyptian and Israeli wines, which meant that the food was pretty bad or else they were worried about having to run for cover on a full stomach.

At any rate, Ellen Cherry and Abu had little trouble conversing in a normal tone.

“This dining room strikes me as rather drab,” Abu confessed. He gestured at the gold-flecked bamboo matting that covered the walls. “We paid a decorator good money for
this
? There is not a stalk of bamboo in the entire Middle East.”

“Maybe he thinks Jerusalem’s in Polynesia,” she said.

“Jerusalem is everywhere,” said Abu, a bit too solemnly. “The aura of it extends around the globe. Jerusalem is everywhere. There is just not enough of it in this room.” He thought for a moment. “My dear, you are an artist. Why do we not hang some of your pictures in here?”

When she didn’t respond right away, he added, “Naturally, we would have them insured.”

Ellen Cherry had to smile. Were her paintings blown up with the I & I, she might realize some financial gain from them. “Well, I showed you slides back in June,” she said.

Abu concealed a shudder. He remembered trees that resembled old gay actors trying on kimonos, hills that bounced like red rubber hemorrhoids. Who could eat in such company? Who could meditate on brotherhood or fair Jerusalem? “Yes, dear, but those were done awhile ago, as I recall. When you lived in that place, Seattle. How about something more . . . recent.”

“Don’t have anything recent. I’ve not exactly been painting since I’ve been in New York.”

Ellen Cherry was lying. True, after the Airstream turkey had been sold to the Museum of Modern Art (which had outbid a large corporation that wanted to sponsor it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade), she had thrown her brushes and colors into an incinerator. In late summer, however, she started painting again. Almost feverishly. She had enough new canvases to cover every wall in the I & I, including the pantry and the men’s room. But she wasn’t showing them to anyone, not even her alleged dealer, Ultima Sommervell, who, like Abu, had asked to see new work. It was not Ellen Cherry’s intention to ever, ever show them.

Suppose, though, that one moonless night you were to dress in black pajamas (the ninja kind, the cat burglar kind), and, employing spider lines and tree frog cups, you scaled the wedding-cake facade of the Ansonia Hotel at Seventy-third and Broadway, climbing (pity your poor butt if you’re afraid of heights) to floor eleven, where you use a short lightweight wrecking bar to pry loose a window frame. Suppose, then, you were to pull yourself in, your ebony Taiwanese sneakers last to slide over the sooty ledge. Discreetly flashing a powerful penlight, suppose you locate the paintings in question, stacked against the apartment wall, their faces resolutely to the plaster. Silently, one by one, you pull them back and inspect them. To your surprise, there’s not a landscape in the lot! In many of the pictures, nothing is depicted but a small silver spoon. Others feature a single bedraggled purple sock. And just when you thought pop art had been buried with Andy Warhol, you discover realistic renderings of a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans. One after another, spoons, socks, and bean cans, spoons, socks, and bean cans, the sequence broken only occasionally by full-length nude portraits of a man you, as an art lover, recognize as Randolph “Boomer” Petway III. From the single bedroom, you hear the feathery moans of a woman sleeping alone, and as you tiptoe out of this Gallery of the Missing, you recall that someone once said, “The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.”

Abu was called up front to pose with Spike again, to grant yet another joint interview. He preferred to chat with Ellen Cherry or to supervise the dishwashing and
falafel
-frying, but when one made a grand public gesture such as Isaac & Ishmael’s, one was obliged to meet the press.

While he was away, Ellen Cherry tuned in the demonstrations. She could hear her uncle Buddy’s sax crooning to the faithful, crooning them up the slopes of the Temple Mount, crooning the Messiah down from heaven to say hi to them there. Screened by a starched white veil of tablecloth, she touched herself between her legs. It was like stroking a live bee. A bee trapped, tiny wings awhirr, in a puddle of molasses.

When Abu rejoined her, he announced, “I am afraid Spike is permitting the demonstrators to get him upset.”

“They don’t upset you, Mr. Hadee?” Lifting her errant left hand into the light, she surreptitiously examined it for traces of moisture.

“Of course they do. I am appalled by the fear and ignorance that motivates such behavior. I am concerned about violence. The difference, dear one, is that I am Arab and Spike is a Jew. Oh, yes! To say that Arab and Jew are brothers and sisters is not to say that we are the same. There are racial differences among people, yes? There are cultural differences, sexual differences.” (At the mention of the word “sexual,” Ellen Cherry involuntarily squirmed.) “In my opinion, those differences can be good. What a dull world this would be were we all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another’s peculiarities. We need only
respect
those peculiarities—and to be grateful for them. Our similarities provide us with a common ground, but our differences allow us to be fascinated by one another. Differences give human encounters their snap and their fizz and their brew.”

Trite or not, Ellen Cherry liked what Abu had to say. If he could say those things in Uncle Buddy’s voice, she thought she might follow him anywhere. To her mind, could a man combine Mr. Hadee’s content with the Reverend Buddy Winkler’s style, he might constitute a reasonable facsimile of that Messiah that the excitables on the street were so ga-ga about. Of course, Ellen Cherry was near to drunk.

“What’s your take, then, on the demonstrations?”

“My
take
?”

“Yeah, you know, your . . .” Her train of thought switched to a siding, perhaps to try to balance its effervescent load. Abu’s flowery freight, however, stayed right on track.

“There are differences among Jews,” he said. “Jews are not cut from whole cloth, do not imagine they are. Their so-called clannishness, their solidarity, has many exceptions. Yet, a candle burns in their blood, and as different as their lives outwardly may be, each from the other, every Jew reads his or her life story by the light of that same candle. It hurts Spike Cohen when he is attacked so bitterly by other Jews. He may deny it, our Spike the Shoe Wolf, but you can tell the attacks wound him. The Arab, he is used to that. We have been fighting among ourselves as long as grains of sand can remember. Vendettas, raids, bloody feuds, they are more common among Arabs than oil wells or dromedaries. Arabs have injured one another more than they have injured Jews. I am not surprised that there are Arabs out there on UN Plaza who would make me into a lollipop. You understand? My head on a stick.”

Abu paused. He and Ellen Cherry exchanged furtive glances, both of them laboring in vain to keep from picturing his dark head impaled like a toasted marshmallow.

Eventually, he continued. “You are an artist . . .”

He’s changing the subject now
, she thought.
He’s back to decorating. Well, I can’t help him there. He wouldn’t understand what I’m painting these days. I barely understand it myself.