Skinny Legs and All (59 page)

Yes! I see it now
, thought Ellen Cherry.
The religious training I was given as a girl was a form of child abuse
.

And she thought she heard somebody next to her say, “Yeah! That’s right! I see it now.”

Eeena eeena, eeena-eeena ai

Eh, eh-eh, wop wop haj

In the room of the wolfmother wallpaper, a woodpecker flies in through the transom and leaves three farts: one on a hot skillet, one in a bottle, and one between the strings of an autoharp. Room service.

The founding of a religion is an elaborated version of pitching coins into a wishing well or spitting off a bridge
, Ellen Cherry was thinking.
I guess people have an innate superstitious urge to want to fill a void
. As she was thinking this, Salome began shedding veil number five, releasing it as she whirled. It had concealed her ankles, calves, knees, and lower thighs, that section of the dancer’s body that Ellen Cherry had snidely characterized as overly thin. With the falling of that scarf, there vanished the last vestiges of any illusion one might have retained about money.

Whenever a state or an individual cited “insufficient funds” as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so-called economic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably disclosed that there were plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called “money.” It was akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn’t bake a cake because she didn’t have any ounces. She had butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just didn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

There then followed some fairly standard wisdom along the lines of how it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven (when one considered how often that currency served as the paper representation of a big rigid ego, and how that heaven, on the other hand, was the loose state of egolessness, one saw what Jesus was driving at), to which Ellen Cherry was positive she overheard Spike Cohen exclaim, “Hoo! How true it is!” Then, the tambourine banged like a fist on a jewel box, and Salome entered the extended series of exquisite whirls that would climax with the dropping of the cloth from her breasts.

“Mmm. Nice tits,” remarked the bartender, a sentiment that echoed around the room. They were a young girl’s tits, only slightly larger than Ellen Cherry’s, but they were as perfectly formed as the wheels of a bicycle and seemed to subscribe to no theory of gravity. Glistening with perspiration, they resembled oversize tulip bulbs bathed by a fine spring rain. They heaved from Salome’s exertion like jellyfish in a choppy tide, a condition that some found prurient and others distasteful. In any case, none took their eyes off her, even though a brassy fellow yelled from the courtyard door, “Hey! New York just kicked a field goal to go ahead!”

Eeena eeena, eeena-eeena haj

Beneath the floorboards of this room, schoolgirls operate a diamond mine. Every card on the table is the queen of diamonds. And the wallpaper howls at the moon.

Revelations were starting to overlap. Ellen Cherry was just thinking about how no amount of money could buy security, and if it could, it would be a bad bargain at any price, since security was a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction was a form of death; she was thinking something in that category when the sixth veil flew away from Salome’s likable, lickable breasts, and abruptly her mind was occupied with notions of time, history, and the afterlife. She saw that the past was a recent invention, that people sacrificed the present to a future that never really came, that those who tied all of their dreams to an afterlife had no life for there to be an “after” of; saw that time was a meadow not a highway; that the psyche was an all-night restaurant, not a museum or a church; and that on every conceivable level, belief in a hereafter was hazardous to health. Moreover, the world would not be destroyed, at least not until the sun pooped out in about two billion years—and by then there would be other options.

“But what about Judgment Day?” Ellen Cherry found herself whispering.

Every
day is Judgment Day. Always has been. Always will be.

“Anything else?”

Yes. Just this. The dead are laughing at us.

“Wow,” said Ellen Cherry Charles.

FOR HOURS,
the Reverend Buddy Winkler had been pacing the floor of his office. Cracking his knuckles. Grinding his gold teeth. Scratching his face until the pustules broke and bled. He was just so blessed dad-blamed all-fired
frustrated!
He could hardly stand it! Lordy lordy lordy lordy law. All those many long lonely months, years even, that he’d been preparing himself, priming himself, honing himself for one monumental and glorious act: the bringing down of the Dome of the Rock so that the Third Temple might rise in its place. This very day, Sunday, January 23, was when the holy explosives were supposed to go off. Today! And here he was, hamstrung, impotent; stuck among the niggers and the dope fiends and the sodomites in New York City, not only deprived of the opportunity to personally fulfill his God-appointed mission but unable to be on hand in Jerusalem in case the rabbis and yeshivas went ahead and bombed the damned mosques without him (which probably would not happen, the CIA would see to that).

Lordy lordy law, he was fit to be tied. He was about to explode his own self. He needed an outlet for the righteous energy, the redemptive fury, with which Jehovah had flooded him.

It was going on five in the afternoon when Buddy hit upon the idea of venting a little spleen on Isaac & Ishmael’s. If ever an establishment needed a sharp whack with God’s flyswatter, the I & I was it. Those peacenik humanists! That dancing girl! That blabber-mouth Jezebel of Verlin Charles’s! Yep. Bud allowed as to how he might amble down there and wag a finger or two at their shame. He telephoned several of his Zionist friends, but they were all watching the Super Bowl. So were his contacts in the Little Matches of Jesus. Okey-dokey. Let the fools sully the Sabbath with their trivial games. Buddy would go it alone.

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Zinga dopla dop lop zinga

Eh, eh-eh, eeena-eeena ai

THIS IS THE ROOM,
all right, but the candles have burned down, the lamps are dry, and the blue neon has blown a fuse. The wallpaper might as well be stone. In the blackness there can be heard a low, perpetual rattling and a
click click click click
. It is Jezebel’s bones. Or else the rolling of the dice.

The teenager was completely naked then, except for the short purple veil that masked her face. Abu and Spike were beyond worrying over the illegality of the situation. Detective Shaftoe certainly wasn’t about to arrest her. He was himself in irons. Nobody moved, and above the whine, drone, and drumming of the orchestra, no sound was audible except for Salome’s labored breathing. She had been dancing for more than two hours and obviously was near exhaustion. The dance appeared to be winding down. The whirls were elongated, slow and dreamy now, although they’d lost little if any of their impact. She turned as if knee-deep in fruit pulp, and the hypnotized audience followed her as helplessly as if she were the cufflinks of Mandrake the Magician.

Earlier, much earlier, in the afternoon, Ellen Cherry had considered applying the eye game to the dancer, but decided it would have been akin to painting a second smile on the Mona Lisa. Now, she was incapable of that kind of self-control, even if she had deemed it desirable. Her mind was calm, yet humming with activity, and Salome seemed to hold on to it with small sweaty fingers, the way that she held on to her tambourine.

When the seventh veil flew away from Salome’s face, it was as if the girl had opened her mouth and burped out a bird-sized butterfly. Ellen Cherry’s first thought was,
How beautiful she is!
Her second thought was,
Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves
.

Yes, that was it. The government wouldn’t take care of it for you, no matter how much you’d paid into Social Security, or how many votes your political action committee may have bought. You couldn’t learn it in college, colleges chose largely to ignore it. Churches, conversely, were falling all over themselves to save you the trouble of thinking about it; they would hand you an answer as neat and tidy and definitive as your horoscope in the daily paper—and, unfortunately, just about as useless because it was just about as generic and every bit as speculative. Great books, paintings, and music were helpful, in an inspirational way; nature, even more so. Valuable clues were constantly dropping from the lips of philosophers, spiritual masters, gurus, shamans, gypsy circus girls, and wild-talking tramps in the street. But they were clues, only. No self-proclaimed holy man could cut the mustard for you, and the ones who were truly holy would tell you so. Nor could you turn it over to some chatty, disembodied entity channeled from the other side. (The dead are laughing at us, remember.) You couldn’t even learn it at your mammy’s knee.

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn’t follow you home and park your car.

Was there a more difficult lesson for a human being to learn, a paradox harder to accept? Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely—but it was the bottom line.

It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah. He’d call you.

Um, well, okay
, thought Ellen Cherry,
I guess I understand. But wait a minute. This isn’t all? Surely there’s more? There must be something else
.

The dance was ending. Salome executed one last passionate pirouette, slapped both feet resoundingly against the floor, then staggered to a stop. She stood facing, but not looking at, the audience; her eyes downcast, her mouth gasping, her entire respiratory system convulsing, her legs wobbling as if about to give way. Oddly, nobody, not even her chaperon, made a move to support her or to cover her nakedness. The room was silent, transfixed.

Ellen Cherry’s condition was not measurably superior to the dancer’s. She was tremulous, flushed, in a kind of trance. She was in the room and not in the room. Her mind whirled endlessly upon a dance floor of ideas. Instinctively, she sensed that once the last of the veils had dropped, some greater, more all-inclusive secret should have been exposed; she should have been squinting at the contours of the Mystery. Thus, she squinted at poor Salome, who continued to stand there, shaking, panting, dressed in angel chaps of sweat. And she thought,
Come on, now. What’s the punch line? There’s got to be something else
. Until, finally, a voice inside her said:

“We’re making it up.”

Who? What
?

“Us. All of us. It. All of it. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”

We’re making it up?

“We make it up. We made it up. We shall make it up. We have been making it up. I make it up. You make it up. He, she, it makes it up.”

Okay, I’m an artist, I can accept that. In theory. But how do I apply it to my daily life?

“You’ll have to figure . . .”

It out for myself. But hold on. Please don’t go away. Can’t you at least leave me with some advice
?

“You need more?” (The inner voice was incredulous.)

Yes. Please. A little more. A speck more in the line of practical advice
.

“Very well. The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can’t see the ball.”

You’re kidding
, thought Ellen Cherry Charles.

Ellen Cherry made for the door. She had to get out of there and get out fast. All that had transpired seemed perfectly natural to her, as natural as daydreaming or brainstorming or the eye game; she was overwhelmed, to be sure, but hardly frightened or bewildered; she was, in fact, in a state rather next to wahoo. But she needed to change spaces, to get some air.

Others, perhaps as many as twenty, followed her out. And when she turned the corner and headed up East Forty-ninth they did likewise. It wasn’t as though they were interested in her, but, rather, that she was in the lead of a group that was being swept along by its own stupefied momentum.

The group was far enough down the block that it failed to hear the commotion back at Isaac & Ishmael’s.

At exactly the moment that they were turning the corner, Buddy Winkler had pushed his way into the restaurant. When he had spotted Salome, still standing there naked (her chaperon was in the act of draping a coat about her), he’d rushed the bandstand, nearly falling over Roland Abu Hadee, who, for some reason, was on his hands and knees, picking up the discarded veils. Some witnesses later testified that the Reverend Buddy Winkler had shouted, “Beast! Great Fornicator! Whore of Babylon!” Others would claim that he was merely sputtering and growling. In any case, he charged the girl and grabbed her by the throat.