Still Life with Woodpecker (2 page)

Once, Princess Leigh-Cheri used a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification. She had hoped that at the appropriate moment she might be visited by either the Lamb or the Beast, but, as usual, only Ralph Nader attended her.

IF THE CIA
imagined that its hospitality would charm the monogrammed socks off of Max and Tilli Furstenberg-Barcalona, it was once again wrong. During the first decade of their residency, the royal couple never complained about the drafty old mansion, for fear the place was bugged. In later years, however, made brazen by advanced age (the bravery of childhood returning, like salmon, to the source), they griped as much as they pleased.

The King would stand at a window (during halftime or the seventh-inning stretch) and stare apprehensively at the creeping tide of brambles. “I may be the first monarch in history to be assassinated by blackberries,” he would grumble. His Teflon valve grumbled with him.

The Queen caressed her Chihuahua. “You know who lifed here bevore ve did? Smokey zee Bear.”

Encouraging her parents to move was futile, Leigh-Cheri learned.

Max, a tall, horse-faced man with a Hitlerian mustache, shook his head so hard and long that were he wearing his crown it would have toppled off and tumbled into the berry vines. “Changing places at the table doesn’t fool the cards,” Max said.

“Moof? I got three teas this veek,” said Queen Tilli. “No! I forget. I got
four
teas. Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o.”

Like a pair of
r
’s trapped in a Spanish songbook, Tilli and Max lurked in their shoebox castle, waiting to be rolled.

THE PRINCESS LIVED
in the attic.

As a child, it had been her favorite playroom. It was private and cozy up there. She had liked the low, slanted ceiling and the complete absence of coat-of-arms wallpaper. As a child, she had appreciated the view of Puget Sound from the attic’s west window and the view of the Cascade Mountains from the window facing east. There was one mountain in particular, a white beak, broad and cloud-snagging, that would nearly fill the east window on those days when vision was not obscured by mist or rain. The mountain had a name, but Leigh-Cheri could never remember it. “It’s an Indian name, I think.”

“Tonto?” asked the Queen.

Now the windows were painted black—except for a single small pane through which the Princess could entertain an occasional corner of the moon.

The Princess lived in the attic and did not come out. She could have come out, but she chose not to. She could have raised the windows or scraped off the paint, but she
chose not to do that, either. Having the windows nailed shut and painted black was her idea. The attic was illuminated by one forty-watt bulb. That was also her idea. The Princess had furnished the attic, as well.

The attic was furnished with a cot, a chamber pot, and a package of Camel cigarettes.

ONCE,
Leigh-Cheri had lived much as any other young woman within her parents’ domicile. She had a room in the north end of the second floor, a room with a full-sized bed and a comfortable chair, a desk at which to do her schoolwork, and a dresser filled with cosmetics and underwear. There was a phonograph dedicated to the faithful reproduction of rock ‘n’ roll and a mirror dedicated to the flattering reproduction of her own image. There were curtains at the windows and heirloom carpets on the floor, while upon the walls posters of the Hawaiian Islands rubbed edges with photographs of Ralph Nader.

The room sometimes seemed pinched and stifling to her, compared to that “big wide world out there” for which she yearned, yet she was fond enough of her quarters and returned to them agreeably each evening when classes were over and this or that committee for this or that ecological cause was adjourned.

Even after she was forced off the cheerleading squad at the University of Washington, a humiliating experience that provoked her to withdraw from college, she occupied her room as correctly as a cephalopod its shell. Those days, she shared the room with Prince Charming.

Prince Charming was a toad. He lived in a terrarium at the foot of Leigh-Cheri’s bed. And yes—you nosy ones—she
had
kissed the toad. Once. Lightly. And yes, she’d felt
silly as shit. When one is a princess, however, one is tempted by things that we common people barely comprehend. Besides, the circumstances under which she had acquired the toad encouraged superstitious behavior, and, moreover, was a little teenie quick peck on the top of a frog’s head so much sillier than kissing the picture of a desired one—and who hasn’t kissed a photograph at one time or another? Leigh-Cheri kissed Ralph Nader’s photo fairly frequently.

It might be noted here that Freudian analysts of fairy tales have suggested that kissing toads and frogs is symbolized fellatio. In that regard, Princess Leigh-Cheri was, on a conscious level, innocent, although not so naive as Queen Tilli, who thought fellatio was an obscure Italian opera and was annoyed that she couldn’t find the score.

PRINCE CHARMING
was given to Leigh-Cheri by old Gulietta, the last living of the servants who had accompanied Max and Tilli into exile. At Leigh-Cheri’s birth, in Paris, four of those loyalists were still in service, but all but Gulietta died soon after the royal family took up residence in the Puget Sound palace. Perhaps it was the dampness.

The U.S. government provided a servant, also, a man named Chuck who was to function as gardener, chauffeur, and general handyman. He was, of course, a CIA informer. As age added infirmity to his native indolence, Chuck was no match for the Great Northwest blackberries, and they edged ever closer to the walls of the house. At the wheel, he was terrifying. King Max and the Princess had for some years refused to ride with him. Chuck still drove the Queen to her galas and teas, however,
seemingly oblivious to the Hail Marys and Oh-oh, Spaghetti-O’s bubbling in rank fear from the back seat.

Regularly, each fortnight, Chuck sat down to poker with the King. Even with a telltale ticker, the King regularly, each fortnight, took Chuck to the cleaners. Thus, Max added Chuck’s salary to his own. “It’s all he’s good for,” said Max, whose great mule face would smile faintly at what he must have considered a little joke on the CIA.

Gulietta, on the other hand, was in her eighties, both efficient and energetic. Miraculously, she had kept the huge house free of cobwebs and mold while doing the royal wash and preparing six meals a day: since Max and Tilli were carnivores and Leigh-Cheri vegetarian, each meal had been, in fact, two.

Old Gulietta spoke no English, and Leigh-Cheri, who was brought to America when she was not much taller than a jug of wine, spoke nothing else. Yet, it was Gulietta who told Leigh-Cheri her bedtime story each night until she was fifteen, always the same story, a story so frequently repeated that the girl came not only to comprehend its general meaning but to actually understand every word, though pronounced in a foreign tongue. And it was Gulietta who sensed the true dimensions of Leigh-Cheri’s depression after the Princess suffered a miscarriage during the UW homecoming game. (She was in midair—all a-leap—when the blood broke loose, rivulets racing as if to hemophilic touchdowns from beneath her diminutive cheerleading skirt.) It was Gulietta who sensed that her young mistress had lost more than a baby that autumn afternoon, had lost more, indeed, than the baby’s father (the second-string quarterback, a pre-law student who headed the campus chapter of the Sierra Club and intended to work for Nader someday), although the memory of him sitting on the bench pretending not to notice as she was whisked from Husky Stadium in embarrassment and fear haunted her mind and her heart like an ugly specter in muddy shoes.

It was Gulietta who, during that unhappy aftermath,
came to her with hag hands cupped around a toad. The Princess was not immediately overjoyed. But she had heard tales of Old World totems, and if toad magic could help, she’d give it a try—and let the warts fall where they may.

Alas, Gulietta, this was an American frog of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a time when wishing apparently no longer led to anything, and Leigh-Cheri eventually named it Prince Charming after “that son-of-a-bitch who never comes through.”

SANDWICHES WERE INVENTED
by the Earl of Sandwich, popcorn was invented by the Earl of Popcorn, and salad dressing by the Oil of Vinegar. The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it. Princess Leigh-Cheri would have liked to reinvent it, but at that point she hadn’t a clue.

She had ovened that rubber cookie called the diaphragm and gotten pregnant anyway. Many women do. She had played hostess to that squiggly metallic house-guest who goes by his initials, IUD, and suffered cramps and infections. Many women do. She had, in desperation and against her fundamental instincts, popped the pill. She became ill, physically and emotionally. Many women do. She had experimented with the jellies and jams, creams and goops, sprays and suppositories, powders and foams, gels and gunks only to discover her romantic personality—she had grown up with European folk tales (
one
tale, at any rate)—repulsed by the technological textures, industrial odors, and napalm flavors. Many romantic personalities are.

This constant battle with the reproductive process, a
war in which her only allies were pharmaceutical robots, alien agents whose artificial assistance seemed more treacherous than trustworthy, was gnawing with plastic teeth at her very concepts of love. Was it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those stoppers, thingamajigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalistic puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires, to censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitary, so slick and frolicsome, so
casual
that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?

Since she could not possibly answer that question—she couldn’t even ask it without getting winded—and since the lunch-hour, parking-lot rendezvous in the back of her boyfriend’s van were frankly deficient in certain romantic details that she’d always associated with sex, the Princess decided that she would enter a second exile: celibacy. Before she could steal safely across the border, however, the biological IRS caught up with her and exacted its stubborn price.

WHEN HER LOVER,
the quarterback, implored her to have her pregnancy “taken care of,” Princess Leigh-Cheri rested her forehead against the plate glass of the vegetarian restaurant in which they were dining and wept. “No,” she said. “No, no no.”

At nineteen, she had already undergone one abortion. She would not tolerate a second. “No,” she said. A teardrop hung out of each blue eye, like a fat woman leaning out of a tenement window. They bobbed, balanced, and bobbed again, as if dreading the uncertain journey down her cheeks. Wavering there, her teardrops reflected for a moment the sheen of the soybean curd upon her plate. “No more vacuum cleaners, no more steel. They can scrape my heart, they can scrape my brain before they’ll scrape my uterus again. It’s been over a year since my last D and C, and I still feel raw in there. It feels bitter when it should feel sweet, it feels ragged when it should feel smooth, it feels deep purple when it should feel pink. Death has thrown a stag party in the most sacred room in my body. From now on, that space belongs to life.”

Any time that technology subverts a benevolent natural process, the sensitive smell sulfur. For Princess Leigh-Cheri, abortions had not only the reek of totalitarianism but the shriek of betrayed meat. If another D and C was an intolerable idea, however, the prospect of inopportune maternity was equally distressing—and not just for the usual reasons. Furstenberg-Barcalona was an ancient lineage in which strict codes had evolved. If a female member of the family wished to possess full privilege, if she would someday be queen, then she must neither marry nor mother before the age of twenty-one, nor could she before
that age forsake her parents’ domicile. And although she considered herself one of the people, Leigh-Cheri did very much indeed desire full royal privilege. Leigh-Cheri believed that she could use that privilege to help the world.

“Fairy tales and myths are dominated by accounts of rescued princesses,” she reasoned. “Isn’t it about time that a princess returned the favor?” Leigh-Cheri had a vision of the princess as hero.

As Queen Tilli put it when Max asked her what she thought their only daughter wanted out of life, “She vants to buy zee vorld a Coke.”

“What?”

“She vants to buy zee vorld a Coke.”

“Well,” said Max, “she can’t afford it. And the world would demand Diet Pepsi, anyhow. Why doesn’t she buy
me
a martini, instead?”

IT WAS AUTUMN,
the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a parachute. It landed in the sideline Astroturf, so upsetting the cheerleaders that for the remainder of the afternoon their rahs were little more than squeaks. The Huskies won anyway, knocking off favored UCLA, 28-21, and at nearby University Hospital, where Leigh-Cheri had to have a pint of common blood pumped into her royal conduits, the interns were in a festive mood.