Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

  Margaret, with the fresh baked piroshki she was fetching back to her desk at the law firm; Melissa, the Microsoft widow, with a basket of Gorgonzola and winter pears bound for suburbia; Dev, whose breasts in her cheap, fuzzy sweater were as heavy as the cabbages she sold in her stall; they and others, different and similar, would kneel hesitantly beside his chair, kneeling so they would be at eye level with him and so they would not be overheard, and say, with varying degrees of embarrassment, “I see you here a lot.”

  “Yes,” he’d reply. “I’ve been watching you, too,” and though that was not always the truth, the little lie didn’t trouble his conscience, not even when he sensed a vibration travel down a spine to settle with an almost audible pang in a clitoris.

  “What are you? No, I mean who are you? What do you do?”

  “I’m Switters, friend of both God and the Devil.” Then, getting an uncertain reception, “Taker of the stepless step.” Then, “Two-inch astronaut.”

  That usually stopped them. Lightly dumbfounded, the woman would give him a long, perplexed though hardly rankled look, and as shyly and sweetly as she had knelt, she’d rise, muttering “Have a nice day” or “Stay dry” or some other genial inanity, and walk away, seldom without a wistful glance over her shoulder as she paused at the cobblestones to unfurl her umbrella. Not infrequently, he’d spot one of them in the market again and exchange with her one of those futilely desirous smiles that are like domestic postage on a letter to a foreign destination. Did they approach him a second time? None save for Dev, who was much too undereducated and overburdened to be fazed by cryptic epigrams and non sequiturs; and who eventually followed him to his room, where, against his better judgment, she gladdened him unmercifully. Evidently he gladdened her, too, for afterward she claimed she needed a wheelchair more than he.

  And she returned. Twice or thrice a week. Usually early in the morning, while her brothers were stocking the produce stand she would operate until dusk. When she unhooked her bra, it was like a farmer unloading a cart, and when she pulled down her panties, Switters thought he was back up the Amazon. Dev had meaty lips, chapped red cheeks, and walnut-shell eyelids beneath a prominent dark brow, and was as wide of hip as she was thin of guile. A strapping Eastern Orthodox milkmaid of Slavic descent, pretty in a coarse, uncultivated way, she was uncomplicated and honest in mind and emotion, complex and pungent in bodily aroma. She was always out of his room by five forty-five, but her musks hung around all day. Before long he was putting her on with his clothing, tasting her in his bread and cigars.

  Wallpaper curled and stayed curled, windowpanes fogged and stayed fogged from Dev’s humidity. Dev’s cries spooked ledge pigeons into flight, and these were urbanized birds accustomed to every manner of human commotion. Dev’s pubic mound was like the hut of a shaman. Fruit flies picnicked on her thighs.

  They had virtually nothing in common, nothing whatever to talk about, but she seemed without agenda beyond the erotic, and, at twenty-nine (the oldest woman with whom he’d ever lain), fatalistic and juggy, there was not one thing about her to remind him of Suzy. Sometimes as he shook her—her vapors and her short hairs—out of his sheets, his eyes almost teared with gratitude. He did come to see, in time, that she perceived him as a dramatic figure of mystery and was as magnetized by that aspect (real or fallacious) of his image as, say, Margaret or Melissa, but Dev was content to rub up against the mystery, wisely feeling no compulsion to probe or dispel it, which the others surely would have done. When he recognized that about her, his appreciation deepened into affection, and he took to awakening before five in cheery anticipation of her rapping—a coded knock he’d taught her so as to know it was her soft self knocking rather than one of Mayflower Fitzgerald’s bothersome cowboys.

  O Dev, unreflective Dev, you are the one who is the mystery. Despite the numerous clues, largely olfactory in nature, you scatter in your wake.

  If Dev was an O-ring that sealed wahoo in his body, a gasket against the leaking of that emotional oxygen now in shortened supply as a result of his sacking, his break with Suzy, and the Kandakandero curse that precipitated those two events, so then were the Art Girls. No Art Girls, either individually or collectively, ever visited his room, and, in fact, not all of the Art Girls were girls, but their presence in the Pike Place Market and in his acquaintanceship helped him to sail through that strange season—literally as well as figuratively.

  From his two-inch elevation, he’d watched them filter into the market almost daily from the art school down on Elliott Avenue, walking mostly in pairs, sometimes singularly or in threesomes, but never en masse, although they were classmates and dressed as if siblings or even clones: black berets, black turtleneck sweaters, pea coats on which were pinned buttons bearing messages of rude social protest (one alluded to CIA malfeasance and paid tribute to Audubon Poe), rings in earlobe, lip, and nose. They carried sketchbooks, mainly, but also paintboxes, cameras, occasionally an easel; and each according to her or his favored medium—pencil, ink, crayon, watercolor, or film—would set about to depict her or his favored feature of the market: people, produce, or architecture. They strove to be disconnected and cool, but their vitality and curiosity were difficult to suppress. Try as they might, the nearest they could come to the cynicism and ennui with which somewhat older artists advertised their genius was to strike the odd hostile pose or suck defiantly on cigarettes. Finding them charming, Switters flirted openly with the Art Girls, even when they turned out to be boys, and though they were too self-consciously hip to ever kneel by his chair, as did the Margarets and the Melissas, they demonstrated through knowing expressions and inclusive gestures their unpremeditated approval of him.

  Approval was tested, shaken, and finally cemented one January afternoon when a couple of them, representing at least two genders, presented him with a photograph that the anatomically female of the pair had snapped of him without, so she believed, his knowledge. After briefly examining and complimenting the picture, Switters proceeded to give the astonished young woman the date and time of day it had been taken, as well as prevailing weather conditions before, during, and after the exposure, and a detailed description of the candy bar her friend had been eating while she aimed the telephoto lens—all routine for a company operative. Could she really think some callow amateur, let alone one as cute as she, could photograph him from any distance without being systematically registered and remembered?

  To regain her composure, the girl informed him that her faculty adviser had complained that the sign on the wheelchair—prominent in the photo—might give offense to the religious and the afflicted, prompting Switters to respond that he was certain the student photographer had rejected that moralistic nudging toward self-censorship since no artist worthy of the name gave a flying fuck whether or not any special interest group—minuscule or multitudinous, benign or malicious—took offense at their heartfelt creations. “Humanity is generally offensive,” he told her happily. “Life’s an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can’t tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for them.”

  If he had overstated his position a tad for the sake of shock value, it had worked: they retreated as though from a fiery chili they’d assumed to be merely exotic pimiento. Indeed, but a philter can blister the gums, and the most effective aphrodisiacs are often foul at first taste. In a matter of days, the pair and its cohorts were friendlier than ever, having debated his pronouncement vigorously and at length in classroom, studio, and coffeehouse (few among them were yet of tavern age), concluding that it made up in bravery and brio what it lacked in sensitivity, and that it had been issued, moreover, in defense of their own aesthetic rights. Besides, he had a gorgeous smile.

  Where Switters and the Art Girls truly connected, though, was in the gutter.

  For weeks they’d watched with ill-concealed fascination whenever he’d push one of his minute boats into a current
of streetside rainwater, often wielding a wilted dahlia stalk as a wand to guide it past obstacles as it commenced its voyage into the unknown. Day by day, berets cocked, the girls edged closer to the launchings. Once, one of them returned a boat to him that she’d retrieved from the place it had finally run aground. “It made it all the way to Virginia Street,” she said, dimples enlarging in both diameter and depth. It was only a matter of time before they started to make toy boats of their own.

  From the start, their boats were lovelier than his. His, in fact, were pathetically engineered. How inept was Switters with tools? Had he been assigned to build crosses in Jerusalem, Jesus would have died of old age. The Art Girls, conversely, made lovely little vessels; clean, sleek, and well-proportioned, while his were decidedly otherwise. Yet, when they began to race them (human nature being what it is, racing was inevitable), his—lopsided, clumsy, cracked, splintery, wobbly of mast (often no more than a carrot stick)—always won. Always.

  Challenged, the Art Girls fashioned increasingly finer craft. Forsaking those scraps of broken citrus crates that had provided shipwright fodder in the beginning, and that were now in short supply and deemed inferior into the bargain, they turned to the art school for materials, appropriating for hull and deck pieces of wood originally intended for stretcher bars, frames, maquettes, and the like, while making off with costly rice paper, parchment, and strips of Belgian linen canvas that could be cut into little sails. Rather quickly, spurred as much by artistic temperament and the human love of difficulty as by Switters’s unexplained and undeserved success, they progressed from catboat to sloop to ketch to yawl to schooner. They spoke of jibs and mizzensails, added bilge boards, keels, and rudders. And being artists, they painted their vessels in brilliant blues, whites, and golds, often inscribing a well-chosen name on the bow such as Shakti, Athena, Mermaid Lightning, Madame Picasso, or Madame Picasso’s Revenge.

  Each and every one of Switters’s boats was christened Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters (scratched on the foredeck with a ballpoint pen), each was of the same primitive design in which he made no improvements beyond substituting a cabbage leaf sail for the customary lettuce leaf whenever the breeze was especially stiff or when he happened to accidentally produce a rat-trap-sized boat rather than the mousetrap size that was his usual limit. It wasn’t that Switters eschewed beauty and grace. No, indeed. He was, in fact, a champion of the beautiful in an age when beauty had been voted out of office by philistines on both the right and the left. His boats remained raw and rudimentary because he was incapable of making them differently, the handyman gene having been recessive for generations in the males of his family (which might well account for their tendency to become “men of mystery,” borrowing Eunice’s droll phrase). And anyway, his dumb dinghies continued to triumph.

  “Sorry, darlings,” he’d apologize as, at the finish line, the girls would parade single file past his wheelchair to plant a victory kiss on his victory grin.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “He must cheat.”

  “Is it some kind of, like, trick?”

  “Fuck!”

  Into the shallow streams of their racecourse—streams that bore mum petals, sprigs of dried statice, seeds, spices, crab shell fragments and tossed latte cups; streams shoaled by squashed apples, rotting lemons, runaway brussels sprouts, and the occasional yeasty horse turd; streams drizzled with cloud water, tea, lemonade, soup, screwtop wine, and drool (avian, equine, and human), in addition to a half-hundred varieties of coffee; streams dredged clean by municipal workers every night only to be collaged the next day with lurid organic detritus shed by activities within the Pike, the belly and heart of Seattle—into those cobble-bottomed streams the girls commenced to shove brigs, brigantines, barks, frigates, and clipper ships: vessels meant not for sport but for cargo or battle. It was as if, having despaired of exceeding his vulgar Virgins in speed and endurance, they sought to overwhelm them with scope, intricacy, and grace.

  Indeed, they were works of marvel, those nautical midgets, especially when the clipper ship decks were stacked with lumber, rum barrels, hogsheads, cotton bales, or sacks of grain; when the frigates were outfitted with cannon and beaked figureheads for ramming an enemy. Races were interrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether due to outbreaks of naval warfare. As the fighting raged around it—”Fuck the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”—a lumpish Switters Virgin, flying a crude Jolly Roger, would go careening by in awkward audacity and lurch its way (providing it didn’t run aground on a half-submerged bagel) to the storm drain at the end of the street. Pretending to ignore him, the Art Girls made plans for a reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar, deciding it might be a more interesting and authentic engagement if the warships were manned.

  “Fruit flies,” suggested Luna, one of the more innovative of the girls. “We could rub grape pulp and stuff on the decks and in the rigging, and next thing you know we’ll have a crew.”

  “Hello?” countered Brie, who was Luna’s heated rival in the talent department. “Did you happen to notice that it’s winter? There aren’t any fruit flies out.”

  “Are, too. There’s always a flock of ’em flitting around that rosy-cheeked brunette who works in the stall over there.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Twila. “Even when she walks down the street.”

  “You mean Dev?” asked Switters innocently. As one, to a woman, each of the girls swung like a beacon to face him, their eyes narrowed with suspicion, or rather, some psychic knowledge well beyond suspicion, a daunting display of feminine intuition in full efflorescence. He actually blushed.

  When they’d had enough of broiling his marrow under their sarcastic smirks, they returned to preparations for Trafalgar. “Are we going to have critters aboard or not?”

  “Darlings, please!” pleaded Switters, reclaiming his pallor. “Critters? Rarely has a linguistic corruption stunk so excrementally of willful hayseediness. It’s the sort of ill-bred mispronunciation associated with barnyard sodomites and greeting-card wits, even exceeding in déclassé offensiveness the use of shrooms when mushrooms is the word intended.”

  “Life is offensive. Get used to it.” They had him there.

  “Bet Dev says shrooms.” There, too.

  Being as fundamentally nonviolent as they were artistically restless, the girls soon lost their taste for naval warfare. One day, to everyone’s delight, a lowly garbage scow appeared in place of a windjammer, and the next day somebody launched an ark. These were followed by fishing trawlers, tugboats, barges, rafts, kayaks, houseboats, tankers, and ocean liners. And, as any art historian could have predicted, there eventually bloomed a period of stylistic mannerism, of art for art’s sake. The girls began to bring in boats that bore little or no resemblance to boats: impressionistic boats, expressionistic boats, Cubistic boats, boats more closely resembling swivel chairs, toupees, bowling trophies, or poodle dogs than anything that ever plied the seas; boats that wouldn’t steer correctly and in some cases wouldn’t even float. Anti-boats. Suicides. Sinkers. Bangladesh ferry service. Then, Luna stopped the show with a miniature Christ who walked on water. Everyone was stunned, but two days later, during which time she’d neither eaten nor slept, Brie unveiled a Christ who not only walked on water but also towed skis. Apparently, the end was near.

  Their little regattas had been attracting an increasing number of kibitzers, so it was hardly a surprise when a writer for the Post-Intelligencer mentioned them in her column. “Regrettable,” bemoaned Switters. “Any day now we can expect the novelty-greedy snouts of TV cameras to come sniffing at our pleasures.”

  A product of their culture, the Art Girls could neither share nor understand his objection. An aversion to media exposure was as incomprehensible to them as would have been in earlier times an aversion to the favors of a king or the blessings of the Church.

  There might have developed a quarrel, but (naturally enough, since it was well into April) the rains stopped. The sky went blue on them, the sun bounded on
stage like a cut-rate comedian who doubled as his own spotlight, and within a day the market streets and gutters were as dry as rye. And dry they remained. With the dawning of spring, moreover, it dawned on the girls that their school year was drawing to a close, final exams were imminent, portfolios must be readied for grading; and, so, with a chirpy panic, they turned their full attention to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs that for months they’d been ignoring, to the faculty’s supreme bewilderment, in favor of maritime models and nautical whirligigs.

  On their rare forays into the market now, they did, singularly or in pairs, seek out Switters, always with just a trace of dreaminess in their perky hellos and good-byes. “What are you doing with yourself these days?” they’d inquire, implying that his life must be dreary without them.

  “The house is on fire,” he’d answer merrily. “I’m looking out the second-story window. In my case, that happens to be two inches above the ground. Perfect!”

  Whereas in the past it had been an unspoken rule that no prying was permitted, now they’d ask, “But what are you doing here in the market? What did you do before? You know, like before?”

  “Oh, I gave up a proctology practice to go live in the Ural Mountains. Or did I give up a urology practice to go work for Procter and Gamble? Hmm?”

  “You can’t remember whether you were a proctologist or a urologist?”