“. . . we both know you do not. It was just your usual line of—how do you call it?”
“Flapdoodle?” he suggested helpfully, regaining some control.
“Besides,” she went on, “the pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit. In the Order of St. Pachomius, we have always worked to build strong spirits. Spirits that can never be broken. Not even by the things that are to come.”
“What things?”
Domino stood. She was light on her feet, yet firmly planted. (Like a palm tree of a certain vintage?) “Your own spirit, for all of its—flapdoodie?—is very stout, I think, and would not be so badly out of place here. Perhaps it’s even needed. But you mustn’t feel pressured. We’ll get along without you. Even Fannie will. And cursed and misguided and lost to Christ as you are, you may actually need us more than we need you. So, you decide. I’ll go away now and let you mull it over. Just remember that the supply truck could arrive at any hour.”
“Wait.” He caught her wrist. It felt as if he’d grabbed the neck of a swan.
“Yes?”
“The truck. From Deir ez-Zur won’t it go back to Damascus?”
“Eventually, but along a different route. It returns to Damascus by way of Palmyra, the oasis town about a hundred kilometers to the south of us.”
Somewhat reluctantly he released her arm. Sister Domino’s flesh was as pure, and as forbidden, to him as Suzy’s always was, and thus had the capacity to make him dizzy. “Hmm. Well. Ah. What’s the date today? Around the first of June, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what. Let’s cut a deal. In the fall, I’ve got to bop down to Peru to see a man about a taboo. But I’ll stay until then. How’s that? I’ll stay through September, providing my grandmother is healthy, and for those—what is it?—four months, I’ll give you my absolute best, although I’m making no promises regarding Fannie. I’ll stay—but there are a couple of conditions.”
Eyes narrowing, she stiffened, turning her cheeks into something resembling toy igloos for Eskimo action figures. She was thinking that Switters was going to insist on being shown Cardinal Thiry’s secret document. He knew she was thinking precisely that, and it made him smile. If that dusty old paper really was the Serpent in their Eden, it undoubtedly would reveal itself to him in time. And if not, he didn’t give a good goddamn. He had other wants.
“First, I want to meet Masked Beauty.”
“Mais oui. Of course you will. That goes without saying.”
“And I want Sister Pippi to build another pair of stilts for me. A shorter pair. A pair whose footrests—this is essential, so listen up—a pair whose footrests are exactly two inches above the ground.”
Bobby Case thought it was hilarious. Hilarious. Switters, the scourge of Iraq, the brave-hearted bane of the pickle factory, the poetry-spouting libertine who raised eyebrows at the C.R.A.F.T. Club, even; Switters, operative’s operative and erstwhile stalwart defender of the erotic rights of the young, now a flunky at a convent, performing mundane clerical services for a gaggle of over-the-hill nuns! Hilarious.
When Bobby learned that the nuns had been recently defrocked, were holed up in a private oasis in the Syrian desert, and answered to an abbess who, in 1943, had been the model for the Matisse nude that graced Maestra’s living room wall, he had to admit that the situation had a novel flavor, a certain cachet. But it was still pretty funny. Bobby had to laugh, despite the fact that Switters could not now accept the assignment in Kosovo that was about to be offered by Audubon Poe. And he undoubtedly would have laughed all the harder had he, like the cuckoos in the willow trees, had a bird’s-eye view of Switters clomping and hopping around the convent grounds on a pair of undersize stilts.
The new stilts hadn’t been long in coming, and, as requested, hadn’t been long in length. The soles of his feet—as smooth and pink as a babe’s—were held off the ground at the barely perceptible height of two inches and not a centimeter less or more, and from that modest elevation he scanned the terrestrial and the astral, inspected the commonplace and the rare, as though he were revolving apace with the axle that turned the Wheel of Things. What cosmic insight was afforded by the two-inch perspective? The only advantage as far as he could tell—perhaps because he cloddishly clumped rather than mystically levitated—was that everything seemed a bit less serious when observed from an ambulatory loge. Of course, that might have been the master’s point. And Today Is Tomorrow’s, as well. A similar thought had even occurred to him in his Invacare 9000. At any rate, he certainly didn’t look like an enlightened being as, ungainly and stiff-legged, he negotiated the oasis’s shady paths. He walked the way furniture might have walked. Or a stick beetle on its journey along a twig.
It wasn’t that he was slow. After a week or ten days of practice, Switters, on stilts, could have beaten any of the nuns in a footrace. Moreover, his movements were entirely devoid of the strain, deliberation, and self-pitying sloth that one sometimes noticed in the physically impaired. On the contrary, he stilted with a reckless ebullience, so glad was he to be free of the wheelchair and its sickly associations. Still, there was something comical about him, like a crow blundering across a pavement grate or a boy in his mother’s high heels (Domino, in fact, wondered why he didn’t simply wear clogs, to which he explained that his survival depended upon there being space, air—oxygen, nitrogen, argon, plus traces of helium, hydrogen, ozone, krypton, xenon, neon, carbon monoxide, and methane—between his feet and the earth), and the sisters never reached a point where they could watch him without some amusement. Bobby, for better or worse, was deprived of the spectacle, but as has been noted, he found the whole business in Syria quite funny, including, once he was let in on it, the business of Sister Fannie. His mirth didn’t prevent him, however, from offering Switters sincere and well-reasoned advice. His e-mail read thusly:
> Whether or not you’re man enough to admit it,
> podner, you’re attracted to innocence like mildew to
> strawberries. But just because that little Irish rosary
> wrangler is a technical virgin, that don’t mean she’s
> pure. From what you tell me, Fannie’s less innocent
> than your average Patpong skivvy girl, intact cherry
> and a million damn Hail Marys notwithstanding. That
> don’t mean squat lessen you want it to, but I’d be
> remiss if I failed to point it out.
> It strikes me that the one you really want is the older
> one (not that Fannie ain’t Methuselah’s eldest
> daughter by your and my usual standards), and I have
> to say I find that both touching and troublesome, like
> when that nice aunt of mine near Hondo used to bake
> me cookies but always shaped and colored them so
> that they looked like ladybugs, which meant I could
> only eat the damn things alone in the root cellar or
> out back of the garage. Well, maybe that there is an
> imperfect analogy. But you listen to Captain Case,
> this is your captain speaking: if you really do have a
> heartfelt hankering for the older one with the name
> that cannot help but evoke memories of Antoine
> better known as Fats, whose rendition of “Blueberry
> Hill” was so frigging awesome and definitive that in
> nearly fifty years hardly any other singer has had the
> balls to try to cover it, then you should not lay a paw
> on Fannie, no matter how sweetly Domino may
> sanction it or swear it’s copacetic. Because once you
> do the deed with Fannie, any chance for romance with
> Domino will have flown out the window like a pigeon
> who just noticed the rotisserie was on.
/>
> Objectively speaking, you might be better off with the
> older one (Forty-six? Are you kidding me? Jesus,
> boy!) for the reason that there ain’t as likely to be
> COMPLICATIONS that might interfere with your
> rumble in the jungle come October.
How did Switters react to Bobby’s advice? Well, he said to himself: I’d eat ladybug cookies in broad daylight in the middle of downtown Hondo or Dallas or any precious place else, including the end-zone bleachers at the Texas-Oklahoma game, and any redneck cracker unevolved atavistic possum-lipped hooligans who were wont to harangue me about it could damn well. . . . Then, suddenly he remembered the album of Broadway show tunes so cautiously concealed in the secret compartment of his crocodile valise, and his bravado dissolved in a hot flush of shame.
That evening, he set up the computer in the dining hall and played the CD throughout dinner. It eased his private guilt only marginally: they were middle-aged French nuns, after all, not a pack of testosteronies, and they, moreover, enjoyed the concert thoroughly, although Mustang Sally did mention during coffee that she preferred rock ’n’ roll.
After the last romantic swell had subsided, he took Fannie by her callused little hand, led her to his room, undressed her, and lay down with her on the tracks before the conjunctional freight train.
Why?
Because “Stranger in Paradise” from Kismet always made him feel . . . libidinous.
Because he refused to believe that he might have a “heartfelt hankering” for Sister Domino.
Because he was not the sort of man to be compromised by rational advice.
Because he was Switters.
Having slept through breakfast the next morning, he arrived, yawning and reeking, at the office they had established for him in the main building to find a note taped to his computer screen. It summoned him to an immediate conference with Masked Beauty.
He had been introduced to the abbess nearly a fortnight earlier, when Domino had escorted him to her quarters, and had had only fleeting glimpses of her since. That initial meeting was memorable, however.
Her apartment was small, no more than double the size of his own room, and sparsely but opulently furnished; which is to say it contained only a tiny table, a cane-bottomed chair, a wooden settee, a chest of drawers, and a corner shrine encircled by wooden candlesticks, yet there were marvelously rich carpets underfoot, the pillows on the settee (which apparently doubled as her bed) were boisterously patterned and could have been stolen from an oriental harem as imagined (or actually visited in Morocco) by Matisse, and the tassel-roped curtains that draped both the windows and doors were of such heavy brocade that they would have strained the back of the stoutest camel and defied the claws of the meanest housecat. Masked Beauty had stood at one of the windows, peering through a narrow part in the brocade, her back turned to Switters as the candles flickered and a cloud of incense smoke seemed to overload with oily perfumes every molecule in the space.
When her tall, erectly held figure slowly pivoted to face him, he saw that she was veiled. The sensation he had was that of being received by a Bedouin matriarch (were there such a thing) or the wife of a minor pasha (were such a reception permitted). Despite the crucifix that hung above the shrine and the image of Mary that dominated its nave, the atmosphere in the apartment was decidedly more Levantine than Roman. Lines from Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au Voyage,” the very first poem he’d studied at Berkeley, drifted through his mind, lines such as, “In that amber-scented calm” and “Walls with eastern splendour hung,” and, waiting to be introduced, he spontaneously blurted out in French the poem’s refrain: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté / Luxe, calme et volupté.”
Domino and Masked Beauty exchanged glances. Both sets of eyes seemed to be smiling. The abbess, in a flat, childish voice, bade Switters sit beside her on the couch while Domino arranged for tea. Then, without excess of preamble, and still under veil, she engaged him in a dialogue about beauté. He told her that in America, socio-political dullards had chopped up beauty and fed it to the dogs sometime in the late 1980s on grounds ranging from its lack of pragmatic social application to the notion that it was somehow unfair to that and those who were, by beauty’s standards, ugly.
The abbess asked if it wasn’t true that beauty was, indeed, useless, to which he responded with an enthusiastic, “Mais oui!” He proclaimed that beauty’s great purpose was always to be purposeless, that its use to society lay in its very uselessness, that its lack of function was precisely what lent it the power to scoop us out of context, especially political and economic context, and provide experiences available in no other area of our lives, not even the spiritual. He likened those philistines who would banish the beautiful from art, architecture, dress, and language in order to free us from frivolous and expensive distractions to those scientists who proposed blowing up the moon in order to free us, psychologically and commercially, from the effects of the tides.
The abbess agreed that a world sans lune would be a poorer world indeed—in the desert, especially, moonlight was the magic frosting that slathered delectability onto the scorched hard torte of the earth—but surely those critics were correct when they complained that ideas and ideals of physical beauty tended, at worst, to oppress the plain in appearance, and, at best, to make them feel inadequate; while giving those graced with comeliness, through no particular effort of their own, a false sense of superiority. “Yeah,” Switters blurted in English, “but so what?” Then, in his halting French, he argued that the two positions were equally egocentric and thus equally inane. Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he’d choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive. He was willing to concede, though, that the plastic crown of glamor could bear down as heavily on its wearers as the dung corona of plainness could upon its, and that frequently the difference between the two was merely a matter of fashion, rather than any objective, universal aesthetic indices.
During this banter, which persisted for nearly half an hour, Domino remained silently attentive. She busied herself with refilling their teacups and to his pronouncements outwardly reacted only twice. At one point, he had nodded toward the plaster Virgin in the shrine and wondered why those who had been allegedly visited by Mary at places such as Fatima and Lourdes (homely young girls in both instances) had been moved to dwell upon her physical beauty, comparing her to film stars or pageant queens, when, historically in all probability, she was an average-looking teenager from a dusty backwater shtetl. Both Domino and her aunt had started a bit at that, exchanging meaningful blinks, before the abbess suggested that the girls naturally would have had a limited frame of reference with which to attempt to describe Mary’s holy radiance.
Later, as Domino bent over to pour tea, her chestnut hair had fallen over her face, and the easy grace with which she’d employed her left hand to sweep it back prompted Switters to declare that that gesture, itself, was an unconsciously choreographed act of intense beauty, and of more value, ultimately, to the human race than, say, the sixty new jobs created in a depressed suburb by the opening of a Wal-Mart store. As she straightened up, Domino whispered near his ear, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”
For her part, Masked Beauty had clucked and compared Switters to Matisse, who, she professed, identified the female form with beauty to such a degree that for Henri, it was the perfect symbol of love, truth, and charity; both a garden of sensual delights and a link (more so than prayer) to the divine. “It’s flattering to be adored, I suppose, but that is a terrible burden to load on the backs of women.” She clucked again. “Henri was an old fool, and if you are not careful, you will end up the same.” She laughed. “But Domino was right. You are an interesting fool.”
Now that the subject of Matisse had been broached, Switters wanted
to ask the abbess all about the circumstances surrounding the painting of Blue Nude 1943. Before he could facilitate the segue, however, his hostess stood, seeming to indicate that the visit was at an end. Switters rose to face her. She would have been only a couple of inches shorter than he, were he not now back on his stilts, and he found himself checking out her feet to see if she wore some sort of platform shoes. She did not. When he lifted his gaze from her sandals, he saw to his delight that she was loosening her veil. He supposed he was prepared for anything, but he was wrong.
The septuagenarian’s face, when the veil fell away, proved to be nearly as round as her niece’s, yet without a trace of a double chin. She had large but elegant ears, a voluptuous mouth that became frank and impatient at its corners; a nose longer, more bony than Domino’s, though no less perfectly formed; eyes that were the same odd mixture of gray, green, and brown, but whereas Domino’s orbs invited comparisons to, for example, diamond-dusted napalm, amphetamined fireflies, or hot jalapeño ginseng spritzer, Masked Beauty’s, no longer isolated above the veil, seemed to be paling, waxing transparent, as if agate cinders were cooling into a watery ash. In contrast to her thick, wavy, elephant-colored hair, the abbess’s complexion was rosy and youthful, so smooth, in fact, that her skin might have been her most memorable attribute—were it not for that other thing.
That other thing—the thing that cut short any impulse to exclaim, “My God, she must have been gorgeous in her day!”—was a wart. On her nose. Near the tip of her nose. And not just any common, everyday wart. Hers was a singular wart, a wart among warts, the rotten ruby jewel in the crown of wartdom, the evil empress, the burning witch, the tragic diva of the wart world.
Very nearly the circumference of a dime, reddish umber in hue, it appeared spongy in texture, irregular in outline, resembling nothing so much as a speck of hamburger, a crumb of rare ground beef that might have spilled out of a taco. Even as she stood stationary, the wart appeared to shudder, like the tiny heart of a shrew, and to radiate, as if a fungus that grew on raw uranium was practicing for fission. Simultaneously feathery and lumpish, like a squashed raspberry, a pinch of dry snuff, a tuft of moss that a wounded robin had bled upon, or the butt end of an exploded firecracker, it caught the candlelight and in so doing, seemed to enlarge before his eyes.