Had he patience, a simple tool or two (a hairpin or nail file would have sufficed), and a lower ebb of spirit, he surely could have picked the lock, for, despite his imperfect dexterity, he had successfully completed the burglary course at Langley. In his present mood, however, he summarily rejected that option, returning, instead, to his room to wrest the Beretta from its crocodile-hide cocoon. Back at the pantry, he aimed the weapon at the padlock, and with a little grunt of enthusiasm (a truncated wahoo, one might reasonably categorize it), he squeezed off the rounds necessary to blow apart the lock, adding one or two more for good measure. For a split second, tiny burrs and shards of steel whizzed angrily in all directions, like metallic bees in a bug riot.
Alas, the pantry proved to contain but six bottles of wine. It was his own fault, the increased frequency of festivities from monthly Italian nights to weekly blues nights having depleted the stock. “One must make do,” he muttered philosophically, and after jamming the pistol in his waistband, he gathered up the sextet of dusty green bottles and with difficulty, due to the manner in which a burden of almost any size could create an imbalance for a stiltwalker, tottered off to the dining hall.
The sisters had left the table and were bunched in the doorway, Domino out in front like the leader of the pack. He realized then that the gunshots had frightened them: they probably imagined themselves under another terrorist attack. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to give you a scare. Firearms are to Americans what fine food and drink are to the French: can’t hold a proper celebration without them.” He treated the women to his sweetest, most luminous grin. “And we do, I understand, have something to celebrate this evening.” He swung the grin like a searchlight, narrowing its beam on Domino. “Pippi, please relieve me of this libationary freight—and uncork it, if you would, so that it might inhale, to salubrious effect, nature’s precious oxygens.” Nearly toppling over in the process, he thrust the bottles upon the redhead and then clomped off to fetch his computer cum disk player. “Don’t lament,” he called. “Our separation will be most endurably brief.”
True to his word, he was back in minutes, though he did not sit with them until he had unleashed Frank Zappa’s atonal, polyphonic rendition of “Happy Birthday” upon the gathering. Deliberately shunning Domino’s table (she shared it, as usual, with Bob, Pippi, and ZuZu), he took a seat (his feet planted carefully upon a chair rung) with those four diners—a relatively older group—presided over by Masked Beauty. To appease him, perhaps, there was an open bottle of wine on each table. The other bottles had disappeared. “One must make do,” he mumbled, dividing his table’s wine into four glasses (Maria Deux declined on the grounds of a troubled liver), and persuading, with forceful gestures, the other table to follow suit.
Gazing at Domino along a line of sight that bisected the wad of bubblegum that God, not wishing to defile his golden throne, had deposited on Masked Beauty’s compliant proboscis, Switters raised his glass. All present held their breath. To their relief, he said only, “To Simone ‘Domino’ Thiry! Long may she brighten this ball of clay with her grace!” Everyone uttered an assent of some sort, as she was cherished by her colleagues, and Domino reddened rather charmingly.
After the toast, things settled down to normal for a while, although Zappa’s contorted instrumentals kept a slight edge on the proceedings. However, as the wine receded—and it had completely vanished long before the eggplant-and-feta pie and the salad of chopped tomato and cucumber had been properly dispatched, the reverend sisters being thoughtful eaters—social intercourse attained a degree of animation typically seen only on blues nights and not always then. There was lively conversation and even a titter or two.
“Maria, O Maria, blessed lady of the tender repast, our genius engineer of endless culinary triumphs, please show us again the gastronomic mercy for which you are rightly renowned and allow the assembled celebrants to refill their cups, for though we be unworthy of the grape, any unsated thirst might be construed as an insult to the occasion. The birthday girl must be feted, and for that, naught but your prime-time vintage will do.” Switters was guessing that the extra wine had been stashed with Maria Une’s provisions. The hunch proved correct, for Masked Beauty, somewhat hesitantly, gave a nod of assent to the flustered old cook, whereupon Maria Une shuffled back to the kitchen and retrieved a pair of the missing bottles. When the vessels had been decorked and their contents distributed—both Marias this time abstained, leaving Switters little choice but to assume their allotment—a warm atmosphere enveloped the dining hall. Or, perhaps, Switters only imagined it.
Pippi lit candles at each table, as it was past the hour for her to turn off the power, and Switters withdrew the poem from his pocket, unfolded it, and read it to himself in the flickering glow while awaiting Pippi’s return from the generator shed. The poem was about some golden tablets, inscribed with secrets of the soul and heart and hidden in the pyramids, and how a wise Egyptian king had refused to allow Plato to mooch the tablets on the grounds that the Greek—weakened by his priggish philosophy of asexual love—mightn’t be able to bear up under the weight of so much robust passion. Clearly, the implication (he could imagine the poem being analyzed by his professor at Berkeley) was that the divine secrets are withheld from those who lack the courage to accept and explore their own sensual natures. An accurate enough sentiment, he heard his inner voice agreeing. But I can’t palm off this piece of anti-Platonic propaganda on Domino as a birthday present. What could I have been thinking?
In a move to outflank his imp, he thrust a corner of the page into the nearest candle flame. The paper instantly ignited, and he held on to the burning poem until the fire reached his fingertips, whereupon he dropped the last smoldering corner of it onto the wooden tabletop. (Good thing Pippi had never gotten around to sewing those pseudo-Italian tablecloths.) All conversation ceased at the onset of this little pyromaniacal display, and he sensed himself the object of apprehensive surveillance. In the middle of the burning, however, he overheard Domino say dismissively, “Mr. Switters is a CIA agent,” as if that explained everything; and he could tell that the sisters were conjuring images of him in a Moscow attic, on a secluded Cuban beach, or in a dim café in Casablanca, setting fire to coded instructions, plans for a deadly new weapon, or a single mysterious word scrawled in blood, in order that he might save a democratic government or a brave double agent, who happened to be, in her spare time, a beautiful contessa who’d donated her fortune to Catholic orphanages; and they, the Pachomian sisters, were reveling in these images. Reveling in them.
Inspired, Switters scooped up the poetry ashes and ate them. Then, lips all black and flaky, he raised his glass as if for another toast. His glass, alas, was empty. Registering his predicament, Masked Beauty handed him her wine, which was largely untouched. He smiled his appreciation. He took a gulp to wash down the lingering black snow of charred paper, and he said, “To nuns! On the occasion of Sister Domino’s birthday, I salute all nuns, for nuns are the most romantic people on earth.”
That seemed to go down pretty well with the assembly (although Domino was rolling her eyes a bit), so he elucidated. “Each nun gives her heart completely to a man from a distant place and a distant time, a legendary husband she loves beyond everything else, though he comes to her only in her prayers and her dreams. Every true romantic lives a life of idealized otherness, but it is the nun who lives it most purely and with the least self-serving compromise.”
At this, the sisters applauded. Even Domino clapped, although her clapping seemed watered down with politeness. Switters bowed and was about to continue, was about, in fact, to launch into a diatribe against Church fathers for relegating nuns to subservient positions, was about to go so far as to accuse their beloved old St. Pachomius of actually establishing nunneries as a devious means of getting devout women out of the way, neutralizing their sexuality, and exploiting their unpaid labor. Fortunately, perhaps, the three elder sisters at his table chose that moment to stand and excuse themselv
es, Maria Une to soak her varicose shanks, Maria Deux because she sensed her liver trying to turn itself into pâté (if only she could envision a ball of mystic white light in its stead!), and Masked Beauty to get her masked beauty sleep.
Leaping onto his chair, Switters waved off their departure. “Please, sisters, grant me a moment more. I’ll be leaving you soon, and before I go, I’d like to say. . . . Mmm, you know I could speak my piece with ever so much more, uh, ease and, uh, precision, were my tonsils frescoed with another light coat of the cardinal pigment: Maria, you flesh-bound instrument of numinous nurturance, I know you harbor two more bottles in your cupboard, and while I’d never be so rapacious as to covet them both . . .” At that point, ZuZu, who was weaving a bit and looking rather ruddy, filled his glass to the brim from a bottle she’d apparently retrieved from the kitchen when no one was looking. “Oh, thank you, my dear! God bless. Now. Mmm. Delicious. Now.” He cleared his throat.
“I’ve spent the greater part of my adult life in the company of men. Yes. And men that no honest, plainspoken, hard-working, God-fearing folk would want to be around for eleven seconds: wild-eyed, restless, and often dangerous men; fellows who could not drink this fine vin rouge of yours without losing control; rebels and dreamers and lunatics, soldiers-of-fortune, out-of-work mercenaries, vagabond scholars, expat journalists, gamesters, bohemians, and failed international speculators; irresponsible men who insist that something interesting must be happening pretty much at all times—or else, watch out! Men who’d enthusiastically stay up for days arguing over the nuances of a book even its own author couldn’t completely understand, yet refuse to devote half a minute to an insurance policy, a mortgage, or a marriage contract; men . . . well, I think you see the kind of fellows, bless their poor doomed butts, who I’m talking about here, and I mention them only to underscore the contrast between such men and the wholesome feminine companionship I’ve enjoyed these past nearly four months. Yes. Mmm.”
Following a big swig that nearly exhausted his libation, he, gazing at the ceiling, went on to laud the women for their devotion to simple tasks and for practicing stability without stagnation, although, as the tribute lengthened, he began referring to them in such overheated terms as “sunstruck outcasts,” “desert zealots” and “wilderness saints.” Eventually, as lines from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air”) commenced to stray into the monologue, he realized that he’d lost his French and had been prattling away in English. Good God! Not this! he thought, as he suddenly imagined he heard himself crooning “Send in the Clowns.” But it wasn’t he. Someone had slipped his album of Broadway show tunes into the disk player.
As candle flames swayed to the haunting, bittersweet Sondheim refrain (part of the song’s appeal was that it was impossible to tell whether it was cynically ironic or sentimentally self-pitying), Switters glanced around the dining hall and discovered that his audience had abandoned him. Only three of the ex-nuns remained. Bob and ZuZu were dancing. Slow dancing. Dancing cheek to cheek, fairly clinging to each other, the circus frizz (somehow musically appropriate) of the one almost engulfing the practical Julia Child crop of the other. My, my, he thought. Am I responsible for this, or has it been going on for some time? The only other remaining diner was Domino, who sat at the next table, her arms folded across her chest, regarding him with an amused, sympathetic smile.
He seemed momentarily dazed but quickly recovered. “A man must get carried away with himself from time to time,” he said, “or run the risk of his juices drying up.” Domino nodded, still smiling, and the laser finished with Sondheim and moved on to the next cut, which happened to be the terminally romantic “Stranger in Paradise.” Indicating the blissfully gliding ZuZu and Bob, he inquired if she wouldn’t like to dance. She replied that while his talents were numberless, she really didn’t believe he could dance on stilts. “Push your table over here,” he said, and when she had coupled the two tables, he hopped up onto the combined surface, bidding her to follow. “I’ve frequented Asian nightclubs with smaller dance floors than this,” he said.
At first, they danced awkwardly, Domino keeping a discreet distance, but as she grew more accustomed to the novelty of the situation and as the music in her ears and the wine in her blood took over, she relaxed into his light embrace. “Can you believe?” she asked. “I haven’t danced since my junior prom in Philadelphia.”
“Well, then,” he said, dipping her gingerly, then pausing as “Stranger in Paradise” faded out and “If I Loved You” from Carousel came on, “consider this your present. Happy birthday.”
“Thank you. Thank you very, very much.” Her appreciation struck him as touchingly genuine. “When is your birthday?”
“It was back in July.”
“And you didn’t celebrate?”
“Lost track of the calendar and forgot all about it—until sometime in the middle of the night. Then I got up and went out in the desert and tried to count the stars. Astronomers claim the human eye can see no more than five thousand stars at any one time, but I swear I counted nineteen thousand. Not including asteroids and major planets. Of course, I may have counted some black holes by mistake. But it was a splendid celebration.”
Domino squeezed his hand and folded against him, moving in his arms like a pendulum moving in a grandfather clock. “I should like to have done that for my birthday: counting stars.” She sighed close to his ear. “Better than vespers, maybe.”
“Unless I’m mistaken, they’re still up there. Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, the Big Dipper, Orion, neutron stars, pulsars, novas, supernovas, red giants, white dwarfs, purple people-eaters, the whole twinkly-assed crew. We could. . . .” He motioned toward the door.
“No,” she whispered. “Not tonight. I must go soon.” Her voice brightened without rising. “But tomorrow night? We could, if you want, count stars tomorrow night.”
“Sure. I’m free. I’ll meet you around ten. At the gate.”
“No. It’ll be cold and windy out there in the open. We’ll meet in the tower. You know? At the top of—what do you call it? The ladder.”
“As long as it isn’t the corporate ladder, I’ll be happy to climb it.”
They, in their dancing, had kicked over all but one of the candles. The dining hall was so faintly illuminated they could no longer ascertain if Bob and ZuZu were still in the room, yet Domino’s eyes seemed luminous, even though partially closed. If it was the wine that was responsible, either on her part or his own, he would ever be wine’s loyal friend. He swore it.
“My grandmother,” he said, “confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.”
“Sounds not quite a proper method to me. Are you drunk, Switters?”
“Certainly not. But it’s a state that might be beneficially attained were I to gain access to that last bottle back in the kitchen. In the interest of knowledge, of course. We could see if I pass Maestra’s test.”
“You’ve rearranged enough furniture for one night.” She smiled, glancing at the combined tabletops over which they’d been (at times, precariously) skimming. The ballad from Carousel had ended and a lively, up-tempo tune from South Pacific was intruding on the mood. She pulled away from him. “See you at the tower. Bring your calculator.” She was going, and he was prepared to let her go, but, abruptly, before either of them could step aside, each of their faces moved forward, as if attracted by a sudden mutual activation of atomic dipoles or else shoved together by formless relatives of the Asmodeus. And they kissed. They surprised themselves utterly by kissing.
It wasn’t a lengthy kiss,
as kisses go, yet neither was it a friendly peck. (As the Egyptians knew full well, Platonism never stood a chance in this world.) It was a kiss of moderate duration, devoid of all but the sweetest hint of tongue, yet a kiss fraught with pressure, irrigated with mouth moisture, and animated by some force that transcended the mere contracting and relaxing of oral musculature. It possessed a muscular rhythm, however, as well as a kinetic inquisitiveness, and a systemwide excitation was somehow synergistically precipitated by the crude, unsanitary, and yet glorious co-mingling of lip meats.
How could anything as commonplace—and in their pink, fatty, babyish way, dumb—as human lips produce such mysterious pleasure? Accompanied by tiny noises like carp feeding or rubber stretching or fallen kumquats returning to the branch? Fusing one pair of lips to another must be akin to attaching an ordinary prefix such as re or a or ex to an ordinary (and rather harsh) verb such as ward or rouse or cite. Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon.
When at last they began to pull apart, a thread of spittle as slender and silky as a spider’s wire connected them for another second or two, as if they were continents linked by a single transoceanic cable. Then, with an inaudible pop, they were disconnected, staring at each other from opposite shores.
“À demain,” she said, a little breathless but not rattled in the least. “Tomorrow night.”
“The stars.”
“Count them.”
“Every damn one of them.”
“Okay.”
The following night, and every night thereafter for seven months, they lay on a Bedouin carpet in the roofless tower and looked up at the cat-black sky. Not many stars got counted. On the other hand, lest one jump to conclusions, not many carnal apples got bobbed, either—at least not in the sense of conventional sexual intercourse. What transpired nightly in the room at the top of the tower was at once more uneventful and more extraordinary than routine copulation and sidereal enumeration. And, no, that wasn’t a typographical error back there: it persisted for seven months.