Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

  Maybe the princess put aside the golden ball until her own children were old enough to play with it, or maybe once she had a prince to play with she simply abandoned her beloved toy (she was certainly capable of that), and it got packed away in an attic, thrown out with the garbage, stolen by a chambermaid, or donated to Goodwill Industries. In any case, Leigh-Cheri had never been curious about it, and the psychiatrists and mythologists who’d analyzed the story—they claimed the spring (“so deep its bottom could not be seen”) symbolized the unconscious mind; the frog, of course (talk about typecasting), symbolized the penis, ugly and loathsome to a girl-child, but to an emerging woman a thing of some beauty that could contribute to her happiness and fulfillment—those analysts were sure that the golden ball represented the moon, but they never asked what became of it, either.

  It was Bernard who’d raised the question, and in the empty days that followed their jailhouse meeting, Leigh-Cheri wondered why it seemed so important to him. The CIA wondered, also. The CIA suspected that the story was a coded message packed with information about revolutionary activity in Max and Tilli’s former kingdom. The CIA submitted its tape of the story—and Bernard’s apparently urgent response—to its experts in the home office. Attorney Nina Jablonski lamented the fact that of all the stories Leigh-Cheri might have told, she had chosen one about a royal family in which a king and queen ended up happily ever after. Because of the CIA monitors, Jablonski refused to ask Bernard why he was interested in the fate of the golden ball, although Leigh-Cheri requested that she do so. “We’re dropping the ball,” Jablonski said flatly.

  As a result of the fracas with the guards, Bernard’s visitor privileges were revoked. Moreover, accounts of the incident were leaked to the press. Whereas the media had been politely interested in a beautiful young princess who wished to enlist deposed royalty in the service of environmentalism, they were savagely intrigued by a beautiful young princess who was involved, politically, romantically, or both with a notorious bomb-throwing outlaw. If the Furstenberg-Barcalona monogrammed telephone had, the previous week, frequently tinkled, it now exhausted itself in a monstrous marathon of jangling, although it sometimes could not be heard above the knockings at the door. Were it not for the blackberries, reporters would have camped in the yard.

  Max was in a funk due to the constant interruption of his TV sportscasts, and both Tilli and her new Chihuahua developed nervous diarrhea. Chuck was going bananas trying to intercept all the phone calls and to photograph with a miniature camera the strangers, mostly newsmen, who rapped at the door. Gulietta kept the house running fairly smoothly, everything considered, but she had begun to toot cocaine so prodigiously that often her central nervous system was buzzing in pace with the phone. Oddly enough, Leigh-Cheri was the calmest member of the household. In part, this could be attributed to the love that enveloped her like a silk-lined fever, but it was also due to the fact that on Wednesday, two weeks late; out of breath; embarrassed but making no excuses; flustered but offering no explanations, her menses showed up. It neither called first nor knocked, but stepped through her door, sticky, mortal, its head as red as her own, remained for five days, then disappeared again, leaving behind an exhibition of cheerfully painted tampons and a sustained series of sighs of relief that could have fluttered the flags of every used-car lot in Los Angeles.

  In celebration of the proven effectiveness of She-Link, Leigh-Cheri sent out for Chinese food. Chuck snapped a whole roll of film of the Oriental boy who delivered it. “Someday, when conditions are right, I’ll have Bernard’s baby,” thought Leigh-Cheri, chewing a mouthful of fried rice. “and it can have a golden ball to play with, or anything else its daddy gives it except dynamite. But for now …”

  For now, her energy was devoted to pestering Nina Jablonski about schemes to see Bernard again before his trial. Jablonski didn’t have the heart to tell her that there wasn’t going to be any trial.

  51

  ON LEIGH-CHERI’S BIRTHDAY, Guilietta baked a chocolate cake and sank twenty candles into the frosting. Although they were too peeved with their daughter to promote a celebration, Max and Tilli appeared at the big oak table in the dining room, where the cake was lit up like an oil refinery, long enough to sing the traditional anthem. They lingered until, with a desperate expulsion, the Princess puffed out the candles. “Zee vhole vorld knows vat her weesh vas,” complained Tilli to her pooch.

  Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a package. Twenty centuries under our belts and where do we go from here?

  For her part, Leigh-Cheri went back downtown and called on Nina Jablonski.

  “You have chocolate on your face,” said the attorney.

  “It’s my birthday,” said Leigh-Cheri.

  “Then let me buy you a drink.”

  They went to a fern bar and ordered champagne cocktails.

  “To justice,” said Jablonski.

  “To love,” said Leigh-Cheri.

  “You’ve got it bad, sister.”

  “No, I’ve got it good.” The Princess downed her champagne cocktail and ordered a tequila mocking-bird. “Tell me, Nina, you’ve been married for several years—”

  “Twice. Twice for several years.”

  “Well, do you think it’s possible to make love stay?”

  “Sure. It’s not at all unusual for love to remain for a lifetime. It’s passion that doesn’t last. I still love my first husband. But I don’t desire him. Love lasts. It’s lust that moves out on us when we’re not looking, it’s lust that always skips town—and love without lust just isn’t enough.”

  “Anybody can fuck anybody, Nina. But how many people can play together in the fields of true love?”

  “Jeez. You make true love sound like some kind of elitist picnic. That’s a smug misconception. Love, of all emotions, is democratic.”

  Leigh-Cheri got the notion that Jablonski was chiding her for her monarchal background. She didn’t care. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not so sure about that. I have an idea that love is a lot more exclusive than popular songs have led us to believe. Now lust, lust is democratic, all right. Lust makes itself accessible to any clod or clone who can muster enough voltage to secrete a hormone. But like you say, it doesn’t stick around for long. Maybe lust gets fed up with democracy after a while, maybe lust just gets bored with the way it’s spent by mediocre people. Maybe both lust and love demand something more than most of us have the stomach for. These days, certainly, folks seem more concerned with furthering careers than with furthering romance.”

  “You say you’re twenty today?”

  The Princess registered the lawyer’s insinuations of immaturity, but though she was unfamiliar with neoteny, she didn’t care about that, either. “Yes, I’m twenty, and, can you believe it, I have no idea how old Bernard is. He has at least a dozen driver’s licenses, each one under a different name and a different age.” With ecological soundness, she diverted into her throat a quantity of tequila that otherwise might have been left to stagnate or poured down the drain to poison the fishes. “Have you ever wondered what kind of driver’s licenses they have on the planet Argon?”

  “I think you better let me call you a cab.” Jablonski gave Leigh-Cheri that uncomfortable half-amused, half-resentful look that people always give you when they’re remaining sober and you are getting looped.

  As a matter of fact, Jablonski had begun to look increasingly at Bernard in that same fashion, although a rabbi’s dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in the King County Jail. Jablonski had come to believe that Bernard simply had too much fun. It was one thing to be a bomber, quite another to enjoy it. “Fighting the system is serious business,” the lawyer had reminded her client. “It’s serious business that creates the system,” answered Bernard. He seemed to regard his impending trial as a party the government was throwing for his amusement, to look forward to it the way a frustrated amateur actor awaits the annual skit at the Elks Club. Eventually, Jablon
ski decided that it would best serve her client, as well as radicalism in America, if a trial (due to changes in the social climate since Bernard’s previous conviction, the judiciary had offered him a new trial) could be avoided. She asked Bernard if he would mind pleading guilty. He was delighted. “If society is considered innocent, then any person who isn’t guilty isn’t leading a meaningful life,” he said. “Besides, an outlaw is guilty by definition.” She took his admission of guilt into plea bargaining, where she traded it for a reduced sentence. It was all arranged at a meeting with the prosecutor in the judge’s private chambers.

  “Nina,” said Leigh-Cheri, her birthday blood swarming with the liquid locusts of libation, “you’ve got to get me to him before the trial. And we’ve got to get him out, even if I have to blast him out.”

  “Hush!” Jablonski glanced around the bar. “Don’t ever so much as mention blasting, not even in a joke. Sister, listen, I’ve got some good news. Bernard isn’t going to have to stand trial. He’s being transferred to McNeil Island. Tomorrow morning. To begin serving a ten-year sentence. That means he’ll be eligible for parole in only twenty months.”

  Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl’s gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord’s last pratfall, and after all that time we still don’t know where passion goes when it goes.

  52

  A WOODPECKER’S MOVEMENT around a tree trunk defines a perfect spiral. To connect the hoppity helix of the woodpecker to the macrocosmic spiral of our stellar system or to the microcosmic spiral of the DNA molecule or, for that matter, to the hundreds of natural spirals in between—snail shells, crowns of daisies and sunflowers, fingerprints, cyclones, etc.—may be assigning to geometry more meaning than the mundane can abide. Suffice to say that a woodpecker is first on one side of a tree and then the other; disappearing, then reappearing at a point slightly higher up the trunk.

  Bernard Mickey Wrangle had disappeared again, this time into the maximum security wing of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, but nobody, with the possible exception of Princess Leigh-Cheri, was expecting him to reappear any time close to soon. True, he could be paroled in twenty months, if he behaved, but who could expect Bernard to behave? Certainly not officials at McNeil. They isolated him in solitary confinement. The only person permitted to see him there was Nina Jablonski, and she saw him only once because he fired her when he found himself imprisoned without the fun of a trial. Jablonski explained that if tried he could have been made to serve the remainder of his previous thirty-year sentence plus time for his escape, or he could have drawn a new sentence that was nearly as bad, particularly had he turned the courtroom into some outlandish celebration of outlawism as he had been hinting he would do. “You’re lucky,” said Jablonski. “You could come out of McNeil looking more like a bald eagle than a woodpecker. This way, I’m going to have you back in circulation while your hair’s still red.” Bernard thanked her for her concern, but he felt betrayed, nonetheless, and he dismissed her. “That’s the trouble with political people,” he said. “There’s not one of you, left, right, or center, who doesn’t believe that the means are justified by the end.”

  With that, he spiraled out of view.

  On the day of his transfer to McNeil, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had published a one-column picture of him, grinning, as usual, as if mouthing a pulpy newsprint “yum,” his snaggleteeth and freckles ghosted out but his eyes frictional, even in gray ink, with the special hungers of the terminally alive. Leigh-Cheri tore the picture out of the paper and pressed it beneath her hangover pillow. It did little, if anything, to relieve her headache—her temples were banging like her daddy’s valve—but during the night she awoke to the unmistaken sound of the chipmunk that lives at the center of the earth, and it seemed unusually close to her ear.

  53

  THAT YEAR, spring came to the Puget Sound country as it frequently does, like a bride’s maid climbing a greased pole. After a gradual, precarious ascent, spring, in a triumph of frills and blooms and body heat, would seem to have finally arrived, only to suddenly slide down into the mud again, leaving winter’s wet flag flapping stiffly and singularly at the top of the seasonal staff. Then, girlish bosom heaving, spring would shinny slowly back up the pole.

  When Leigh-Cheri took to bed with her hangover, spring was riding high. She arose two days later to an un-seasonal frost. It had numbed the bejeepers out of insects and buds. It had thrown the fear of February into batteries and birds. So inanimate was Prince Charming that Leigh-Cheri believed him deceased, although when the first sunbeam to drill through the window frost caused his flipper to twitch, she sat the terrarium in front of an open oven and watched as he stoically revived. It was the middle of April. Except for the faithful who are always sounding alarms about the return of the Ice Age, nobody in the Pacific Northwest was prepared for such a frost.

  Down in Pioneer Square, where the Princess bussed for one last meeting with Nina Jablonski, frosty cobblestones gave the area the appearance of a marshmallow plantation. Shrubs and winos seemed startled in the morning light. Even the D-note of the ferry horn had a frosty edge as it blared up from the waterfront. As for the manholes, they looked as if they’d been snorting cocaine. The manholes, Leigh-Cheri noted, bore an enlarged resemblance to Gulietta’s nostrils of late. Leigh-Cheri had been waiting to catch Gulietta when she wasn’t buzzed so that she might ask the old woman if she knew whatever happened to the golden ball, but such an opportunity hadn’t presented itself.

  Leigh-Cheri was dressed warmly in a heavy green sweater and jeans, yet she was inadequately insulated for the coolness of Jablonski’s response when she revealed to the attorney her new plans. Jablonski called the Princess selfish, frivolous, narcissistic, indulgent, and immature.

  “The monarchy of Mu was a half-assed idea,” said Jablonski. “It would never have worked because all those dethroned kings and deposed duchesses own chunks of the big corporations whose excessive profits are threatened by a clean, healthy environment. It’d never work, but at least it was a move in the right direction, at least it was a decent impulse, an attempt to get yourself involved with something more important than your own emotions. This, however …”

  “You don’t think love is as important as ecology?”

  “I think ecology is love.”

  On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic—the supremacy of the organization over the individual—is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control. As for magic, there’s none at all because the aim of any social activist is power over others, whereas a magician seeks power over only himself: the power of higher consciousness, which, while universal, cosmic even, is manifest in the intimate. It would seem that a whole human being would have the capacity for both intimacy and social action, yet sad to say, every cause, no matter how worthy, eventually falls prey to the tyranny of the dull mind. In the movement, as in the bee house or the white ant’s hill of clay, there is no place for idiosyncrasy, let alone mischief.

  A romantic, however, recognizes that the movement, the organization, the institution, the revolution, if it comes to that, is merely a backdrop for his or her own personal drama and that to pretend otherwise is to surrender freedom and will to the totalitarian impulse, is
to replace psychological reality with sociological illusion, but such truth never penetrates the Glo-Coat of righteous conviction that surrounds the social idealist when he or she is identifying with the poor or the exploited. Since, on a socio-economic level, there are myriad wrongs that need to be righted, a major problem for the species seems to be how to assist the unfortunate, throttle the corrupt, preserve the biosphere, and effectively organize for socioeconomic alteration without the organization being taken over by dullards, the people who, ironically, are best suited to serving organized causes since they seldom have anything more imaginative to do and, restricted by tunnel vision, probably wouldn’t do it if they had.

  Dullards can put a pox on the most glorious moral enterprise by using that enterprise as a substitute for spiritual and sexual unfolding. Finally, it is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism, although some at Outlaw College go so far as to contend that dullness is evil. Of course, whether something is dull can be a matter of taste (one person’s ennui is another person’s coronary), and there are a lot of ostensibly boring chores that somebody has to attend to, but when you bring that up to a scholar at Outlaw C., you’ll find the sucker has just resigned in order to enter business in Tijuana, is too stoned to talk, has been arrested on some complicated charge, or is up to his mustache in a love affair and doesn’t wish to be disturbed. Well, we don’t need any help from those guys to see that Leigh-Cheri, once resplendent with social idealism, had fallen off a dream cliff, slipped into the vision pit, or nibbled forbidden fruit, because Nina Jablonski’s declaration that a lover is one who first of all loves the earth simply didn’t move her. All she wanted from the lawyer was a detailed description of Bernard’s cell.

  “It’s small but big enough to stretch his legs in, so they don’t have to take him out for exercise. There’s nothing in it but a steel cot with a piece of foam rubber on top. That’s it. Guards shove in a piss pot two times a day. Ten minutes later, I think it’s ten minutes, they remove it. Once a week they take him to a stall next door where he can shower.”