BOOMER WAS DISPOSED to swill the champagne directly from the bottle, a procedure that violated some sense of propriety in his wife. Ellen Cherry was from the South and had good manners. She didn’t have panties on, but she had good manners.
Ellen Cherry walked back to the galley and fetched two glasses. They were water tumblers, but they were glasses. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve lost my spoon.”
“You were gonna take this champagne by the spoon?”
“Hey, it’s good, but it’s not that good.”
“You were gonna eat your popcorn with a spoon, then. A Yankee habit you picked up in Seattle.”
“Just shut up, Boomer,” she said. The movie had started, and some men in monkey suits were prancing around a huge sculpture of a candy bar. For a second, Ellen Cherry thought it was a wilder version of the snack bar commercial.
“Whaddaya mean you’ve lost your spoon? You only had one spoon?”
“Forget it.” On the screen, the apemen were worshipping the great god Hershey. Some sort of primitive chocolate cult. “I’ve got—we’ve got—a whole blessed set of stainless steel flatware. But I had a special little spoon. It was a silver dessert spoon. I bought it at a Catholic garage sale.”
“That spoon meant right smart to you,” said Boomer. His mouth was stuffed with popcorn. “And now it’s lost.”
“You’re making fun of me. It’s no big deal.” She filled their glasses. “For the first three years I lived in Seattle, it was the only spoon I had to my name. I had chopsticks and one spoon. I think I left it in the cave back there.”
“You wanna go back and get it?”
“Well, obviously I do!”
Boomer stared at her. “Seriously?”
“No, God, no. Don’t be silly.”
“’Cause I’ll do it.”
“Forget it, Boomer.”
“I’d go back and get your spoon. It’s hundreds of miles, but I’d go.”
“I know you would. Forget it. Let’s drink a toast. It was just a dumb little secondhand spoon.”
He lifted his glass. There was a spaceship on the screen. “Well, your spoon can just keep my sock company.”
They laughed. They toasted their week of marriage, including their hour in the cave. Little did they know.
"SO MR. STICK WAS made from the wood of a fig tree, a very old fig tree that apparently had some special aura about it, like the locals thought it was enchanted or something. Maybe it had been struck by lightning or there was a spring beneath it. Maybe it was just old. Sometimes, being old is enough. Clearly, I’m not respected because I’m a bean can but rather because I’m old, as bean cans go; I’ve been around, seen things, learned a thing or two, survived, and that puts me in a separate category, a kind of elder statesman among canned vegetables. It’s a common thing with humans. Mr. Petway remarked to Miss Charles that now that he’d reached the age of thirty, he was going to start starching the collars of his Hawaiian shirts. He said, yes, of course, it would chafe his neck but dignity had its price. Droll fellow. Although disagreeably prolific in the production of epidermal foliage. I’m sure happy that inanimate objects have been spared the curse of body hair. Anyway, there was this venerated fig tree in Phoenicia, and Mr. Stick was fashioned from its wood by an equally venerated astronomer.”
As Conch Shell and Painted Stick were telling their story (the stick’s contribution consisting mainly of irrelevant asides pertaining to what did and did not get caught in the spiderweb of the stars), Can o’ Beans retold it to him/herself. That was his/her method of absorbing information. Whatever Can o’ Beans heard or overheard, he/she immediately repeated it—or a personalized version of it—to him/herself. That way it stuck. It would be interesting to see if a kid could get through Harvard using a retention technique perfected by a can of pork and beans.
“This revered astronomer maintained an observatory on the Plain of Al Biq¯a. It’s amazing that there were observatories so long ago, nearly a thousand years before Christ, but I guess the ancients paid a lot of attention to the heavens, even though they had no instruments. That is, they had no telescopes. Evidently, Mr. Stick was designed as an astronomical instrument of some sort. He pointed out unusual occurrences in the sky.
“The astronomer cut the stick and walked it to his observatory, where, under a full moon, it was painted by the priestess. The observatory doubled as a special shrine where the more educated Phoenicians would come to adore Astarte. (One of the Goddess’s titles was Shepherdess of the Stars.) There was an attractive priestess on duty there, and Mr. Stick is claiming that she would have sex with anyone who made a cash donation to the observatory. A novel means of institutional fund-raising. Wonder if the Smithsonian knows about it?
“Later that same year, a sailor donated Miss Shell to the observatory. The Phoenicians were a seafaring people, famous for their navigation, and this fellow had discovered the conch shell on a deserted beach. In his opinion, she manifested an aspect of Astarte, so he brought her to the astronomer, who’d taught him everything he knew about starlight, and to the priestess, who’d shown him the irrefutable link between pussy and the Pleiades. Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.
“Mr. Stick and Miss Shell hit it off right from the start. Individually, they were fine, but in tandem they were terrific. Like Tracy and Hepburn. Gradually, they acquired a reputation as especially effective talismans. It was partly because of them that King Ethbaal and Queen Acco of Sidon paid a royal visit to the observatory, bringing along their young daughter, Princess Jezebel. The child enjoyed her first spiritual experience there. She realized that there was something larger, more meaningful in life than licking honeycomb and dressing up her pet monkey.
“Several years later, when Jezebel was the blushing bride of King Ahab of Israel, her parents wrote her that the astronomer had died. Jezebel dispatched an agent to Phoenicia to acquire the contents of the observatory reliquary for a shrine she was having built in Samaria, capital of northern Israel. Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn’t it true that there’s always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don’t get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples—tropical and downtown types—always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds. In any case, Israel and Judah were rivals, and it was a peacock feather in Israel’s cap, militarily and commercially, when Ahab married Jezebel, cementing close relations with Phoenicia. When Ahab got Jezebel, though, he also got Astarte, which wasn’t that bad of a deal since few around him except a bunch of angry old geezers with bad breath and impotence anxiety gave much of a hoot for Yahweh. At least, that’s what Miss Shell is reporting.”
MIDWAY THROUGH 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Ellen Cherry lost contact. She was tired of bland Right Stuffers, gay computers, and extraterrestrial chocolate bars. ("It’s from Jupiter,” she said. “It’s not even a Mars bar.”) Champagne and popcorn were long gone, leaving a greasy bubble in her belly and her mind, and their petting session had petered out; it was tough to snuggle in bucket seats.
Finally, after considerable squirming of buttocks and clearing of throat, Ellen Cherry dared to ask to be excused. “Honey, would you be terribly upset if I went in the back and painted for a while?”
“Do what you have to do.”
Pretending not to notice the sudden drop in husbandly temperature, the fidelity with which his tone mimicked the death grunt of a hypothermal polar bear, Ellen Cherry kissed her mate’s broad forehead, from which the hairs were retreating like farm boys fleeing the old homestead for the lights of the city, and said, “Thanks, hon. I’ll make it up to you on our two-week anniversary.”
“We’ll be in New York th
en.” He said it as if being in New York was the equivalent of being in some kind of trouble.
“Yeah!” she exclaimed, cheerfully. “The biggest apple in the orchard, and we’re going to sauce it.” Before he could refute her, she sailed from the cockpit into the cabin, moving with speed and grace, considering that she was dragging a dead skunk of guilt by a logging chain.
As she selected one of several stretched, sized, and primed canvases from the full-length pull-out storage drawer beneath the side lounge sofa, she thought:
I’ve ruined it for him.
As she set up her easel in the side lounge, she thought:
He wanted me to stay. I wanted to go. Somebody had to lose.
As she mixed her colors, squirting ringlets of paint from the tubes, she thought:
He thinks it’s not right that art is the most important thing in my life. But that’s why I’m good at what I do.
As she unwrapped her brushes, inspecting each one individually in the ghastly, stale turkey light, she thought:
He says I love my art more than I love him. Well, he’s correct. But I also love it more than I love me.
Once she commenced to paint, she ceased to think. That skunk corpse of guilt floated off like a hairball. Soon she was whistling and humming, dancing first on one foot and then the other. She slopped the paint on, and she dabbed it on, she knifed it on thick, and she washed it on thin, she tinted it with white and shaded it with black, she blended it into creamy textures and isolated it in singular, emphatic, commalike brush strokes. When it came to techniques, she was definitely a slut.
On her small canvas, she recreated a section of the Crazy Mountains, the range near Livingston that they had admired earlier that day; that is to say, she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to see them, for a person has not only perceptions but a will to perceive, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it—which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognize that imagination is reality’s master, we call “sages,” and those who act upon it, we call “artists.”
Or “lunatics.” Can o’ Beans was correct when he/she linked low-reality orientation to mental illness, but the true idiot is distinguished from the “idiot” sage or “idiot” artist by his or her lack of control. The idiot’s twisted perceptions of the world are not voluntarily or imaginatively altered, they are merely faulty. Lunatics are at the mercy of misunderstood and unmanageable perceptions. When it comes to their reality, artists call the shots.
Ellen Cherry was calling the shots, turning mountains upside down, changing boulders into willow trees and willows into lemon meringue pie. The canvas vibrated with mad megajoules of natural energy: geology, meteorology, zoology, and botany all mixed together in a slow boiling tribute to nature and paint. Painting, she sang a song of cobalts and oxides, cadmiums and umbers; naming the pigments aloud as a novice in a convent might recite the names of the saints: “Vandyke brown,” for example, patron saint of cheap cigars; “rose madder,” protector of irate florists.
She sang and whistled and danced; she winked and squinted and stuck out her tongue; she smirked and scowled and scratched her pussy (her panties were still dangling from the cockpit gearshift); she got paint on her elbows and in her hair (where, because it was yellow ochre—patron saint of Tulsa Chinamen—it blended in and went unnoticed for days); she flung, plodded, stabbed, and caressed with loaded brushes, lost in a state of dizzy transcendence, as glad as a hobo on the way out of town.
The finished product? Well, it was neither a harsh slice of reality nor a harmless fluff of fantasy, but something in between. In the unpromising surfaces of bare rock, she had found a bright wheel of capricious emotions, while in cloud puffs that surely must have been burping with innate whimsy, she found such a bleakness as would chill the heart of a commissioner. She wasted little time admiring the finished product, however, but set right to work tidying up after herself. And once disengaged from the act of creation, her guilt came back. In her rush to return to her husband, she committed the cardinal sin of the painter: she inadequately cleaned her brushes.
As far as Boomer was concerned, she needn’t have hurried. He was fast asleep, folded over the steering wheel like a bearskin rug. Gently, she shook him. Blinking, bewildered, it appeared as if the act of waking was something foreign to him, as if the very idea of waking was a concept that his mind could not frame.
“Why you waking me up?” he grumbled.
For some reason, she could not tell him the truth: that it was after one in the morning, they were parked in four spaces at a drive-in movie theater in the middle of Montana, the movies were over, the lights were up, the other cars had left, a loud, vulgar wind was spitting snowflakes like seeds from an albino watermelon, the attendants were too intimidated to rap on the window of this grotesque vehicle and were probably debating at that moment whether or not to telephone the sheriff. Ellen Cherry, for some reason, couldn’t tell Boomer that. So, she said, “Because you were snoring.”
He blinked some more. He couldn’t believe his ears. “I wasn’t snoring,” he said indignantly. “I was on assignment.”
When the police cruiser pulled alongside the roast turkey, Ellen Cherry was still turning his words over in her mind, as if, in understanding them, she might learn whether she loved him or whether she did not.
"PHOENICIA MEANS ’LAND OF THE PURPLE.’ Grapes? Wisteria? Diarrhetic prose? A violet haze in the hills? No, Phoenician traders were famous throughout the Mediterranean and beyond for their red-purple dyed goods.
“Believe it or not, the source of the purple dye was the conch, the marine animal that occupied, that constructed, shells such as this one that sits beside me in my hour of need. Phoenicians actively hunted conch for the dye that was in them. In prying loose the animal, its shell was usually damaged, which was why a large, unbroken specimen, such as our friend here, was comparatively rare.
“In a sense, the dye conch symbolized Phoenicia. The Phoenician language was closely related to Hebrew, the language of King Ahab, and there were other cultural bonds, but even so, Jezebel was homesick for her native land. Miss Conch Shell became a comfort to her, serving her emotionally as well as spiritually, representing not only Astartebut placid, palm-lined coastal towns whose buildings, streets, and workers’ hands were perpetually permeated with a reddish-purple dye. As far as the queen was concerned, the thoroughly Phoenician Miss Shell was the centerpiece of Samaria’s principal goddess shrine. Wrapped in purple papyrus, she was often clutched to the royal bosom.
“Land of the purple. That has a nice ring. O’er the land of the purple and the home of the mauve. Our Mr. Sock is purple, come to think of it, purple like the circles under a Mafia don’s eyes, purple like the government inspection stamp on a cut of raw meat. I’m tempted to ask what Mr. Sock might have fetched on the Phoenician market. Ooops! Mustn’t laugh. Makes my sauce burble out.”
"MER-CEE," said Patsy. “Bud sure left here in a good mood.”
“Why shouldn’t he be in a good mood?”
“Not saying he shouldn’t. Just saying he was.”
“Something happened to him while he dozed off after supper. Something definitely happened. The Lord speaking to him in a dream and all. It may be beyond your and my understanding. God works his wonders in mysterious ways.”
“That’s a fact,” agreed Patsy. She returned to her crocheting, Verlin went back to trying to fold his road map. “You know, though, hon, that rebuilding the Temple business—don’t it strike you as being up to something?”
“I don’t know a blessed thing about it. What kind of up-to-something?”
“Well, it just seems like so many preachers these days are in it for the fame and fortune.”
“Huh! Buddy don’t have a pot to whiz in.”
“Not yet.”
“You casting stones, Patsy?”
She sighed. “Not in any position
to, I reckon.” She fell silent for a time, reflecting upon her own transgressions, comparing them to those she imagined of Buddy Winkler: the weakness of the flesh versus the hunger of ambition. That, of course, got her nowhere, and eventually she gave up on it. She smiled fatalistically and hid the smile behind her crocheting. I’d be obliged to say this much, she concluded. Of the Seven Deadly Sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.
AS THE SPRING AFTERNOON WORE ON, as noisy birds gargled bug juice and buds struggled to free themselves, layer by layer, from their tight Victorian undergarments, Painted Stick and Conch Shell told how the misogynist Yahweh party relentlessly slandered the reputation of Astarte and her champion in Israel, Queen Jezebel, and how, finally, the widowed Jezebel was murdered by Elisha’s Yahwist puppet, Jehu. They told how they were spirited into hiding by brave farmers, who secreted them in grain jars during the cruel purge that followed Jehu’s usurpation of power. By the hundreds, priests and priestesses of the goddess were butchered, their holy places leveled. It was 843 B.C.. The year the patriarchs won the pennant.
In a matter of months, however, Jezebel’s daughter, Athaliah, came out of left field, so to speak, and managed to seat herself on the throne of southern Israel, Judah. Painted Stick and Conch Shell found themselves smuggled into Jerusalem, into the Great Temple, itself; the First Temple, Solomon’s Temple, so-called; the magnificent Hebrew hobble-gobble, where curtains of Phoenician purple, a kind of lullaby, calmed the strident psalms of agitated gold.