“Art school is nothin’ but a waste of your time and my money,” Verlin protested. “It’s flat-out silly. Bud claims art’s Satan’s way of belittlin’ God’s handiwork, and Bud may be on target. I do know it’s silly. Why don’t you go to a decent Christian women’s college and study to be a teacher? Or develop some secretarial skills? Somethin’ to fall back on. Some security. Marry yourself a good provider—”
“Like ol’ Boomer?”
“A woman needs a strong, hard-workin’ man. You wanna end up with some sissy makin’ mudpies in a attic fulla rats?”
Ellen Cherry smiled. She was remembering the rodents that fought over spilled popcorn alongside the steamed-up cars at the Robert E. Lee.
It was only because of Patsy’s militant support that Ellen Cherry was permitted to enroll at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which had one of the top fine-arts departments in the nation. She was happy and successful at VCU. She was excited there. She learned to properly stretch and prime a canvas, to ink a lithography stone. She discovered post-painterly expressionism and Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe became at once her ideal, her heroine, the subject of a paper for which Ellen Cherry earned her first collegiate A. The eye game of her childhood she played with fresh zeal, finding it increasingly a pitchfork with which to puncture what Melville labeled the “pasteboard mask” of visible reality. She was beginning to comprehend what de Kooning meant when he said, “Whatever I see becomes my shapes and my condition.”
On weekends, she Greyhounded to Colonial Pines—Daddy’s orders—where she continued to date Boomer Petway. Drinking beer and motel-hopping with Boomer provided a relaxing contrast to the intensity of classroom and studio. She had herself a fairly sweet little setup. Until something happened that busted her deal, leaving her with an emotional limp more pronounced than Boomer’s jerky gait.
Among the congregation of Colonial Pines Third Baptist Church, a rumor had been circulating that art students at VCU were forced to draw naked bodies. It was said that men as well as women paraded around totally nude in front of mixed classes of boys and girls. Essentially, the report was correct, except that nobody was “forced” to enroll in life classes and that the male models always posed in jockstraps. At any rate, dissatisfied with the school’s response to their letter of inquiry (Ellen Cherry, in self-defense, had denied the existence of the life classes), the Reverend Buddy Winkler and Verlin Charles decided to find out for themselves.
So dramatically did Bud and Verlin burst into the classroom that many of the students laughed and shouted, “Rambo! Rambo!” But Ellen Cherry wasn’t laughing. Her protests took on a hysterical edge as Verlin pulled her from the room (Buddy Winkler remained to lambast the professor and preach to the thoroughly embarrassed model). Wails, as piercing as meat hooks, as black as swamp water, spiraled from her breast when Verlin commenced to pack her belongings.
Buddy soon joined them in the dormitory. In a frenzy, the two men seized dry washcloths and scrubbed the lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow from her face. So harsh was the scrubbing that it peeled the skin from her cheeks. Like a boiled tomato, her lips split. Her eyelids swelled until it was as though she looked at her room through a blizzard of cinders. She felt as if she were caught in a firestorm and that the purest, smoothest part of her was being pitted.
All the while, as the men scrubbed at her, they uttered one word, over and over.
“Jezebel,” they chanted.
“Jezebel!”
JEZEBEL RODE with Ellen Cherry and Boomer in the big roast turkey. Wherever Ellen Cherry went, Jezebel went, too. If Georgia O’Keeffe had been her temporary heroine, Jezebel was her eternal double, her familiar, the bright wound she swung in like a hammock, the ceramic skeleton that clacked inside her flesh. From the day of her humiliation at VCU until the present, a tambourine rang in her blood, and while it just as easily could have been Salome’s tambourine, Ellen Cherry identified it as Jezebel’s. As a rule, its ringing was soft, its beat distant: months would pass during which she and her invisible twin did not so much as brush past each other in the hall. No sooner had the turkey entered a colored canyon in southeastern Idaho, however, a place where the sandstone appeared to be painted with lavender eye shadow and pomegranate lip balms, than the latent frankincense of Jezebel filled the turkey like an effluvial stuffing and . . .
But hold on. Jezebel has waited this long, she can wait a little longer. First, we should deal with the turkey itself; its origins, its destination, its raison d’être.
For days following her forced withdrawal from college, Ellen Cherry stayed in her room and cried. Downstairs, Patsy and Verlin quarreled viciously. Verlin called Patsy a strumpet, a mother who influenced her daughter to behave lasciviously. Patsy called Verlin a hypocrite who enjoyed lasciviousness but lacked the backbone to admit it.
“God created my body,” said Patsy. “I’m not ashamed of its nekkidness.”
“Fine,” Verlin said. “Why don’t you get undressed, and I’ll call up all my friends to come paint pictures of you.”
“Your friends couldn’t paint a shithouse wall.”
Patsy charged that she might have become a dancer if it hadn’t been for Verlin. Verlin countered that she ought to fall on her knees and thank him for saving her from disgrace.
At one point Ellen Cherry overheard Verlin say, “She’s been shut up in her room for damn near a week. When’s she gonna come downstairs?”
“Oh, probably when her face heals,” answered Patsy.
“Her face is not that bad. We cleaned it, for God’s sake! It’s not like we flayed her.”
“In any case,” Patsy said, “she can come down whenever she’s good and ready to. She’s free, white, and eighteen.”
So I am, thought Ellen Cherry. She bolted upright in the tear-smeared bedclothes, propelled by the surprise of the obvious. “So I am!”
When she was certain that Johnny Carson had signed off for the night, she slipped downstairs—Verlin imitated alligators in the bedroom, Patsy tossed and turned on the sofa—and cooked a four-egg omelet, washing it down with the brandy Patsy used to flavor fruitcakes, the only alcohol allowed in the house.
Morning found her in the welding shop, where she somehow persuaded Boomer to loan her five hundred dollars. Maybe she threatened to tell his drinking buddies that he took tango lessons on the sly. Maybe she twisted her tongue in his ear.
That midnight she once again crept downstairs. Patsy had moved to the bedroom, Verlin snored on the sofa. For a while, she stood over her father. Floating upon a pond of sleep, his pink face reminded her of a Monet water lily. She thought him an honorable man damaged by dogma. Patsy and Uncle Buddy were vying for his uncertain soul. Buddy had the lead, but Ellen Cherry would bet Boomer’s five hundred on Patsy. Bending to kiss his cheek, she smelled the mildew and changed her mind.
Ellen Cherry boarded the next Greyhound to pass through Colonial Pines. That was at four in the morning. It carried her to Cincinnati. From there, she set out hitchhiking, heading for New Mexico to do something girlish and romantic, such as setting up her easel beside Georgia O’Keeffe’s grave. She hadn’t counted on the vagrancies of the road, however, and she landed in Seattle, where she was forced to modify her eye game to accommodate hissing curtains of rain.
Working nights as a waitress, Ellen Cherry earned a degree in three years from the Cornish College of the Arts. In only one way did graduation alter her fortunes: she was now eligible for membership in the Daughters of the Daily Special, a local organization of waitresses with college degrees. Paying relatively stiff weekly dues and raising additional funds with bikini car washes and bake sales (most of the bakery goods were pilfered from restaurants in which the women worked), the Daughters established a fund that awarded grants to deserving members so that they might lay down their trays and devote some time to their true calling. When Ellen Cherry won hers, she painted for six months without interruption. The work she completed was hung in a restaurant. “I escaped, my paintings didn?
??t,” she told the girls. It may have been the happiest period in her life.
For several years, Seattle’s art scene, like New York’s, had been dominated by the Big Dumb Ugly Head School of painting. Dealers and collectors too insecure to buck fashion were obliged to cover their walls with clumsy portraits of the aggressive victims of urban angst: those angry, tormented sourpusses for whom the next plutonium enema apparently was right around the corner. In the background was the compulsory burning building, skull-and-crossbones, or rabid dog with a hard-on. The world of art is seldom slow to rotate on its gelt-greased axis, however, and—wham!—overnight, connoisseurs were interested in integrity, vision, and technique again. Because of nostalgia, perhaps, an unconscious yearning for a countryside not damned by pollution and development, landscape painting began to be taken seriously for the first time since the Great Depression. And a path began to be beaten to the door of Ellen Cherry Charles.
Sure, she depicted cattails growing out of the side of ferry boats; sure, her trees were loops in space, her mountains sky-blue and her skies as tan as stone: they were recognizably landscapes, nonetheless, and they acquired an audience. She hadn’t the trendiest gallery, the most chic patrons, but she was launched, as they say, and down to two shifts a week at the War on Tuna Café.
Generally speaking, that was her situation when Boomer drove into Seattle in the turkey.
APPROACHING RETIREMENT, Boomer’s father had purchased an Air-stream motor home with the notion that he and his wife might spend their golden years touring the United States. “We’ll drive this sucker from sea to shining sea,” he said. “And not miss a one of our favorite TV shows,” added Mrs. Petway.
Alas, midway through his retirement party, at the apex of merriment, Mr. Petway collapsed and died. His widow sold their house and moved in with a sister, but not before signing over the Airstream to Boomer.
“What the hell am I gonna do with an eight-ton silver egg?” Boomer wondered.
His metaphor was apt. Except that it had a cockpit with steering wheel, Airstream’s motor home looked almost exactly like its famous trailer. Which is to say, it looked like the ovoid deposit of a metallic dragon-bird, the hard-boiled cackleberry the Statue of Liberty was about to peel for her breakfast. Silvery as starlight, bulbous as a porpoise nose, the Airstream was an elongated pea, a bean, a sausage skin inflated with mercury, a land blimp, a lemon (in shape, not performance), the football of the titans.
Each morning before he went to work, Boomer would stand in his driveway, hands on his hips, scrutinize the Airstream, and shake his head. Some days, if he wasn’t late, hungover, or both, he would circle it, tracing its curves in the dust with his lame foot. One morning, a funny picture popped into his mind. From then on, every time he saw the motor home, he thought of that image.
This continued for approximately a year, until one Friday he awoke in a mood that could best be described as operatic. Overwrought, melodramatic, exploding with energy, his head swimming in a kind of ornate, fatalistic overture, he frightened away the soprano with whom he’d spent the night, fetched a six-pack, and drove the Airstream to the welding shop. There, ignoring work orders and the hoots of his assistants, he spent a month fabricating a pair of giant metal drumsticks and two stumpy metal wings, then welding them to the motor-home body in appropriate positions.
“There,” Boomer said. “If that ain’t the spittin’ image of a roast turkey, what is?”
“It’s cute,” the girls all said. “How’d you ever think of that?” They giggled nervously.
“You’ve goddamned ruined a highly expensive piece of equipment,” his buddies accused. They were embarrassed for him.
Calmly now, he packed every thread of his wardrobe (six pairs of jeans, five Hawaiian shirts), his welding paraphernalia, and collection of spy novels into the forward storage bin. He loaded on a cargo of Pabst. And then he aimed the glimmering breast of the thing northwestward.
“If Ellen Cherry’s not with me on this,” he said, “I’ll just motor on down to Mexico and tequila myself into a stand-up fossil.”
WOMEN WERE MORE INTERESTED IN SEX than men were, Ellen Cherry was convinced of that. True, men talked about sex more. Men were forever making a big deal about it with jokes, Hustler magazines, aggressive advances, and transparent braggadocio—but in her opinion that was largely for the benefit of other males. They thought that to be masculine, they had to be copulative dynamos, and it was largely to prop up their insecure masculinity that they resorted to sexual display, whereas, in fact, it was their relatively mild interest in actual physical contact that was largely the source of that insecurity. Why am I not more horny? Why isn’t my pecker bigger? Why am I washed up after one orgasm when she can have a dozen and still be ready to go (to go with some fresh man)? How do I know that kid’s really mine? It’s got red hair! Ellen Cherry had to laugh.
Typically, her own interest in sex was abiding and deep. And incognito. In a patriarchal society, the abiding sexuality of the healthy female was obliged to wear a prim disguise. Unaware of the irony, men flaunted their pale desires, while the stronger passions of the woman were usually concealed. Nobody could tell Ellen Cherry otherwise.
The only thing that interested Ellen Cherry more than sex—in her five years in Seattle, she had drained the night drops from at least eight swains, none, she discovered to her dismay, half as satisfying as Boomer—was love. And art. Well, sex, love, and art intermingled when Boomer eased the remodeled Airstream into her apartment house parking lot.
Its honking drew her to the kitchenette window. The notorious raindrops of Seattle blistered the fire escape, and the sky looked like bad banana baby food. But there it was! Shining in the gray. Thirty-two feet long, sixteen thousand, five hundred pounds. Emergency lights blinking, windshield wipers chasing themselves. And beside it, Boomer Petway doing his wild and gimpy dance, splashing puddle water almost as high as its appendages.
“I made it for you!” Boomer yelled. “Made it for you, little sugar britches!
“Wahoo!”
After combing her curls with the most convenient implement, which happened to be a tofu-encrusted chopstick, she raced downstairs. Oblivious to the shotgun drizzle, incandescent with surprise and wonder, she circumambulated the outlandish turkeymobile, hand in hand with its creator. Around and around they went, in a glow of amused admiration, until they had practically worn a path in the wet asphalt. Eventually, he swept her up in his arms and carried her into the belly of the beast. Her panties were off before she hit the bed.
He tricked me, Ellen Cherry was thinking now. With art and sex, he tricked me into love.
Trouble was, she had scant faith in her love for Boomer. Married less than a week and already it was slipping like a frayed fan belt. Lust she feared would also leave in time. Just fly out the transom one morning on its salty red wings. Whatever happened, though, her art would see her through. She was confident enough in it to take it to New York. Give her the big time. Give her a big break. Give her Manhattan. The Bronx and Staten Island, too. Give her this day her daily bread. Boomer’s welding, for the time being, would bring home the bacon and the turpentine.
Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, “Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?”
It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, “In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.”
Mr. and Mrs. Petway, tricked and trickster, were turkey-trotting through a loop of the Bible Belt. Slogans of the death cult were everywhere. “Jesus Is Coming,” the billboards announced. “Prepare to Meet Thy Maker.” “Repent for the End Is Near.” Can o’ Beans had the feeling that if doomsday didn’t arrive quite soon, those people were going to take up a collection and send for it.
“Time Is Running Out.” “Have You Reserved Your Place in New Jerusalem?” Echoes
of Uncle Buddy and his ilk. It gave Ellen Cherry the Hebrew-jeebies. Especially since the brightly hued cliffs and craters that surrounded the billboards had succeeded in releasing her doppelgänger, old Jezebel, from her rouge jar.
“Bring Him the Bleeding Head of the Whore,” read one sign, and that one really escalated the willies, because Ellen Cherry was positive that the “Whore” to whom the sign referred was Jezebel.
She had outgrown her susceptibility to car sickness, but she squinted anyway, intending to employ the eye game as a distraction. Instantly, the rough, irregular contours of the sandstone landscape, the interlocking configurations of mesa, gully, and natural chimney, began to soften, to sift, to close off the background space so that the countryside was projected forward, millimeters in front of Ellen Cherry’s nose, where it presented itself as laced webs of scrambled color. Alas, since the jumbled color was both powdery and decorative—it tended toward salmon, grape, and ivory—it was even more evocative of cosmetics than when it was in hard-edged perspective, and Jezebel’s presence was reinforced rather than denied. The artist called off the game.
Soon after arriving in Seattle, the incident at VCU still painfully alive in her mind, she had procured a bible and gone searching for the lurid details of Jezebel’s debauchery. From Sunday school, she had a hazy picture of a thoroughly immoral harlot who costumed herself like a rock ’n’ roll vamp, but she couldn’t recall a single biographical fact. Imagine her surprise when the Old Testament Book of Kings informed her that Jezebel was a royal—and faithful—wife.
Actually, the biblical story of Jezebel is only a few sentences long. It seems that she and her husband, King Ahab, were accused of practicing idolatry by a young right-winger named Jehu, who had designs on the throne. Earlier, Ahab had acquired by devious means some real estate belonging to a neighbor, and Jezebel was said to have sparked a rumor that led to the neighbor’s death. Ahab, a Hebrew, was king of northern Israel; Jezebel was the daughter of a king and queen of Phoenicia. Being a foreigner, she didn’t wholeheartedly worship the god of the Jews, which may have led to the “idolatry” charges, but aside from loyally supporting her husband in his suspect land deal, she apparently had been as properly behaved as, say, Queen Elizabeth.