Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (48 page)

“Because they’ve never been to
Thailand.”

“Really? The Thai are better at sex
than us?” Switters thought he detected a soupçon of wounded national pride. “In
any case, Fannie ended up with the Pachomians, and now she’s released from vows
and is hot to trot: another obsolete expression, I suppose. She likes you.
She’s still young and attractive. I find it degrading to pimp like this, but as
it may be the only way to assure that both of you are content to remain at the
oasis. . . .”

“Well, you can stop it right now. As
far as I’m concerned, Fannie can stick with her finger.”

“Why? Don’t you find her appealing?”

“She’s not so bad.” He was about to
add, “For a woman of her age,” when it occurred to him that such a sentiment
could be both undiplomatic and self-incriminating. What he said instead,
however, was worse. He didn’t intend to say it, wasn’t sure he meant it. It
contradicted, in fact, the very comment he had so prudently suppressed, a
remark that for all of its insensitivity had at least been truthful. He felt
ventriloquized, as if the imp in him, for reasons that it alone understood, was
throwing its voice. “I guess I thought maybe you and I might . . .”

“Ooh-la-la! No, no, no. You and I?
That is ridiculous.”

“Why? Don’t you find me appealing?”

“You’re not so bad,” she said, giving
it right back to him (or to the trouble-making bugger who had hijacked his
larynx). “For a man of your age.” Had she read his mind? Her tone became more
serious. “I lost my virginity when I was sixteen.” (An image of Suzy went
zinging through his brain like a hot pink bullet.) “It took me years to get it
back. If I ever lose it again, which is rather unlikely, it will be to a man
with whom I’m united in Christ. That wouldn’t be you, would it, Mr. Switters?”

“Offhand, I’d say the odds are
against it. But stranger things have happened.” (
Shut up, you little
bastard!
)

“No. I doubt if you could meet my
standards. You haven’t found maturity yet, and you haven’t found peace.”

He wanted to say, “If you’re
referring to that pre-senile stagnation that passes for maturity these days and
that hypocritical obsequiousness that passes for peace, I’d rather have
shingles than the one and scurvy than the other.” What emerged from his mouth,
however, was, “Damn! You sure know how to break a guy’s heart.”

“Nonsense. Even though you told me
you loved me the moment you laid eyes on me . . .”

“I did?!” He came within half a hue
of blushing again. (While he had lain in helpless delirium, his evil elf must
have had a field day.)

“. . . 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.