Still Life With Woodpecker (23 page)

Shut up in an attic taking lunatic lessons from a pack of cigarettes and the moon, she obviously got her lover’s smartass ideas all tangled up with some archaic Indian tales and her personal meeting with a couple of self-proclaimed extraterrestrials who smelled like the cedar chests where retired pompon girls stow the prom dresses they’re too old and fat to ever wear again. In her isolation and confusion, she’d decided she’d cracked a coded message from another dimension. But her hairs would have known, wouldn’t they, if she was actually picking up signals from beyond the mirror?

In any event, although she was too obsessed with the implications of her theory to attribute it to a spinoff from outlaw bullshit, she felt the need for Bernard more strongly than ever. It was occurring to her that if she had cracked the code of the Camel pack in her contemplative cell, Bernard must have accomplished at least as much. Maybe Bernard had seen things there that she’d overlooked. Even if he hadn’t, she was wildly anxious to share her information with him, to seek his opinions and advice. She felt as if she’d bootlegged a tape of the Golden Eternity Vibrating Ethereal Choir, that group that sings on the soundtracks of bad movies based on the Bible, and she couldn’t wait to play it back on Bernard’s machine to see if it still had the ring of truth, the ring of truth being the finest sound there is, although there are noises some women make in bed that are definitely in contention. The tracks of her tears led farther than the end of her nose, for a change, and she’d be damned if she could hold off another fourteen months to share her discovery with that man whose redheadedness surpassed her own.

So the Princess made a choice. She would go to him.

Nina Jablonski, the redheaded attorney, had a new baby. She was on leave from her firm. Leigh-Cheri would borrow her credentials. She would go down to McNeil Island and impersonate her. She’d wear wide spectacles, paint on extra freckles, put up her hair in a bun. Easy as toast. Although technically Jablonski was off the case, the guards wouldn’t know that. Bernard would be curious enough about “Jablonski’s” sudden appearance, after six months, to agree to see her. And Leigh-Cheri would end up in his cell.

Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She could have been visiting him weekly in the guise of his attorney. Leigh-Cheri went limp imagining making love with Bernard every Thursday in his cubicle.

As excited as she was, it still wasn’t easy, after so long a time, to just up and leave the attic. She thought perhaps she’d better come out slowly, like a diver coming up from flatfish territory, on the lookout for the bends.

Several mornings later, as preparation for her reemergence into the outside world, she walked to the window, whose nails she’d pried loose the evening before, and opened it slowly. Not slowly enough, however, to avoid dumping Chuck off the forty-foot ladder from whose top rung he’d been peering in through the single clear pane, searching for her radio transmitter—and masturbating vigorously. Chuck plummeted into the blackberry brambles, where he sank from sight, his still stiff member learning rudely and repeatedly that “prick” has more than one definition.

Dumbfounded, Leigh-Cheri listened to Chuck’s moans for a minute or two before, leaning out of the window, she began to cry for help. Her cries attracted the attention of a faded man in a Sears suit and an amateur haircut who was just then shuffling up the palace lane, bringing terrible news from jail.

72

CHUCK WAS HOSPITALIZED
for nearly a month, during which time the CIA assigned a full-time professional to spy on the Furstenberg-Barcalona family. The operative kept showing up in different disguises, first as a fire inspector, then as an encyclopedia salesman, next a county health nurse wanting to put an ear to Max’s valve, until Queen Tilli, petting her Chihuahua all the while, finally confronted the guy and said, “Vhy don’t you just take zee leetle camera and der notebook und go leesen in on zee upstairs extension like Chucky did? You gonna get a tension headache, alvays changing your looks like dis.”

It was academic, of course. Short of direct armed intervention, there was nothing further the United States could do to preserve right-wing tyranny in Tilli and Max’s homeland. And Max, suspecting that right-wing tyranny would only be replaced with leftwing tyranny, as was usually the case, had washed his royal hands of the whole affair. As for Princess Leigh-Cheri, who, the CIA had learned, was an unwitting candidate for reigning monarch once the revolution was complete, Leigh-Cheri, far from getting herself prepared to rule a nation, Leigh-Cheri was in the condition a Camel pack is in once it’s been dropped in a barnyard and chawed up and puked out by a goat.

As news of her self-internment had circulated, via the pages of such periodicals as
National Enquirer, Parade,
and
Cosmopolitan
, the Princess had begun to attract more and more imitators. Women whose men were in prison or military service or Alaska working on the pipeline began bolting themselves in their rooms as public proclamation of lonely devotion. Several men did the same. Eventually, misguided romantics started taking to stripped-down boudoirs, garrets, basements, woodsheds, doghouses, and fallout shelters when their lovers were not away at all but could have been in their arms nightly if they hadn’t elected to sequester themselves as proof of their subjugation to the authority of Love. A wife in Unionville, Indiana, a woman known to have spent thirty dollars a week on Hallmark greeting cards, repaired to an unlighted cellar creeping with black widow spiders to demonstrate the depth of her feeling for her husband and three hungry children. Some people who locked themselves away didn’t even have sweethearts. By autumn, almost a hundred “princess prisoners” were staring at wallpaper in improvised “love attics” across the land, and some sort of competition was underway, radio stations offering cash prizes for endurance records. Leigh-Cheri had an inkling of this activity, but her mind had been on pyramids and cosmic mystery, and she hadn’t given it much thought. Well, the news finally traveled as far as solitary at McNeil Island, where evidently it did not sit well at all.

In fact, Bernard, who’d been behaving relatively straight in hopes of securing an early release, was so perturbed by the reports that he availed himself of the illegal but commonplace prison-system underground post office and risked his record to sneak out a letter to Leigh-Cheri. The missive, in the handwriting of the bribed guard to whom it was dictated, was delivered by Perdy Birdfeeder, a middle-aged malefactor from Tacoma freshly freed after doing fifteen years for purse-snatching. Birdfeeder, who’d grabbed hundreds of purses over a period of many years before he got careless and snatched a colostomy bag—he might have gotten away even then had he not stopped to count the change—helped tug the bleeding Chuck out of the blackberries, severely snagging his new government-grant suit in the process, and then handed over the letter to Gulietta. Birdfeeder could thank his lucky stars that the royal custom of executing messengers who bore ill tidings was no longer observed.

“Yuk!” That was how the note began.

Yuk! If you think the Black Hole is bad, you should try it with baby ferrets hanging by their teeth from the skin of your testicles. That’s how I felt when I learned that our personal relationship has become public soap opera, a low-budget interview with Barbra Streisand, and a sport on the order of flagpole sitting and phone-booth stuffing. Babe, it appears that you and I are no longer sucking the same orange. Romance is not a bandwagon to be jumped on by lost souls with nothing more interesting to ride. I thought you’d learned by now that “romantic movement” is a contradiction in terms and that, if prompted, society is all too eager to turn the deepest, most authentic human experiences into yet another shallow fad. You prompted. I guess you can take the girl out of the movement, but you can’t take the movement out of the girl. Even in solitary, you couldn’t curb your herding instincts. Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.

73

THE TEARS OF THE PRINCESS,
if placed end to end, would have circled Seattle like a moat.

The tears of the Princess, if dammed, would have provided refuge for the hunted whale and moorage for the
Ship of Fools
.

Among the Berbers, it was held that since there is no memory in the grave, earth from a burial mound can help a person forget his or her sorrows, especially the heartbreak of unhappy love. But Bernard included no grave dirt with his letter, and if he had, the tears of the Princess would have turned it to mud.

After she had completely soaked the foam rubber mattress with her bitter weeping, she hurled the mattress out of the window into the blackberries below. (Too bad for Chuck it hadn’t been there when he fell.) Then she smashed the chamber pot against the wall. Later, pacing frantically, she slashed her feet on its shards.

Seizing the Camel pack, she squeezed it in her small fist, toppling the pyramids and busting the dromedary’s hump. Mummies ran from the pyramids in panic, dragging their wrappings behind them. Water spewed from the camel’s cracked hump like a fountain of tears.

For hours she would cry softly, almost imperceptively, rubbing her eyes raw with her knuckles. Then she’d leap to her feet and scream. Helpless, King Max and Queen Tilli (and the CIA agent, disguised now as a Roto-Rooter man) kept vigil at her door, while inside the attic Gulietta stood quietly, cupping Prince Charming in her hands, perhaps protecting him from redheaded rage, perhaps invoking the magic of the frog.

After three days of such carrying on, Leigh-Cheri grew calm. She was, after all, in close harmony with lunar rhythms, and that which wanes must wax. Three days of darkness is as much as the moon will tolerate before it yelps, “Enough already,” and begins slowly to reopen the antique refrigerator from whose icy innards will shine the transformative light of the world.

Outside, the rains had come, the rains that like a blizzard of guppies would pelt the creaky old house until spring. There is no weeping that can compete with the Northwest rains.

So Princess Leigh-Cheri blew her nose. She sat her bare buttocks on the cot wires, careful not to snag anything. She thought for a while. She uncrumpled the Camel pack. Then she smiled. She turned to Gulietta. Her voice was determined and gay.

“Bring me A’ben Fizel,” she said.

INTERLUDE

IF THIS TYPEWRITER
can’t do it, then … what? Can the Muse punt?

The Remington SL3 needs a verb job. It clearly can’t write between the lines. It’s insensitive to the beauty of fungoid alkaloids—the more I ingest the more inarticulate it becomes. And despite my insistence upon traditional literary values, it remains petulantly
moderne
.

Believe me, I’d have few qualms about switching machines in the middle of the stream, but nothing’s open at this hour except Mom’s All Nite Diner and the contraption that taps out Mom’s menu spells “greese” with three
e
’s. Besides, I’ve been informed that the Remington warranty doesn’t cover “typing of this nature,” whatever that might mean. (I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised: when I went to buy a policy from Mutual of Omaha, they’d only insure my typing finger for fire and theft.)

I guess there’s nothing left to do but ram in the clutch on this bourgeois paper-banger and try to coast to the finish line. In the event that I don’t make it, in the event that you, dear reader, must finish without me, well, you’ve been a good audience, probably better than an underdeveloped novelist with an overdeveloped typewriter deserves, and I’d like to leave you with one perfect sentence, one memorable image to fold in violet silk at the back of your brain box. Something on the order of a drop of tropical jelly oozing from a love bite on a concubine’s lip. Alas, there’s not enough juice for us to indulge ourselves—a familiar complaint in the last quarter of the twentieth century—so at the risk of being coy, I’ll thank you quickly and
arrivederci
on out of here. As they say in my country, have a nice day.

PHASE
IV

74

THE DAWN CAME UP
like a Have-a-Nice-Day emblem. The sun shone like Mr. Happy Face himself, and the horizons were all smiles. From boundary to boundary, the people arose as if they’d been given champagne enemas, convinced that they
were
going to have a nice day. A nation traditionally, historically, anciently monarchal was about to seat its first sovereign in thirty years. It was Coronation Day, hooray.

Everyone had the day off. The hotels and boarding-houses were full. Along the procession route, crowds began thickening before dawn. All seats in the stands had been reserved as soon as booking opened, and tickets were selling on the black market for the equivalent of ninety dollars each. Balconies overlooking the route cost even more. School children had been given mugs, plates, pamphlets, and badges, and they carried them as if they had supernatural properties, pressing them to their new spring outfits. From the radio aerials of automobiles, little flags fluttered chirpily. Soldiers, heroes of the revolution, wore brand-new boots of squeaky leather, and women, young and old, smiled at them from behind bouquets. By eight o’clock, there were in the streets more flowers than people. And as common as roses were the dark blooms of cameras.