Still Life With Woodpecker (29 page)

She kissed him impulsively. “I knew you’d understand. Where you been all my life, big boy?”

Bernard passed her the bottle. He began to sing:

Twenty froggies went to school
Come on ye Texas Rangers
Down beside a shady pool
Come on ye Texas Rangers
There they learned to work and play
Come on ye Texas Rangers
And drink Lone Star beer all day
Hee hee ye Texas Rangers.

“Bernard, I don’t feel like singing.” “Sure you do.

The river lies cold and green
The river lies cold and green
Leaves are dropping one by one
And the river lies cold and green.

Funny, rivers always give us ballads. None of that E. E. Cummings stuff.”

“Bernard, I want to talk some more.”

“Shoot.”

“You seem to be saying that the ideas I developed in the attic were intrinsic to the Camel pack, that their origins weren’t necessarily Argonian.”

“Maybe the Camel pack
is
Argon. In my father’s house there are many mansions. Get my drift? I’m an outlaw not a philosopher, but I know this much: there’s meaning in everything, all things are connected, and a good champagne is a drink.”

Bernard began to sing again. Timidly, Leigh-Cheri joined in. Between verses, they opened another bottle. The popping of its cork echoed throughout the great stone chamber. Of the three billion people on earth, only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri heard the popping of the cork and its echoes. Only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri passed out under the tablecloth.

98

WHILE THEY WERE SLEEPING,
the lamp burned down. They awoke in a blackness so dense it would have put the fear of death into coal tar. Bernard struck a match, and Leigh-Cheri gripped his arm.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

“I doubt it. I was thinking about the origin of the word pumpkin. It’s such a cute word. Kind of plump and friendly—and sexy in a farmer’s daughter sort of way. Perfect. I wonder who came up with that word. Some old pumpkin-patch poet in ancient Greece, I suppose. A traveling salesman out of Babylon?”

“Bernard! Knock it off! It’s been hours. I’m sure it’s well past dawn.”

“You’d never know in this bar. Here. Let me light a lamp.” He managed to ignite another of the antique lanterns.

“If he hasn’t let us out by now … Bernard! This is no temporary pique. He means to leave us in here.”

“I’m afraid you’re right. There’s no way he could release us now without considerable embarrassment. If he’s like a lot of men, he’d rather be a murderer than a fool.”

Leigh-Cheri was silent for a while. Then, abruptly, she laughed. “But it’s okay, isn’t it?” She flashed him a grin wide enough to deliver the Sunday New York
Times
through. “You’ve got your dynamite!”

“Precious little good it’ll do us here.”

Her smile snapped shut. Her heart called the New York
Times
and cancelled its subscription. “What … do … you mean?”

“Three years ago in Hawaii I tried to explain to you about dynamite. A bomb is not one of your pat solutions. Dynamite is a question not an answer. It can keep things from solidifying, it can keep the ticket open. Sometimes, just raising the question is enough to regenerate life, enough to reverse the decay that results from indifference. But dynamite is unless to us here. Sure, we could blast the door down, but there’s no place for us to take cover. The explosion would kill us.”

Leigh-Cheri began to weep. (For a beautiful royal princess she’d certainly shed a lot of tears in her life.) Bernard hugged her tightly. His fingers ran like foxes through the forest fire of her hair. “You know,” he said, “I’ll bet pumpkin is an American word. It just sounds American to me. Sweet dumb well-fed optimistic down-home ball of fun. I think of a Midwest cheerleader getting knocked up on the back seat of a Chevy after a frosty Friday night football game. You know what I mean? American Pumpkin.”

99

OUTSIDE,
a dragnet was being woven. Due to the political climate of the Middle East in the last quarter of the twentieth century, everybody, including Gulietta, had sallowed A’ben Fizel’s story of Zionist abduction. Police from a score of nations and troops from a dozen armies were searching for Princess Leigh-Cheri. Jew and Arab alike searched for her, and in their combined efforts achieved a kind of peaceful cooperation they had all too seldom known.

Inside, it was not unlike McNeil Island or the attic. Bernard and Leigh-Cheri were far better conditioned than most for confinement. There was even a package of Camels to keep them company. To be sure, nobody shoved in lunch plates or chamber pots, but pyramid power kept the wedding cake oven-fresh, and she had her corner for elimination and he his. As the days passed, they rationed increasingly smaller portions of cake and champagne, yet it seemed as if they had an indefinite supply. “What I miss most is the moon,” said Leigh-Cheri. The outlaw said he missed it, too.

What they would do when they were freed and whether or not they’d do it together was a subject they tactically avoided. Obviously, Leigh-Cheri was washed up in that neck of the woods. She’d have to leave her pyramid as far behind as the fiancé who’d built it. And despite certain tingling memories of his long, slippery staff, of its intriguing curve and its violet crown, that could not be too far to suit her.

She might drop in on Gulietta and have a peek at her roots. (Bernard, also, had a standing invitation to visit Gulietta’s palace.) After that, she’d probably return to America. Unquestionably, Bernard would. But as for a life together, well, Bernard could overlook her Arab bed-mate, but he couldn’t forget her inclinations toward do-good and group-think, and for her part, Leigh-Cheri had begun to suspect that in the last quarter of the twentieth century Cupid was too dazed, crazed, and generally pissed-off to stick around and finish a job. “There are three lost continents,” she lamented. “We are one: the lovers.”

100

FROM THE INVISIBLE BIOGENERATOR
of the pyramid, they derived tremendous energy, which they used up in nonstop conversations and in resisting sexual desire. There was an unspoken agreement between them that since the future of their relationship was up for reappraisal, they would not bite off any what might prove to be junk-food sex. They swapped a kiss now and then and spied on each other when they went to their respective corners to pee, but otherwise behaved as if she’d been reared in Virgin Mary, Georgia, and his after-shave cologne was No Mi Molestar. Mostly they talked.

“Leigh-Cheri, you were on the brink of marrying that man. Didn’t you even know him well enough to anticipate his current display of bad manners?”

She thought it over. “Well—he did say something spooky once. He’d been drinking, and he was sort of bragging about how powerful he and his family were. He said that they had the United States over a barrel. He said if America went to war with anybody—Russia, for example—he and his people could determine the outcome. He said they could cut off America’s oil supply any time they felt like it and that it would be all over for our country. If the Arabs took a notion to withhold their oil, we couldn’t resist a foreign invasion. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Yeah, it probably is.”

“Doesn’t it upset you?”

“Hell, no. I’m not gonna worry about it. No more than I worry about
any
aspect of politics and economics.”

“You’re sticking your head in the sand. If Russia conquered America, it’d be terrible.”

“In many ways it would be. There’s nobody on earth half as boring as the Communists, no matter what their nationality, and the Slavs were on the dark and dreary side to start with. Communism is the supreme example of how political idealism can transform human beings into androids. You can bet the bright lights would dim if those robots ever got their iron paws on our switch. But I don’t have to leave my house to have fun. I’d still find ways to rock and roll.”

“Selfish. Frivolous. Imma—”

“Wait a minute. Hold on. What I’m saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There’s the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun—which is to say, preserving the human spirit. Let me tell you a story. In the nineteen-forties in Nazi-occupied Paris, an artist named Marcel Carné made a movie. He filmed it on location on the Street of Thieves, the old Parisian theater street where at one time there was everything from Shakespearean companies to flea circuses, from grand opera to girlie shows. Carné’s film was a period piece and required hundreds of extras in nineteenth-century costume. It required horses and carriages and jugglers and acrobats. The movie turned out to be over three hours long. And Carné made it right under the Nazis’ noses. The film is a three-hour affirmation of life and an examination of the strange and sometimes devastating magnetism of love. Romantic? Oh, babe, it’s romantic enough to make a travel poster sigh and a sonnet blush. But completely uncompromising. It’s a celebration of the human spirit in all of its goofy, gentle, and grotesque guises. And he made it in the very midst of Nazi occupation, filmed this beauty inside the belly of the beast. He called it
Les Enfants du Paradis—Children of Paradise
—and forty years later it’s still moving audiences around the world. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the French resistance. Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné’s movie, his
Children of Paradise
, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.”

Leigh-Cheri squeezed Bernard’s hand until the freckles turned color. The freckles gathered up their belongings and made for the fingertips. The freckles were ready to abandon ship. “You must take me to see that movie some day. Will you promise?”

“I promise, Leigh-Cheri. And we will find a way to see it, no matter what the politicians and the generals do. Communist totalitarianism won’t stop us and neither will capitalist inflation. If tickets cost a thousand dollars each, we’ll pay without batting an eye. And if we can’t afford to pay, we’ll sneak in. Afterwards, we’ll have Hostess Twinkies and a jug of wine. And if Twinkies and wine are too expensive, we’ll grow grain and grapes and make our own. And if they confiscate our little vineyard and our Twinkie patch, why we’ll
steal
what we need from those who have excess. Ah, Leigh-Cheri, life is too short for us to be deprived of any one of its joys by the sad, sick androids who control laws and economics. And we won’t be deprived. Not even in totalitarianism. Not even in a pyramid.”

With that, he popped the last remaining bottle of champagne and swigged an amount four times the size of his daily allotment. He handed it to Leigh-Cheri, and she did the same.

“Yum,” he said.

She apparently concurred.

101

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS
Bernard drank no champagne and Leigh-Cheri sipped only enough to wet her lips. Even so, there was so little left….

Of the cake, the cake whose snowy tiers had once seemed as inexhaustible as a natural resource, only crumbs remained. Crumbs and the broken sugar wing of a confectionary cherub.

What’s more, the oil had been used up in all but one of the lamps. They restricted themselves to an hour or two of lamplight daily and spent most of the time in darkness.

A month had passed—though they had no way of reckoning—and it was starting to tell on them. They seldom mentioned the possibility of death, yet it was in their eyes when the lamp flickered, it was in the way they stared at the dwindling food and drink.

They couldn’t imagine why no one had come for them. The thick granite walls prevented them from hearing the workmen who swarmed over the pyramid with spray guns. A’ben Fizel was having it painted black. Nobody would ever be allowed inside the pyramid again, Fizel decreed. It was permanently closed, a memorial to his beloved.

Once, Leigh-Cheri went so far as to say, “If they should find us in here many, many years from now, we’ll look the same as we do now. Thanks to pyramid power, our corpses will be perfectly preserved.”

“Good,” said Bernard. “Beauty like mine deserves to last. I want the children of tomorrow to be able to gaze upon my teeth.”

“It’s ironic, isn’t it, how this starts and ends with pyramids? I mean, we wouldn’t be trapped inside this thing if it weren’t for the Camel pack. And, of course, your crazy story about the Red Beards from Argon. I guess it goes back further than Camels. It goes back to our red hair.”

“Which will be perfectly preserved, thank God.”

“Yeah, sure. But it
is
ironic. I wanted to solve the mystery of the pyramids, and here I am locked up inside one, maybe going to die in one, and I’m as far from the answer as ever.”

“You mean that’s all you wanted? To learn the meaning of pyramids?”

“What are you implying,
all
I wanted? That’s a lot. I suppose you know the meaning of the pyramids.”

“I do.”

She halfway believed him. “Then will you please enlighten me? How come you found the meaning when so many others have failed?”

“Simple. It’s because others—like you yourself—have looked at pyramids wrong.”

“Looked at them wrong?”

“Yep. You’ve looked at a pyramid as if it were a finished product, the whole item, the thing itself. But a pyramid is just part of the thing, and the bottom part at that. Pyramids are pedestals, babe. A pyramid is merely a base for something else to stand on.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

“Well, Jesus, Bernard. What stood on the pyramids?”

“Souls. Souls like you and me. And we have to stand on them now. The pyramid is the bottom, and the top is us. The top is all of us. All of us who’re crazy enough and brave enough and in love enough. The pyramids were built as pedestals that the souls of the truly alive and truly in love could stand upon and bark at the moon. And I believe that our souls, yours and mine, will stand together atop the pyramids forever.”