Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

bacon sandwiches, taking them out by the swimming pool to eat. The pool had been emptied for the season and covered with a blue plastic tarp that for a zip of an instant transported him back to Inti’s Virgin and the tattered canopy with which the dory had tried in vain to hold back the Amazon sun. In November, the Sacramento sun needed no such restraint, although it was certainly warmer there than in Seattle, and drier, as well. The golf course that bordered the stucco ranch house that Eunice had won in the marriage lottery was as green as Socrates’s last cocktail, but everything between it and the coastal range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east was so amber, dusty, flea-bitten, and buff it reminded him of the lion population in a second-rate zoo. It was visual cereal that, milkless, crunched in his eyes, and he realized that were he to strike out across those stubble fields where wheat and barley had recently been sheared, he’d be better off in a wheelchair than on foot. Even the steely soles of Inti’s feet would have been diced.

Done with breakfast, he decided to attempt meditation. It was never easy to commence—his internal river of thought and verbiage had a velocity that overflowed or crumbled Buddha’s dams—and on that morning it was particularly difficult to get started. Bobby had taught him not to wrench the valves, however, so he sat passively, neither fostering thought nor trying not to think, and gradually the flow subsided—except for one unstemmable trickle, and that trickle’s source was Suzy. After about an hour of that, he thought What the hell! , and gave it up. He hadn’t made it into the medulla of the medulla, but he’d gotten closer to the Void than airports are to most major cities; he’d glimpsed its invisible skyline, breathed its odorless smokes; and since it was eternal, knew it’d be there the next time he bought a ticket. Just not today. Today, for better or worse, was a day to think about Suzy.

There is something so sweet about a young girl’s sexual longings, he thought. There’s a sad and happy sweetness in them. Her longing was not for orgasmic release: that would come with the years. Her longing was not even for an amplification of the genital quaver that her body for some time would have been softly trilling; nor was it strictly a longing for love and affection: in fact, the more love and affection a girl was receiving from her family and friends, the less that was a part of it. As much as anything else, it was a longing for information. There was information about men; about being with men, alone, in dark places, that she sensed she must access in order to navigate the mysterious vastness of her life-to-be. Her subconscious mind was signaling to her that such information was essential to her very survival in the adult world, and her hormones, for reasons of their own, were augmenting those signals with a barrage of swelling itches and tingles. Implicit in most sexual yearning was a deep-seated desire to connect somehow with the mystery of being, but the yearning of the young was overlaid with a scary yet optimistic desire to solve the smaller (though they’d hardly seem small at the time) mysteries of the adult universe, a universe in which the penis seemed to cast a long shadow and the vagina formed a gateway to both shame and salvation. If the longing of many older women lacked that sweetness, it was because they already had gleaned the information for which young girls were so shyly desperate, and may have found it disappointing and unsatisfactory, particularly where men were concerned.

Switters went back indoors and rolled about the house for a while, maneuvering around utterly obsolete churns and spinning wheels and uncomfortable wooden rocking chairs. Were he ever offered a voyage in a time machine, Colonial America would be far down his list of preferred destinations, although he suspected that Jefferson, Franklin, and the lot would be worthy drinking companions, maybe even deserving of C.R.A.F.T. Club membership, which was not something one could say of a single governmental leader of the past hundred and fifty years.

In contrast to the harsh pragmatism of the Early American decor, the contents of his mother’s closets, which he examined now in some detail, were stylish and luxurious. Hanging there, bereft of the flesh whose silhouettes they mimicked, were soft, powdery pantsuits, slithery black cocktail dresses, and matte suede jackets trimmed with lamb, each flying an inconspicuous but haughty little flag emblazoned with an Italian name (Oscar de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana) that he’d have recognized if he read Vogue or even Newsweek instead of Tricycle and Soldier of Fortune. Eunice did them justice, too, he had to admit, though he failed to find her, at fifty-seven, hair in a hennaed bun, face in a brittle tuck, to be as buzzy with allure as he remembered her mother, Maestra, to be at that age. Dwayne’s closet, which he also examined, was filled with goofy golfing garb and shiny suits Switters wouldn’t have worn to a Chiang Mai cockfight.

Gradually he made his way to the door of Suzy’s room, but although he went so far as to grasp the knob, he just could not allow himself to violate its sanctity. He’d never been that kind of spy. He sat there for a long time, however. Thinking.

Suzy doesn’t merely want to feel, she wants to know. She yearned to concretize the unsubstantial image of the “real” life that awaited her; to prepare herself, perhaps, for the transfiguration, the metamorphosis that would split her dreamy cocoon, discharging her, a wing-damp, unsure butterfly, into the leafy gardens of wifedom and motherhood. Well, would he not be the perfect teacher? He not only had the experience, he also had the devotion, the caring. If the male erection was the compass with which so many women, for better or worse, must get their bearings in the world, what finer instrument than his own? Why, if Amelia Earhart had had my peepee on board. . . . He recalled Bobby’s story of how, in olden times, the uncles had initiated—

But no. He couldn’t sell it to his conscience. The bedroom was not a classroom. There were some skills (if skill was the right word) that a person needed to develop, through trial and error, on their own. To “teach” Suzy about sex, from his well-burnished lectern, would be to deprive her of the follies and fumbles of teen romance: the embarrassment and awkwardness, worry and wonder, telltale stains and tangled-up limbs—all the gawky ecstasies and sticky surprises that jack out of the box of neophyte lust. What right did he have to streamline that process? What right to teach her anything?

He asked that question again late in the afternoon, when, after completing an outline of the Fatima story at the family computer, he found himself adding to it the following provocation:

The Virgin Mary, in her Lady of the Rosary guise, appeared to the kids at Fatima six times in 1917. Way back in 1531, she chose Guadalupe, Mexico, for the first stop on her tardy comeback tour, imprinting her image, so it’s said, on a poor Indian’s poncho and instructing him to have a church built outside of Mexico City. Next stop, Paris, three hundred years later (God’s time is not our time), where a novice spied her twice in a chapel. This time, she wanted a medal to be cast with her image and regular devotions said to her. She was back in a relative flash in 1858, appearing no less than eighteen times in a grotto down the road at Lourdes and referring to herself as the Immaculate Conception. She must have liked the neighborhood because she turned up next before four children in Pontmain, France, and succeeded in getting another church constructed in her honor. In 1879 she hovered above a village chapel in Ireland; in the 1930s she did Belgium big time, appearing to various youngsters no fewer than forty-one times in several locations, referring to herself at Beauraing as the Virgin of the Golden Heart, and at Banneux as the Virgin of the Poor. It was in Amsterdam between 1945 and 1959 that she took off the velvet gloves, calling herself the Lady of All Nations and demanding that her contact petition the pope to grant her the titles Co- Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate. Starting in 1981, she touched down in two of the most screwed-up places on earth, Rwanda and Bosnia, wanting to be known as Mother of the World, no less, and Queen of Peace. And speaking of bad locations, her image affixed itself to the side of a finance company office in Florida a couple of years ago, though she didn’t apply for a loan.

So, my steamy little kumquat, I’m forced to ask: where has Jesus been during all this? Mary makes multiple appearances, demands increasing recognition, assumes ever more grandiose titles, and insists on equal billing as the Co-Redeemer. Yet over those five centuries, and the fifteen that preceded them, not a peek of Jesus or a peep from him. What’s going on here? In his time on earth, he didn’t seem all that shy. Notice how Mary never mentions him in any of her pronouncements? God, yes, but not Jesus. She herself is hardly mentioned in the Gospels, and on those few occasions when she does make the scene, Jesus is less than enthusiastic about her, going so far, in Matthew, I believe, as to snub her, asking, “Who is my mother?” and answering that anyone who does God’s bidding qualifies as his mother. Could there be a revenge motif here? Could Jesus be under house arrest, chained up in his mother’s basement? Does she have something on him, is he being blackmailed? I suppose we could perceive all this Mary activity as a natural resurfacing of the feminine principle in society, a welcome reemergence of the goddess as the dominant religious figure. But might it also signal a palace coup of the sort that cost the brilliant upstart Lucifer his No. 2 position in Heaven—or else a public airing of a nasty little family feud?

As Switters read, then read again, the preceding two paragraphs, his forefinger hovered over the