Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“Voila!” she exclaimed, and Switters instantly recognized and approved her intent.

Once the checkered pants had been pulled over the stilts and fastened about his waist, and a tin funnel appropriated as a hat, he set off, head higher in the air than a streetlamp. It was so much like a one-man circus parade that he had little choice but to break into a booming, up-tempo rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

The sisters abandoned their duties to line up and cheer the funny giant. Even dour Maria Deux had to grin. And each time he staggered past the chapel, he glanced down to see a face pressed to an uncolored pane in the stained-glass window.

Switters paraded. He pranced. He teetered. He waved. He sang. And everyone seemed enchanted. Everyone, that is, except Domino Thiry.

By the time Switters relinquished the stilts, dusk was settling onto the oasis like a purple hairnet through which a few stray strands of blondish daylight curled. After Pippi congratulated him on his performance, she hurried off to crank up the generator. Domino pushed him back to his room, through an archaic pastoral gloaming: cuckoos cooing themselves to sleep in the willows, chickens marching dumbly to the roost (one young hen lingering behind as if wanting to stay up past her bedtime and watch chicken MTV); the comforting, almost touching sight of people quietly performing their evening chores; the pappy air quickened by the fairgrounds smell of frying onions; everywhere a winding down, an innocence, a rhythm, a timelessness, an anticipation of stars, a secret fear of midnight.

The pair didn’t speak. Switters was exhausted, undoubtedly, and Domino seemed in a bit of a pique. In silence they let themselves be swabbed by the curative sheep tail of bucolic twilight. Were they a normal couple in such a setting, they might be looking ahead to supper and wine and parenting and sex and prayers and dreams. As it was, Switters was imagining the possibilities that stilt walking might hold for him (between then and the autumn when he would return to Amazonia), and Domino was wondering how the hell he could walk on stilts in the first place.

That was the very question she fired at him—arms tightly folded, face all aglower—once she had shoved his chair across the threshold with just enough extra force so that he’d been obliged to brake to keep from crashing into the opposite wall. He turned slowly to stare at her, fatigue and just a touch of merriment tempering the fierceness that might otherwise have kindled his eyes. “Un moment,” he croaked, so parched and hungry he could scarcely speak. He tipped the water pitcher, drinking from it directly and not stopping until it was dry. Then he rolled to the crocodile valise, from which he withdrew a half-stale Health Valley energy bar, which he devoured in four mighty chomps. During the time he took to refresh himself, she changed neither position nor expression.

Wiping his mouth with the torn sleeve of his jacket, he turned to her once more. “Okay, Sister—if I may still call you that. . . .”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you just say Domino!?” She must have surprised herself with the heat in her voice because she immediately softened her face and her tone. “In the Middle Ages, a domino was a black-and-white mask that people wore during carnival. So, you see, my name connects me to my aunt in still another way.”

“Okay. Cool. Did you notice, Domino, that each and every time I fell off the stilts, no matter how hard I fell or in what position I landed, I managed to bend my legs so that my feet never touched the ground? No? Yes? You’re not quite sure? Well, I did, and they didn’t. You are now about to find out why.”

After the painful experience with Suzy, it was unthinkable that he would lie to Domino. (Maybe he couldn’t lie to the Devil or God.) Nor was he inclined to offer her the abridged version that he’d related to Maestra and Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. No, he gave her, as she stood transfixed in the doorway, the full account, complete with Sailor Boy stew and penis-jab, although he did first warn her, much as he had Bad Bobby, that what she was about to hear was so unbelievable that he scarcely believed it himself. And he left purposefully vague the precise outlines of Today Is Tomorrow’s head: there would be limits to her credulousness.

The telling took the better part of an hour, and when at last he slapped his now permanently soiled trouser legs as if to punctuate the end of the story, Domino seemed, well, not so much perplexed as hypnotized, not so much stunned as drunk, her customary radiance restored, even intensified, like the sultan’s chronically sick wife who was miraculously restored to health by the stinking beggar’s fairy tales. She said little, however; just looked kind of goofy in a dignified way and then excused herself to try to digest the strange and perhaps tainted ambrosias he’d just fed her.

“I’ll be packed,” he called after her. “In case the truck to Deir ez-Zur comes in the morning.” And to himself: But I’ll be damned if I’ll blow this falafel stand without having a peek at Masked Beauty.

As it turned out, however, by 7:30 A.M., when Domino knocked with his breakfast tray, something had happened that put a spin—positive or negative, he honestly couldn’t say which—on his desire to meet the once blue nude. Life was Finnegans Wake, to be sure, except for those times when it was Marvel Comics.

“Look at this,” Switters muttered, barely glancing up from the computer over which he was hunkered, and on the screen of which a message from Maestra dully shimmered in a state of inkless, bloodless, ephemeral, somehow untrustworthy electronic quiddity. Squinting, Domino read over his shoulder, slowly extracting the salient facts from the hard-nosed rococo of Maestra’s prose.

It appeared that the Matisse oil that had hung for so many years over Maestra’s living room mantel; the painting that had enlivened certain of Switters’s boyhood fantasies and that briefly had seemed destined to become his own; the ace up his grandmother’s filmy financial sleeve; the innovative razzmatazz ramble of flattened pigment inspired by the naked body of Domino’s aunt, was, in a word—in two words, to be exact—stolen property.

And when the painting was reproduced in the auction house catalog, its rightful owner had come forth.

In January 1944, five months before Allied troops landed at Normandy, the last prominent Jewish family left in the south of France had been finally discovered and arrested. Their hiding place, an abandoned mill, was comfortably, even elegantly furnished, and among articles confiscated there by the Nazis were artworks that the cultivated fugitives had continued to accumulate, even in their time of peril. A few weeks later, Matisse’s Blue Nude 1943 was loaded aboard a train that departed Nice, bound, presumably, for Berlin. That was the last that the family, imprisoned and tortured, or Matisse, aging and forgetful, was to hear of it. Until, that is, it turned up at Sotheby’s just now, where it attracted the attention of the lone surviving member of that persecuted family, who immediately laid claim to it.

The good news for Maestra was that the grateful owner was presenting her with a two-hundred-thousand- dollar reward (a fraction of its worth) for having “protected” the painting for all those years and for surrendering it without a legal battle. The interesting news for Switters was that the owner turned out to be Audubon Poe’s patron, the Beirut-based businessman, Sol Glissant.

“That is interesting to me, as well,” said Domino. “Not only because of the picture and its connection to my aunt but because Sol Glissant happens to be the benefactor who donated to the Pachomian Order this oasis!”

“Are you jiving me? Enough, already! If the world gets any smaller, I’ll end up living next door to myself.”

“Oh, but I am beginning to find these . . . these coincidences involving you and Masked Beauty and the painting and all of us to be exciting, to be meaningful. Suppose they are omens? Operating instructions from the Almighty? This news from your grandmother, it only makes me more confident that what I am about to propose to you is the correct decision.”

She had his full attention then. Clicking off the computer, he gazed at her directly, finding her at that instant more than usually vivacious.

“We spoke of you last night after dinner and again this morning, all of us, including Masked Beauty, and we have decided to ask you to stay on with us here at—at the convent. If I may still call it that.”

Switters felt something subtle slither out of his nether regions and up his spine, but he would have been hesitant to label it kundalini. Even before she revealed the reasoning behind this surprising request, he could sense his vision of getting Seattle’s Art Girls involved with stilts—stilt-making, stilt-racing, stilts for stilts’ sake—fading into vacancy.

Domino’s reasons were both practical and philosophical.

Switters excelled at languages. He had advanced computer equipment and a satellite telephone. He was adept in their use. Isolated more than ever from the world at large, the sisterhood would benefit in numerous ways