Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

> 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.

When her tall, erectly held figure slowly pivoted to face him, he saw that she was veiled. The sensation he had was that of being received by a Bedouin matriarch (were there such a thing) or the wife of a minor pasha (were such a reception permitted). Despite the crucifix that hung above the shrine and the image of Mary that dominated its nave, the atmosphere in the apartment was decidedly more Levantine than Roman. Lines from Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au Voyage,” the very first poem he’d studied at Berkeley, drifted through his mind, lines such as, “In that amber-scented calm” and “Walls with eastern splendour hung,” and, waiting to be introduced, he spontaneously blurted out in French the poem’s refrain: “La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute / Luxe, calme et volupte.”

Domino and Masked Beauty exchanged glances. Both sets of eyes seemed to be smiling. The abbess, in a flat, childish voice, bade Switters sit beside her on the couch while Domino arranged for tea. Then, without excess of preamble, and still under veil, she engaged him in a dialogue about beaute. He told her that in America, socio-political dullards had chopped up beauty and fed it to the dogs sometime in the late 1980s on grounds ranging from its lack of pragmatic social application to the notion that it was somehow unfair to that and those who were, by beauty’s standards, ugly.

The abbess asked if it wasn’t true that beauty was, indeed, useless, to which he responded with an enthusiastic, “Mais oui!” He proclaimed that beauty’s great purpose was always to be purposeless, that its use to society lay in its very uselessness, that its lack of function was precisely what lent it the power to scoop us out of context, especially political and economic context, and provide experiences available in no other area of our lives, not even the spiritual. He likened those philistines who would banish the beautiful from art, architecture, dress, and language in order to free us from frivolous and expensive distractions to those scientists who proposed blowing up the moon in order to free us, psychologically and commercially, from the effects of the tides.

The abbess agreed that a world sans lune would be a poorer world indeed—in the