Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Picasso, neither Modigliani nor Andrew Wyeth, had ever captured. “Usual for you, perhaps. How did it go for Fannie?”

Switters glanced around the room, as if searching for assistance or inspiration. Mute and motionless in her shrine, the shiksa-like Mary offered neither. “Why don’t you ask Fannie?” he said finally and a little defiantly. What was this all about?

“We can’t,” Domino replied, after translating his response for the abbess. “She has gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean?”

“A Syrian surveying team came by very early this morning. Had you arisen at a decent hour you might have noticed. We feared they were police hunting for you, but they only wanted to fill their water casks. When they left, Fannie left with them.”

He scowled. “Voluntarily?”

“It would seem so. She took her belongings.”

“No note?”

“Rien,” said Masked Beauty.

“Nothing,” said Domino.

“Well, dash my dumplings,” said Switters.

The next half hour ranked among the most uncomfortable he’d ever spent. It made him long for the minefields along the Iraqi-Iranian border. As delicately as possible considering the nature of the previous night’s activities, even waxing poetic when circumstance and elan allowed, he attempted to give the women an overview, from his perspective, of how it had gone for Sister Fannie.

He’d rather expected that Fannie would be a scratcher, a screamer, a biter, one of those bedroom banshees whose veneer of civilization was involuntarily ripped away by the claws of Eros. To his surprise, her volcano lay dormant, and no shifting of plates that his undulations engendered could precipitate a measurable eruption. The first time, she had grimaced and whimpered a little, because as gentle as he was, he had hurt her. The second time, she was more relaxed, and the third, in the dawn’s early light, she’d actually cooed a couple of times with pleasure. For the most part, however, she’d been a quietly interested, curious, almost studious participant, eager enough but not in the least demonstrative.

And now she had decamped, leaving him to wonder if losing her virginity at thirty-four mightn’t have been anticlimactic for her, a big disappointment, and, suspecting that it must have been his fault (which, alas, it might have been), and spurred on by her Asmodeus, she’d gone in search of a man or men who might better live up to her long-held expectations. Or, casting himself in a more favorable light, he considered that it might have been so overpoweringly wonderful for her that she’d been unable to speak or move out of sheer awe, and afterward she’d run off to sample a variety of partners in order to make comparisons. (Somehow, that seemed less feasible.) On the other hand, the experience—good, bad, or mediocre—might have buried her beneath such an unexpected avalanche of conditioned Catholic detritus that a spirit-bruising guilt had sent her scurrying home to Ireland to beg refuge as a lay sister in an orthodox nunnery.

“Je ne comprends pas.” He shrugged. “I don’t understand.” Indeed, he didn’t understand, and it would ruffle his masculine feathers for months to come, because Fannie neither returned nor sent any word.

Strangely enough, once he completed his full account of the deeds that had nearly demolished his narrow cot, Domino sighed, smiled sympathetically, and said that Fannie’s exodus, as long as she came to no harm, was probably for the best. For her part, Masked Beauty said nothing more on the subject whatsoever, but instead inquired if Switters would mind teaching her how to operate a computer.

Beginning tomorrow morning, he e-mailed Bobby Case, Matisse’s blue nude will be sitting beside me at this very keyboard.

Far out, Bobby wrote back. Next thing I know, you’ll be knitting socks with “Whistler’s Mother.”

It’s true, I suppose: I am learning to appreciate older women to whom I’m not related. But you needn’t put Whistler’s mother in quotes. The actual title of the painting to which you refer is “Arrangement in Gray and Black.”

Thanks for correcting me. You’re a true friend. I could have made a fucking fool of myself at any number of swell soirees.

“I wish I didn’t,” Switters told his pupil, “but when I leave at the end of September, I have to take this vampire with me.”

Masked Beauty said she understood but that she had reason to believe that God would eventually provide the Pachomians with a computer of their own.

Right, thought Switters. God going under the name of Sol Glissant. Aloud, he explained that it wouldn’t be quite the same, that the sisters would require a server, one with satellite capabilities since there were no telephone lines into the oasis, and should they obtain one, there would be hook-up charges and a monthly fee. When the old abbess asked who his server was, she was surprised to hear him answer, “The CIA.” She’d thought he had severed his ties to that organization. He explained that officially he had, but that he still had friends at the pickle factory, clever angel boys who saw to it that he remained on-line.

“This research you’re going to be doing—and the Langley search engine is the best that exists—will all be paid for by the CIA. No, no, it’s not a problem. Even when it isn’t bribing dictators and financing right-wing revolutions, the company’s got so much money stashed under its mattress it can’t sleep at night for the lumps. The CIA doesn’t submit its accounts to Congress as specifically required by our Constitution, which means it’s an illegal arm of government to begin with. So, even if we’re stealing, we’re stealing from outlaws.”

“I’m unsure that that makes it more virtuous.”

“Maybe not, but it certainly makes it more fun.” At that point, Domino, who’d stopped in to see how the lesson was going and if Switters’s French was up to the task, gave a light little laugh. He grinned back at her and neglected to inform either of them of the high probability that Langley was allowing him to remain on-line so that it could keep tabs on his activities, those, at least, to which he gave electronic voice.

He went on to warn Masked Beauty that the computer would tax her Christian patience, for while the machine was developed as a time-saving device, it frequently ate up far more time than telephone calls or physical trips to the library. “Some of the Web sites you may want to visit will be getting so many hits you’ll have to queue up like a Chihuahua waiting for its turn at the world’s last bone. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the Internet, there’re just too damn many people using it. Too damn many people using the roads, using energy, using parks and trees and beaches and cows and sewers and planes, using everything except good taste and birth control, although I suppose those two may be the same thing. I mean, did you get a look at the parents of the American septuplets? And did you think of geometric progression and shudder in horror? That one couple’s one tasteless test-tube tumble could dork down the entire gene pool?”

Neither of the Frenchwomen was familiar with the “little miracle in Iowa,” but, as he well knew, overpopulation and its myriad foul consequences was a paramount interest of theirs, so his rantlette garnered a favorable response. He was mistaken, however, in his supposition that Masked Beauty’s travels on the Internet would be limited to sites either directly concerned with family issues or ones that provided the occasional forum for those who were. She would, with his assistance, visit such sites from time to time, but the primary focus of the Pachomian abbess’s investigations proved to be on a different subject altogether. Fortuitously, perhaps, it was a subject to which Switters, the previous year, had devoted a modicum of attention.

June. July. August. September. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere—which included, naturally and, as a matter of fact, emphatically, the Syrian desert. The sun was as red as a baboon’s backside. Relentless, it rose each and every morning and like a malicious baboon climbing a staircase, treated those trapped on the ground floor to a rude display.

Serrated with heat, abuzz with wind-whipped sand, the air outside the compound was like a bouquet of hacksaws. Within the walls, plenteous pools of shade made life bearable, though it was far from cool. At odd moments, orchard trees would quiver, as if trying to shake themselves free of the heat, or would tilt ever so slightly, as if longing to lie down in their own shade. Then, all would grow still again until the next brimstone breeze wafted with a gritty obduracy out of the great oven door. It was an oven that knew well the stern exertions of soda and salt, but not at all the puffy gaieties of yeast.