As a matter of fact, he worked her chador off her shoulders, unhooked her bra, and bared her breasts. She didn’t object, though the breasts themselves, livid and alert, seemed almost to blink in astonishment at their exposure. He kissed them, licked and sucked them, rolled them in his palms, and squeezed their nipples between thumb and forefinger as if testing berries for ripeness or turning the knobs of a particularly delicate scientific instrument—and, actually, when he gently twisted the rosebud dials, it pumped up the volume of her breathing to a virtually orgasmic level. When he advanced his explorations and adorations to the lower half of her body, however, he was rebuffed. And, in truth, he didn’t mind. He had his hands full—and his mouth full, too—and he was content with that largess.
After a while, they paused to see if the stars were still there. Domino fingered her own nipples, perhaps to calculate the difference between his touch and hers; or, just as likely, to facilitate a conversational segue. “Have you noticed,” she inquired, “that the grapes are becoming full on the vine?” She wondered if he might be persuaded to stick around for the harvest and for the winemaking that would follow. She thought it only fair, she said, that he help replenish their pantry since he had done so much to reduce it. Of course, she knew how anxious he was to get down to Peru, no doubt with good reason. . . .
He interrupted to reveal that he’d always wanted to participate in a grape-stomping, longed to jump up and down on tubs of the fruit until his feet, including the spaces between his toes, were as purple as eggplants or 2- balls, and that he could never fully trust a person who didn’t find the prospect of squashing grapes in their bare feet irresistible; but, alas, he feared that stomping grapes on stilts would be neither very enjoyable nor very effective.
“Silly,” she said. “We are not old shoeless peasants. We use a press.” Then, as if there was some doubt that he fully understood the meaning of the word
They spent the night in each other’s arms, sleeping only intermittently due to the novelty, the shock, of their romantic union. And sometime before the sun reclaimed their patch of Syrian sky, he agreed to stay on at the oasis until the end of October. They both knew full well that neither her request that he stay nor his consent to do so had anything especially to do with the actual harvesting of grapes.
The supply truck came, bringing gasoline, flour, soap, cooking oil, sugar, toothpaste, and salt. It also brought magazines and mail. Included in the mail was a statement from the Damascus bank with which the Pachomians did business, and the bottom line was not encouraging. So few contributions had been deposited in their account (widows in Chicago and Madrid each sent them a hundred dollars, Sol Glissant appeared to have forgotten them altogether) that Domino instructed the driver to reduce their usual petrol order by half next trip and to deliver no toothpaste or cooking oil at all. They’d clean their teeth with salt and attempt to make their own oil from the walnuts that would be ripening soon. She also canceled magazines and papers: they could get their news from the Internet. She did order, on behalf of Switters and paid for with his deutsche marks, a five-pack of cigars, a ten-pack of razor blades, and a six-pack of beer. The driver, who had no idea that there was a man residing at the convent, gave her a funny look.
Later, when the truck had gone and he’d come out of hiding, Switters said, “First purchases I’ve made in more than five months, and in that time not one person has tried to hypnotize, charm, cajole, mislead, or frighten me into buying their goods or services. You can’t appreciate how clean that feels.” No, having lived so long in an ad-free zone, she couldn’t really appreciate it, and she wondered if maybe he was not a bit of a tightwad. On the other hand, he had offered to pay what she considered an exorbitant sum for a pinch of hashish if only she would approach the driver about it. She refused.
The mail delivery also contained an unsigned postcard, addressed to Abbess Croetine and postmarked Lisbon. Everybody guessed it was from Fannie, though they couldn’t remember ever having seen a sample of her handwriting. Its message read, in badly misspelled French,
Something was sorely troubling Masked Beauty, and it very well could have been that mysterious postcard. Or, it could have been that their dedicated daily tours of Net sites simply were not bearing fruit or producing results to her liking. More than likely, she was upset both by the card and the unsatisfactory data. In any case, she began gradually curtailing her appearances beside the computer and seemed, during that October, to have initiated an acceleration of the aging process. Her complexion, which heretofore had been unnaturally smooth, showed signs of cracking. Her pale eyes faded further, and her posture, formerly as upright with natural dignity as a flagpole with pompous sentiment, commenced to slump, giving the impression that, like Skeeter Washington, she’d spent too many nights hunched over a piano. Switters suspected that computers themselves could cause premature aging; and, obviously, the abbess had long been subjected to the tugs of earthly gravity, but something else was weighing on her, wrinkling her and pulling her down. Only her wart seemed unchanged and unaffected, a clod of red mud from the mean fields of Mars.
As second-in-command at the convent, Domino must have shared Masked Beauty’s every concern, yet she struck Switters as more radiant, more vivacious than ever. It would be easy to credit love, and maybe that’s where credit was due, but neither she nor Switters was the type to let themselves be made over by Cupid. Undoubtedly, they were delighted, even thrilled by their amorous bonding, each thoroughly intrigued with the other, yet they were suspicious of the affair as well, and tended to regard it with a skeptical, sometimes mocking eye.
While they displayed no affection in public, their affair was quickly common knowledge, and some of the sisters, most particularly the two Marias, were more than a little disapproving. As for Bobby Case, he was informed only that Switters had postponed for a month his return to the Amazon. Nevertheless, Bobby ventured a fairly accurate guess as to the reason for the delay, and he chided Switters for thinking with his little head instead of his big one. Bobby also chose that moment to transmit a photograph of his current girlfriend, an Okinawan cutie who looked not a day over fifteen. The fact that Domino was old enough to be the girl’s mother (almost, under the right circumstances, her grandmother), seemed not to faze Switters, if it registered on him at all.
Every night between nine and ten, he leaned his stilts against the tower’s adobe wall and climbed the long ladder to what he had christened the Rapunzel Suite. There, he rolled onto the carpet, propped his feet on a cylindrical pillow, and, watching the stars slide by like lighted portholes in a luxury liner, awaited Domino’s arrival. She would appear promptly at ten, never out of breath from the climb, pull her chador over her head, and snuggle in naked beside him. Unlike some women he’d known, she could shed her clothing without shedding her mystery.
It had been his experience that women of a certain age often tended to let themselves go. They became lax and dowdy. Switters supposed he couldn’t blame them: nobody had a greater disdain for maintenance than he. Undoubtedly, some of their frumpiness could be attributed to sheer laziness, to frustration, and to capitulation: they had given up on themselves, given up on life. All too often, however, they had simply been worn down, exhausted by having to serve too many children in addition to the helpless golfing goobers to whom they were bound by law. Was it because she’d been neither a harried wife and mother nor a steely career-chasing spinster that Domino’s spark continued to glow? Was it because she’d never compromised herself in the desperate, always illusional quest for security? He didn’t know. He didn’t very much care. “Never look a gift shoppe in the mouth” was his motto. Whatever she’d been like as a young woman, he suspected she had grown increasingly mysterious and alluring with age. She referred to herself as a “born-again virgin,” and one night near the end of his October extension, he learned that she meant it literally.
She asked him if he celebrated Christmas, and he answered that there were very few days on the calendar that he wouldn’t celebrate, if given half a reason. She protested that Christmas was special, it being the presumed birthday of Jesus Christ—or was that one more thing in which he didn’t believe?
“Um, well, it’s like this, Domino: I’ve always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That’s the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child’s purity is corrupted by society, that’s the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its
