Skinny Legs and All: A Novel by Tom Robbins

Author:Tom Robbins
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2010-10-05T02:45:01+00:00

It wasn't complicated. The talismans had decided that one of their group must leave the cathedral, leave the hiding place and venture into the city. Specifically, one of them must link up with Turn Around Norman, must follow him home, observe him and his life-style at close range; offstage, as it were; and report back, if possible, the following day. Obviously, it was a dangerous ploy, but it was the only way the objects might accurately ascertain whether or not the street performer was capable of playing an active role in getting them out of New York and across the sea to Jerusalem.

To minimalize the risk of discovery, the object selected for the mission would of necessity be the smallest among them, the least conspicuous. And that would be, of course, poor Spoon.

~

A week before Thanksgiving, Ellen Cherry had a waitress dream. She had the waitress dream. She had the Nightmare of the Mixed-Up Orders. In that notorious dream, the waitress (in this case, Ellen Cherry) delivers the blood sausages to a table of Buddhists and serves the vampire party the garlic soup.

She awoke with beads of sweat the size of popcorn above her upper lip and doming her nipples. And she didn't feel a whole lot better after turning on the lamp because she knew that this dream was standing with one leg in reality.

In the week since her conversation, her confrontation, with Boomer, she had been twisting in a cyclone of introspection. She'd gone from hurt to hope and back again; she'd endured pang, then numbness, and, finally, self-examination. She'd gone through her soul like a street thief going through a drunk's pockets. And what she had found, along with enough emotional loose change to feed every vending machine in the Institute of Pop Psychology, was a snapshot of herself taken before she had declared herself an artist. The picture was so old and faded and crinkled that she couldn't tell what she looked like in it.

Maybe Boomer's right, she thought. Right not only about me not really loving him—God knows I've never been willing to bet the farm on the steadfastness of my devotion—but right also about me being so lost in my identity as an artist that I couldn't find my heart with a map and a flashlight. Certainly, he's right about me being married to art, I've never denied that, but what I've got to consider, for the first time in my life, is whether maybe it isn't a bad marriage. Whether I didn't marry art when I was so young that 1 missed out on a lot of other things, things that might have taken me places and shown me stuff and made me whole and happy in ways I can't even guess. If I had waited, maybe I would've ended up just dating art instead of marrying it, or maybe 1 would have had no truck with art at all.

When she had forsaken painting the previous year, it was because she was disillusioned with the New York art world and devastated by Boomer's conquest of it.

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