Cat's Pajamas by James Morrow Read Free Book Online

Oscar nomination for The Rabble Capitalists, a feature-length documentary about the unlicensed peddlers of Gotham, those dubious though ambitious folk you see selling fake Rolexes, remaindered books, and sweatshop toys on street corners and in subway stations. Alas, my success was fleeting, and I eventually resigned myself to a career in cranking out instructional videos (tedious and talky shorts intended to galvanize sales forces, inspire stockholders, and educate dentists’ captive audiences). One of these days I’m going to sell the business and return to my former life as the SoHo bohemian who signed her oil paintings “Boadicea,” though my name is really Susan Fiore.
    The night I delivered Bruno Pearl from death, my mood was not far from the syndrome explicated in the Kaleidoscope video called Coping with Clinical Depression. At the beginning of the week I’d broken up with Anson, a narcissistic though singularly talented sculptor for whom I’d compliantly aborted a pregnancy one month earlier. As always occurs when I lose a lover, I’d assumed a disproportionate share of the blame, and I was now engaged in a kind of penance, pacing around on the ferry’s frigid upper level as the wind cut through my fleece jacket and iced my bones. Despite my melancholy, I took note of the old man, the only other passenger on the weather deck. He was leaning over the stern rail, a skeletal septuagenarian in a tweed overcoat, his face as compacted as a hawk’s, his nose supporting a pair of eyeglasses, one lens held in place by a ratty pink Band-Aid. He stared at the Statue of Liberty, an intense gaze, far-reaching, immune to the horizon. My forlorn companion, it seemed, could see all the way to Lisbon.
    Glancing north, I fixed on the brightly lit George Washington Bridge, each great sagging cable gleaming like a rope of luminous pearls. Anson believed that our descendants will regard suspension bridges with the same admiration we ourselves accord cathedrals and clipper ships, and tonight I understood what he meant. I turned back to the Statue of Liberty. The gentleman with the broken glasses was gone. In his place—a void: negative space, to use one of Anson’s favorite terms.
    I peered over the rail. If suicide had been the old man’s aim, he’d evidently thought better of the decision; he was thrashing about amid the ferry’s widening wake with a desperation indistinguishable from panic. For a fleeting instant the incongruity transfixed me—the lower Hudson, an aquatic wasteland, a place for concrete quays and steel scows but not this fleshy jetsam—and then I tossed aside my rucksack, inhaled sharply, and jumped.
    Anyone who has ever studied under Nikolai Vertankowski knows better than to equate performance intercourse with displays of more recent vintage. Today’s amateur exhibitionists and open-air stunt fuckers, the professor repeatedly reminded us, are not carrying on a tradition—they are desecrating it. For the true sex artist, all was subtext, all was gesture and grace. In revealing their skin to the world, the classical copulationists achieved not pornographic nudity but pagan nakedness. When Bruno and Mina ruled the eros circuit, they shed each garment so lissomely, planted each kiss so sublimely, and applied each caress so generously that the spectators experienced this tactile cornucopia no less than the lovers themselves.
    Then, of course, there was the conversation. Before and after any overt hydraulics, Bruno and Mina always talked to each other, trading astute observations and reciting stanzas of poetry they’d composed especially for the occasion. Sensitive women wept at this linguistic foreplay. Canny men took notes. But the connections themselves remained the sine qua non of each concert. By the time they were famous, Bruno and Mina had perfected over a dozen acts, including not only Sphinx Recumbent and Flowering Judas but also Fearful