Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Julian's apartment is second floor front. It's neat and clean, with waxed hardwood floors, a wall of exposed brick, a white piano, books and paintings everywhere. There is a blue velour sofa upon which Julian is made to lie. While Howard mixes Scotch and sodas, Rupert fills a syringe from a vial of aminophylline he has taken from its place behind a gelatin salad mold in the refrigerator. He gives Julian an injection.

“There, that ought to beat them bronchial buggers into submission,” he says to Julian. Then, to Sissy, “I was a medic in the Army. I really should have become a doctor. Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers, as it were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society. .”

“Too bad you don't have a pill for bullshit.” Carla smiles as if she were joking, but she'd said it tartly. Rupert glares and takes a big bite of Scotch.

“Where do you live, Miss Hankshaw,” asks Howard, trying, perhaps, to change the subject.

“I'm staying with the Countess.”

“I know,” says Howard, “but where do you reside when you aren't visiting New York?”

“I don't.”

“You don't? ”

“Well, no, I don't reside anywhere in particular. I just keep moving.”

Everyone looks a bit astonished, including the recumbent Julian.

“A traveler, eh?” says Howard.

“You might say that,” says Sissy, “although I don't think of it as traveling.”

“How do you think of it?” asks Carla.

“As moving.”

“Oh,” says Carla.

“How. . unusual,” says Marie.

“Mmmmm,” mumbles Howard.

Rupert bites into his Scotch again. Julian issues a watery wheeze.

The silence that follows is soon broken by Carla. “Rupert, before you get too engrossed in your research on Scotch as a cure for aging, don't you think you'd better phone Elaine's and cancel our dinner reservations? We'll never get in again if we just don't show up.”

“What would we do without you, Carla? Without our little efficiency expert, Carla, everything would just go to hell. Carla is thinking about running for mayor next year, aren't you Carla?”

“Up yours, Herr Doktor Book Salesman. Will the demands of your medical practice allow you to call Elaine's or shall I?”

“Oh let me do it,” pipes Marie. The short, vivacious brunette lifts herself out of her platform shoes and glides in stocking feet to the telephone.

“Speaking of running for office,” says Howard pleasantly. “Does anybody think McGovern has a chance?”

“Do you mean a chance to be canonized or a chance to be assassinated?” asks Rupert.

“If Rupert needs a bullshit pill then Hubert Humphrey needs two,” says Carla. “And that might be McGovern's role. If he can turn off Humphrey's fountain of corn then McGovern has done the sensibility of America a great favor, even if he forces his party to nominate a jingoist creep like Scoop Jackson in Miami Beach.”

Like many of their liberal counterparts, the friends of Julian Gitche are disillusioned with politics, but also like their counterparts they have failed to discover an alternative to politics in which to place their faith, channel their humanism or indulge their penchant for conflict and speculation. Thus, the conversation around the red patient on the blue sofa drifts to the upcoming national political conventions. When Marie returns from phoning the restaurant, she joins in.

Sissy leaves her chair and wanders about the apartment. Its full bookshelves remind her of public libraries in which she has napped. Wandering, she holds her thumbs close to her side, lest she nudge an antique, totter an objet d'art, smear a picture glass or agitate the pet poodle. She is intrigued but suffers no illusions; she knows she is in an alien environment.

Eventually her explorations lead her into the bedroom, where there is a covered birdcage of Florentine design. She wishes its inhabitants were not sleeping, for she “has a way” with birds. She recalls Boy, the runaway parakeet who for a time was the sole exception to her rule to go always alone. Boy's owners had clipped his wings, but once Sissy taught him how, he hitchhiked as well as some birds fly. That Boy is a cinch to go down in the Parakeet Hall of Fame.

Hoping to hear a cheep that might indicate insomnia in the cage, Sissy sits upon the double bed. Gradually, she reclines. “No Indian blankets,” she notes. “No Indian blankets.” And that is the last thought she has before she blacks out.

Two hours pass before she is awakened — by a sound softer than a cheep. It is the sound of buttons passing through buttonholes. Buttons that have not breathed freely in three days are sighing with relief, their yokes lifted, their nooses loosened. One by one, button necks are freed from the trap that is the fate of most buttons the way that compromises are the fate of most men. Soon Sissy cannot only hear button liberation; she can feel it.

Someone is undressing her.

And it is not Julian Gitche.

24.

"WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?" asked Sissy, in a voice webby with sleep.

“Oh, Rupert and Carla had a little hassle and went home,” said Howard.

“Julian fell asleep on the couch; we covered him up,” said Marie.

“We thought that we should make you comfortable, too,” said Howard.

“Yes, dear,” said Marie. “We've been watching you here sleeping and you looked so sweet. We thought we should help you get comfy for the night.”

Sissy thought that quite considerate of the Barths. They were a couple as amicable as they were handsome. She did wonder, however, why they were both in their underwear.

Between the two of them, they had her out of her dress in no time.

“There, isn't that better?” inquired Marie.

“Yes, thanks,” said Sissy. She did feel more comfortable, but she also felt as if she should apologize for not having on a brassiere. Bra hooks can test the most agile of thumbs, as many a frustrated boy will testify, and Sissy had been unable to wear that garment whose name in French means, enigmatically, “arm protector,” since she had left her mama. Light seeping in from a crack in the bathroom door gave a strawberry sheen to her gumdrop-shaped nipples. She hoped she wasn't embarrassing these nice people.

Oh my goodness, she must have been, for in a second Marie slipped out of her own brassiere — in an effort, obviously, to make Sissy feel less conspicuous.

Marie moved her bare bosom close to Sissy's. The two sets of nipples stiffened in formal greeting, like diplomats from small nations. “Mine are fuller but yours are more perfectly shaped,” observed Marie. She leaned closer. The envoys exchanged state secrets.

“Highly debatable,” said Howard. “I'll wager they're the exact same size.” Judiciously, in the spirit of fair play that characterizes his profession, he cupped his left hand about a Marie breast and his right about one of Sissy's.

He weighed them in his palms, squeezed them the way an honest grocer squeezes excess water from a lettuce, let his spread fingers sample their circumference. “Hmmm. Yours are larger, Marie, but Miss Hankshaw's — Sissy's — are more firm. You'd think they would have started to droop; I mean, from not wearing a bra.”

“Howard! Watch your manners. You've made her blush. Here, Sissy, let me compare.” Marie seized Sissy's free breast, quickly, like a monkey picking a fruit, rolling it about in her hungry little fingers, rubbing it against her chin and cheeks.