Ishmael Reed: The Terrible Threes

Limbs were flying, and the heels of feet were facing the ceiling. Their buttocks were rolling, gyrating, and at one point, when their rhythm was perfectly synchronized, he gave a nasty shift, like a potbellied flamenco dancer he’d once seen do, and she shrieked like someone who’d walked into the kitchen in Florida on Sunday morning and found an alligator on the floor. There were lots of French kisses and Russian fingers. The cognac had spilled on the floor. They were so weak that they almost missed the Soviet airliner that was to return her to her family in Kiev. She was wearing a black dress decorated with red roses, black 40s hat, and she carried a black handbag. Their sporadic love had become victim of yet another liberalizing trend in Russian politics. She was quarreling with her relatives because she wanted to claim her Tartar heritage, while they wanted to be thought of as European. A friend of the family, who’d had dinner with them, drank all of the Stoli they’d ordered, ate the red cabbage and the sturgeon, had returned to Kiev to tell her family that she had a black lover. They were very provincial people, commented upon books they hadn’t read, and performances they hadn’t seen. He thought he remembered her telling him that they were mathematicians. They had a dacha, housekeeper and a chauffeur, and didn’t want to blow it.

Nance never seemed to get along with the parents of the women he dated. Virginia’s mother took the cake. Virginia said it wasn’t until she was thirty-five that her mother stopped beating her with the cord of an iron. When her relatives visited them, when they were married, he always wondered why they kept on their trench coats. One night he awoke and found that she wasn’t sleeping beside him. He drove to the motel where her family was staying, and peeked into the window of the suite they’d rented. Some of his personal items lay on the table, and her sister, the one with a case of inhibited metabolism, was holding up one of his shirts and plucking a long strand of the Russian lady’s coarse black hair from it, marked exhibit A. Virginia was crying. They seemed to be building up a case against him. That wasn’t the only cause, but he remembered in the series of arguments they’d had before they broke up, he said that she was still shackled by her family. Afterward, he’d dated a series of European-American women, ranging from the California beauties you see modeling bikinis in Sports Illustrated , Herb Gold’s favorites, to the black-haired, arty types who listened to Laurie Anderson and were into the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Virginia and her friends were right about European-American women. They spent a lot of time tossing their hair.

While vacationing in the Caribbean, he’d visited a museum where he came upon the painting of an ancient Carib woman. She was rotissering a pig. The lust in her eyes, as she stared at that pig, was immaculate. He fell in love with her fat lips and shining hair. She had small breasts and her legs looked as though she spent a lot of time running in and out of craters. Another painting showed her spearing a wild boar.

A few weeks later, he ran into a woman who looked just like her, at a gallery opening on the Lower East Side. She said that she was a Flipachino, from a small island in the Pacific called the Flipachines. They began to date, and for a while they were as happy as two sailors, dancing in a movie with Anne Miller. Her mother found out about it. She began to send strange envelopes to him. Some were filled with parts of birds. In a large envelope covered with stamps with the pictures of men wearing the kind of hairstyles that influenced the punkers, he found the ear of a large rat. He told his lover about it, and she said that her mother had always sent horrible material to her lovers, and that her last boyfriend, Richard, had disappeared.

One night she called to tell him that her mother had flown in from the Flipachino Islands and wanted to have dinner with them. That was fine with him, because after dinner maybe they’d go to her apartment, put on some Marvin Gaye records. Marvin Gaye would have loved her because she was a real healer. What Martin Luther King Jr. would have called a “Doctor.” The kind that would have sent J.F.K. with his bad back to a chiropractor. She did all the work, all you had to do was lie there. She may not have been the kind of woman that you found behind every great man, but she certainly was next to him in a variety of other ways. At dinner her mother said that she didn’t see anything on the menu that appealed to her and requested that the waiter bring her the names of the diners. He didn’t get the import of this incident until later, when his date went to the ladies’ room, and he was left alone with her mother. Her mother didn’t say anything, but glared at him a long time. This made him uncomfortable and he shifted in his seat. What was taking her daughter so long in the bathroom? Finally, her mother pulled out a huge basket made of straw, with a ship design on it, and removed something. It was a miniature head, about the size of a chestnut. An old wrinkled chestnut, or a prune. It was the head of a man. The lips looked as though they had been sewn. Richard, he said, weakly. The old woman nodded. He went out to the parking lot and emptied his dinner on the ground. He never ate shrimp again.

That’s when he entered a celibacy period. Orifices of the 90s were like those of the 80s, anyway. They were covered with Do Not Enter signs. No wonder Cupid was armed. He and others like him had had it with American women. He was hearing this from a lot of men. That American women were always kvetching and talking about being unhappy, without knowing what they were talking about. Even when they were happy they were unhappy. His Jewish dentist had become so upset with American women that he’d changed his religion to Islam, changed his name, and married an Arab woman. The newspapers were full of ads for foreign women, usually Asians. As far as Nance was concerned, somebody from outer space could have all of the American women. Virginia was safe, though. Though she had a habit of broadcasting their former intimate secrets on the air, he could count on there being nothing sexual between them. In fact, today, Thanksgiving, he was going to join her and her “beau,” Phillip Wheatley, editor of the business page of the New York Exegesis .

President Jesse Hatch had been trying to arrange a meeting with Reverend Jones for three weeks, ever since Pedigree auctioneers had revealed the existence of a letter written by the late Admiral Matthews; rumor had it that if the letter were revealed a special prosecutor would have to be called in to unravel the mess and call for indictments. Inside the Oval Office, which Hatch rarely saw, Hatch paced up and down, his tie loosened, mashing cigarette butts into ashtrays, and behaving in a generally Type A manner, like Bogart in The Maltese Falcon . Jones expressed his annoyance with Hatch by staring disdainfully at the ashtray. Hatch got the message. He put out his cigarette. Reverend Jones listened patiently. “Goddamnit, that special prosecutor is trying to put our asses in jail, and all you have to say is pray.”

“Don’t worry, Jesse, it’ll blow over. We have someone to take the fall. If Congress acts up we’ll throw them a piece of meat. Kosher meat.”

“I don’t follow you,” Hatch said, already calmer.

“Look at it this way, Jesse. Krantz has no family, he doesn’t get along with the press, and he’s Jewish. Who else would have that kind of name? So even though he converted — I baptized him personally — he’s still a Jew at heart. We can say that he did it for Israel or something. You know, convince the Arabs that we’re evenhanded, satisfy the Christian majority at the same time. We’ll get public opinion on our side. Blame it on communism. That always works. Say that Krantz was part of some kind of worldwide communist conspiracy aligned with Satanists and Antichrists. Besides, I’m beginning to have my doubts about Krantz. He was always hanging around with the Admiral. Touring nuclear subs with him. And another thing. It’s been almost four years since I brought him to Washington. He hasn’t aged one bit.”

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