Still Life With Woodpecker Read Online Free PDF

discussion led by Dr. Linus Pauling on Vitamin C as a prevention and a cure. Oh my, this was exciting. Was there any planetary problem of significance that the Care Fest overlooked? Leigh-Cheri couldn’t think of one.
    Maybe Leigh-Cheri would admit nothing significant in the fact that the articles in the magazines she was perusing were largely about romance: who was breaking up—or taking up—with whom, what to do when husbands lose interest, how to cope with loneliness and rejection, and so forth. The advertisements in the magazines were almost exclusively concerned with making oneself attractive to the opposite sex. Moreover, the movie that was screened aboard the plane was a love story. The movie had an unhappy ending and thus was considered “realistic.” And when the Princess put on a headset to listen to the taped music that Northwest Orient provided its passengers, the songs she heard were about hearts breaking and hearts aching, or hearts quaking as they slid, spewing sparks, across the electrified threshold of new love.
    Maybe Leigh-Cheri elected to disregard the evidence because it was just too personal. If beneath the great issues and all-encompassing questions (as underplayed as they were in the last quarter of the twentieth century) a more intimate struggle raged, a struggle whose real goal was romantic fulfillment, maybe it was courageous and honorable to attempt to transcend that struggle, to insist on something more than that.
    Maybe.
    In the rear of the aircraft, Bernard Mickey Wrangle reached inside his jacket … and pulled from his breast pocket … not a detonator … nor a fuse … not yet … but a package … of Hostess Twinkies.
    Too bad the Queen insisted that you fly first-class, Leigh-Cheri. Too bad you’re sitting next to your snoozing old chaperon instead of next to Bernard Mickey Wrangle. Since Hostess Twinkies always travel in pairs—because like the coyote, the killer whale, the gorilla, and the whooping crane, Hostess Twinkies mate for life—there would have been a Twinkie each for you to share.

17
    THE AIRLINER CIRCLED HONOLULU the way a typing finger circles a keyboard, awaiting the message from the control center that would instruct it when and where to land.
    And they land …
    … on A.
    Runway A.
    A for “attic.”
    A for “amore.”
    What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart. This flight could only terminate in a room close to the moon.
    The No Smoking sign was on. (In the attic, the Camel cigarettes were never to be lit.) The signal to Fasten Seat Belts was given. (In amore, belts fasten and unfasten at delicious intervals.) Gulietta clutched her wicker case, which now bore but the slightest spoor of frog. Leigh-Cheri clutched her thighs, as dry now as princess thighs ought to be. Bernard Mickey Wrangle, listed on the passenger manifest as T. Victrola Firecracker but once known to millions as the Woodpecker, clutched nothing, not even his black powder underwear. The Woodpecker knew better than to clutch and to hold. The Woodpecker simply grinned. He grinned because he had reached Hawaii without detection. He grinned because Twinkie cream always made him grin. He grinned because it was the last quarter of the twentieth century, and something momentous was happening.

INTERLUDE
    MAYBE I’M MISTAKEN ABOUT the Remington SL3. I’m no longer convinced that it will do. Oh, it’s a superb tool—for the proper desk in the proper office. If there’s a treatise you wish to compose, a letter to the editor, an invoice, a book review, why it will cross your t ’s before you come to them, and I’m positive that there are secretaries who would prefer it to their mates. But for the novelist, any typewriter is a formidable thing; and the Remington SL3, with its interchangeable printing units, its electric margins, variable line spacer, paper-centering scale, personalized touch control, automatic paragraphing button, vertical and horizontal half-spacing,