‘You went to the Crazy Horse?’
‘No. I met her at City College, in front of the Rivera mural. She was doing a course in the history of art at UCLA. She was only twenty, she was pretty and she was very easy to be with.’
‘You were forty-four at the time and not quite in the Sean Connery class of pulling power. Why do you think she fell into your lap, so to speak?’
‘I struck up a conversation with her, she liked talking to me and one thing led to another.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Moved in with her history of art lecturer.’
‘Aren’t they usually married?’
‘Or divorced.’ He’d begun to look around at the walls. ‘Not a bad painter. Lydia. Not very original but not bad. And looking at that Interior with Sleeping Cat, you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in that woman’s mouth.’
‘But cool she wasn’t, your wife and my mom.’
‘Definitely not. What’s this with multicoloured numbers copulating, Ah, Love, Let Us Be the Square Root of True or Something Other?’
‘My cousin Phyllis is unloading some of the older autisic savants in her collection.’
‘And this with the nude on a motorcycle, Harley No. 7.’
‘Ossip Przewalski, he’s a steady seller. Where are you living these days?’
‘Furnished apartment in the Mission. Very Edward Hopper.’
‘Feel like a classic pizza at Marco’s?’
‘If you let it be my treat, Carmencita.’
‘You got it, Pops.’
Olivia, who had stayed in the office to give us privacy, now emerged for introductions.
‘Olivia Partridge,’ I said, ‘this is my dad, the infamous Herman Greenberg.’
‘Famous too,’ she said to Dad. ‘Didn’t you do Worlds without Worlds, words and pictures?’
‘Yup,’ said the graphically novel parent, shuffling his feet modestly. ‘Lettering’s the hardest part. Olivia, could you join us for pizza at Marco’s?’
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said, blushing prettily while Dad admired her legs.
Off we went then, into a smiling spring evening, each of us wearing a smile.
Chapter 30
Vroom Vroom
‘Such wonderful pictures!’ says Phyllis. ‘And they’re all done autistically?’
‘New gearbox every time,’ says Alyosha. ‘Also valve job.’
‘Take me through The Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants again, Alyosha. Here’s the beginning of it, with an elephant dozing in a hammock slung between two trees.’
‘Is Dimitri Pyotr Elephantovitch, ZZZZZZZ peacefully.’
‘When suddenly …’
‘Suddenly TSADSABAM!’
‘Lightning strikes the tree WHAM!’
‘Flaming fire bursting out SSWEEUUU!’
‘But Dimitri Pyotr is ready for it.’
‘With trunkful of beer squirting SSSSQUIRSHHH! Out goes fire tssss.’
‘And the elephants tell this Beeriodic Fable to …’
‘Elephant childs. Moral of fable: Always have trunkful of beer in case of stricken with lightning.’
‘Why not water, Alyosha?’
‘Is oral tradition, always beer.’
‘Love that fable, Alyosha.’
‘All elephant childs learn this. Now I make for you some borscht, yes?’
Chapter 31
Ingress of Volatore
I want to reach Angelica and I don’t know how to do it. I can only proceed by trial and error. It was in this way that I chanced upon the mind of Alexander Zhabotinsky. An interesting habitat in which the proprietor appeared riding through a jungle on the back of a painted and bejewelled elephant, reclining in a gilded howdah with an attractive woman who was wearing only a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Entertainment was provided by a band of orang-utans in Cossack dress backing a parrot in a sequinned gown who sang, in English, tangos from Finland.
The mahout in charge of the elephant was described in Zhabotinsky’s thoughts as ‘dirtified pubic and counting’. This was of little interest to me until that individual turned and revealed himself to be none other than Vassily Baby, brother to Alexander.
‘Aha! Vassily Baby! Well met!’ Slipping into the mind I found in his head along with a cloud of Stolichnaya, I saw a tall building on which the name Jarley Goode Ltd was inscribed on a brass plate at the entrance.
The name had a moneyed sound, so I flew to the financial district of San Francisco. There stood Jarley Goode Ltd, where Vassily Baby was employed as a certified public accountant. In his thoughts as he studied a database on his computer I found that he had promised his widowed mother to look after his unworldly younger brother. So here was the source of the miserable pittance that kept Alyosha in beets and potatoes.
Recalling what a tight squeeze it had been to get into Vassily’s mind that first time I wondered why it was so easy this time. Was Vassily weaker now? Was I stronger? Drifting through the barren and dusty attic of his largely unused brain I realised that I was much the stronger one. Vassily had never been in love, while I, loving Angelica steadfastly through thick and thin, had acquired mental and spiritual muscle that took me through his feeble defences easily.
It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold. Mine had had plenty of time to cool and I was looking forward to a long-deferred feast. Hovering high above him, I watched him leave his office. He stopped at a nearby delicatessen, bought a sandwich and a six-pack of beer, took them to his Mercedes and, with me following, drove to the Fort Point parking spot I remembered from our last meeting. From there he walked to the overlook, taking with him Stolichnaya from the glove compartment, and sat down to eat his sandwich and drink his beer while waiting, I suppose, for his next beautiful stranger, or possibly hoping for a return engagement with Angelica.
Vassily waited and I waited, hovering high above him while the evening opened to that time that always catches in my throat; the sky was still light but the bridge lamps had come on and those in the houses across the bay. I descended to twenty feet above Vassily’s head – I wanted him to see me grow suddenly huge as I dropped on him from that height.
‘Vassily Baby,’ I yelled down to him, ‘here is Volatore!’
He looked up and screamed but I was on him like an owl on a mouse and there was nothing he could do, my talons had him pinned.
‘Call of nature! Trousers down!’ I commanded, exposing his nether parts to the cool evening air while he whimpered piteously.
Then I thought a little smaller but not too much, and really gave him something to scream about when I achieved ingress by that same passage from which he had evicted me one evening not so long ago. He was moaning, possibly not from pleasure, when I left him there and flew away. Vassily could not have imagined a hippogriff but Ariosto did, so an eventful evening was had by all.
Chapter 32
Double or Nothing?
The doubleness, always the doubleness! And so little certainty. None, in fact. For the present I seemed not to be subject to Ariosto’s words. Wait, I thought, as an almost-idea rose to the surface: a something, a what? The almost-idea of a key, an action, a repositioning of mind, a placing of myself in a new relation to my situation. The bitten biting? The doubled unifying? The lost finding? Hang on!
Orlando Furioso is fiction, right? Ludovico Ariosto made it up out of his head. OK, it’s a classic. I’m not saying that I, Angelica Greenberg, can write a classic, but maybe I can invent my own story and live into it. Why not? Maybe even octave stanzas. Here goes:
Angelica, now from Ariosto freed,
Thinks of her Volatore, wandering far;
To find him is her first and foremost need,
To seek him underneath his guiding star.
She knows not what Dame Fortune has decreed;
She’ll carry on, whate’er her chances are.
On the other hand:
Let me now bring my rhyming to a close
And what I have to say I’ll
say in prose.
Because looking for a rhyme can drag you away from where you want to go. So I’ll start again by setting out my objective. Which is what? Well, I want to hook up with Volatore again.
I’ll do a little Q and A:
Q: How do you want to hook up with him, on all fours?
A: Let’s leave sex out of it for the moment, OK?
Q: So in what form do you want him, beast or human?
A: The problem is that when he’s human he’s someone else.
And when he’s a beast he’s not really a suitable lover. I mean, I couldn’t take him home to meet my parents. If I had any parents at home.
Q: Did you think your love was going to break an enchantment and reveal him as a handsome prince?
A: Spare me your sarcasm, OK?
Q: In the past you’ve had Volatore as idea without visible form. Want to try that again?
A: It’s too much like hearing voices in my head. I was able to do it for a little while but longer would drive me crazy. Besides, he’s got to be available for that to work.
Let’s back up a little. Why am I attracted to Volatore? Attraction is too weak a word – I am drawn to him as the ocean is drawn to the full moon. Why? Is it the animal of me being pulled by the animal of him? Like Pangaea that was one continent until the tectonic plates moved apart; now sea turtles have in them the cellular memory that drives them across the far, far ocean miles to the place that once was whole. In illo tempore. Do I believe that Volatore and I were once one? That we were parted so that a sea of emptiness appeared between us? Yes, I think I do believe that. I believe in the primal animalness of all of us. I believe in the imagined reality of us coupled with the ordinary reality. We walk on our hind legs and wear clothes but in our being are the almost-remembered selves that went naked and speechless on all fours.
With all due respect – not all that much, actually – I think the Beards and the Levys of this world have no idea how to come to grips with my problem(s). Maybe I’ll have to go it alone. All right then, I’ll see what I can do with the story of me by me. No Ariosto.
Chapter 33
A Place for Everything?
At first there was just one place which was everyplace. One thing which was everything. One body which was everybody.
Later there was one thing which was two, one double thing, one thing with two parts. Then the two separated. They became two ones. They were Volatore and Angelica and sometimes they were together but mostly they weren’t. Then they disappeared from each other. Each could feel the presence of the other somewhere, but where?
Angelica tried to send her thoughts to Volatore. She sent this: Volatore, come to me! If you can’t come to me, talk to me however you can!
Then she waited.
I looked at the two of them in my mind: a woman and a hippogriff. What if the woman became a hippogriff? No, I wouldn’t like that. And if the hippogriff became a man he’d have to take over some human’s body and there are too many problems with that.
I looked at the two of them side by side and shook my head sadly.
‘That’s all I can think of right now,’ I said. ‘I’ll try again another time.’
At this point I decided to abandon story-writing and just carry on typing out the events of every day as they happened. Ariosto imagined Volatore; Volatore imagined me but I can’t imagine how our story ends. Bad word: I don’t like to think of an end to our story.
Chapter 34
Some Kind of a Joke?
I settled back into my normal routine. I saw Dr Levy every week and took my extra-strength placebos when the stress was more than usual. I kept a simple journal, nothing more, and I tried to find a quiet place to put my head. I wasn’t giving up on Volatore but I needed to pull back from the front line for a little rest and rehabilitation. Whenever Clancy phoned I made it clear that our friendship was on hold. I went to the gallery every day and pretended that there was nothing else going on in my life.
Funny, how the mind brings up sights and smells from childhood. There was a day in April when the air seemed heavy with the impending season and there came to me the pungent odour of skunk cabbage and the clerical visage of Jack-in-the-pulpit. There was an old woman down the road who was versed in ‘herbs and simples’. I suppose the simple part of it was to do with simple cures. She was known to have helped Jane Wakeman get rid of her baby when she was three months gone. She used the Jack-in-the-pulpit seeds for divination and it was said that she could tell when people were going to die.
She grabbed me by the arm once and put her face close to mine. I was eleven at the time.
‘Ever dream of flying?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You will,’ she hissed. She made an obscene gesture and went away cackling to herself.
Remembering her I recalled my flights, waking and dreaming, with Volatore, the heat of his body between my legs and the funky animal smell of him.
On this April day in 2008 a man came into the gallery with a very wide canvas, six feet or so, wrapped in brown paper. His clothes, all paint-smeared, were new: black jeans, blue denim shirt, Timberland boots. He seemed clean enough but there was a strong smell about him, a funky animal smell that I recognised.
‘Why are you blushing?’ said Olivia.
‘I don’t know, maybe it’s early change of life.’
Hard to tell his age: forty maybe. He was tall, strongly built, clean-shaven. Odd expression on his face. High on something?
‘Have you made an appointment for us to see this man?’ I asked Olivia.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’
‘Are you Angelica Greenberg?’ said the man to me in a Tom Waits kind of voice. His English was all right but it sounded dubbed, as in a foreign film where the speaker’s lips aren’t shaping the English words you hear.
‘How do you know my name?’ I said.
‘It came to mind.’
‘Came to mind how? In a dream? In a Rolodex?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And how did you know to come here to the gallery?’
‘This is where my feet brought me.’
‘Oh really? And what’s your name?’
‘Volatore.’
I jumped back as if he’d grabbed me by the crotch.
‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ I said in a voice that was not my normal one.
He reared back and showed the whites of his eyes like a half-broke horse.
‘What’s wrong with my name?’
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘It came to me.’
‘Is it your first name?’
‘It’s my only.’
‘Who are your parents?’
‘No family, there’s just me.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Around.’
‘Have you exhibited anywhere?’
‘No. Are you going to look at the painting?’
‘OK, mystery man, unveil it.’
He tore off the brown paper and threw it on the floor. As he did so I caught a glimpse of a naked woman tattooed on his right wrist. Not the usual full-frontal thing but with the body slightly turned and the left arm raised. He removed a Michnik from a nearby easel and put up his painting.
Olivia and I stepped back to viewing distance. ‘Has it got a title?’ I said.
‘Tiny, Tiny Dancing Giants in the Dim Red Caverns of Sleep,’ he answered.
Olivia and I stood there taking it in. The thing was unsettling but hypnotic and difficult to turn away from. You wouldn’t call it figurative but it wasn’t abstract either. There was a lot of dimness and redness and the idea of the tiny, tiny dancing giants was perfectly clear but not spelled out. Looking at it made me woozy and I had to lean against a wall to keep from falling over. We mostly have music in the gallery and this afternoon it was the Emma Kirkby recording that had lifted Volatore to my window. ‘ “Voglio, voglio,” ’ she sang to Anthony Rooley’s lute. ‘ “Voglio morire,” ’ she sang,
and the tiny, tiny dancing giants danced silently in the dim red caverns of the wide canvas.
‘Opera?’ said the man who called himself Volatore.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s “Olimpia’s Lament” when Bireno sails away and she’s left on the beach.’
He gave me a measured leer.
‘You ever get left on the beach?’
‘Don’t get smart with me,’ I said, ‘I’ve dealt with better leerers than you.’
‘Sorry!’
‘You know Orlando Furioso? Vivaldi did an opera with that title, based on Ariosto’s epic poem.’
‘It’s got plenty of operatic situations, like Orlando’s fury because he’s got the hots for Angelica but she wants no part of him. Happened because they drank from different fountains, kind of thing goes on every day in opera land.’
‘So you’ve read it.’
‘Guess I must have, since it’s in my head.’
I almost said that he didn’t look like a reader of sixteenth-century epic poetry, but decided not to.
Pause.
‘Well?’ he said, watching me with a condescending smile on his face.
‘Where’s this painting coming from?’ I said. ‘I mean the idea.’
‘A dream.’
‘Can you say a little more about it?’
‘Everything I had to say is up there on the canvas.’
‘What else have you painted?’ said Olivia.
‘Nothing.’
‘Can you leave it with us and come back tomorrow?’ I said. ‘We’d like to give this some thought.’
‘OK.’
‘There’s a shower here that you can use,’ said Olivia, ‘if you want to freshen up.’
Angelica Lost and Found Page 8