She sat on a while after he had gone, chafing at this final remark. He so obviously wanted her to return, even though the very idea made her ill. What if he was mistaken and Bremrose drove her back to the solace of the bottle, and she plunged deeper, and perhaps fatally this time?
To bolster her courage and convince herself of the soundness of Paul’s judgement, she pulled from their earlier conversation the words that had most astonished her. She wanted to savour again his outrage regarding her parents’ offer of the surgery.
“They should have been horsewhipped.” She relished again the ripe fury on his face as he said this. Then it happened again: a scrupulous decanting of the light that is also truth. She sat amazed, drinking it in.
Why did she feel the need to set the scene for him when it would be an affront to his sensibility, and to hers, to conjure up The Aardvark’s jarring interior? As she described the grotesque carmine décor, it dawned on her what she ought to have seen the moment she’d opened the door. This was a haunt for hardened New Yorkers, the locals who could handle or were oblivious to its ugly interior with its deliberately ironic resemblance to a new and gaping wound. She had stumbled in, unsteady, untried and unprotected by irony, wit or experience. She had lacked the requisite cynical carapace. On the contrary, she’d been nakedly, perilously needy. She had parted her legs shamelessly for him as he stroked her under the table, inviting her own wounding.
“He looked like Campbell,” she explained, quickly qualifying, “I mean, his hair was so like Campbell’s . . . when he first came in, his silhouette in the doorway, backlit.”
Paul’s eyes were closed, his lips compressed. He nodded. Grimly, she thought. Then his eyes opened and she saw a raw grief misted over.
“It goes on happening, Agnes. You must be prepared. I think of these jolting occurrences as the Dr. Zhivago delusion, which is so poignantly portrayed in the film. Zhivago is sitting on a rumbling trolley and he spies a lovely, blonde-haired woman he is sure is his lost Lara. He gets off in high agitation at the next stop, runs after her — we, the audience, see that it is not in fact Lara — and he collapses, clutching his chest. He has suffered a heart attack and dies, there on the street. This is what transpires every time. We catch a glimpse of a person who resembles, in some slight, even negligible way, the one we have lost. And we are made ecstatic, buoyed by the delusion that he or she is still alive. Their death was simply a bad dream and now we have woken into a heady, glorious deliverance. We want to rush over, throw our arms around this beloved person, so miraculously restored to us. Then, of course, the barren, chill truth makes the heart shrivel and we clutch at our chests like poor Zhivago. The worst perhaps is when we dream of our beloved in the warm fullness of being, and then wake into that devastating absence and relive the first knifing of the pain all over again.”
“He cut me.”
“What!”
“Guam. The man I met in the awful bar. We went back to my hotel. It was in the East Bronx. I was so drunk and so reckless. I thought he would make love to me the way Campbell had. He told me I was ‘stupid like an animal.’ Then he tried to cut my throat.” She unwound her scarf to show him the livid, disc-shaped scar.
“Agnes, my dear.”
“A dog saved me.”
“What dog? Do you mean there was a guard dog in the hotel?”
“No. He came out of nowhere.” She took great care not to sound defensive. “I locked the door after we went into the room. I slid the bolt.” She showed Paul a postcard reproduction of the slain nymph with her satyr and canine mourners, pointed to the dark chestnut hound at her feet. “It was this dog.”
“Agnes, I look at this painting every time I am in London. The work was once called The Death of Procis and was thought to illustrate the sad tale of mistaken jealousy out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And —”
“Laelaps,” she interrupted. “That is the dog who rescued me. Guam had put the point of the knife against my throat and the dog growled and bit him on the leg. And he ran. He undid the lock and the bolt and ran. Laelaps stayed with me and let me lean on him. He was very strong. His fur was like silk.”
“Did you call the police, or alert the hotel’s night desk about the attack?”
She pictured the hole in the wall that constituted reception and night desk at the A-1 Guest House. Had there been anyone there when she stumbled in with Guam?
“No. I ought to have called the police. I suppose I washed out the wound. I did do that. And the dog stayed with me, you see. He lay down beside the bed.”
“The man did not enter you? You did not have sexual intercourse.”
“No.”
“I have one more rather urgent question to put to you, Agnes, before we talk about the apparition. Can you remember if the knife was clean? My concern is whether it had blood on it already.”
HIV. Her stomach lurched. She searched the lurid shards of her memory of the galling, transgressive scene that had erupted on the bed. Her exposed breast. His hissed crude invective. The black hairs on his wrist. His Adam’s apple an obscene bulge as he pushed his face near hers in a terrible parody of passion. His features hideously contorted by contempt. The fear clawing in her belly and all over her scalp, then behind her eyes. Blackness. Until the shock of his breath searing her cheek as he bent over her, his knees gripping her hips, and his left hand a heavy vise clamping both her wrists to the wall. In that smothering proximity, his pores exuded the stench of imperfectly digested meat.
She’d had a foretaste of her own death then and understood how he perceived her. She was a lump of matter to which he would apply his blade with judicious, discerning cuts. His words came back to her in a newly lethal guise. “I am an artist.” There would be no frenzy; only a cool exactitude, ear to ear, then throat to navel.
She disinterred a shocking remembrance: the moist-eyed gaze of rapture he lavished on the knife. He had looked with a pride-filled love at its glittering edge and the tip he would shortly dig into the yielding hollow of her neck. Briefly, he had turned the knife in the air, this way and that, so that he might better admire its two reflective surfaces.
And yes, she had seen that both sides of the blade were immaculate. The knife was probably the only unsullied thing in the room. Until the dog came.
“The knife was clean,” she told Paul.
“A good idea to get tested in any case,” he said.
He remained silent for some moments, all the while keeping his long brown eyes trained on her face. She wrestled with the notion he was employing some intellectual probe devised for ferreting out mendacity in his students. But why would she fabricate such a tale? The worst she could be accused of, surely, was reporting on a phantasmagoria. The wound and its livid remnants were real enough, as was the brush with death.
“You are lucky to be alive,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“And perhaps fortunate too, to be delivered such a cogent, pressing lesson early on. You willfully impaired your judgement with alcohol and very nearly paid with your life. You see clearly, and will not forget, the depths of degradation into which alcoholism takes us, and how completely it despoils our integrity and our gifts. And now . . .” He closed his eyes and folded his hands. It was a classic prayerful pose, except for the fact he was not on his knees. When he opened his eyes and looked at her, his pupils appeared huge, gleaming with a disconcerting intensity.
She waited, in an unsettling tension, for what he would say. He looked like a master brooding on a condign punishment for a lapsed follower. Did the Twelve Steps make any reference to fantasists? Will he chastise her for her failure to distinguish fact from the projections of an alcohol-sodden brain?
“Would you pass me your postcard, please, Agnes?”
She hesitated a second before complying, wrestling with the irrational fear he would rip the picture in two.
He pored over the image while she waited, lacing and unlacing her fingers beneath the table.
“Has it occurred to you
that the scar at the base of your throat anatomically duplicates the javelin wound suffered by di Cosimo’s dead nymph?” He tapped the base of his neck, above a crisp collar of cornflower blue.
A strange, exhilarating fear swept through her. Her wound and the nymph’s wound: how indeed could such an uncanny coincidence come about? She dared go no further with this unanswerable question. To dwell on it would be to enter a vast territory, perilously charged. Such delving could also be dangerously solipsistic. She must step back and simply yield, as she had done to a large extent with the apparition of the dog. What had happened was inexplicable. Not a miracle. Certainly not that. She was far too flawed a being to merit miracles. What then?
She looked up at Paul expectantly. His brow was creased. An awful thought blighted her perspective. Surely he did not think she inflected the wound on herself?
She must, and did, ask him this question.
“My dear young woman, most assuredly not. I know you to be honest, perceptive and intelligent. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, etcetera.’ Let me tell you about a veridical vision I once had, at a moment of extremity in my own life. It was not a dog, but an angel I saw. This is an experience I have only ever told to a very few trusted friends, and now I will tell you.
“This happened some weeks after my stay in hospital, being treated for the internal damage caused by drinking the shoe polish. The pain of missing my partner had again plunged me into an abyss of despair. I bought a bottle of Jura, produced on that rugged island populated mainly by seals and red deer. It was the place George Orwell spent his last days. Perhaps that too influenced my choice. I was about to open the bottle before me, at the kitchen table, when I became aware of a presence in the room, rather like the heaviness that presses on one before an electric storm. I looked up from the bottle and saw towering opposite me, in the chair where Richard used to sit, a muscular angel. His face was like Raphael’s Saint Michael, a beautiful, although undeniably masculine face with a strong jaw and eyes more supercilious than kind. What struck me most, what made me most afraid, were his wings, which were massive and unfurled. I sensed the lethal power lurking in the dense structure of vanes and barbs underlying those mighty pinions. I thought of Leda, and pitied her. The wings were a peculiarly ugly colour, like dirty bathwater or dog urine on snow. He did not wear the typical Renaissance angel’s flowing garments with the characteristic sculptural folds. Rather, he was dressed in the drab olive garb of a doctor in an operating theatre. And thus I have always thought of him as the Angel Doctor. He said only one thing to me in a basso profundo that made the room shake. He said: ‘Paul, you do not have to drink.’ The sternness of his utterance was like a whip lashed across my face. There was no kindness or gentleness in him, as I said.
“I stood up on trembling legs and poured the whisky down the sink. I ran water to flush away the smell. When I turned around, the chair he had filled with his magnificent presence was empty. That was my veridical vision, Agnes. Like you, I have no doubt that what I saw was ‘real’ and pre-eminently truthful, most particularly for its ramifications on my life. I was irradiated by the vision. I hesitate to call it mine. The appearance of the towering Angel Doctor literally stilled my hand. Although I have often been tempted, I have not purchased or partaken of alcohol since that day.
“It interests me enormously that our visions have a similar source. They spring from the work of painters to whom we devote a scrupulous and passionate attention. I therefore think you will appreciate, as I do, an insight provided me by one of the few friends to whom I entrusted the details of my experience. He is a polymath, whose many areas of expertise include a wide-ranging knowledge of the world’s religions. When I told him about the Angel Doctor’s resemblance to Raphael’s Saint Michael, he asked me if I had ever encountered the Hindu concept of darshan. I had not and this is how he explained the idea to me. The Hindus believe that the more often they go to the temple to look at images of their gods, the greater is the gods’ power and their actual visibility. In other words, by paying worshipful attention, by really looking, we intensify the gods’ aura and the eidetic clarity with which they are seen in this world. You see what my friend was getting at, Agnes? By my vigilant and often wholly enthralled study of Raphael, I had, in some sense, brought an aspect of his art to life. I offer the concept to you as an intriguing possibility to ponder with regard to your own experience. What do you think? Or rather, how do you feel?”
“Overwhelmed,” she admitted.
She found his suggestion marvellous, yet simultaneously so alarming it threatened to overturn the commonsense world altogether. She deliberately drew back from the fearsome edges of this startling precept, so starkly revealed against the quotidian. She would ponder it later, as Paul counselled.
“At the risk of overwhelming you further, Agnes, I would ask that you take this poem and read it.” He handed her a copy of The New Yorker folded open at a page of close-set text. It was not a magazine to which Agnes had ever been particularly drawn. But once she glanced at the poem, set in its own box at the bottom of the page, her interest immediately quickened. The title was “A Renaissance Monster.”
“The author’s name is Hugh Massinger-Pollux,” Paul told her. “He is in his early nineties, I understand, and he regards himself as a last living repository of the Modernist tradition — a direct heir of Pound and Eliot and Yeats. I gather that in some academic circles he is derided as a quaint, pontificating egotist. In other critical camps, his work is passionately championed as lucid, steely and musical. He will be of interest to you because he has embarked on a series of poems inspired by the secular paintings of Piero di Cosimo. The one I have given you plays with the conceit that the monster in Perseus Rescuing Andromeda is in love with his captive.”
“Oh!” Agnes exclaimed. She was uncertain whether to feel triumphant or trumped that a well-known poet had seen exactly what she’d perceived the first time she looked at Piero’s suffering sea-beast. “That is just what I have always thought,” she told Paul, not caring, for the moment at least, if she sounded jejeune.
“Ah, well then.” Paul’s smile was mild. “The ducks, as an old professor of mine used to say, are lining up.”
She looked at him perplexed.
“I am sorry, Agnes. I did not mean to be deliberately obscure. I was simply reacting to this most happy coincidence of your perception matching so seamlessly with the poet’s. So I will cut to the quick of the matter. Some days ago I was given a letter of enquiry that Hugh Massinger-Pollux had sent to our Dean of Arts. Specifically, Mr. Massinger-Pollux is seeking the services of a researcher to assist him in his work on di Cosimo. The job would be short-term, conceivably three or four months. I thought at once of you, Agnes. Such a situation would give you a period of justified leave from Bremrose. I can easily substantiate in a letter to your Dean and the Board of Governors that your work with Mr. Massinger-Pollux is essential to your studies, particularly since he is now living in Tuscany, in a villa near Florence. I am sure you see the advantages. You have not yet been to Florence, I think. Simply to walk about the city’s historic core, which is so little changed since di Cosimo’s time, will fructify your own line of thought as to the character of the man and his creations. You can see the hills and the remnants of the forests where he doubtless sketched the animals and birds we see in the paintings on which your own research centres. Not to forget the Uffizi, which holds the Perseus and Andromeda. You can look, as closely as the guards will allow, at the grand physiognomy of the monster whom both you and Mr. Massinger-Pollux believe to be smitten. I must warn you that time is tight. Although I have no doubt your qualifications are pre-eminent, there may be others who are interested in applying. I understand Mr. Massinger-Pollux has sent his enquiry to several universities. Can we meet again tomorrow? Give me your answer then, and I will email the venerable poet directly. My recommendation will be glowing, I assure you. What do you think, Agnes? Will you read the poem and give this proposal your consideration?
”
Her head was reeling. Oddly, it was the prospect of seeing the actual forests where he’d sketched the animals which pulled at her most powerfully. Of course she had qualms. Was she up to the task? What if the elderly poet was irascible or made sexual advances? — No, she corrected herself. That was a ludicrous notion. He was far too old for such urges.
“Tomorrow, then, Agnes?” Paul was already on his feet, glancing at his watch.
“Yes, thank you.”
It was a few moments before she was able to focus clearly on the words of the poem. The idea that she would soon see Tuscan contados, Florence and the foaming coral ruff framing the lugubrious features of the sea monster, had set off spangled fireworks in her head. Finally, she read:
And Cosimo Rosselli, his godfather, and the master to whom he was apprenticed
Took Piero with him to Rome where Rosselli was summoned by Pope Sixtus IV
To paint certain frescoes in the Sistine Chapel —
A Sermon on the Mount and the Healing of the Leper (1481).
The young Piero did the landscapes for this fresco.
And see! Above green hills surging strongly as song
The rising sun englobes a small and solitary bush in olden blaze.
Here, this early, is Piero’s signal fire.
His origin, his marker and his passion.
The flamey fingers point forward to his masterworks
Where fire behaves in accordance with its most secret nature
Inhabiting even the eye of the monster Perseus slays
Mistaking its love for vilest cruelty.
That gaze the beast turns on the captive Andromeda
Is tender, truthful — mild.
Love is the flame in the monster’s eye.
It was the last phrase clinched it. How perfect was this synchronicity, so much so as to seem unreal.
By eight o’clock that evening, she had the poem to heart. How amazing this opportunity should present itself, almost like a divine dispensation. She would have the time she needed to heal, in a place of safety and intellectual exchange, and to ready herself for the return to Bremrose in January. The ducks are lining up. She turned over in her mind this quaint expression of Paul’s, picturing not real birds, but their wooden effigies, like the ones in old films featuring scenes at country fairs. Fair-goers tossed a ball at the row of little wooden ducks set above a trough filled with water, in the hope of submerging them all. Not birds lined up for an actual hunt, then; no bullet penetrating feathers and flesh. No spilled blood; only an innocent game played at an old-time fair.
Hunting Piero Page 35