My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

by Russell Hoban

  I took her by both bruised arms and pulled her to me and kissed her. She kept her mouth closed for a moment, then opened it as we pressed against each other. She tasted like peaches and cream, like summer and sunshine, like hope. Thank you, I said to the wheeling stars and unseen planets high above us in the night.

  That was as far as it went that night. We didn’t end up in bed. When I left her I spun out into the North End Road where the street lamps glowed like fire balloons. A 28 bus trundled by as shiny and sweetly red as a toffee apple. Scatterings of Saturday-night shouted and screamed in random decibels that spiralled into the darkness above the illuminations of Ryman, Fish and Chips, and Cancer Research UK. Brightness pervaded the North End Road all the way to the night lights in Waitrose. At the roundabout I crossed to the Fulham Road which was awash with buses, cars, taxis, litter and louts of all classes. Turned into Barclay Road at Domino’s Pizza and made my way to the west side of Eel Brook Common, Basuto Road and home, descending through levels of unlight and quiet to ordinary reality where I was uncertain of her kiss that still lingered on my tongue.

  My flat looked different now; it seemed pleased with what I was bringing to it. I poured myself a Glenfiddich, said, ‘Here’s looking at you,’ and sat down to try to remember Bertha’s face. I could hear her voice but her face wouldn’t come.

  Nicely warmed by the whisky, I got Maps of the Heavens off the shelf where it lay – it’s too tall to stand up – and turned to Albrecht Dürer’s marvellous sixteenth-century woodcut of the northern celestial hemisphere. There was Sagittarius the centaur aiming his arrow at Scorpio; I could feel the vibration of his bowstring but I couldn’t find Pluto; maybe he was busy in the underworld. That’s how it is – you can’t always see what’s going on.

  I dialled Bertha. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. I noticed that I had put my hand on my heart.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘Would you tell me your birth date, time of birth, and place of birth? I want to ask my astrologer to do your horoscope.’

  ‘You have a personal astrologer?’

  ‘The same as I have a GP and a dentist,’ I said. ‘I’m not her only client.’

  ‘You want my horoscope because …?’

  ‘Because whatever this is we’re in, we’re in it together so it’s a good idea to know how the stars and planets are for both of us. Don’t you think?’

  There was a pause at her end. Then, ‘I don’t want to know too much.’

  ‘Because it would …?’

  ‘Get in the way of whatever I might be doing. I’d fall down stairs, slip on banana skins, get run over by buses, walk into plate-glass doors – that kind of thing.’

  ‘How about if I get your horoscope and don’t tell you anything, keep it all to myself?’

  ‘Then I’d catch you looking at me in a certain way and I’d think, oh shit, what has he found out about my stars? No, it’s a bad idea.’

  ‘OK. When can I see you again?’

  ‘You’re not tired of me yet? I’m a lot of trouble.’

  ‘It’s a lot of trouble not seeing you.’

  ‘I think we both need a little time to settle down. Can you phone me Thursday?’

  ‘OK, Thursday.’

  ‘And when you phone, call me Barbara – that way I’ll always know it’s you.’

  ‘Barbara.’

  ‘Yes, Phil.’

  ‘Till Thursday, then, Barbara.’

  ‘Till Thursday, Phil.’

  We rang off and I poured myself another drink. The phone rang.

  ‘Barbara?’ I said.

  ‘I was born on 17 August 1967,’ she said. ‘In Exeter. At quarter to nine in the morning.’

  ‘You changed your mind about horoscopes!’

  ‘Yes, I’m tired of being afraid of everything. Show it to me when you get it, I want to know all there is to know.’

  I e-mailed her details to Catriona. Then I went online and ordered a personalised baseball bat from the Louisville Slugger gift shop in Louisville, Kentucky. The Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, so this bat would have the Red Sox logo plus the engraving, in three lines:

  GENUINE

  Barbara Strozzi

  LOUISVILLE SLUGGER

  It would take a couple of weeks to get here.

  While waiting for the bat to arrive I’d be seeing Bertha (Bertha/Barbara) whenever possible, teaching my classes, and cruising for Page One. Until now I’d always put events of my own life into my novels. This time I wasn’t going to do that; whatever was happening with Bertha/Barbara and me would be kept separate from my writing.

  2

  Bertha/Barbara Strunk

  Here I am again, getting into something I’ll probably be sorry for. As always. What else can I do – lock myself up to keep from making mistakes? Why did I tell Phil to call me Barbara? There is something between me and Barbara Strozzi. What it is I don’t know. BS also means bullshit. Why did I kiss him the way I did? I guess I need to have a man wanting me. Pathetic.

  He left the CD with me, and after he’d gone I put it on and listened to it for a while but I couldn’t really get with it. The singer sounded either fretful or miserable or both; she sounded like a victim, which is not what I am. Although I make a lot of mistakes. With men mostly. Both short and tall.

  Professor Adderley is a good example of what I’m talking about. He taught drawing and painting at Humberside University and he also lectured on Art History. A big man, tall and broad with a beard. In his forties. He was very free with his hands and he liked to invite girls to his studio for private sessions. He was looking over my shoulder one day when I was painting a costume model, a girl in a flapper dress. ‘You’re missing the essence of flapper,’ he said. ‘Flapper is free and easy but your painting is tight. You need to loosen up.’ I said I’d try. He had whisky on his breath. Later he stopped me in the hall and said, ‘You have a very good walk. If you could paint like you walk there’d be a big improvement in your work.’

  I said, ‘Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.’ I had a pretty good idea what was coming next. One evening he caught me coming out of the Union bar with a couple of pints in me and he breathed on me and said, ‘I’d like to paint you. Would you pose for me?’

  Some of his paintings were hanging in the halls – they were harsh and raw, with garish colours, something like John Bratby. I was curious to see how I’d look in a painting by him so I said, ‘OK. With my clothes on, right?’

  ‘Any way you like,’ he said. This was on a Monday and I agreed to come to his studio on Saturday. On Tuesday he did a lecture with slides on Caravaggio, Carracci, Gentileschi, and other fifteenth-century Roman painters. Orazio Gentileschi had a daughter, Artemisia, who was the first woman to paint historical and religious subjects. One of the slides was her Judith Slaying Holofernes. ‘Very strong,’ said Professor Adderley. ‘She learned a lot from Caravaggio. But the power in this picture comes from her own experience. She’d been studying with Agostino Tassi and he raped her. So she cut off his head in this picture and her rage made it one of the best things she ever did. She enjoyed it so much she did a second version, with Holofernes’s leg visible as he struggles while the maidservant holds him down. Did two more with Judith and the maidservant sneaking out with the head – all four paintings first-rate.’

  On Saturday I went to Prof. Adderley’s place. Middle of May but grey and rainy. Rode there on my bike with Marianne Faithfull in my head, singing:

  At the age of thirty-seven she realised she’d never

  Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair,

  So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singing

  Pretty nursery rhymes she’d memorised in her daddy’s easy chair …

  Prof. Adderley had a house in town. Wife and two kids. The studio was a separate little building in the back. It looked like his home away from home: there were a skylight and a north-light window, a galley, a well-stocked ba
r, a fridge full of beer, and a sleeping alcove.

  ‘It’s not all that warm in here,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you something to take the chill off? A little Courvoisier maybe?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  He poured me a fairly large one and one for himself. ‘Here’s to Art and all who sail in her,’ he said, and we clinked glasses. ‘I’ll do some sketches first,’ he said. ‘See where it takes us.’ I was wearing jeans and a pullover. So he sketched for a while, then he shook his head and said, ‘Really, a body like yours, it’s a shame to cover it up. Plus I think that taking your clothes off would free you up generally.’

  I could see what was going on in his head as if it were a video, and right there was where I should have put a stop to the whole thing but I didn’t. I thought I looked pretty good with no clothes on, and, as Zero Mostel said in The Producers, ‘If ya got it, flaunt it.’ So I flaunted it, stupid me. Prof. Adderley (‘Please, call me Brian’) gave me a kimono and a screen to change behind, then when I came out and took off the kimono he studied me from various angles before arranging me on some cushions. Setting the pose required a lot of handling and his hands tended to linger wherever he put them. Next thing I knew he’d unzipped his trousers and was on top of me. A heavy man, and strong.

  ‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Put your Agostino Tassi back in your pants!’

  ‘Come on, Bertha,’ he said. ‘This can’t be that much of a surprise to you.’

  ‘You’re the one that’ll get a surprise if you don’t get off me,’ I said. There was a serious struggle, then I punched him and bit and scratched, I was in a real rage, as much at myself for being stupid as at him for trying to rape me. I was fighting as hard as I could, and without meaning to I jabbed my thumb into his left eye. Hard. He screamed and jumped up, and there was the eye half-hanging out of his head and blood pouring down his face. ‘You bitch!’ he said, trying to put the eye back where it belonged. ‘Get me an ambulance!’

  I dialled 999 and hurried into my clothes but before the ambulance and his wife came I took his mahlstick – it was an aluminium one with a rubber ball on the end – and rolled it over his face to get blood on it.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he yelled.

  ‘You had the mahlstick in your hand when you tripped over something and that’s how it happened,’ I said.

  ‘That’s odd,’ his wife said when she burst into the studio. She looked at the blank canvas and then at me. ‘He doesn’t ordinarily use a mahlstick at this stage,’ she said. He was moaning and groaning and cursing. ‘You never were very good at nudes,’ she said to him. ‘This one must have given you a lot of trouble.’ She was a good-looking brunette about twenty years younger than Adderley.

  ‘You’re a real comfort to me,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could get me a drink.’

  She poured him a cognac and one for herself and stood looking at him while she drank it.

  The paramedics arrived then. ‘Jesus!’ said one of them to Adderley. ‘What happened?’

  He showed them the mahlstick. ‘Got this in my eye,’ he said. ‘Hurts like hell.’

  They gave him painkillers but they didn’t seem to help much. When they put him in the ambulance his wife gave me a hard look and said, ‘Why don’t you go along and hold his hand – I’m stuck here with the kids.’

  All the way to the hospital he held on to my hand. One of the paramedics was with us while the other one drove, so the Prof, didn’t say anything to me but he squeezed my hand and mouthed the words, ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I mouthed back. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’ I was, too.

  At the hospital they examined him in A & E and sent him up to surgery to have the eye removed. When he was out of surgery I sat by his bed and waited for him to come out of the anaesthetic. After a while he put his hand up to the bandages and felt around, then he opened his one eye. ‘I’m glad I’ve still got one eye to see you with,’ he said.

  I said, ‘I’m glad you’re glad.’ I didn’t know what else to say. He seemed humbled by what had happened. I took his hand and said, ‘When you’re ready to go back to work I’ll pose for you again if you want me to.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Looking at you made me want to paint in a new way. I don’t want to do ugly any more.’ He closed his eye and went to sleep then and I got a minicab back to his place for my bike. It was dark by then. His wife came to the door when she heard the car. She didn’t say anything, just stood there with the light behind her. Then she closed the door and I rode home with Marianne Faithfull and ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ in my head again.

  Brian was back at work in a week with his eye still bandaged and he said his wife had left him and taken the kids. He didn’t seem to be exactly broken up about it; he told me this was the second wife who’d left him. He had visitation rights for the daughter of the first marriage, now a teenager, and he expected the same for the little son and daughter of the second. I had the feeling that he wasn’t up for a lot of quality time with his kids.

  He wanted me to pose again so I did. When I came out from behind the screen I dropped the kimono and we stood looking at each other.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Here I am,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’ I didn’t know I was going to say that. Then again, I think I did. And that was how I became Brian Adderley’s mistress. He turned out to be not such a bad guy, or maybe I turned out to be not such a good girl. His new paintings were a whole lot better than the old ones, they were less about him and more about what he was looking at. Which was me most of the time. We drank a lot of cognac and beer and we ate a lot of pizza, Chinese, Thai and Indian take-aways. I put on a few pounds which quite pleased Brian. ‘The more of you, the better,’ he said. His new paintings were better – more sensitive than the earlier ones. I couldn’t help being proud of that.

  When they removed Brian’s eye in hospital the surgeon inserted an implant made of coral compound which was attached to the eye muscles so that it could move naturally. It took four weeks for this to heal, then we went to London and stayed at the Regent Palace Hotel for the two days it took to make the artificial eye.

  The ocularists were two brothers, Karl and Georg (pronounced Gayorg) Lichtheim, who had a studio in Berwick Street. Both of them were tall and thin with grey hair. Karl did all the steps up to the painting, then Georg painted the eye and put in the little red threads for the veins.

  The room where they worked was big and bright and looked something like a dentist’s surgery. Equipment everywhere. Charts on the walls and diplomas from Germany. First they took an impression of the eye socket and made a mould. Then from the mould they made a wax shell which was carved and fitted. The iris button was inserted in this and the position checked for accuracy when the eye moved. From this they cast the plastic shape which would be the finished eye. This was ground down and a temporary plastic shell made. Then the eye was painted and clear plastic was processed over the paint.

  So there we were then. We went back to Humberside and it was business and pleasure as usual. Brian still had an eye for the girls but I was the only one that ever was invited to the studio. Even if he’d had others I wouldn’t have minded – it was an OK arrangement while I finished the course but I wasn’t in love with him. He had proprietary feelings about me and tried to convince me that I could become a better painter. ‘I’ve changed because of what happened between us,’ he said. ‘That experience has been absorbed into my painting and you should make use of it in yours.’

  He liked to talk about Artemisia Gentileschi. Probably he had fantasies of her when he was in bed with me. He bought a book about her and one about her and her father, Orazio. He was dead keen on Artemisia’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. I believe he’d have liked to be dominated by a woman like that Judith. ‘Look at the arms on her!’ he used to say. ‘She didn’t need the sword for the job, she could have torn his head off with her bare hands. And look at this one with Judith and the maidservant sneaking out with the head in a b
asket, how the hand she holds up to block the light of the candle throws a shadow on her face like a death-cloud. And notice that she’s still got the sword – she’s ready for anything. What a woman!’

  ‘Judith or Artemisia?’ I said.

  ‘Both.’ He opened the other book. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘this is Orazio’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt, with Joseph having a kip while Baby Jesus has a pint or so of Mary’s Best. Nobody does a better Jesus on the tit than Orazio. Look at Mary’s sweet expression and the dreamy sensuality in the eye of Baby Jesus. Absolutely first-rate. Now let’s see what Orazio does with Judith and Holofernes. He seems to have avoided the scene where she tops him – a little too rich for his blood maybe. The closest he gets is Judith with Abra, her maidservant, and the head. The head is like a hired prop and the whole thing, which is necessarily posed, looks posed, as if he’s told his two female models, “Pretend you’ve just heard something and you’re scared.” So Judith looks up as if she’s just heard a pizza delivery at the door and Abra isn’t sure whether she’s heard anything or not. Orazio just didn’t have the balls for Judith.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to do Judith and Holofernes,’ I said to Brian.

  ‘I might just have a go at that,’ he said. ‘You’ll be Judith and I’ll be Holofernes.’

  ‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said. So we did Judith and Holofernes. I posed for Judith and the maidservant and I photographed Brian in the Holofernes pose and costume. He painted two pictures. In the first one Holofernes is in white tie and wearing all his medals. He’s leaning back against Judith with his left hand between her legs while she garrots him with a white silk scarf. She’s wearing diamonds and she’s more out of than in a strapless white satin sheath. Abra, the maidservant, is naked except for white stockings as she kneels in front of Holofernes embracing his legs and looking up at his last moments.