My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

by Russell Hoban

  The second painting is a closer view with Judith and Abra kissing as the maidservant dangles the head by its hair. Both paintings were done in the manner of Artemisia Gentileschi, and Judith had arms like a stevedore. A very striking pair of pictures, both of them over two feet high. It took us three months for the two of them and I stopped counting the hours I posed, the drinks we drank, the takeaways we ate, and the pounds I gained.

  Although they were done in a style not his own, there was still something strong and original in those paintings. I’d seen a lot of his work and these were his best. ‘Are you going to exhibit them?’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the art world. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition?’

  ‘Wankers,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s going to pay real money for these.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ve got one or two connections,’ he said. I carried on with my classes and waited to see what would happen. A couple of days later there was a Rolls parked in the drive, a chauffeur having a smoke, and a large lady all in pink in the studio. ‘Lady Constance Ullage,’ said Brian, ‘this is my good friend and model, Bertha Strunk.’

  ‘How do you do,’ I said.

  ‘Charmed,’ said Lady Constance. She looked me up and down and from several angles, took hold of my chin, turned my face this way and that, and said, ‘I am keen to see what he’s done with you.’ She spoke very posh.

  ‘Perhaps a little something to refresh the critical faculties?’ said Brian.

  ‘Gin, please,’ said Lady Constance. I poured for her and she knocked back a couple of quick ones while Brian went to the rack, took out Judith Slaying Holofernes, and put it up on the easel. ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘Twice.’

  Lady Constance looked from the painting to me and back again. ‘Piquant,’ she said.

  ‘And here’s the companion piece,’ said Brian, ‘Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes’

  ‘Touching,’ said Lady Constance. She patted me on the bottom and said, ‘Keep up the good work.’ To Brian she said, ‘I’ll phone you,’ and swept out like a pink wedding cake on wheels.

  ‘She looks like real money,’ I said.

  ‘She can just about afford the Rolls,’ said Brian, ‘but she knows seriously rich people.’

  There was a phone call the next day from Lady Constance, and the day after that an E-Type pulled up in the drive and a man in a white suit, black shirt, no tie and a panama hat stepped out. When he spoke it was with a South African accent. ‘Judith, I presume?’ he said, and kissed my hand.

  ‘That’s me,’ I said.

  ‘I am Theodor von Augenblick. Is Holofernes at home?’

  ‘This way, please,’ I said, and led him to the studio. Brian had evidently been briefed by Lady Constance because he took a bottle of apricot schnapps from the fridge and I poured it into little glasses.

  ‘Prosit!’ said von Augenblick.

  ‘Prosit!’ said Brian.

  ‘Prosit!’ said I. Clink, and Brian went to the rack.

  Von Augenblick settled himself in the viewing chair while I poured again and Judith Slaying Holofernes went up on the easel.

  ‘Prima!’ said von Augenblick. ‘With this kind of thing you don’t lose money.’

  Up went Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes.

  ‘Bravo!’ said von Augenblick. ‘These will move, that I promise you.’ To me he said, ‘I can see that you have been a real inspiration. I hope this man appreciates you.’

  ‘I do,’ said Brian.

  We all had another drink, then von Augenblick said to Brian, ‘How long does it take you to do paintings like these?’

  ‘Three months for these two,’ said Brian.

  ‘I am well acquainted in Dubai,’ said von Augenblick, ‘and I believe something could be done there with these and others from your brush. I have in mind variations on this theme: Judith and the maidservant and Holofernes before the party was over, and Judith and the maidservant in more intimate situations after. What do you think?’ He said this while undressing me with his eyes.

  Brian looked from von Augenblick to me and said, ‘“When Duty whispers low, Thou must, the youth replies, I can.”’

  ‘This is a youth who will not go hungry,’ said von Augenblick to me. ‘Now, if I may abduct these two beauties from the seraglio?’

  ‘They’ll be delighted to go with you,’ said Brian. He wrapped them up in brown paper and shook hands with von Augenblick who kissed my hand. Then von Augenblick and the two beauties got into the E-Type and roared away.

  ‘Oughtn’t you to have got a receipt or something?’ I said to Brian.

  ‘You don’t do that with people like him,’ said Brian. ‘Either there’s trust or you back away altogether.’

  ‘And you do trust him? He seemed awfully smooth to me.’

  ‘Oh, he’s definitely a smoothie but I do trust him, and now let’s get to work on dirty pictures.’

  So the fridge was restocked and once more the takeaway deliveries started beating a path to our door. I stretched canvases while Brian sketched various compositions and we got into the spirit of the thing pretty quickly. Sometimes, when we tried different poses, one thing led to another and it was a while before work resumed. I have to say it was a fun time, and the thought of a result in Dubai kept us feeling good.

  We heard nothing from von Augenblick for three weeks, at the end of which time there arrived a cheque for £266,667 to Brian. The paintings had sold for £500,000. Von Augenblick’s 33.33 per cent commission left a balance of £333,333 and Lady Constance’s 20 per cent commission came off that. ‘Half of this goes to you,’ said Brian.

  I said, ‘I don’t want any money from this. You’ve got two wives and three children to think of.’

  ‘They’re already getting regular support,’ Brian said, ‘and there’s more money where this came from. They’ll get a big share of the next lot. Don’t let’s argue about it, we’ve got work to do.’

  We carried on with the second Judith and Holofernes painting which was straight pornography, you couldn’t call it anything else. That night I dreamt that I’d ordered pizza, and when I heard a knock on the door I opened it and there was Artemisia Gentileschi. She didn’t say anything, just handed me the pizza. When I tried to pay her she shook her head, got back on her motor scooter and roared away. I woke up and there was Brian beside me, snoring and smelling like a distillery. I put my hand up to my face and it didn’t feel like my face. I stayed awake for a long time, trying to remember how Artemisia had looked when she handed me the pizza. The box had felt warm so I knew there was a pizza inside but I thought there might be a message as well and I wanted to get back to the dream but I couldn’t. Maybe, I thought, what was in the box wasn’t a pizza.

  Brian was lecturing the next morning and I should have been in class but instead I went to the dean’s office. Graduation was only a month away but I said that I was urgently needed at home and asked him if I could complete my course work and deliver it as soon as possible for my degree. He looked at my records and agreed. Then I hurried back to the studio, threw my things into a bag, and went to the bread bin where Brian always kept a lot of cash. I took out £500 which I reckoned he owed me for pre-Dubai posing and inspiration, left a note saying that I didn’t want any of the Dubai money and caught a bus to London. I got a room at the Earls Court YMCA and there I was. Sometimes I do things without knowing exactly why I do them. That’s one of my problems.

  I’d been thinking about artificial eyes. It seemed like a nice neat quiet kind of work and I needed a job. I went to see the Lichtheim brothers in Berwick Street. Karl said, ‘This is for you a lucky day. Georg thinks of retiring and we will try whether you can be trained for this work. We begin with two days a week and we see where it goes.’

  They started me on irises. That went all right and pretty soon I was working full-time painting artificial eyes. Karl and Georg liked country and western music, and I hear
d a lot of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris while I worked. The song that was most often in my head was Johnny Cash singing ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’.

  On a Sunday morning sidewalk,

  I’m wishin’, Lord, that I was stone,

  ’Cause there’s somethin’ in a Sunday

  That makes a body feel alone …

  That song was in my head on a Friday evening when I was in Earls Court Road going home. Feeling perfectly safe when all of a sudden I was dragged into a side street. With all those people around! There were two of them, both white, and I didn’t know if it was a mugging or rape they had in mind. I fought like a wildcat, and this time I really tried to stick my thumb in somebody’s eye but I wasn’t doing all that well when – it was like magic – the one holding me from behind wasn’t there any more. Next, somebody big got between me and the one in front and he laid that one out with a kick to the chin. Very impressive.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. He was well over six feet. Square-jawed martial-arts hero type.

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Will you let me walk you home?’

  ‘Yes, I will, but what about him?’ The one he’d kicked was still out cold and I think he had a broken jaw. The other one had run off.

  ‘What about him?’ he said. ‘That’s an occupational hazard in his line of work.’

  ‘Maybe we should call an ambulance.’

  ‘Call one if you want but I won’t wait around for it. The paramedics will give the police a bell and there’ll be paperwork and I’ll probably get done for GBH.’

  ‘OK, I’ll just tell the ambulance where to find him and we’ll go.’ I dialled 999 on my mobile, made my call, and we walked away.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked my new friend.

  ‘Troy Wallis.’

  ‘Unusual name.’

  ‘I’m an unusual guy. And your name?’

  ‘Bertha Strunk.’ He smiled a little smile when I said it. ‘The boys at school used to make jokes about Bertha’s trunk,’ I said, ‘and I gave them more than one bloody nose. Are you going to make a joke?’

  ‘No. You’re very physical, aren’t you.’

  ‘I don’t know. More than some, less than others, I guess.’

  He grabbed me and kissed me, a really serious kiss with a lot of tongue action. I could have kept my mouth closed but I didn’t. He moved both hands down to get a good grip on my bottom and we stood like that for a while.

  ‘You’re pretty physical yourself,’ I said when I got my mouth back. He was still in charge of my bottom.

  ‘I’m a very simple guy – when I see what I want I go for it.’

  ‘Are you going to walk me home or are we just going to stand here and make a pair of spectacles of ourselves?’

  ‘Sorry, kissing you made me lose track of time.’ He gave me his arm and we walked.

  I guess I’m a very shallow person, really, but it felt good to be with a big strong man who wanted to look after me. That might not be a good enough reason to marry somebody but three months later I was Mrs Troy Wallis. I’ve just written how it happened but even now I ask myself how in the world it did happen.

  He was a bouncer at Jimmy Maloney’s in the Fulham Road. He worked nights and I worked days so we didn’t see a lot of each other and living with Mr Muscles was pretty boring. We didn’t have much to talk about and it’s just as well that I’m not in the habit of writing home because the sex was nothing to write home about. It was about a month before he started bouncing me around. I was living in his flat in Harwood Road by then. It happened one evening when I gave him his tea before he left for work. Bangers and mash. No veg, he didn’t care much for veg. He looked at it and said, ‘What kind of rubbish is this?’

  I said, ‘Banger rubbish and mash rubbish.’

  He said, ‘Don’t you come it with me, I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, I know how sensitive you are.’

  ‘And none of your sarcasm either.’

  ‘Not even a little?’

  Wham! He gave me a backhander that broke my nose and sent me flying across the room. ‘That’s pretty good,’ I said. ‘How’s your forehand?’

  ‘I’m warning you! Watch your mouth before I get mad and knock your teeth down your throat.’ With that he threw the bangers and mash on the floor and stomped out.

  That was the last evening I spent under Troy Wallis’s roof. I packed a bag and went to Chelsea & Westminster Hospital where, after waiting about an hour, I had my nose fixed by a young doctor who wanted to know who’d done that to me. I told him I’d walked into a glass door. I crashed at the Lichtheim studio that night, and the next day I found this flatshare. Troy hassles me in the street sometimes but so far he hasn’t turned up here or at work. I think he doesn’t want to interfere with my earning capability in case he should need it. I looked in the yellow pages and there was an ad for flat fee uncontested divorce for £500 but I didn’t have the money and I hated the idea of all the bother. I’ll take care of it sometime. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Troy will get run over by a bus or something.

  In the meantime all I wanted was to pull myself together and not do anything foolish for a while. Right, so I had to go to that tango class. It didn’t seem a bad idea at the time but now I’m entangled with this five-foot-seven-inch Phil. At least I can’t marry him but that still leaves a lot of margin for error.

  He wanted to see me again this week but I said I needed a little time to think about things. So he sent me my horoscope. Astrology, that’s all I need. Another thing to worry about. This Catriona person says that Phil and I ‘somehow mirror each other and mirror each other’s capacity to mirror, and may both feel attracted and annoyed by qualities in the other you dislike in yourselves. You have both been badly treated – with violence or contempt – by your exes, and the suns of both of you are squared by Neptune.’ Of course I’m the kind of person that, if I read about a disease, immediately I have all the symptoms. Suggestible is what I am. Very. I believed everything Catriona said and I sent my mind back to the Saturday of the tango class. Had I felt anything pulling me? Had I felt Neptune squaring my sun? I think maybe I did. ‘Your Marses (libido, will power, assertiveness) are in square – a difficult challenging irritating aspect, and a strong trigger. Exciting but dangerous. Arousal and alertness.’ There was more, but that was all I could take in just then. I wasn’t understanding all of it, particularly that part about mirrors and the capacity to mirror. What is there in Phil that mirrors me? He said that his wife left him because he was a failure. I guess he feels like a failure. I certainly do. Whatever I’ve done has turned to shit. Except the artificial eyes. I don’t seem to be doing any harm there.

  I tried to understand what it is that’s between Phil and me. If anything. No, I can feel something. Mirrors. Planets. Are we like two planets circling each other? No, one would be in orbit around the other. The smaller one. Is Phil in orbit around me? Neptune squaring my sun. At work I googled for Neptune. There were pictures of it, all blue and cold and far-away-looking. It used to have a Great Dark Spot but in 1994 it wasn’t there any more. Phil and I both have dark spots.

  He rang me up on the Thursday after we met at the tango class. ‘Hi Barbara,’ he said.

  I liked how that sounded. ‘Hi Phil.’

  ‘Are we going to the tango class this Saturday?’ he said.

  ‘I’m thinking about it. Have you got a VCR?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be without one. Why?’

  ‘If I rent a copy of The Rainmaker from Blockbuster, can we watch it at your place?’

  ‘You don’t have to rent one – I’ve got it. When do you want to come over?’

  ‘Half hour?’

  ‘Great. I’ll meet you at Domino’s Pizza so you don’t get lost.’

  All the way there I was thinking, Do we kiss? We did. Walking along the path beside the Underground lines we held hands. OK, I thought. Why not?

  Phil’s place was about what I e
xpected. Lots of books, stacks of videos. A TV and a VCR. Desk and computer. Various boxes not yet unpacked. On the wall a large print of William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott. Brian had used that picture in his lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites. ‘“Out flew the web and floated wide,”’ I quoted. ‘“The mirror crack’d from side to side; / ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried / The Lady of Shalott.”’

  ‘The poem doesn’t say what the curse is,’ said Phil. ‘Only that she mustn’t look down to Camelot. Maybe she needn’t have laid herself down in that boat and died.’

  ‘Did you put that picture up since meeting me?’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s been up since I moved in eight months ago. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Mirrors. Why did you choose that picture?’

  ‘I don’t know – it just spoke to me. She’s “half-sick of shadows” and she’s tangled in her own web. In the cracked mirror is the bright view of all that she can’t have. Her feet are naked, she’s never walked out into the world.’

  ‘Are you sick of shadows and tangled in your own web with a mirror view of what you can’t have?’

  ‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m down there in that river in a boat without a paddle. Not dead but drifting. Shall we order a pizza and watch the film?’

  ‘OK, Barb,’ said Phil. ‘That’ll be cosy.’

  So we did that, and watching the film with beer and pizza was the cosiest thing I’d had in a long time. Kelly, the beaten wife, was so sweet, how could young lawyer Rudy not fall in love with her and want to protect her? I was with them all the way and I was actually shaking with the suspense of waiting for the scene where they finish off that bastard of a husband. Phil was holding me close to him and I knew he was being Rudy in his mind while I was being Kelly.

  When it finally happened it was almost too much for me, I could hardly breathe. And when Kelly said to Rudy, ‘Stop, give me the bat and leave. You were not here tonight!’ I came close to spilling my beer. When it was over we hugged and kissed and didn’t say anything for a while. Then we looked at each other and I said, ‘Can I stay here tonight?’