Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  Alice’s excitement was underlined by the sharp edge of hunger, because Angeletti, in spite of her hints, had not proposed that they have supper along the way. She began, now, to hanker after Mars Bars. She saw in the glass that behind her on the wall were fixed two vending machines, but neither of them, sadly, was in business to dispense junk food. One provided a selection of scents and the other provided tampons.

  When Alice met Angeletti in the vestibule, she noticed with some amusement that he was wearing a voluminous old-fashioned dress shirt, goffered and starched in the manner once undertaken by Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and her kind.

  ‘You’re a very natty dresser,’ she said. ‘Mr Alphabetti-Spaghetti. I really like your shirt.’

  Angeletti offered his arm. ‘My shirt?’ he said. ‘You like a man in a boiled shirt?’

  Alice burst out laughing, for no other reason than that she had never heard the term before.

  ‘But really,’ she said, a bit primly, to temper her unguarded admiration. ‘I really see no reason for us to be all glammed up like this.’ When Angeletti smiled at her, she could smell the toothpaste on his breath.

  ‘I guess that’s the Protestant in you,’ he said. ‘You may rest assured, Mrs Riley, you look like Minnie Mouse around the feet.’

  Chapter 36

  Alice was enchanted by The Magic Flute, just as she had been that very first time when Jem had played it to her in the cubicles off Mrs Fergusson’s music room. She knew that it made sense the way a dream makes sense, deeply at the centre of her being. And here, in the dark, towards the end of Act Two, when the young prince stood robed before the altar in the Temple of Wisdom, though she knew that he was beautiful and honourable and brave and that he had just passed unflinching through the waterfall and the fire – and that he was eminently competent to construct an emergency shelter for her in the tundra – she also knew more clearly than ever that she did not want him or any of his kind, because he lacked subtlety and guile. Not like Sarastro.

  Sarastro was the mächtiger böser Dämon, the big smell at the top. Sarastro was the operator; the con-man; the abductor; the devious high priest. Sarastro had stage-managed the entire event. The others had all been putty in his hands. He had made food appear in the forest and the talisman belonged to him. He had wrested it from the Queen of the Night. She knew that there was no way he would ever behave as if he were running the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Why should he? Alice had never been in love before and the knowledge now weighed on her heavily. It awed her and brought to ground, painfully, all the agreeable air-borne ebullience of the day.

  * * *

  Afterwards she walked with Angeletti in silence through a maze of small streets. He stopped when they came upon a late-closing delicatessen and he bought a paper cone of black olives. He also bought a tin of amaretti and a bottle of red wine which the shop assistant uncorked. Then Alice accompanied him to his room.

  Angeletti put down the biscuits, the olives and the bottle of red wine on the cabinet beside the bed. Then he took off his jacket, his shoes and his tie. He reclined on the bed with his feet on the covers and took up the cone of black olives. Alice watched him drop the fruit into his mouth and chew at the flesh. Then he spat the stone into his hand.

  ‘Take your clothes off,’ he said. Alice began with her shoes and her stockings. Then she started on the buttons of the sea-green silk. She placed her garments, carefully folded, on the floor beside her feet. She accomplished these things quickly, making efficiency a cover for her awkwardness and contriving for herself the illusion that the process was really not very much different from taking one’s clothes off in the doctor’s surgery. Matthew Riley had never required ritual undressing of her. When she looked up, Angeletti was still chewing on black olives.

  ‘Are you in a hurry?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘If you must know, I’m embarrassed.’

  ‘Your embarrassment is delightful,’ Angeletti said. ‘And all too patently obvious. Carry on.’ His speech was slurring rudely as his tongue worked at the fruit. Alice kept on until she stood awkwardly exposed, with the no man’s land of the hotel carpet stretching between them. Angeletti put down the cone of olives.

  ‘Take a walk to the glass,’ he said. He gestured to the mirror on the opposite wall. ‘Go practise a little narcissism.’

  Alice walked to the glass. She practised a little narcissism. She looked at her hair and at the tilt of her head and at her neck and shoulders. Then at her breasts and her navel and at the triangle of pubic hair at the parting of her thighs. Reflected in the glass behind her, she could see that Angeletti had taken up the tin of amaretti and had removed a pair of small, prettily wrapped biscuits. She watched him twist off the tissue papers and crumple them in one of his hands. He put down the tin and the wrappings on the bedside cabinet and got up. She watched him crush the biscuits in his teeth as he approached her. When he bent and kissed her nipples, he did so through the fine, abrasive gravel of crushed apricot kernels and sugar, which goose-pimpled her arms and made her wince. Then he kissed her on the mouth and quickly released her.

  ‘Turn around,’ he said. ‘Take a look over your shoulder.’ Alice, as she craned to follow the journey of her spine, was surprised and pleased by the depth and symmetry of the three equidistant dimples which nestled above the groove of her buttocks. When she looked up, she saw that Angeletti was back on the bed, eating his biscuits. Alice registered that his black silk socks had picked up some of the carpet nap on the soles. She turned and approached the bedside table, assuming that the curve of her pretty rear end would have won her the right, at last, to eat. As she reached out her hand to the tin, Angeletti took it up and passed it into his right hand so that it lay out of reach on the far side of his body.

  ‘Angeletti!’ she said, a bit frantically. ‘Can’t you see that I’m starving to death?’ She knelt on the bed and reached for the tin, realizing too late the compromising effect of stretching herself naked like that across Angeletti’s chest. It disconcerted her to feel the proximity of his breathing under the delicate, starched fluting of the shirt.

  ‘OK, Alice,’ he said. ‘You win. Hold on.’ He took out a pair of biscuits and unwrapped them. Then he held them out to her on his palm. When she reached for them, he closed his fingers. ‘With your mouth,’ he said.

  Alice stopped in her tracks and stared at him. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘With your mouth,’ he said. ‘Take them with your mouth, Alice.’ Alice hesitated. Then she bent forward to take the biscuits with her mouth. It was once her mouth had closed around the coating of kernel and sugar that she felt the vibrations of Angeletti’s soundless laughter.

  ‘I have you eating out of my hand,’ he said. Alice did something then which she had never done before to any living thing, though she knew full well that Iona Morgan had. She sank her incisors viciously into the flesh of Angeletti’s palm.

  ‘Stop it!’ he said so ferociously that she immediately complied. And then he was looming over her and flaying himself clumsily out of his clothes.

  Angeletti was like a holy maniac in bed. An unlovely crusader, grooving on a brutal cause. Alice found it an affront to all her tender expectation. It was grimly evident, after all, that Angeletti detested her. Or, at best, that she had become a featureless irrelevance. The desert underhoof; the infidel terrain. Anyway, it was making her feel sick. She began to count out numbers in her head. It was only when she had got to seventy-eight that the additional, persistent discomfort in her shoulder blade impinged upon her consciousness. It came to her what was causing it. She was lying on one of the jewelled button studs of Angeletti’s exquisite boiled shirt. Emotion crowded in on her in the form of poignant regret. She lost count in the number sequence and struggled unsuccessfully against a girlish flow of tears.

  Angeletti paused and looked at her once the tears had spilled from her eyes. He addressed her, she thought, in the tone of a kindly, reassuring lifeguard who has happened upon a small, wayward boat.

&
nbsp; ‘Hello in there,’ he said. ‘Are you all right? You look like you could be suffering a little from motion sickness.’ Alice said nothing. His tone was an obscenity to her. Angeletti wiped her eyes on the corner of the sheet. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’re soaking the pillow. What’s the matter? You don’t like me?’ Alice said nothing. He wiped her eyes on the sheet again and followed this by planting a run of small, soft kisses on her mouth. ‘My dear Miss Elizabeth Barrett,’ he said. ‘Are you tormented by a crippling malaise? Are you currently burdened with a poetical surfeit of delicacy?’ Alice said nothing. He wiped her eyes again on the sheet.

  ‘I hate you, Angeletti,’ she said. Angeletti merely behaved as though she had uttered a small endearment. He planted another sequence of light kisses on her face.

  ‘Bedroom etiquette, rule one,’ he said. ‘My name is Giovanni. I would really be most gratified if you would use it, Alice.’

  ‘I hate you, Angeletti,’ Alice said. She wondered for a moment why it was, exactly, that she had never been able to use his name. Even while she liked him, she had merely toyed inwardly with the idea of calling him ‘the Don’. Was she afraid that the floodgates would open? Would they release an emotion too powerful for her to keep in check? Was it the power within the name itself – that stunning, operatic name? Might it have been easier had his name been David or Henry or Charles? Angeletti was holding her chin between his forefinger and thumb.

  ‘ “Joe-vanni”,’ he said coaxingly. ‘Come on now. After the first time it’s not going to be so difficult.’

  ‘Giovanni,’ Alice said woodenly and she waited for the ghost voice of the Commendatore to boom at her from the walls. Angeletti’s face was promptly suffused with pleasure.

  ‘And again?’ he said.

  ‘Giovanni,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh my,’ Angeletti said. ‘Oh glory be.’ And he kissed her and wooed her and talked out at her, then, such a curious, gentle, primeval cadabra that it drew her towards some violent unknown whirlpool and made her hum and shake.

  ‘I’m drowning,’ she said, panicking wildly.

  ‘No, no,’ Angeletti said. ‘You’re OK. Take it easy now. You’re not drowning.’

  Alice found that the pleasure of it was rare and strange and high. It made her give herself up; trade herself unguardedly for its exquisite, indescribable finesse. And she knew that over her shoulder were the waterfall and the fire.

  Chapter 37

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Angeletti said afterwards. Alice looked at him rather bitterly for what had recently taken place between them. It had required from her a huge and galling capitulation. Yet, from the ease of Angeletti’s manner, it was perfectly apparent that he was resolved to behave as though nothing momentous had happened. All he had done was to get up and stumble to the bathroom where she had heard him clatter up the loo seat and pee with the door open. Then he had idled about the room for a moment, gathering his cigars and his lighter. She had watched him scratch inelegantly at the back of his naked thigh as he returned to the bed. He was behaving, in short, as though the act which had occurred between them had given him the right to display his nakedness, not for erotic purpose, but rather as if he were in the men’s locker room at the gym where he went to lift weights.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Angeletti said. ‘You’re perfectly all right, Alice. I didn’t let you drown.’ He reached out amiably to pat her thigh. ‘Drowning is merely analogous with sexual climax,’ he said. ‘Though I believe that to drown for real is nothing like half so much fun.’ ‘Fun’. How did he dare to call it ‘fun’? ‘Welcome to the climax, Alice,’ he said. ‘It’s not a thing to be so afraid of.’

  Alice stared grimly into the bedclothes. ‘I think what happened to me was everything to be afraid of,’ she said.

  Angeletti laughed. ‘I guess you’re absolutely right,’ he said. ‘As you very often are. You have a most inconveniently sharp and penetrating mind.’

  ‘For a woman,’ Alice said.

  ‘Ouch!’ Angeletti said, faking a wince. ‘You really are very angry with me.’

  ‘Oh go ahead and smoke!’ Alice said irritably. ‘You don’t have to soft-soap me with compliments.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to soft-soap you with compliments.’

  ‘Nor do you have to ask me about your filthy, stinking cigars,’ she said. ‘I’ve just exhibited for your entertainment that I am incapable of minding anything that you do.’

  ‘Hey now, but that’s abject,’ Angeletti said. ‘That’s unworthy of you.’

  She shot him a look just in time to see the Adam’s apple rise and fall again in his throat as he swallowed. She found it quite alarming in its power to attract and she quickly looked away.

  ‘As if you didn’t know they make me feel violently sick,’ she said.

  Angeletti looked amused by her vehemence. ‘ “Violently” sick?’ he said. ‘Oh my! I can see that I had better reform myself, or I could be in trouble.’ He handed her the box. Alice took it but she looked at him no less caustically as she did so.

  ‘I suppose you’re telling me I can do what I like with these?’ she said.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said. So she got up naked from the bed and carried the cigars into the bathroom where she broke them irritably into small pieces and dropped them into the lavatory bowl. After that she planted herself on the seat and issued forth, with relief, the longest pee of her life. Then she returned to the bedroom.

  ‘So what have you done with my cigars?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve thrown them down the bog and I’ve peed on them,’ she said. Angeletti appeared to be delighted. He laughed with pleasure.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘It sure as hell won’t be me who picks those things out the John.’

  ‘Nor me neither,’ Alice said. ‘ “Sure as hell”, you pigswill bastard.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Angeletti said.

  ‘I called you a bastard,’ she said.

  Angeletti held out his hand to her. ‘Oh, come here, my sweetheart, my wrangling queen,’ he said. ‘You still want to know what a meat axe is?’

  Alice stayed where she was. It was almost exactly the spot where she had taken off her clothes.

  ‘Come where?’ she said. Angeletti laughed. He pointed hospitably to the crook of his arm. Alice stood still, trembling slightly, with the expanse of carpet between them. ‘You scare me to death,’ she said.

  ‘Oh come now,’ he said. ‘You’re not scared of me. You’re the woman who wrapped me in barbed wire, remember? You damn near threw me down a hole in the floor.’

  ‘Oh rubbish,’ Alice said. ‘You entertain yourself with lies. You’re a filthy great bully, Giovanni, and you know it.’ She considered, with shame, that his bullying did not make her love him less. Perhaps it even made her love him more. But she didn’t like it and she didn’t understand it. ‘I don’t think I know anything any more,’ she said.

  Angeletti looked her over carefully, a bit painfully, from head to foot. He began to enunciate slowly.

  ‘ “I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens”,’ he said. ‘ “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”’

  She was thrown by the unexpected lyricism of the words. ‘That’s very lovely, Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Did you write that?’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Just an American poet. You may pay it no attention.’ Alice looked down, a little bitterly, at her hands.

  ‘Your prettiness is about more than I can bear right now,’ Angeletti said.

  Alice’s glance was both bruised and suspicious. ‘I want you to tell me that you’re sorry,’ she said.

  Angeletti stared at her for a moment. ‘For what?’ he said.

  She made no reply. She began to pace the floor, running a hand nervously through her hair. She reached the chest and began to fidget with some of his things. Keys, nail clippers, a small pile of letters. Somebody’s page proofs with pencilled markings, bound with two elastic bands. A box
with new running shoes. The characters jumped at her eyes. Adidas. Then she turned to him.

  ‘You’ve always abused me from the moment you walked into my life,’ she said. ‘ “Grab your coat”, “jump in the cab”, “curtsey to God”—’ She wanted to add, ‘With your mouth. Take them with your mouth, Alice,’ but she couldn’t. The words stuck in her throat. ‘You’ve always manipulated me,’ she said.

  ‘Alice,’ he said sincerely. ‘That time we met. I appreciate I wasn’t all that nice to you. Believe me. I had things on my mind.’

  ‘You christened my baby,’ she said bitterly.

  Angeletti looked suddenly as if he might erupt, but he did not. ‘Baptism, so help me, is not my job,’ he said.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. A hideous doubt, as yet unacknowledged and unexpressed, overcame her. ‘You could have called me,’ she said. ‘How do I know you didn’t keep me from my friend …’

  Angeletti wiped a hand over his mouth. ‘I beg you, Alice,’ he said. ‘Don’t pursue this. It’s damaging. You delegated to me and then you passed out. God knows – about the whole business – I told you I was sorry. I couldn’t be more sorry if I walked the earth for you from end to end in a hair shirt. What do you want from me? You want my head on a plate?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said unreasonably. ‘I want your head on a plate.’ Or did she? She half wanted his head, severed by sheet metal and bleeding on the autostrada. But then again, she half did not. And one glimpse of the Highland brain surgeon striding towards her with his brogues and bedside manner and she wanted his head back on again. Oh be my Green Knight, Giovanni; be my Magic Man. Take your head on and off like a top hat full of rabbits. Let it roll, grinning among bitten macaroons – bitten amaretti – my Mr Apollinax. My angel. Mr Angeletti has come upon us like one of God’s angels, Mrs Riley. I would like to have your head and to keep it, Giovanni, but how? In a pot like Isabella? Like the head of Clordio-Cloudio? Like a necromantic? The dead girl in the bed? I thought you’d like that, Mrs Riley. Oh, not your head, Giovanni! Let’s make it the brain surgeon’s head.