‘All right,’ Alice said sulkily. ‘I’m sorry. All those things. They weren’t your fault. I know that.’ She paused. ‘But about tonight. I mean about what you did to me. Well, I still think you should say you’re sorry.’ Angeletti was maintaining his usual disconcerting eye-contact. It obliged her to look away.
‘You’re having a tantrum because you got fucked,’ he said.
Alice began edgily to pick up her clothes. She stepped into her pants. It angered her intensely that all her garments were those which he had bought for her.
‘I guess this sounds a little unmentionable to a person of your refinement and sensitivity,’ Angeletti said dryly as he watched her, ‘but during the act of sex it is inevitable that a person will get fucked if that person happens to be a woman.’ Alice mumbled furiously into the buttons of her dress, wanting him both to hear and not to hear. ‘Pardon me?’ he said.
‘I said, “Jug Jug”,’ she said. ‘It’s T. S. Eliot on the subject of violation.’ Sylvan. As in the change of Philomel by the barbarous king so rudely forced. ‘Just another American poet,’ she said. ‘You may pay it no attention.’
Angeletti’s face gave no sign of emotion in response, though he paused and swallowed before he spoke.
‘You’re a clever girl, Alice, and you’ve been well educated,’ he said. ‘I guess your parents gave it a great deal of their money and their concern. Were it not for your wilfully placing your body supine under Mr Matthew Riley, I might have met you at Oxford University. Not messing with pigeons in burgundy. I beg you now, for your own sake and mine, stop demeaning yourself like this.’
Alice pulled with venom at the ratchet of her zip. She loathed him for having bought her stockings and a suspender belt, but the Marks and Spencer school uniform was currently in the boot of his hired car, along with her tights. And to mess with a suspender belt right then was unthinkable. Like working in a club for bent businessmen. She put her shoes on over her naked feet.
‘You behaved like a roughneck,’ she said. ‘You practically raped me.’ She picked up her handbag and she slung it over her shoulder. Then she headed for the door. He waited until her hand had made contact with the latch.
‘Will you answer me a question before you go?’ he said. ‘Just one word. Yes or no.’ Alice paused and let her hand fall.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Are you hurt?’ he said.
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said.
‘Yes or no,’ he said. ‘Answer me yes or no.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘No.’
‘And did some ghoulish, hooded monster spit on your face? Pee in your mouth? Jam broken bottle-glass up your female orifice?’
‘No,’ Alice said. ‘That’s three questions.’
‘Thank you,’ Angeletti said. ‘You got fucked, Alice. Now I care for you with all my heart and I’m sorry if I bruised your pride and your tender soul, because I prefer to believe that I cherish those things. So maybe I was a little emphatic. You came to my bed with your libido wrapped in chain mail. What did you seriously expect from me?’
‘I expected nothing,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t know what I expected. I told you I don’t know anything any more.’
‘You expected that I would offer myself gift-wrapped for a mechanical aid,’ he said. ‘You expected that I would collude with you so you could work out in your head on your head friend’s ninth-grade father-fixations.’ Alice felt her indignation rise and fall again as it gave way to a kind of dying inside. Angeletti continued, relentless, but then she knew already that he was temperamentally disposed towards blood sports. ‘The Divine Miss Davidene Delight,’ he said. ‘In her dress of sea-green silk.’ Alice looked down at her clothes.
‘You dressed me up like this on purpose,’ she said. ‘I hate you more than I can say.’
Angeletti was lying immobile on the bed, his long brown hands under his head. It was a while before he spoke.
‘That was a nice thing you did with me,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I don’t know how difficult it was for you, Alice. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it, because I do.’ Alice felt herself shaking. I am dying, she thought, dying. And the sea shall be my element. ‘Congratulations,’ Angeletti was saying. ‘You came, Mrs Riley – just like a gorgeous little birthday treat.’
Alice held on to her sanity by fixing hard upon Giovanni’s little birthday treat. Two scoops of vanilla ice-cream on a bath bun washed down with a Cherry Coke. Then she added hot fudge sauce.
‘Believe me, I’m distressed that you should hate me so much,’ he said. ‘I really had no idea you felt so badly.’
‘I love you,’ Alice said bleakly. Angeletti did not move. He remained as he was, with his hands under his head. Alice stood, similarly immobile, at the door. She had her back against the wall and she was staring down into the carpet. It was the same, uniform, cloud-grey carpet as covered the floor in the ladies room of the bar where she had first put on the dress. In fact it covered the floors of the entire hotel. She recalled, now, how she had stood admiring herself before the glass as though she were about to embark upon a bright little adventure. Alice in Wonderland. She had already been on the edge of hunger then and that was five hours ago. Right now, she thought suddenly, I will commit murder for part shares in a Cadbury’s Flake. Where is my meat axe and why does that bastard not feed me?
Then, with a creeping horror, she remembered something else. Something so much worse than hunger that she slid slowly down the wall until she was squatting on her haunches. That machine on the wall of the ladies room which hadn’t been vending chocolate bars. She had had no need of a tampon in something like ten weeks. Or could it simply be that if a person took up residence in a nunnery, then that person would, by grace of God, stop ovulating? For the second time in one evening Alice found herself grimly beginning to count out numbers in her head.
‘Giovanni,’ she said eventually, and she heard her voice sound cautiously as if against the wall of a tomb, ‘can I please tell you something absolutely dreadful?’
Chapter 38
At four o’clock in the morning Giovanni put down the typescript which he had been reading by lamplight while Alice slept. He got up to clean out the toilet bowl. Piece by piece he extracted his broken cigars and laid them on the absorbent wad of the New York Times Book Review. He parcelled them up and put them into the plastic disposal bin. Then he washed his hands. He was dressed in dark green exercise pants and a voluminous dark green hooded sweatshirt. When his watch said four-fifteen, he pulled on his sports socks and his brand-new running shoes and he stepped out in search of a baker. He found one, eventually, plying his nocturnal trade in the narrower mazes of Soho. After that he returned and woke Alice whom he had previously coaxed to sleep at one o’clock in the morning.
‘Time to wake up now, my sweetheart,’ he said and he gave her the bread. He watched her bolt it in lumps.
‘You’re eating for two,’ he said.
‘Not for certain,’ she said. ‘I mean, I can’t be certain, can I?’
Giovanni smiled. He helped her back into the sea-green silk and bent to lace her shoes. He put his jacket of the previous evening around her shoulders. ‘Put it on,’ he said. ‘Button it. It’s cold outside.’
She accompanied him down in the lift and watched, blinking, as he settled the bill. Then she walked out with him to the car. ‘Who’s Nance?’ she asked suddenly.
‘She’s my assistant,’ Giovanni answered. ‘Why do you ask?’
Alice shook her head dismissively. ‘No reason. What did you do while I was asleep?’ she said.
‘I read,’ he said. ‘I cleaned out the toilet bowl.’
‘Oh, but you shouldn’t have,’ Alice said. ‘I would’ve done that.’
‘For sure,’ Giovanni said. ‘A pregnant woman on her knees before my toilet bowl at four o’clock in the morning. Now I could grow accustomed to that kind of homage.’
Alice watched him throw his luggage into the back. Then
they got into the car.
‘What will you do when you’ve dropped me?’ she said.
‘Exercise my new running shoes,’ he said. ‘Cover a few miles. I’ll come by for you after Mass. I’ll drive back with you to your parents.’
‘Aren’t you sleepy?’ she said.
‘Nope,’ Giovanni said. ‘I make it around midnight.’ He laughed a little at her yawnings. ‘Do we ever get to inhabit the same time zone?’ he said. She leaned her head against his shoulder as he drove. Sleep combined with the novelty of Giovanni’s new tenderness had left her feeling like a well-nurtured and trusting child.
‘You’re funny,’ she said cosily.
‘How’s that,’ he said. ‘ “Funny”?’
Alice shrugged contentedly. ‘You’re being nice to me,’ she said. ‘I expect it’s because you think I’m pregnant.’ She entertained herself along these lines in the darkness. ‘I expect it brings out the gentleman in you,’ she said. ‘The prospect of one yukky little glob of mucus and cells – all gummed together with dear Mr Riley’s emissions.’
Giovanni kept his eyes on the road. ‘I really don’t need that kind of talk,’ he said. ‘Not from you.’
Alice sat up and looked at him. ‘Well I hope you’re going to sign me up for the right-to-life crusade,’ she said. ‘Just before you fly out of Heathrow on Monday morning.’
Giovanni took a while to respond. ‘You took your head off my shoulder,’ he said. ‘Put it back.’
Alice tried, for a while, to engage in sober contemplation. To be pregnant would be an unambiguous disaster. Jem’s baby was one thing, but Matthew Riley’s as well? And to follow within seven months? It was impossible. And whatever would become of Homer? Yet it seemed such a waste to lose her last precious time with Giovanni in fixing on such things. Especially now that they had at last arrived at a point of quietude. She returned her head to his shoulder. Wrapped in Giovanni’s jacket, she escaped instead into a blissful, assuaging fantasy. She would give up the pigeon house, give up everything; would have the new baby and Jem’s baby too, and she would live in the English countryside and be Giovanni’s English mistress; Giovanni’s country girl. Giovanni was rich. Giovanni would love her and keep her and plant roses around the door. She saw the sole of his Adidas running shoe on the edge of the spade as he pushed down, with his prodigious strength, into the wholesome earth. He would visit her whenever his business brought him to London. He would get children upon her in great numbers. Apple-cheeked children in smocks and velvet knickerbockers with hands outstretched to catch falling apples, who would all be the best of friends. Dominic and Arabella and Ganymede and Amanda-Jane. And two fingers to the tawdry bridegroom whom she had been obliged to share with Flora. Thumbs down to him. Thumbs down to you Matthew Riley, liar and cheat. And, as for Giovanni, to be his mistress would not be a problem. He was a Catholic, was he not? Catholics didn’t get that fussed about a little bit of fornication. It was people like Miss Aldridge and Oliver Cromwell who bothered their heads about things like that.
‘Giovanni,’ Alice said, in a voice like ash in a graveyard. ‘I wish that you would tell me about the second Mrs Angeletti.’
Giovanni was silent for a very long time. Alice thought that he would not reply at all.
‘Now I have a little story to tell,’ he said, ‘And it’s not so elevating here and there. I expect that you will listen until I’m through.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll listen.’
‘Good,’ Giovanni said. ‘Then I’ll begin. That night I got your message. That message on the answering machine. Yours was not the only message I got that night. The other was from the police.’
‘The police?’ Alice said.
‘Shut your mouth and listen,’ Giovanni said. ‘That is what you have undertaken to do.’
‘Sorry,’ Alice said.
‘My wife’s car collided with a truck,’ he said. ‘The second Mrs Angeletti is dead.’
‘Dead?’ Alice said. It came over her, with a kind of creeping horror, that Giovanni had been all dressed up for the opera that night. She wondered, again, whether Giovanni was seriously mad.
‘Mary-Lou was absconding to join her lover,’ he said. ‘She had left me a while back, as a matter of fact – for a man who was big in pornography.’
‘In what?’ Alice said.
‘Pornography,’ Giovanni said. ‘Do you suffer from hearing loss?’
‘No,’ Alice said.
‘Good,’ Giovanni said. ‘Then I’ll go on. Now understand me, Alice. This is a truly wholesome character we’re dealing with here. This is a man who keeps a twelve-foot-high bronze statue on his lawn of himself screwing a goat.’ He paused. ‘A case of bronzing one’s first sexual experience. I guess it’s somewhat analogous with bronzing a child’s first shoe. He got raided doing pre-pubertal castration scenarios with abducted Hispanics.’
‘You’re not serious, I hope?’ Alice said.
‘Once MacMahon was jailed,’ Giovanni said, ‘Mary-Lou came back to me. I guess she was always afraid of the dark and she never liked to play on her own. She discovered a consuming passion for meeting my every whim. She decided I liked to get my shirts ironed on both sides. All that kind of stuff.’
Alice was suddenly struck by the notion that Mary-Lou had expended her efforts upon Giovanni’s pretty boiled shirt. Mary-Lou would have laundered it and starched it and goffered the frills. And Giovanni had then unseamed her on it. She had lain in his arms on a shirt made lovely by the hand of the porn king’s dead mistress.
‘And by “both sides” I don’t mean front and back,’ Giovanni said. ‘I mean inside and outside. The woman stood around in my kitchen all day long, struggling to make gnocchi by hand and mixing up batches of peanut butter cookies. Now it’s true I adore peanut butter cookies and, besides, Mary-Lou was so monumentally incompetent that the performance was in itself gratifying.’
Alice winced. She could not help feeling rather sorry for Mary-Lou as she envisaged Giovanni provoked by the odour of blood. She saw him, like Petrucchio, ordering away the dishes of home-made gnocchi and sending the trays of peanut butter cookies crashing to the ground.
‘Mostly I tolerated it because Mary-Lou was pregnant,’ he said. ‘God knows she really wanted that little baby and, God knows, so did I. I guess she was just nesting, poor girl.’ Then he said nothing for a while. He drove on in silence, staring ahead at the road.
‘And then?’ Alice said.
‘MacMahon got sprung from jail,’ Giovanni said. ‘About two months before I came to London. Now, I knew she’d make a run for it – just as soon as he’d succeeded in bribing his way out of the country. As a matter of fact I could deduce it from the number of cookie sheets that were currently dropping out of her hands.’
Alice heard the baking trays crash like cymbals as he spoke. She tried to recall wherever before she had heard such an everyday tale of ordinary folk.
‘I needed to come to London,’ he said. ‘I’d meant to come in July and I’d already delayed over a month.’ Giovanni paused. Then he added, ‘And you will appreciate, Alice, that I could not in any case keep a watch on my wife twenty-four hours a day.’
‘No,’ Alice said.
‘Quite apart from it gets unimaginably boring,’ he said, ‘to cohabit with a not very bright pregnant woman with ants in her pants who is dropping cups of butter and cornstarch all over your kitchen floor.’
It came to Alice with shame, at that point, that she was beginning to enjoy the story of Mary-Lou every bit as much as she had ever enjoyed some of Jem’s domestic anecdotes. Perhaps the unreality of the day was playing tricks on her, but it seemed to her not dissimilar to the story of Maddie and the suicidal cellist. Or the snail expert who had bled in Holy Week.
‘I’ve always wondered,’ she found herself saying unguardedly, ‘how Americans measure butter in a cup.’
‘Pardon me?’ Giovanni said.
‘No, nothing,’ Alice said.
‘So I hired two guys t
o watch her,’ Giovanni said. ‘Professionals, as I thought.’
Alice turned to him wide-eyed. ‘But you don’t mean spies?’ she said. ‘What I mean is – well – you don’t get spies to watch your wife.’
‘Are you reading me?’ Giovanni said. ‘My wife was thirty weeks pregnant. She was in a delicate state of mind. You expected that I should sit back and allow her to liaise with criminals in some godforsaken hole? I had the child to think of.’
Alice conceded the point. It was after all not unreasonable, in the circumstances, for him to insure against her absconding with his baby.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Forgive me.’
‘To cut a long story short,’ Giovanni said. ‘She got wise to them. When she noticed she was being followed, she panicked and hit the gas. The car smashed into a truck. Mary-Lou went prematurely into labour. She was crushed screaming behind the wheel until men with crowbars hacked off the doors.’
Alice had subsided into a state of nauseous horror. She was grateful for the dark and the hypnotic uniformity of the stretch of road ahead.
‘I have to say it,’ Giovanni said. ‘For a woman who couldn’t rip off her own Band-Aid, she must have suffered the most unendurable pain.’
Alice sat bleakly confronting what Giovanni had just told her. She was suddenly terribly cold. She drew the evening jacket around her and endeavoured to control her shivering.
Temples of Delight Page 29