Angelica Lost and Found (9 page)

‘Listen to that mezzo,’ he would say. ‘It’s like silk but Baltsa puts a razor edge on it when the scene calls for it. If I could draw and paint the way she sings I’d draw and paint much better than I do.’ And he’d sing the seguidilla off-key:

“
Près des remparts de Seville
,

Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia
 …”

and dance me around with a lot of stamping and a rose in the buttonhole of his shirt if one was available. While Mom ran the vacuum cleaner to drown out the noise. So they each got some satisfaction.

Dad took nothing with him when he left, so I ended up with the tottering stacks. I listened through the operas and indexed them. It was nothing from
Carmen
that attached itself to my AWOL father, but the famous chorus from
Nabucco
, ‘
Va
,
pensiero
…’ ‘Fly, thought, on wings of gold …’ as the Jews, all of them named Greenberg, were led away into captivity. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows and tried to figure out whose fault it was.

‘Shit happens,’ said my best friend Rosie Margolis. ‘It’s called a mid-life crisis. My dad did the same thing.’

‘Lap dancer?’ It was Rosie’s mother who had reported the breaking news of Dad’s
Entführung
from the domestic hearth.

‘Stuntwoman. Mom says he’ll need a stunt
man
for the action scenes.’

‘
My
mom says she’s wasted a lot of years on Dad and now she’s out for a good time.’

‘Grown-ups!’ said Rosie, and we both shook our heads. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘your dad’s lap dancer is working her way through college; she’s doing art history at UCLA.’

‘It’s good that she has something besides her ass to fall back on,’ I said while wishing her dead.

The whole thing was hard for me to take in, and it came to me then – though I ought to have known it at fifteen – that parents, especially fathers, were not to be trusted, however reliable they might seem.

Mom was a painter who exhibited at the Eidolon Gallery under her maiden name, Lydia Katz. She looked enough like Agnes Baltsa to be her sister; if she’d been a singer she’d have been a mezzo and a fiery Carmen. Her paintings, however, were gentle and sunny, reminiscent of Bonnard. She’d met Dad at Friday-night life classes at the Sketch Club.

He was – still is, I hope – a big man with a shambling walk, several days’ growth of beard and a funky man-smell that made me feel cosy and safe when I sat in his lap with his Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey breath warm on my neck and his stubble scraping my cheek as he read to me such favourites as Lear’s tragedy of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo and his rejection by the Lady Jingly Jones:

Though you’ve such a tiny body

    And your head so large doth grow;

        Though your hat may blow away,

    Mr Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

Though you’re such a Hoddy Doddy

Yet I wish that I could modify

        the words I needs must say!

        Will you please to go away? …

Sometimes late at night I’d hear sounds on the other side of the wall and I’d put a pillow over my head.

‘Which tree would you suggest?’ someone was saying. Beard?

‘Please do your tree association in your own time,’ I said. ‘I asked you to check out
Orlando Furioso
. Have you?’

‘My dear Ms Greenberg, my reading time is pretty well taken up with professional journals.’

‘Look, Prof, I was referred to you by my doctor because I was getting headaches from the stress of my personal problems.’

‘Which are, specifically?’

‘I’m trying, for Christ’s sake, to deal with two kinds of reality.’

‘Right there is where your trouble is. There’s only one reality – anything else is all in your head.’

‘We’re going in circles, Prof. I think I might have to take my business elsewhere, like Clancy’s Bar.’

‘You’re of course free to terminate the therapy at any time. Sleep on it and let my secretary know at least twenty-four hours before your next session.’

‘OK, Professor Beard. See you. Or not.’

I left his office humming the seguidilla with lots of foot-stamping in my head.

Chapter 16

For Whom the Bell Clangs

It clanged for me as the car made its stops and starts on the way to Clancy’s, tolling out the years of my growing up. All in a jangle of tintinnabulation: Dad gone; Berkeley; Michael; Mom’s death. She’d boasted of being out for a good time but without the constant excitement of her ongoing war with Dad the future was too much for her to swallow and she got cancer of the oesophagus. So why did I buy the gallery? Why do people climb mountains of guilt, cross deserts of regret and travel long roads of too-late to give to the dead the love they couldn’t give the living? Because that’s what people do. While Dad was there Mom was just somebody at the other end of the table; my childhood scrapes and bruises were for Dad to kiss better and my report cards for him to admire. Lydia Katz continues to sell well: her paintings look good on any wall and she’s a lot cheaper than Bonnard.

I have always kept a journal, and at college I did a writing course and was told by Oscar Glock, who taught the course, that I had talent. He was not, however, terribly impressed by talent.

‘Talent,’ he said, ‘is cheap. The woods are full of talented people who will never do doodly-shit because they haven’t got the
cojones
to go in over the horns.’

Mr Glock was given to bullfighting and boxing metaphors. He was shorter than Hemingway but he had a full Hemingway beard and he had published a novel called
Suit of Lights
.

The gallery leaves me plenty of time for writing and I may very well have the
cojones
but I’ve not yet found the right horns to go in over. Of course my imaginary animal friend keeps me pretty busy one way and another but once I get my head sorted I’ll be better organised. Probably.

Chapter 17

From Verse to Bad

It was the middle of a Thursday morning, so there was less of a crush than usual and Himself was sitting at a corner table reading
Orlando Furioso
with a coffee at his elbow while Javier tended bar.

Clancy Yeats is about forty, ten years older than I am. He’s a big man who could be described as ruggedly handsome. He looks a bit like an actor whose name I don’t remember, the one who often plays the male lead’s best friend who doesn’t get the girl. He came to SF from County Antrim a while back on a visit and stayed on. He inherited enough money to buy the bar and here he is. His wife left him three years ago and now he’s divorced and has a teenage daughter he rarely sees. The last I heard she was living in Rome with her art teacher.

‘Hi, Angie,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you recommended this. Ariosto’s a real page-turner. His heroes and their journeys far/All come to life here in this bar,/With beauties needing to be saved/And many dangers to be braved.’

‘It’s catching,’ I said. ‘Those tales of his that I have read/Have made big trouble in my head:/I don’t know if I’m here or there/or drifting somewhere in the air.’

‘Tell me what the problem is,’ said Clancy. ‘That’s what I’m here for. The tables and the chairs and the bar are just a front.’

‘Have you done Canto Eye Vee yet?’ (I always speak Roman numerals as their alphabet letters.) ‘The part where the hippogriff is described?’

‘I have that.’

‘Does he seem real to you?’

‘Yes, in the same way as selkies or werewolves. Maybe you should have a drink, just to settle the dust.’

‘You’re right as always, Clance. Let me have a Peroni and a double Laphroaig.’

‘A boilermaker on an empty stomach: I’m assuming you’ve had no lunch.’

‘Right again. Maybe Charlie can do me a steak sandwich.’

Charlie, who was lounging in a chair by the window, waved to me and fired up his grill. He was a taciturn man with a hoarse voice and he looked piratical, always with a kerchief round his throat.

‘All right, Angie. Tell me about the hippogriff.’

‘His name is Volatore.’

‘I didn’t see that in the book.’

‘It’s not in the book.’

‘Then where’d you find it? Google? Wikipedia?’

‘He told me it.’

‘Ah! You haven’t a drop taken already, have you?’ His head a little bit on one side as he looked at me. Askance.

‘Cold sober, Clance. Scout’s honour.’

‘What were you on when he told you?’

‘Only a little Laphroaig to steady my nerves – not enough to get me drunk.’

‘Where were you at the time?’

‘In my apartment. I had Monteverdi on the Bose, Emma Kirkby singing “Olimpia’s Lament”. The music lifted him up to my window.’

I could feel that first encounter with Volatore becoming huge in me, wanting to burst like a watermelon dropped from a tenth-storey window. I knew I’d be sorry but I couldn’t stop.

‘You were saying?’ said Clancy.

‘I asked him in for a cup of tea.’

‘How’d he get in?’

‘Through the window.’

‘And him quite a big fellow with hooves and talons and wings and all.’

‘He thought small.’

Charlie brought my sandwich over and I sipped my beer.

Clancy waited until I had somewhat appeased my hunger and my thirst.

‘I’m all ears,’ he said then, looking prescient.

‘I gave him tea in a bowl, because of his beak.’

‘As one would. Go on.’

‘I don’t know what came over me …’

‘Take your time, choose your words carefully.’

‘I wanted him to kiss me.’

‘Not a very soft kisser, with that beak.’

‘He offered to change to a man-shape, but I told him I wanted him as he was.’

‘Wanted him as in “I
want
you”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hang on a moment,’ said Clancy.

He went to the bar, came back with a bottle of Bushmill’s and a glass, poured himself a stiff one, drank it down, and while catching his breath indicated to me that I should continue.

‘Well of course he was too big for me so I asked him to think himself and his business smaller.’

Why was I telling Clancy all this? Did I want to make it irrevocably real by reliving it before him? Did I want to word myself naked under a beast to excite him and myself? Was I compelled by some inner demon to commit this act of betrayal? Yes to all of the above as I continued, ‘And when the size was right I …’

‘You don’t have to say it all out.’

‘Yes, I do because we’re talking about a reality that’s not the usual thing. I was only wearing panties and a bra so I took those off and got down on all fours and he covered me the way his father the griffin had covered his mother the mare.’