Angelica Lost and Found (12 page)

‘Floor, dear,’ sighs Phyllis as Angelica and Chow Yun Thin retire to the kitchen where Angelica fills two cracked mugs with tea from her flask.

Among the canvases, Phyllis and Alyosha crouch close enough together to inhale each other’s pheromones as he guides her through
The Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants
. Phyllis is by now realising that she is smelling the hidden message she has been seeking. It is large and shabby and scruffy and its name is Alyosha. She needs some adjectives to fill out that name, and must get a Russian dictionary.

So, breathing in and out in sync, with Phyllis’s cheque-book wet with anticipation, these two recede from view, leaving us to reflect that the
Drang nach Osten
is a faster pull than it used to be. Maybe it’s the global warming.

Chapter 29

Lap of Honour

All of a sudden there he was. Dad, on the outside looking in through the glass doors of the gallery. I went to meet him with the ache in my throat predicting tears. I opened the door and he came in hesitantly.

‘Would you like to hug me?’ I said. ‘There’s a small charge but you can run a tab.’

We hugged, I inhaled the Dad plus Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey smell, we cried a little, wiped our tears, blew our noses, stepped back and looked at each other. He wasn’t in bad shape for a fifty-nine-year-old unshaven type. White hair, some wear and tear but not too much. We hugged again, stepped back again.

‘Carmencita,’ he said, and kissed the top of my head.

‘Did you listen to my request?’ I asked him.

‘My name is Whoever.’

‘Before “
Va
,
pensiero
”
did you hear Garanca do the seguidilla?’

‘Sure I did. That’s some dynamite mezzo! I’ve just heard that she does
Carmen
on DVD and I’m definitely going to get it as soon as I can.’

‘So has the train pulled out and left Agnes Baltsa on the empty station platform?’

‘Later loves come along, but a first love is the one that took you to a place you never knew before, so it’ll always be part of you.’

‘Way to go, Dad. You’re a classy guy.’

‘Well, you know, a man is either a gentleman or he’s something to put out with the garbage.’

‘I’ve seen some of your graphic novels and they’re very good – really I think they’re your best work.’

‘Thank you, Carmencita. It’s a whole new quality market that’s opened up. I’m so much in demand that I’m actually turning down work.’

‘Good for you, Dad, and I’m glad to smell that it’s keeping you in Jack Daniel’s.’

‘You know it! And that Tennessee Sour Mash keeps my hand steady.’

‘So tell me, do you always listen for messages from me on the
Morning Show
?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’

‘Why does a salmon swim upstream?’

‘To get to the other side?’

‘That’s it, and here I am. Can you forgive me?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘I wasn’t sure you would.’

‘For a long time I couldn’t but now I’m fifteen years older than I was when you left and I’ve learned one or two things. Sometimes a demon drives us to do what everybody wants us not to do and even we ourselves might want not to do it but we’ll do it anyhow. That’s just how people are.’

‘About my not very original mid-life crisis – the girl I went off with was working at the Crazy Horse …’

‘They have lap dancers there?’

‘Nikki wasn’t a lap dancer. She danced nude in the Crazy Horse revues.’

‘You went to the Crazy Horse?’

‘No. I met her at City College, in front of the Rivera mural. She was doing a course in the history of art at UCLA. She was only twenty, she was pretty and she was very easy to be with.’

‘You were forty-four at the time and not quite in the Sean Connery class of pulling power. Why do you think she fell into your lap, so to speak?’

‘I struck up a conversation with her, she liked talking to me and one thing led to another.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Moved in with her history of art lecturer.’

‘Aren’t they usually married?’

‘Or divorced.’ He’d begun to look around at the walls. ‘Not a bad painter. Lydia. Not very original but not bad. And looking at that
Interior with Sleeping Cat
, you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in that woman’s mouth.’

‘But cool she wasn’t, your wife and my mom.’

‘Definitely not. What’s this with multicoloured numbers copulating,
Ah
,
Love
,
Let Us Be the Square Root of True or Something Other
?’

‘My cousin Phyllis is unloading some of the older autisic savants in her collection.’

‘And this with the nude on a motorcycle,
Harley No
.
7
.’

‘Ossip Przewalski, he’s a steady seller. Where are you living these days?’

‘Furnished apartment in the Mission. Very Edward Hopper.’

‘Feel like a classic pizza at Marco’s?’

‘If you let it be my treat, Carmencita.’

‘You got it, Pops.’

Olivia, who had stayed in the office to give us privacy, now emerged for introductions.

‘Olivia Partridge,’ I said, ‘this is my dad, the infamous Herman Greenberg.’

‘Famous too,’ she said to Dad. ‘Didn’t you do
Worlds without Worlds
, words
and
pictures?’

‘Yup,’ said the graphically novel parent, shuffling his feet modestly. ‘Lettering’s the hardest part. Olivia, could you join us for pizza at Marco’s?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said, blushing prettily while Dad admired her legs.

Off we went then, into a smiling spring evening, each of us wearing a smile.

Chapter 30

Vroom Vroom

‘Such wonderful pictures!’ says Phyllis. ‘And they’re all done autistically?’

‘New gearbox every time,’ says Alyosha. ‘Also valve job.’

‘Take me through
The Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants
again, Alyosha. Here’s the beginning of it, with an elephant dozing in a hammock slung between two trees.’

‘Is Dimitri Pyotr Elephantovitch, ZZZZZZZ peacefully.’

‘When suddenly …’

‘Suddenly TSADSABAM!’

‘Lightning strikes the tree WHAM!’

‘Flaming fire bursting out SSWEEUUU!’

‘But Dimitri Pyotr is ready for it.’

‘With trunkful of beer squirting SSSSQUIRSHHH! Out goes fire tssss.’

‘And the elephants tell this Beeriodic Fable to …’

‘Elephant childs. Moral of fable: Always have trunkful of beer in case of stricken with lightning.’

‘Why not water, Alyosha?’

‘Is oral tradition, always beer.’

‘Love that fable, Alyosha.’

‘All elephant childs learn this. Now I make for you some borscht, yes?’

Chapter 31

Ingress of Volatore

I want to reach Angelica and I don’t know how to do it. I can only proceed by trial and error. It was in this way that I chanced upon the mind of Alexander Zhabotinsky. An interesting habitat in which the proprietor appeared riding through a jungle on the back of a painted and bejewelled elephant, reclining in a gilded howdah with an attractive woman who was wearing only a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Entertainment was provided by a band of orang-utans in Cossack dress backing a parrot in a sequinned gown who sang, in English, tangos from Finland.

The mahout in charge of the elephant was described in Zhabotinsky’s thoughts as ‘dirtified pubic and counting’. This was of little interest to me until that individual turned and revealed himself to be none other than Vassily Baby, brother to Alexander.

‘Aha! Vassily Baby! Well met!’ Slipping into the mind I found in his head along with a cloud of Stolichnaya, I saw a tall building on which the name Jarley Goode Ltd was inscribed on a brass plate at the entrance.

The name had a moneyed sound, so I flew to the financial district of San Francisco. There stood Jarley Goode Ltd, where Vassily Baby was employed as a certified public accountant. In his thoughts as he studied a database on his computer I found that he had promised his widowed mother to look after his unworldly younger brother. So here was the source of the miserable pittance that kept Alyosha in beets and potatoes.

Recalling what a tight squeeze it had been to get into Vassily’s mind that first time I wondered why it was so easy this time. Was Vassily weaker now? Was I stronger? Drifting through the barren and dusty attic of his largely unused brain I realised that I was much the stronger one. Vassily had never been in love, while I, loving Angelica steadfastly through thick and thin, had acquired mental and spiritual muscle that took me through his feeble defences easily.

It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold. Mine had had plenty of time to cool and I was looking forward to a long-deferred feast. Hovering high above him, I watched him leave his office. He stopped at a nearby delicatessen, bought a sandwich and a six-pack of beer, took them to his Mercedes and, with me following, drove to the Fort Point parking spot I remembered from our last meeting. From there he walked to the overlook, taking with him Stolichnaya from the glove compartment, and sat down to eat his sandwich and drink his beer while waiting, I suppose, for his next beautiful stranger, or possibly hoping for a return engagement with Angelica.

Vassily waited and I waited, hovering high above him while the evening opened to that time that always catches in my throat; the sky was still light but the bridge lamps had come on and those in the houses across the bay. I descended to twenty feet above Vassily’s head – I wanted him to see me grow suddenly huge as I dropped on him from that height.

‘Vassily Baby,’ I yelled down to him, ‘here is Volatore!’

He looked up and screamed but I was on him like an owl on a mouse and there was nothing he could do, my talons had him pinned.

‘Call of nature! Trousers down!’ I commanded, exposing his nether parts to the cool evening air while he whimpered piteously.

Then I thought a little smaller but not too much, and really gave him something to scream about when I achieved ingress by that same passage from which he had evicted me one evening not so long ago. He was moaning, possibly not from pleasure, when I left him there and flew away. Vassily could not have imagined a hippogriff but Ariosto did, so an eventful evening was had by all.

Chapter 32

Double or Nothing?

The doubleness, always the doubleness! And so little certainty. None, in fact. For the present I seemed not to be subject to Ariosto’s words. Wait, I thought, as an almost-idea rose to the surface: a something, a what? The almost-idea of a key, an action, a repositioning of mind, a placing of myself in a new relation to my situation. The bitten biting? The doubled unifying? The lost finding? Hang on!

Orlando Furioso
is fiction, right? Ludovico Ariosto made it up out of his head. OK, it’s a classic. I’m not saying that I, Angelica Greenberg, can write a classic, but maybe I can invent my own story and live into it. Why not? Maybe even octave stanzas. Here goes: