Angelica Lost and Found (15 page)

He certainly convinced George Frideric Handel, who made a career out of his devotion to that exigent deity. It’s hard to be sure which came first. Did God invent Handel or did Handel invent God? Not forgetting that the same arrangement existed between Him and Johann Sebastian Bach. The whole thing is confusing and I dwell on it because there is more to it than meets the mind.

‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ sings the soprano. From what are we redeemed? Original sin? Unoriginal sin? I think uncertainty is what we are redeemed from by this redeemer whom we have invested with the power to redeem us. The extra-strength placebo. If you think it works, it will.

And, unaccountably, it does. Listening to
Messiah
I feel redeemed.

Chapter 38

Calamari, Hali But Not Really

‘Listen, Angelica,’ said Clancy when I finally stopped cutting him short on the telephone, ‘I know I behaved shamefully the other day, but is that a good enough reason to break off a long-standing friendship? I apologise wholeheartedly and I promise never to turn nasty again.’

‘OK, Clancy, I accept your apology and we can be friends again.’

‘Will you have dinner with me this evening? No improper advances, I give you my word.’

I said yes, and we went to a restaurant in the Mission, Delfina on 18th Street. It was crowded and noisy but cheerful. Although the lighting was not intimate the many ceiling lamps were friendly. Above the voices and the clatter of cutlery I could hear the nimble arabesques of John Coltrane’s saxophone in ‘Like Sonny’, one of the tracks I have at home.

‘It’s nice here,’ I said to Clancy, feeling as I spoke more than a little crazed. This place was here with us in it while somewhere else was a nowhere with Volatore in it.

‘And you haven’t even tasted the food yet,’ said Clancy.

‘You order for me, OK?’

‘Right, but first we need to get something sparkly down our necks.’

My attention wandered while he instructed the wine waiter who returned with a bottle and uncorked it, indicating by his expression that Clancy knew what was what. He poured a taster, and when Clancy nodded he poured the golden brightness for both of us.

‘Here’s looking at you,’ said Clancy.

‘Here’s looking right back,’ I replied dutifully as we touched glasses.

It was a very good dinner, with calamari followed by halibut, more sparkling wines, profiteroles, coffee and grappa. All of it delicious and all of it wasted on me. We took turns speaking but it wasn’t conversation. Reality, even when supported by sensory proof, is all in the mind. And the whole evening, Clancy included, was simply not real. No wings, no air rushing past me, no world unrolling below.

When he took me home he said, ‘Probably you’re not going to ask me up for a nightcap.’

‘I’m sorry, Clancy. It’s a reality thing.’

‘Yeah, right,’ he snarled, and drove away.

I was glad to see him go. I was looking forward to a little Jack Daniel’s, some Padre Antonio Soler with the volume down to a whisper, and a cosy chat with Cunégonde whose name no longer seemed right. This cat was more of an Irene. I’d Frontlined her fleas earlier, so she curled up in my lap and purred her satisfaction until it was time to call it a day. I put her in her basket, said, ‘Goodnight, Irene,’ and went to the bathroom. When I came out in my pyjamas Irene was comfortably arranged in my bed and purring so the windows rattled. A real mezzo but no seguidilla.

‘Move over,’ I said, and drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 39

Lunarity of Volatore

Woe! Woe is me! Neither here nor gone, I wax and wane like the moon. And in the dark of the moon I wait in terror, not knowing if I shall ever reach the full again.

How did I dare to break through the boundaries of literary reality! I am a freak, a metaphysical anomaly, an existential desperado, an impossibility that slipped through the net of not-being. Angelica, let me be with you or let me die!

Chapter 40

Once There Was a King

‘Nothing happens on a Thursday,’ said Olivia. ‘Why don’t we close up and go for a drive?’

‘Where to?’ I said.

‘Ocean Beach.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to see the Giant Camera. I’ve never been to it before. Have you?’

‘No, but I’m not sure a giant camera is what I need right now.’

‘When in doubt, try something new,’ said Olivia. So we shut up shop and off we went.

Olivia’s car is a 1941 Lincoln Continental, white. It’s a classic and she claims it pulls a more intellectual type than the Porsche she used to drive. The car’s name is Lucille.

‘It’s what B.B. King calls his guitar,’ she told me. ‘Seemed right for this baby.’

‘Lucille is in a country song too,’ I said. About leaving her husband with hungry children and a crop still to harvest.’

‘Takes all kinds of Lucilles,’ said Olivia. ‘Same as it takes all kinds of Angelicas. And dads.’

‘Aha! I noticed him scoping your legs.’

‘He’s going to do a portrait of me.’

‘Are you sure it’s your face he’s interested in?’

‘Jesus, Ange, what is it with you today? Why do you have to rain on my parade?’

‘Sorry, Liv. I’m a little down today and I guess I don’t want anybody else to be too up. But can I say something about your upcoming portrait session?’

‘Feel free.’

‘He’ll probably do preliminary sketches and most likely he’ll ask for quick poses, fifteen minutes or less.’

‘So?’

‘To get to the essential you he’ll want you to take your clothes off.’

‘Isn’t that what they all want?’

‘I just thought you should be prepared.’

‘I’m always prepared, Ange. Do you have some kind of problem with this?’

‘Right. Sorry, I’ll back off.’

We were driving through the Richmond. The sea was on our left, apartment blocks on our right. There’s just one kind of urban coastal sunlight, whether it’s in San Francisco or Atlantic City or Civitavecchia. It’s flat, it’s hard, there’s no give to it. Colours recede into glare. Trees look stupefied. Buildings and road signs and billboards spring up like toadstools in the darkness of that light.

‘Have we stopped talking now?’ said Olivia.

‘No, I just don’t have anything to say at the moment.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘That weird guy with the smell who called himself Volatore, he really got to you, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Him and that painting that almost made us fall over, and that business with
Orlando Furioso
– the things he knew. He said he must have read it but he didn’t strike me as that much of a reader. You said you were going to tell me why that whole thing hit you so hard when you found out yourself.’

‘OK, Liv. If I told you I’ve had sex with an imaginary animal, what would your reaction be?’

‘An
imaginary
animal?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What kind of imaginary animal?’

‘A hippogriff.’

‘
A hippogriff
!’

‘Named Volatore.’

‘
Volatore
!’

‘Does repeating everything in italics help you to take it in?’

‘Yes. I’m trying to get my head around this imaginary business. Like, did you name your vibrator Volatore and build a whole fantasy around it?’

‘I haven’t got a vibrator. And I didn’t build a fantasy. He appeared at my window one evening. Emma Kirkby singing “Olimpia’s Lament” lifted him up to my apartment. Solid and real, in 3-D with a funky animal smell. One thing led to another and we had sex.’

‘Wasn’t he too big for you?’

‘He thought himself smaller.’

‘Ange, what kind of a relationship did you have with your father when you were growing up?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Might this Volatore be an imaginative displacement of sexual longings for your father?’

‘Jesus! Do they print that on the backs of cornflakes boxes now?’

‘Come on, Ange I’m only trying to help.’

‘Let’s leave shrinkable matters to our respective shrinks, OK? Can we talk about something else? Or maybe we could have a little music?’

Olivia had installed an up-to-the-minute radio and CD player in Lucille and there was a small rack of CDs fitted to the dashboard: Julian Bream; Peggy Lee; Teresa Berganza in
Carmen
, Alfred Deller singing Henry Purcell; Rossini’s
La cenerentola
, an opera not in my father’s collection nor my own. This was a 1994 recording with the orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera House of Covent Garden, London, Jennifer Larmore as Cinderella.

‘What’s in the player now?’ I asked Olivia.

‘Act I of the one you’re looking at,’ she said. ‘My uncle Leon died and left me his collection. I was just starting to listen to it when I picked you up. It’s on track 3 now.’

I took the booklet out of the box and found track 3:

CENERENTOLA

(con fono flemmatico}

Una voltac’era un re

che a star solo annoio
 …

CINDERELLA

(singing to herself)

Once there was a king

who was bored with being all alone …

‘Oh!’ I said. Because those words all at once seemed to be talking to me. I pushed the start button and the voice of the poor daughter, motherless and discarded by her father, humble among the ashes, came to me pensive and slow. The song, with its little story of a lonely king who searched and searched until he found the pure and innocent girl he wanted – why did it make me cry? To me it was a
Volatore
song of heartbreak and hopeful longing, the essence of it not the comedic lightness that Rossini was famous for but something deep and sad that slipped past him. Was Volatore my lonely king? Of course I may be knitting with one needle, that certainly can’t be ruled out. Olivia tactfully made no comment and kept her eyes on the road.

At Ocean Beach we climbed the hill to Cliff House. Next to the bar there were stairs that went around back and there was the Giant Camera, a structure looking like a huge 35-mm camera lying on its back with its lens pointing at the sky.

‘It’s a camera obscura,’ said Olivia. ‘Leonardo da Vinci invented it. Vermeer and Canaletto used little ones, just a box with a lens in front and a ground-glass screen at the back.’

We waited with other obscurophiles and paid three dollars each as we came out of the sunlight into the camera body. We went through a door and into the dark chamber; before us on the round viewing table was a brilliant circle of brightness in which there were seals basking on a large rock by the dazzling blue Pacific. The camera operator told us what we were seeing as he rotated the lens to the marine headland and back to Cliff House.

We came blinking out into the sunlight.

‘OK, Olivia,’ I said, ‘we went into a dark chamber and saw the world around us very bright. Is that it?’

‘The clarity of the view was terrific!’ she insisted. ‘Maybe you have to go into a dark chamber to see the world clearly.’

I didn’t say anything. I had found the contrast between the darkness and the brightness aggravating, like the tongue going into the cavity of an aching tooth. Unreasonable of me but then I’m not an altogether reasonable person.