Madonna of the Apes (23 page)

Chapter Sixty

By the time he reached Bernie’s it wasn’t quite eight o’clock. He’d picked up a container of spaghetti and meatballs on the way over and now, being alone again, recalled that he had other interests. Mandy, on her end of the phone line, agreed to come in an hour. “Though I should pack,” she said. “The plane’s at eleven.”

“Pack first, then come,” Fred said. “I promise, dinner will wait. I’ll make sure you’re up in time in the morning, whenever you say.” He put the plastic container in the fridge, noted that Bernie had a bottle of expendable red wine on the shelf, which he could replace; put plates and forks on the table and settled down on the couch with Mac Curdy’s edition of Leonardo’s
Notebooks.

It was different from trying to corner Suzette, or Mitchell, or Peaslee, or Clay, or the disintegrating carcass of Franklin Tilley. One could sip indifferent red wine and rifle through a book’s index and quietly, innocently, follow the tracks laid down in the written record.

“What was a scudo worth in 1525?” Fred asked himself. “That’s part of the story. What were Clay’s figures? According to the record, when Salai died the
Leda
that has since disappeared was worth 200 scudi. The
Mona Lisa
was worth 100 some, and his little package—we assume his
Madonna
is it, for the sake of argument—was knocked down at 20 scudi? What could you buy for a scudo in 1525? A house? A container of meatballs and spaghetti?”

He began flipping through the book’s index and browsing, and was quickly amazed and beguiled by the extent of the man’s interests as displayed in his writing. Leonardo had something to say, just among the Ws, about water, the weasel, wedges, whirlwinds, the wheel, weights, the will, the wild boar, wineskins, wolves, women, wings, wormwood, the womb, the willow (twelve references), the wasp, walking, wagons, walnuts, washing.

Fred flipped pages and his eye fell on
ermine.
“Let’s see what Leonardo thinks that woman is holding,” Fred said, and found the page, “in the Krakow portrait
Lady with an Ermine.
” There on page 1080 was an entry in a Bestiary, or Book of Beasts, that Leonardo had been compiling until he lost interest.
Moderation
. The ermine because of its moderation eats only once a day, and allows itself to be captured by the hunters rather than take refuge in a muddy lair, in order not to stain its purity.
In the portrait, therefore, Cecilia Gallerani was holding a symbol of her purity—odd emblem for a mistress. Interesting emblem for a mistress.

The reference showed, though, that Leonardo could think like a medieval man, tightly inside someone else’s box. That was an old fable, based on no observation at all, but rather on the way a fable could persist unexamined for centuries. In the same collection, Leonardo wrote of the pelican that, if it finds its young killed by a snake in the nest, it opens its heart with its beak, showers them with blood, and so restores them to life.

“But he couldn’t have believed that,” Fred objected. “Is he putting fables off to one side, in their own category, apart from all scientific observation? He knows, if he’s looked, that a salamander does in fact have digestive organs; that it does not live by eating and breathing fire; nor can it live in fire. He knows it can’t be true, yet he writes it. His whole Bestiary is lies and old wives’ tales, and the corrupt morality fables of illiterate priests. And there’s not,” he grumbled, “not an ape in it.”

In fact the ape and monkey showed up only in the references Clay had cited earlier, which had to do with Leonardo’s dissections for comparative anatomy.

“For reading the implication of those apes, we are left to our own devices,” Fred complained. “If a painting can mean anything, how do we get a line on what Leonardo thought his
Madonna
meant?” Even the fig, which seemed so promising in its suggestion of nourishment, fecundity, sweetness, and incipient rot, showed nowhere in Leonardo’s recorded words in a way that might signal a symbolic importance. There was only a single reference to the fig, and that came from the man’s own observation,
The lowest branches of the trees which have big leaves and heavy fruits, such as cocoa palms, figs and the like, always bend toward the ground. The branches always start above the leaf.

For as many years as he had lived in this world, and as many places as he had been, Fred had never looked to see, and could not say now five hundred years after Leonardo had made the claim, if it was true whether in trees with big leaves and heavy fruit, the branches always started above the leaf. Never mind whether it mattered.

No wonder Leonardo finished so little. He’d be in the middle of something else and ask himself, for whatever reason, if the branch of the tree always starts above the leaf? The only way to know was to find out. To look. At everything.

***

Nothingness has no center,
Leonardo had written,
and its boundaries are nothingness.
The truth of this observation Franklin was now experiencing. But the experience was wasted on him if there was nothing left to experience it with. There might be no ham sandwich waiting for Franklin; but Fred had meatballs with spaghetti still before him.

“An important distinction,” Fred remarked. “Even Leonardo would appreciate the difference between no ham sandwich and a dish of meatballs and spaghetti.”

Chapter Sixty-one

Fred was still reading when Bernie’s doorbell rang.

Mandy’s hair sparkled with rain. She’d been longer than she intended, talking on the phone. “Cold feet,” she explained. “On the part of the bride. She’s out there already, doing the cocktail parties with the friends of Mummy’s, and trying to pacify the priest and all, and she’s about ready to chuck it.”

Fred hung her transparent raincoat in the garage and motioned her upstairs. She was in jeans and a yellow sweatshirt spotted with green paint, oddly festive.

“Where
do
you live,” she asked.

“Cross between a house in Charlestown and ‘no fixed abode,’ Fred confessed. “Until something makes me settle down.”

She looked doubtfully around Bernie’s space, prowling the walls while Fred dumped their dinner into a saucepan and started it warming.

“Slowly,” she called from the wall where Bernie kept the sound system. “Put the burner on warm or you’ll burn it. Your friend has enough Dvořák to just about sink that subject.”

“You aren’t vegetarian are you?” Fred asked, pouring wine for her.

“It depends what I’m passing up,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. On meatballs I take a pass. More for you.”

Fred raised his glass and let it clink against hers. “You and Leonardo da Vinci,” he said.

“He’s vegetarian?”

“Was,” Fred said. “I’m reading his notebooks almost as we speak. I quote, not accurately.
If you are, as you claim, the king of the beasts—
[he’s talking to us humans]
you are the greatest beast of all of them—why don’t you help them? Then they can give you their young so that you can gratify your palate. For the sake of your palate, after all, you have undertaken to make of yourself a tomb for all of the animals.
It makes you think twice about the genus
meatball.
”

“Filthy day. Filthy night,” Mandy said, gesturing toward the window as they sat to the meal Fred had dumped from the saucepan, sorting all the meatballs onto his plate and giving Mandy the bulk of the pasta.

“After we eat, if you want to, I thought we might make love, as long as it’s raining,” Fred said.

“That’s where he sleeps, your friend?” Mandy asked. “On the couch? Does it pull out?”

“I’ll have to check,” Fred said.

When the time came, it turned out that Bernie’s couch was no more than a couch, though Fred found sheets to arrange on it as best he could.

“Never mind,” Mandy said. “I should go home anyway, after. Seduce me. Undress me. Talk to me of Leonardo.”

Fred put a hand through her hair and embraced her before he started working at her clothes. “Leonardo knew about anticipation also,” he said. “
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end,
he wrote.” Fred maneuvered the sweatshirt over her head. This exposed the snake tattoo, old friend now, and a necklace she wore, surprise, made of red beads that glowed like glass. She was wearing a sheer garment for which women must have a name. It covered the torso and tucked in at her waist.

“Tell me more,” she invited.

“Bad habit of mine, I know,” Fred said. “I happen to remember things I read.”

The skirt of the sheer garment did the job of a very short skirt below, as appeared when the jeans were lowered. It was as white as it was transparent, showing the narrow pants underneath, and the bra Fred would still have to figure out. With his large hands he stroked Mandy’s body through the garment until he found a way to peel it down and let it fall to her feet. Mandy helped no more than politeness required. “Yes?” she demanded.

Fred studied her naked back next, looking for the secret of the bra’s engineering. Easy for Leonardo! “Here’s one of Leonardo’s maxims,” Fred said, “He’s a genius. Everyone knows it. Do a survey among all people living in the known world, more of them know Leonardo than Julius Caesar.
Dust makes damage.
How can you argue with that? We should carve it over the post office door.”

Mandy chuckled absently. The movement of her rib cage helped Fred find and unhitch the mechanism that held the bra’s ends together in back, and he relieved her of the garment, dropping it on the table behind her, but at a distance from their plates. The breasts were firm and round and soft, their nipples pinker than they might be because the red glass of the beads around her neck was near them.

“The necklace?” Fred asked.

Mandy shook her head and leaned into him. “It’s not in the way.”

Fred slid his hands down her smooth back again, under the pants, and snaked them downward. “
Movement tends toward the center of gravity,
” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll lift you out of the rest of this.”

“I don’t mind if you’ll stop quoting Leonardo,” she said. “Three’s a crowd.” She’d gone quite serious. Fred lifted her out of the puddle of clothing and held her while she pried her shoes off, one foot at a time. He held her as if he were rescuing her from the burning building.

She whispered, “Isn’t it nice that it takes a long time? Put me down now. Take your things off. No, I will.”

Fred had laid her elegant body down on the couch and, his hands free for the first time, had begun with his shirt buttons. Blue Oxford cloth. Get it done. Mandy swung around, sat up, and her hands went straight to his belt.

“What was that line about the center of gravity?” she asked, finding his.

“You told me to stop quoting.”

“Just the one line again. I liked it.”

“
Movement tends toward the center of gravity,
” Fred repeated.

“It’s true,” Mandy said. “Take your own shirt off. I’m busy.”

Fred let the shirt fall behind him and stepped out of his shoes.

Chapter Sixty-two

“Some of Leonardo’s maxims,” Fred said, after several minutes had elapsed, “if I may?”

“There’s no turning back now,” Mandy said. “Not for me. It’s nice what you’re doing. If you want to talk, talk. Just keep…good.”

“Some of his maxims are easy enough to follow,” Fred said. “Even self-serving. Such as this one:
I never weary of being useful.
”

“No fear,” Mandy encouraged him. “You’re being useful.”

“So I didn’t give it much thought,” Fred continued. “Other sayings he seemed not to finish, like most of the rest of what he started. Until now I thought they didn’t pertain to anything.”

“Example?”

“
Not to leave the furrow,
” Fred quoted.

Her laughter was eclipsed by a gasp.

“More?” Fred asked.

“The fucking couch is too small,” she said. “There’s a crick—yikes!—We’ve gotta try something else or I’ll break a hip.”

“
Every obstacle yields to effort,
” Fred said, rising from her.

Mandy stood, her hands on her hips. “There’s the table or the floor,” she said. “I vote for the floor.”

The telephone rang.

Fred stripped the bedclothes from the couch and picked up its three generous pillows. “Compromise,” he offered.

“Who cares about sheets?” Mandy demanded.

Laid on the floor, the pillows gave generous room for Fred to lie beside her.

The telephone stopped ringing. “You don’t have to get that?” she asked.

“They’ll call back if it’s important.”

Fred stroked her torso as she snuggled against him, one arm under her head and neck, the two of them getting past the interruption. The earrings she wore matched, with their beads, the red necklace. Her dark hair streamed across the sheets. She was alive in Fred’s hands and arms until she cried out, and cried out again, and began crying with surprisingly hot and copious tears. “I’m so sorry.”

***

“Do I dare use your friend’s bathroom?” Mandy asked after a while, tracing an idle finger above Fred’s breastbone and letting it wander toward his groin. Her fingernails were pink, not with paint, but on their own, but less pink than her nipples. “It’s great not to answer the phone,” Mandy said. “I love sometimes on a Sunday morning to just lie in bed and not answer the phone.”

“It’s a luxury,” Fred said. “Maybe a bit anti-social. My guy, who I’m working for now, doesn’t have an answering machine. Why did you say ‘I’m sorry’? What’s the trouble? You have nothing to be—what you’re doing right now could get us in trouble again. To quote—may I quote?”

“Good God. Do you remember everything you read?”

“For a while. Then it goes away. Otherwise I’d have a head like a junk shop. You’ll hate me, since I forgot your name, and that’s important to me. It’s trivial, this other stuff, what I remember. Leonardo tended to think in fables, but he could also be an acute observer. Yes, I foresee trouble on its way.”

“While we’re waiting for trouble,” Mandy said, beginning to concentrate, “you might as well tell me your fable.”

“More an observation Leonardo made,” Fred said. “About the anatomical specimen currently under observation.
Sometimes it confers with the human intelligence but it also sometimes has an intelligence of its own. In spite of what a man wants, it can be obstinate and go its own way. Sometimes it moves by itself, whether the man wants that or not. The man can be asleep, it’s awake, and vice versa.
He goes on and concludes that this creature has a life and intelligence of its own, separate from the man. An independent beast.”

“A pet,” Mandy said. “I know, a pet monkey, with fur.”

“Now you mention it,” Fred said. “Then Leonardo goes on that therefore men shouldn’t hide them under their clothes, but instead…”

“Not that easy to hide anyway,” Mandy said. “I can try. Stay where you are. Pay no attention. I’ll…”

Deftly, she straddled him.