Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 15. Yesterday’s Seguidillas

On the screen of my mind there flicker, like summer lightning, scenes of battle and courtship, chivalry and treachery, life and death in rapidly changing colours, and with them come, as from a great distance, their sounds.

Here am I, Angelica Greenberg of San Francisco, but at the same time I am Ariosto’s Angelica who was chained to a rock to await Orca’s pleasure. Shall I always be this double Angelica? I am for the present out of the action as the story moves elsewhere.

There is a golden ring in my mouth. I put it on my finger and consider what to do next. I am in a clearing in a wood. There is a stream. I don’t want to go anywhere in particular and I really don’t want to do anything but think about Volatore, my imaginary lover who covered me as the griffin covered his mother. Bestiality. Why does my body thrill to the memory of it? I have had him as animal and I could have him as man but I can’t have him as both at once. Not only does my body crave him but my soul also; that’s the mystery of it and I am chained to that mystery as I was to my rock.

I know that he longs for me as I long for him. Obviously we’ve been dropped from Ariosto’s story. What about our own story? We weren’t meant to have our own story, is that it? Against the rules evidently. So where does that leave us?

My mind turned to my fifteen-years-gone father, and on impulse I rang up the KDFC Morning Show and got Hoyt Smith.

‘Good morning!’ he said. ‘How’s this day looking where you are?’

‘Backward.’

‘At?’

‘The past.’

‘ “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” ’

‘Don’t they just.’

‘Where in the present are you calling from?’

‘The Eidolon Gallery.’

‘That’s where there was a show with nudes on Harley Davidsons, right?’

‘Right. Ossip Przewalski.’

‘His paintings stay in the mind.’

‘Yes, and naked women have been moving off the shelves like hotcakes.’

‘I could talk to you all day but the clock is telling me to move on. What’s your pleasure?’

‘Would you play the “Va, pensiero” chorus from Nabucco?’

‘Gladly.’

‘From Carmencita.’

‘To?’

‘Whoever’s listening.’

‘Now for a little Rossini: “Una voce poco fa” from Il barbiere di Siviglia with Maria …’

I switched off. I know it was callas of me but I wasn’t in the mood for anything that light-hearted. I had left my number and Smith promised to phone me to say when Nabucco’s Greenbergs would be hanging their harps on the airwaves.

Thinking my thoughts I drifted through the morning with nothing much doing at the gallery but wandering lookers who didn’t know their ass from third base. In the afternoon I set off for my weekly session with Professor Beard. Not my idea. I had told my doctor, Dr Sugarman, that personal problems were getting me down and he referred me to Beard.

‘He’s English,’ he said. ‘Very advanced. He studied with Karl Kleinkopf who had his analysis with Wilhelm Gutschnerz who had his with Sigmund Freud.’

From what I’d heard, the last time Freud was at the cutting edge of shrinkage was back when Model Ts were rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line. But I didn’t want to disillusion Doc Sugarman so I said OK I’d give Beard a try. Which is why I found myself watching the beardless Prof Beard’s prominent Adam’s apple rise and fall as he spoke. Beard had a weak chin, rimless glasses, no wings.

‘And when did you last see your father, heh heh?’ said the (no) Beard.

‘Why the heh heh?’ I said.

‘Nervous tic, ignore it. When did you?’

‘Last see my father? When I was fifteen, the day before he took off with a lap dancer.’

‘A dancer from Lapland? Where did he find her?’

‘In his lap, where else? What’s this got to do with my reality problems?’

‘I have in mind your fascination with sexual intercourse with animals.’

‘Only my hippogriff, and he’s imaginary.’

‘Quite: an imaginative displacement of your sexual longings for your father,’ said the Prof. ‘We’ve talked about this.’

‘You have,’ I said, ‘but you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Which tree would you suggest?’

By then I was no longer listening.

‘Carmencita’, my father used to call me, ‘Zingarachen’ and ‘My little gypsy’. He loved opera and his favourite was Carmen. He had an album with Agnes Baltsa in the title role and when Mom got sick of hearing it — he always played it so the windows rattled — she threw it out, knowing he’d know he hadn’t lost it but ready to charge him with making it disappear if he said he couldn’t find it. There were tottering stacks of LPs and books in the studio; he had no indexing system, plus treacherous hands that did make things disappear. Regularly. About a third of his working time was spent in searching through the tottering stacks for the urgently needed opera, cantata or book, with cursing, whimpering and shouting. Then he’d buy again the lost treasure. He never lost Carmen though, always kept it on top of the opera stack. He knew Mom had thrown it out so he bought another one that cost three times as much as the one the garbage men had taken away. It was a recognised form of warfare between the two of them and they both knew the rules of engagement.

‘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 stuntman 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.