Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 28. Pheromonal

Lydia Greenberg, née Katz, had a brother. Leo, who is still with us and in good health, had a daughter, Phyllis, who is Mrs Irving Stein. Mr Stein is rated by Forbes one of the ten richest men in America. He built his fortune from the bottom up by patenting and marketing the Stein EZ-Sit, an ‘intimate-size’ ring cushion that is worn inside (loose-fitting) clothes and eases the discomfort of haemorrhoids and other afflictions of the down-belows.

Phyllis Stein, probably around forty, give or take, rejoices in a figure both firm and compact, and her face isn’t too bad when she stops frowning and puts on her glasses. She keeps The Kama Sutra and her vibrator under her silk undies in the Fornasetti chest of drawers in her separate bedroom.

Although she has never performed, she has studied modern dance with a teacher who studied modern dance under Martha Graham. As Phyllis moves about the house she does Martha Graham contractions while making little tongue-clickings that irritate her white-haired husband who walks with an ebony-and-ivory stick that cost more than the cook earns in six months.

‘If you’ve got stomach cramps why don’t you take something for it?’ he rasps, pausing for a fit of coughing.

Phyllis ignores him while wishing she had a house savant who could give her a good clear estimate on how soon she might expect to wear the black Versace (waiting in the Fornasetti) of her grieving widowhood. A short course of too much sex might send Irving out of this vale of tears like laundry down a chute but it’s been a long time since Irving was up to even minimal slap-and-tickle, and as yet Phyllis has no Plan B.

What about the hidden messages in her collection of drawings and paintings by autistic savants? Forget it. Concentrating on them until her eyes bulge out of her head and her brain is pulsing like a jellyfish, she can extract nothing from them but squadrons of meaningless numbers and drifts of recondite architectural detail.

So, when Angelica phones, a little trickle of saliva runs down Phyllis’s chin, and Chow Yun Thin, her driver, is holding open the door of the raspberry-ripple Lamborghini before you can say Chow Yun Fat. He puts the pedal to the medal, and as streets and houses and her life flash by she feels the fickle finger of Fate doing the right thing for once and she senses that this day is not going to be like other days.

Arrived at the girders and skylights and high places, she is drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, to the shadowy corner from which issues the Siberian bass of Alexander Zhabotinsky.

‘You have,’ he bellows softly.

‘Come,’ she breathes.

‘Big autist me,’ he says. ‘Vroom. Four on the.’

‘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.