Angelica Lost and Found

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.