Angelica's Grotto

16 Rock of Aged

‘Angelica,’ said Klein as he walked around her in his mind, ‘is not what she first appeared to be; she’s something else. I’m sure that her name isn’t really Angelica and I very much doubt that she’s the one in the photographs. She smells strongly of sweat plus her own funky odour. There is a mystery between us, however ridiculous. In her words on the screen there was someone trying to reach me while keeping her distance, someone talking hard while wanting to be soft, maybe wanting to be rescued from the rock of her hard self. Can I possibly be, in some way as yet unknown to me, her Ruggiero? I’ve not yet heard her voice. Shall I ring her up?’

Looking at Klimt’s nudes he saw Angelica naked except for her horn-rimmed glasses, Angelica saying, as she offered herself, ‘There are many ways of giving pleasure.’ It was only a fantasy of course. ‘Only a fantasy of course,’ he said, ‘but it’s a good one. Maybe she’s looking for father substitutes, wants to see Daddy’s face between her legs.’ Mentally he rubbed his face in her pubic hair, opened her, tasted her.

‘No word from Oannes,’ he said. ‘I suppose he’s just leaving me to it. I haven’t all that much time left and I’ll die hungering for what I’ve never had enough of. What’s the title of that Courbet painting, the one looking up between a woman’s naked thighs? L’origine du Monde. In one of my books there’s a picture of a knickerless virgin lifting her skirt and scaring off the devil with a flash of her naughty bits. And Sheela-na-Gigs on churches — the stone female spreading her vulva to avert evil or promote fertility. It’s where the power is, it’s where life comes out of. Maybe Angelica will rescue me.’ He saw the imagined woman naked again and found her body beautiful, rich and well-fleshed like the one in the Courbet painting. He saw her nakedness close to his face, felt the heat coming from it. ‘They gave Abishag the Shunamite to King David for his bed but he gat no heat from her. Still, he must have liked having her firm young body touching his old one. This woman whose name isn’t really Angelica, what is her voice like? I think she speaks correctly but sensually, like some of those sexy female reporters on the TV news. They almost never show them below the waist but you can hear in their voices L’origine du Monde of them, the moist warmth between their thighs.

‘This is Sunday; I wonder if she’s answering at that number? She’s a night person, I think. I’ll wait till evening. He scanned the parts of the Sunday Times and the Observer he’d not read at breakfast, worked on Klimt a little, and watched Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales on video, running the Lucrezia Borgia part twice. He napped a little, drank a little as the November dusk gathered in, and spoke to himself about the woman who called herself Angelica.

Finally he connected the telephone tape recorder, set it to start recording when he picked up the telephone, and dialled the number she’d given him. He heard it ring three times, four times. ‘I wonder if I’m interrupting anything?’ he said. ‘Maybe she has a live-in girlfriend.’ He imagined the two of them in bed while the phone rang a fifth time.

‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice was not sensual, only clear and academic, the voice of someone correcting proofs for a scholarly journal. Or the voice of a reporter on the Six o’Clock News. The thought of her naked was maddening.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘This is Ruggiero.’

‘Ruggiero, you’re American!’

‘Everybody has to be from somewhere.’

‘You don’t sound seventy-two — you sound much younger.’

‘There’s a young man in me but he can’t get out.’

‘Hasn’t age given you anything to compensate for that?’

‘I enjoyed my mind until my inner voice went.’

‘You mentioned that before. When did it happen?’

‘About a month ago.’

‘What made it happen, do you know?’

He told her about the piece in the Times.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe your thoughts were too much for your inner voice, so it quit on you.’

‘That could well be. Now you’re in my thoughts. I know you’re not the Angelica in the photographs. Can we meet?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want you to be only a voice and a mental image, I want you to be all of you.’

‘What’s your mental image of me?’

‘You know the Courbet painting, L’origine du Monde?’

‘Very flattering. That painting stops just north of the tits. First I’m a naked blonde chained to a rock, then my hair goes dark, I lose the chains, put on a little weight, and get headless.’

‘Not headless — I see you with a clever face and hornrimmed glasses.’

‘Horn-rims do it for you, do they?’

‘They enhance the imagined nakedness of you.’

‘And you want to meet me so you can have the whole actual me in your mind to look at. With my clothes off, I suppose.’

‘If possible.’ He watched the little red light on the recorder fluttering as he spoke.

‘What kind of rock are you chained to, Ruggi?’

‘Rock of Aged. Rock of impotent lust and madness.’

‘Definitely my kind of guy but give me a better reason why we should meet. Convince me.’

‘I feel as if it’s Destiny: mine and yours.’

‘Destiny’s a funny thing — it could well be that we’ll meet and you’ll wish we hadn’t.’

‘Whatever. Can we make it soon?’

‘Tomorrow night — is that soon enough?’

‘Where?’

‘Surrey Street off the Strand. Be at the Arthur Andersen entrance opposite the old Norfolk Hotel and Surrey Steps.’

‘When?’

‘Quarter past ten — 22.15 hours. Does that work for you?’

‘I’ll be there. How shall I know you?’

‘You won’t need to know me; I’ll know you. There won’t be that many old Ruggieros standing in that particular spot at that time on a Monday night. See you then.’ She hung up.

‘See you,’ said Klein to a dead phone. ‘Harold’s Monday night. Destiny? Something’s moving me; it’s like being swept along by a fast-flowing river. Am I going to drown, be broken on rocks — what?’

He poured himself a large Glenfiddich, knowing that it would make him sleepy, and put on Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Sensations. The music was sombre, dark, fateful. He saw Hannelore walking towards him, smiling with the sun behind her shining through her hair. ‘I haven’t seen much of you lately, Hannelore,’ he said. ‘Mostly what I get are memories from further back. Much further back. Well, whatever’s happening now, things will be what they want to be.’ And he fell asleep in his chair.