Shylock Is My Name

NINE

Among D’Anton’s more lovable qualities, in Plurabelle’s view — and he was a man made of lovable qualities — was his capacity to listen. Especially to listen to her. She had only to say she wanted a thing — for herself or for a friend — for D’Anton to seek ways to get it.

And so it was with a Jewess for the footballer Gratan Howsome. The minute she learned he had a thing for Jewish women, Plurabelle decreed that they should find him one. And Plurabelle had only to decree — especially in a matter that bore on Gratan’s felicity — for D’Anton to act.

Even as they were speaking he remembered being struck by the appearance of a student he had encountered at the Golden Triangle Academy, an institution on which, in his most princely manner, he bestowed time, delivering occasional public musings on beauty and renunciation. Her looks weren’t pleasing to him personally but, with his gift for altruistically entering into a foreign aesthetic, even a limited foreign aesthetic, he was able see how they could be pleasing to someone else — like Thai scorpion soaked in whisky or black bed linen. Something about her, perhaps even something about her family name, to which he wouldn’t have paid much attention, lodged in his memory. He smiled at Plurabelle’s good-hearted suggestion and tapped his nose. “Leave it with me,” he said, more spiritedly than Plurabelle could remember him having said anything.

—

Plurabelle liked her from the beginning, immediately forgetting she’d been procured for the footballer. “You remind me of me when I was your age,” she told the girl, in all likelihood remembering the time before she’d had work done on her face.

She loved the idea that the girl was studying with a view eventually to being a performance artist and expressed the hope that she would one day perform at one of her weekends. “We could put a stage up for you,” she said.

Modestly, the girl explained that a performance artist didn’t employ a stage. Hers was, or would be, a different sort of performance, subverting expectations of what performance space was, even violating what people normally thought of as their space. Art should go where it was not normally welcomed, she said.

Plurabelle listened to her in wonderment. So precocious. So lustrous and bejewelled, though the bejewelled part was an effect of her natural beauty only. “Well your art will always be welcome here,” she said. “My house is yours, violate it as much as you like. I will invite some important people to be violated by you.”

“I’m a long way from being ready for that, Plurabelle,” the girl had replied with a becoming blush.

“Call me Plury,” Plury said.

The girl thought the sky above her head would burst, it had so many stars in it.

It was Plurabelle’s suggestion, one evening, that they dress for dinner as boys. The girl was uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure how she’d look. But she went along with it. Plurabelle had wardrobes of dressing-up clothes.

“Suits you,” Plurabelle said scandalously, knotting a scarf around her neck and putting a cap on her head. “I feel we’re brothers.”

Gratan Howsome, who of course was at the table, was smitten at once.

Thereafter, they did this often. It always ended the same way, with Plurabelle smothering the beautiful girl with Levantine lips in rapturous kisses, laughing wildly, and calling her “My little Jewboy.”

And with Gratan burning into her with his eyes.

—

This was how, unknown to Simon Strulovitch, his daughter Beatrice became an intimate of Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine.