‘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.
Chapter 16
For Whom the Bell Clangs
It clanged for me as the car made its stops and starts on the way to Clancy’s, tolling out the years of my growing up. All in a jangle of tintinnabulation: Dad gone; Berkeley; Michael; Mom’s death. She’d boasted of being out for a good time but without the constant excitement of her ongoing war with Dad the future was too much for her to swallow and she got cancer of the oesophagus. So why did I buy the gallery? Why do people climb mountains of guilt, cross deserts of regret and travel long roads of too-late to give to the dead the love they couldn’t give the living? Because that’s what people do. While Dad was there Mom was just somebody at the other end of the table; my childhood scrapes and bruises were for Dad to kiss better and my report cards for him to admire. Lydia Katz continues to sell well: her paintings look good on any wall and she’s a lot cheaper than Bonnard.
I have always kept a journal, and at college I did a writing course and was told by Oscar Glock, who taught the course, that I had talent. He was not, however, terribly impressed by talent.
‘Talent,’ he said, ‘is cheap. The woods are full of talented people who will never do doodly-shit because they haven’t got the cojones to go in over the horns.’
Mr Glock was given to bullfighting and boxing metaphors. He was shorter than Hemingway but he had a full Hemingway beard and he had published a novel called Suit of Lights.
The gallery leaves me plenty of time for writing and I may very well have the cojones but I’ve not yet found the right horns to go in over. Of course my imaginary animal friend keeps me pretty busy one way and another but once I get my head sorted I’ll be better organised. Probably.
Chapter 17
From Verse to Bad
It was the middle of a Thursday morning, so there was less of a crush than usual and Himself was sitting at a corner table reading Orlando Furioso with a coffee at his elbow while Javier tended bar.
Clancy Yeats is about forty, ten years older than I am. He’s a big man who could be described as ruggedly handsome. He looks a bit like an actor whose name I don’t remember, the one who often plays the male lead’s best friend who doesn’t get the girl. He came to SF from County Antrim a while back on a visit and stayed on. He inherited enough money to buy the bar and here he is. His wife left him three years ago and now he’s divorced and has a teenage daughter he rarely sees. The last I heard she was living in Rome with her art teacher.
‘Hi, Angie,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you recommended this. Ariosto’s a real page-turner. His heroes and their journeys far/All come to life here in this bar,/With beauties needing to be saved/And many dangers to be braved.’
‘It’s catching,’ I said. ‘Those tales of his that I have read/Have made big trouble in my head:/I don’t know if I’m here or there/or drifting somewhere in the air.’
‘Tell me what the problem is,’ said Clancy. ‘That’s what I’m here for. The tables and the chairs and the bar are just a front.’
‘Have you done Canto Eye Vee yet?’ (I always speak Roman numerals as their alphabet letters.) ‘The part where the hippogriff is described?’
‘I have that.’
‘Does he seem real to you?’
‘Yes, in the same way as selkies or werewolves. Maybe you should have a drink, just to settle the dust.’
‘You’re right as always, Clance. Let me have a Peroni and a double Laphroaig.’
‘A boilermaker on an empty stomach: I’m assuming you’ve had no lunch.’
‘Right again. Maybe Charlie can do me a steak sandwich.’
Charlie, who was lounging in a chair by the window, waved to me and fired up his grill. He was a taciturn man with a hoarse voice and he looked piratical, always with a kerchief round his throat.
‘All right, Angie. Tell me about the hippogriff.’
‘His name is Volatore.’
‘I didn’t see that in the book.’
‘It’s not in the book.’
‘Then where’d you find it? Google? Wikipedia?’
‘He told me it.’
‘Ah! You haven’t a drop taken already, have you?’ His head a little bit on one side as he looked at me. Askance.
‘Cold sober, Clance. Scout’s honour.’
‘What were you on when he told you?’
‘Only a little Laphroaig to steady my nerves – not enough to get me drunk.’
‘Where were you at the time?’
‘In my apartment. I had Monteverdi on the Bose, Emma Kirkby singing “Olimpia’s Lament”. The music lifted him up to my window.’
I could feel that first encounter with Volatore becoming huge in me, wanting to burst like a watermelon dropped from a tenth-storey window. I knew I’d be sorry but I couldn’t stop.
‘You were saying?’ said Clancy.
‘I asked him in for a cup of tea.’
‘How’d he get in?’
‘Through the window.’
‘And him quite a big fellow with hooves and talons and wings and all.’
‘He thought small.’
> Charlie brought my sandwich over and I sipped my beer.
Clancy waited until I had somewhat appeased my hunger and my thirst.
‘I’m all ears,’ he said then, looking prescient.
‘I gave him tea in a bowl, because of his beak.’
‘As one would. Go on.’
‘I don’t know what came over me …’
‘Take your time, choose your words carefully.’
‘I wanted him to kiss me.’
‘Not a very soft kisser, with that beak.’
‘He offered to change to a man-shape, but I told him I wanted him as he was.’
‘Wanted him as in “I want you”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hang on a moment,’ said Clancy.
He went to the bar, came back with a bottle of Bushmill’s and a glass, poured himself a stiff one, drank it down, and while catching his breath indicated to me that I should continue.
‘Well of course he was too big for me so I asked him to think himself and his business smaller.’
Why was I telling Clancy all this? Did I want to make it irrevocably real by reliving it before him? Did I want to word myself naked under a beast to excite him and myself? Was I compelled by some inner demon to commit this act of betrayal? Yes to all of the above as I continued, ‘And when the size was right I …’
‘You don’t have to say it all out.’
‘Yes, I do because we’re talking about a reality that’s not the usual thing. I was only wearing panties and a bra so I took those off and got down on all fours and he covered me the way his father the griffin had covered his mother the mare.’
‘His mother the mare …’ He lingered over the words. ‘How long ago was this?’
‘I don’t know what kind of time we’re talking about.’
‘What I mean is, did he make you pregnant?’
‘Not in any way that ends up in the maternity ward.’
‘What other kind of pregnant is there?’
‘Mental, Clancy. All in the mind.’
‘Leave any marks on you? I’d think his talons … unless they were all in the mind too.’
‘There were some scratch marks but they’ve faded by now so I can’t show you any evidence. Do you not believe me?’
A pause while Clancy Bushmilled himself again and I went on to my second boilermaker. The light through the window was very golden, and otherwise full of memories forgotten and remembered and there came to mind a Latin phrase from a book by Mircea Eliade, ‘in illo tempore’, ‘in that time’.
‘I believe you, Ange – it’s just that I don’t know how to get my head around this other reality. I keep seeing you naked on all fours and him on top of you …’ He trailed off into silence and he was blushing.
‘Does it excite you?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Me too.’
Nobody said anything for a moment while the tourist influx murmured and drank its drinks. Then we looked at each other, nodded, and went upstairs.
When we had our clothes off Clancy blushed again and I read his mind.
I got down on all fours and said softly, ‘Here I am. Take me.’
Afterwards, lying in his arms, I saw that he was crying.
‘What is it, Clance?’ I said, and kissed him.
‘I can’t describe it exactly,’ he said. ‘There’s a great sadness come over me, what a little short thing it is to be alive and so strange. Maybe it’s just the whisky.’
‘No, it’s the sense of loss, something lost so far back we can’t remember it.’
‘Were you thinking of Volatore while we were doing it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it better with him? Did it give you that thing that was lost so far back?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Clance. It was what it was.’
‘And you’re hugging the memory to yourself, not to lose the goodness of it, yes?’
‘Please, Clancy!’
‘What happened after he climbed off you? Did you fly away together?’ His face as he said that was not the face of anyone I wanted to be with and I felt thoroughly ashamed, as I had known all along I would be.
‘That’s as far as this conversation goes,’ I said.
I got dressed while he watched me in a dirty-minded way, and left.
‘Come back soon,’ he called to my departing back. ‘You can be on top next time.’
Chapter 18
The Eight O’Clock to Katerini
There is a jukebox in my head. Coloured lights, bubbles going round into vanishment and reappearing to go round again. I have no choice in what songs are played. Sometimes a lissom cheerleader inserts the coins, sometimes a tattooed truck driver; the mystic arm rises and descends with the silent disc which then blossoms into song and I dance or cry or shake my head accordingly.
This time it is a woman in black who feeds the Wurlitzer. The mystic arm rises, descends, and an empty railway station arises in the November evening around Agnes Baltsa as she sings in her native Greek ‘ “To treno fevgi stis okto” ’, ‘The train leaves at eight’. The woman in black remembers, will never forget the eight o’clock to Katerini and a lost love. This is not Baltsa wearing the borrowed language of Bizet; here, giving her whole heart to this little story in the tongue she was born into, she sings me the empty platform, the gathering November night and the departure of love and I cry accordingly.
Chapter 19
A Little Way on the Tin Globe
I phoned my partner Olivia to tell her that I’d not be at the gallery that day, and I went to the overlook at Fort Point to sit and think about things. The sky was blue, the sunlight danced on the water, ships and boats came and went. Round and round in my mind went this time, that time, all time. In illo tempore. My childhood. Telling the bees. My grandmother told me about that. Her husband had joined the International Brigade in 1936 and went off to the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes when she and I were alone and she’d had too much to drink she’d talk about that time.
‘He said it was something he had to do,’ she said. ‘I told him there were things he had to do right here, like fix the hole in the roof of the barn. He did it and then he went off to fight fascism.’
She was a good-looking old woman in a plough-that-broke-the-plains kind of way but her face became almost girlish as she called up the past.
‘Those days seem a long way back,’ she said. ‘The images were brighter, the smells and flavours stronger than now: the taste of honey in the comb, the smell of it and the feel of the wax on my tongue, the stickiness all around my mouth and on my fingers. Sweet, like the golden time that passes; the pink apple blossoms drifting down on the hives in the summer orchard.
‘Before he left he told me to tell the bees. “Be very careful to say that I’ve just gone away for a while but I’m not dead. If they think I’m dead they’ll leave our hives and swarm somewhere else.”
‘ “You’re very superstitious all of a sudden,” I said to him.
‘ “Traditions matter,” he said, “and bees are very serious people.”
‘We had a tin globe on the desk where we did the accounts,’ said my grandmother. ‘On it Spain was only a little way from North America but on the real globe it was a world away from Bakersfield where we lived then. I tried to imagine that war but I couldn’t, it was a whole different reality.’ Her face looked so young!
‘I told the bees and they stayed with us until the summer of 1938. I saw them swarm away out of the orchard and I cried a lot but we heard nothing until a year later when one of his comrades sent us a letter saying that my man had died at a place called Teruel. I couldn’t find it on the globe but it was in the big atlas.
‘There was a plaster bust of Lenin on top of the grandfather clock in the front room. I was dusting it when we got the letter and I knocked it on to the floor where it smashed into smithereens. “Well,” I said, “I guess it was your time to go.” ’
Why does her story come to me so vividly now? Back w
hen she told it I had never heard of a hippogriff. What’s the connection? Then it rises like a golden carp glimmering. The bees. They existed in their time and space in our orchard but they partook of that other time and space where men with bolt-action rifles were saving the world. Telling the bees was folklore but it worked with real bees.
Two kinds of reality – it happens.
Chapter 20
Home Thoughts from Aloft
I began to dream of Volatore. Always we were flying in a greyness. Not like fog but the absence of everything. I felt the heat of his body between my bare legs and the rhythmic tensing of his great wing muscles but there was no sound. I looked for a rift in the silence and the greyness through which I might see the world but there was none.
I said, ‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.’
No answer and the silence woke me up.
It was true enough that we weren’t getting anywhere but I could feel that the connection between us was unbroken. And Volatore was still flying, I was sure of that. Lost perhaps and lonely but still flying. Think of me, Volatore! Think of your Angelica!
Chapter 21
In Loco Wyatt Earpis
With the stress of two realities, one of which was not officially allowed to non-crazies, my head was badly in need of reorganisation. I didn’t think I was crazy but I wasn’t too sure of my sanity. I had abandoned Professor Beard and I was with a new psychotherapist, recommended by Olivia, Dr Levy. He was short, bald, wore very thick glasses and a Wyatt Earp moustache.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the problem?’
‘I seem to be living in two kinds of reality,’ I said. ‘Two kinds of time. Do you know what a hippogriff is?’
‘Yes, it’s an imaginary animal.’
‘Well, I have a kind of relationship with one.’
‘Sexual?’