‘Yes.’
‘Do you dream about him?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing in the dream?’
‘Sitting on his back while we fly through a greyness.’
‘To where?’
‘Nowhere, I told him that we weren’t getting anywhere.’
‘Is your father alive?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him for a long time and I don’t know where he is.’
‘Do you miss him?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘This hippogriff may very well be a displacement of sexual longings for your father. Have you read my comparative study of the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults?’
He took a book with that title off his desk and thrust it into my hands. On the back cover was a large photograph of him dressed more or less like Wyatt Earp.
‘No,’ I said. ‘What have the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults to do with me?’
‘Imaginative displacement and believing that wishing will make it so.’
He looked at his watch, wrote a prescription and gave it to me.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘It’s a placebo, extra-strength. Take two with water as required.’
‘But a placebo’s all in the mind. The word is the Latin for “I shall please”. If you think it’ll work, it will.’
‘There you go. Get my secretary to book a session for you for next week.’
Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for ‘Everything is OK’? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn’t really think it was and it wasn’t.
Chapter 22
Volatore’s Ghost Dance
What? Where? No, how? How is this that I am … what? A ghost? A revenant? I was Volatore, yes? So what am I now? The ghost of myself? No, this is really too much! To be the ghost of an imaginary self ! If indeed I am a ghost I am not one of those who clanks his chains, no! I dance with rage!
Chapter 23
Isaiah’s Ghost Dance
Dr Levy had compared my ‘imaginative displacement’ to the Ghost Dance of the Southwest Indians. My curiosity was piqued but instead of reading his book I went to Google, which took me to the massacre at Wounded Knee. I cry easily, and I wept as I read the words and images on my computer screen. To this small excitation of phosphors have the Sioux warriors of the plains come at last!
I was still at the office computer when I saw two figures at the gallery doors. By their in-your-face humble posture I recognised them as Jehovah’s Witnesses and went to meet them. One was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. The woman was modestly frumped-up but she was pretty in a way that made me think her name might have been Tiffany or Amber before she went into the witnessing business. The man had painfully sincere horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair.
‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Ruth and this is my father Jonathan.’
‘How do you do,’ I said.
We shook hands.
‘We’ve been going around,’ said Ruthany, ‘asking folks how they feel about the world today. Would you say you feel optimistic about it?’
‘Definitely pessimistic,’ I said.
‘Many people tell us that,’ she assured me without placing a hand on my arm, ‘and Scripture gives us an answer in Isaiah, Chapter 65, Verse 17.’ Her fast-draw Bible appeared open in her hands before my reply had cleared the holster.
I read, ‘For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.’
‘But that’s imaginative displacement,’ I said, ‘and believing that wishing will make it so. It’s a Ghost Dance!’
‘Say what?’ said Ruthany.
‘Wovoka, the Paiute holy man from Nebraska, in 1888 had a vision during a solar eclipse, and he started the Ghost Dance Religion.’ I read off my computer printout: ‘ “He claimed that the earth would soon perish and then come alive again in a pure, aboriginal state, replete with lush green prairie grass, large buffalo herds and Indian ancestors.”
‘He told the Indians how to earn this new reality, with prayer and meditation and especially dancing “through which one might briefly die and catch a glimpse of the Paradise to come”.
‘The government banned the Ghost Dance, the Indians didn’t stop, so on the morning of 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee, the soldiers killed a hundred and fifty Indians and wounded fifty, all of them wearing Ghost Shirts to stop the bullets.’ By this time I was crying again.
‘She’s upset,’ said Jonathan to Ruth. ‘We’ll talk about this another time,’ he said to me as I sat there in my Ghost Shirt, weeping by the rivers of Babylon.
Chapter 24
Pictures in the Sand
Sometimes I listen to gospel songs. I like the way they sound. There’s one called ‘Far Side Bank of Jordan’ in the Alison Krauss and the Cox Family album, I Know Who Holds Tomorrow. Willard Cox sings of leaving this world before his wife and waiting for her by the River Jordan while drawing pictures in the sand.
Listening to that song I see, beyond the Jordan, vast herds of buffalo grazing on the lush green grass. And I see the tents of the ancestors and the smoke of their fires. Frying fish from the Jordan, maybe. Rainbow trout, big ones.
Chapter 25
Broad-Mindedness of Volatore
Angelica, no word for me? After all that has passed between us! Are you perhaps now having doubts because you’re a Jewess and my literary father Ariosto was a Catholic? But love knows no barriers – ethnic differences are nothing to me – both of my birth parents almost certainly worshipped the old gods, as do I. Put aside your doubts – there are no religious obstacles to our union!
Chapter 26
Dim Red Taverns of Sheep
Hoyt Smith rang me up to tell me that my request would go out next morning between eleven and twelve. While waiting for that to happen I acted on a heads-up from Phyllis Stein. She collects the paintings and drawings of autistic savants in the belief that they contain hidden messages. She said there was a fellow in Hunter’s Point who was doing the Periodic Table of the Elements with nude figures in elemental combinations, explicitly. Sadominsky was his name and she wanted me to check him out before she showed her chequebook.
So I schlepped myself out to the address she gave me, an ex-factory of some kind, all girders and skylights and high spaces. The door was open and as I stepped inside the Smell hit me. Yes, that one: Volatore! Holding myself ready for whatever there was to be ready for, I advanced slowly.
‘Well,’ said a husky voice with a heavy accent, ‘you looking for?’
‘Sadominsky?’ I said as I descried a bulky figure in a shadowy corner.
‘Zhabotinsky am.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘Who sent?’
‘Me?’
‘Why?’
‘Aren’t you doing the Periodic Table of the Elements with nude figures?’
‘They say I?’
‘You what?’
‘Automatic?’
‘You mean autistic?’
‘Not am. Eccentric, OK? They always.’
‘Get it wrong?’
‘Not Periodic Table.’
‘Not?’
‘Big not. Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants.’
‘Elephants!’
‘With beer tell fable to.’
‘Whom?’
The smell got stronger as he put his head on one side and looked at me slyly.
‘Winey, winey trancing clients in the dim red taverns of sheep.’
‘Sheep!’
‘Baa.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Zhabotinsky.’
‘Your name’s always been Zhabotinsky?’
‘Only since born. See paintings?’
‘All right, let’s see them.’
We went past his kitchen to get to the paintings. It consisted of the factory sink, a little fridge, a Coleman stove, and a cardboard box for crockery and pots and pans. Some beets in a string bag. The furni
ture was orange crates. No empty pizza or Chinese cartons, his budget clearly didn’t run to such luxuries. His clothes were shabby and he was pretty scruffy. The guy was poor.
There were lots of canvases: he was a full-time painter, so what was Volatore to him or he to Volatore? The smell, I noticed, was gone. The paintings were weird and witty and original, not like anyone else’s.
‘These are very good,’ I said.
‘Talk numbers?’ he said.
‘Big numbers if I can sell you as an autistic savant.’
‘No prob. Big autistic savant, me.’
He probably hadn’t ever sold a picture before. He was a latter-day Albert Pinkham Ryder, a recluse who had uncashed cheques lying around all over the place. Except this one had no cheques, maybe he lived on an allowance from an older brother in Siberia, who knows. Maybe he was a dishwasher in some café. Certainly no part of any artistic community or he’d have learned the ropes and found some buyers. A dyed-in-the-wool loner. I was pretty sure I could do right by him.
‘Phone?’ I said.
He took one out of his pocket; he was at least that much connected to the age of technology and commerce.
‘Got a first name?’ I asked him.
‘Alexander. Alyosha you can.’
‘Call you. OK, Alyosha. Let’s see if we can move you into a higher income bracket.’ I wrote down his cellphone number and said, ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow or the day after and arrange to bring somebody to see your work. Be careful crossing streets and don’t talk to strangers. Do svidaniya.’
He kissed my hand. Blessed are the pure in heart, but it takes more than purity to put blintzes on the table.
But Volatore! My Volatore was trying to reach me! Yes,
One day soon, you and I will merge,
Everything that rises must converge …
Yes, my love! I want to merge with you, I long for the two of us to converge! Was it you who put a coin in my jukebox to play me that old Shriekback track? Clever Volatore!
Chapter 27
Cigarettes and Heart Trouble
I switched on KDFC a little before eleven just to be on the safe side. ‘Carmencita,’ Smith was saying, ‘which has put me in the mood for Georges Bizet’s masterpiece. Carmen is one of those classics every mezzo has to face. Year after year they step up to the plate to see if they can knock it out of the park. Most of them get a base hit but not too many put a home run up on the scoreboard. You’re about to hear one who who belts it like the old Bambino, Babe Ruth himself. Elina Garanca truly does the biz for Bizet: Carmen sings the seguidilla seated in a chair with her hands tied behind her back. She’s knifed another girl at the cigarette factory where they both work and now, under arrest, she is alone with Don José, the dragoon corporal guarding her while she waits to go to prison. Carmen methodically sets out to seduce him, he unties her hands and she’s off like a shot to join her smuggler pals at Lillas Pastia’s tavern.
‘Garanca’s mezzo can do anything and her Carmen could have seduced the whole platoon, let alone a mama’s boy like Don José.’
‘ “Près des remparts de Seville,” ’ she sings,
‘ “Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia.
Nous dansons la seguidille
Et boirons du Manzanilla.
Tra la la la la la!” ’
Her voice transported me to that time, illo tempore, when my father and I danced our seguidilla in the foreign country that is the past. ‘ “Va, pensiero!” ’ I sang, and listened for the Babylon-river Greenbergs to join me. But Hoyt Smith was gone and I was hearing the news, I had missed my message to whoever was listening.
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.
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 Carm
en 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.’
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