‘I always smell like this,’ he said. ‘See you.’ He walked over the brown paper on the floor and out of the door.
The painting was still doing its thing on the easel but neither of us wanted to look at it. His smell lingered awhile.
About five minutes after he left I said to him, ‘Wait!’
‘What?’ said Olivia.
‘Never mind. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be.’
‘What were you going to say to him?’ said Olivia.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘His visit seems to have hit you kind of hard.’
‘It has.’
‘How come?’
I shook my head.
‘I’ll let you know when I find out.’
Chapter 35
Animals with Men’s Eyes
I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself Volatore and the weirdness of his visit. He wasn’t my Volatore; who was he and what was he? Was the idea of Volatore like a garment to be worn by random strangers?
I was hanging on to sanity like a fallen climber clutching an unreliable tuft of grass on the face of a cliff. What about the painting? He’d said that the idea of it had come to him in a dream. What did that mean? Was the dream of tiny, tiny dancing giants waiting around for whoever might fall into it? Was the dream permanent while the dreamers came and went? Was the dream reality? And what we called reality, what was that? Our eyes give us visual data and our brains choose what pictures to make.
My mind was freewheeling through words and images. My hand went to the bookshelves and came back with Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Slips of paper marking pages here and there. I opened the book to ‘On an Old Horn’, read:
The bird kept saying that birds had once been men,
Or were to be, animals with men’s eyes …
I closed the book and watched my hand replace it on the shelf. Animals with men’s eyes.
I slept badly that night. Bad dreams. A blackness that kept swooping and opening in front of me. With the smell of the man who called himself Volatore and whose feet had walked him to where I was.
Next day he did not show up. The painting stood there doing its thing as before.
‘You think he’s coming back?’ said Olivia.
‘No.’
‘What about this thing with the tiny, tiny dancing whatnots? What do you think we can get for it?’
‘Maybe seventy-five thousand.’
‘From?’
‘Mrs Goldfarb.’
‘Should we phone her?’
‘No. She’s about due for a visit. Let her discover it for herself.’
While we and the tiny, tiny dancing giants waited I decided to see if I could track down Volatore Two. From the brown paper of the painting’s wrapping there remained a bit of plastic tape. Cosmo’s Art Supply printed on it. I knew the store because it was near the Green Apple on Clement Street in the Richmond, where I had bought my Orlando Furioso.
Cosmo’s is one of those specialist places where the proprietor seems inseparable from his stock, as though the shelves and their contents had generated a keeper to look after them. Cosmo knows where everything is and remembers infallibly who has bought what and when. He’s a tall man, jowly, bags under his eyes, hair in his ears, walks with a stoop and chain-smokes Golden Virginia roll-ups. There were a few other people examining brushes, tubes of paint and paintbox-easels and taking in the satisfying smell of a place that has what you’re looking for. Cosmo ignored them and came to me.
‘I need a reducing glass,’ I said in order to buy something.
‘Things getting too big for you?’
‘It happens.’
He fetched it, I paid for it.
‘Anything else?’ he said.
‘Do you recall a customer with a rather strong smell?’ I asked him.
‘Is he wanted for something?’
‘Why? Did he look like a criminal to you?’
‘Certainly smelled unlawful.’
‘As far as I know, he’s done nothing he could be arrested for. What did he buy?’
‘Best linen canvas, stretchers, palette, palette cups, palette knife, brushes, turps, Venice turps, stand oil, damar varnish, linseed oil, Windsor Newton cadmium yellow light, cadmium yellow deep, yellow ochre …’
‘Outfitted himself from scratch, did he? How’d he pay? Cash, cheque, credit card?’
‘Cheque: Lenore Goldfarb. Pacific National Bank, four hundred twenty-three dollars and seventy-two cents.’
‘Lenore Goldfarb!’
‘You know her?’
‘She’s one of our best customers at the Eidolon Gallery.’
Cosmo pursed his lips, blew out his breath, and made a hand gesture that signified the smallness of the world.
Mrs Goldfarb is a piece of work. By experts. She’s a statuesque blonde who looks thirty-five and is two or three decades older. Her husband has a chain of shops called Bling It On. The main store is on Post Street and there are others in Los Angeles and Carmel. Lenore wears Prada but mostly she’s a walking display of her husband’s merchandise and the overall effect is that of a chandelier. Some women like her are into tennis and golf pros. With Mrs G it’s artists, whatever kind is available.
I thanked Cosmo for his help and returned to the gallery where I found Mrs Goldfarb standing in front of the tiny, tiny etc.
‘Don’t try to sell me that,’ she said. ‘I already own it. Here’s my receipt.’
I read, in her firm script: ‘Received from Mrs Lenore Goldfarb $50,000 for the painting Tiny, Tiny Dancing Giants in the Dim Red Caverns of Sleep. (Signed) Volatore.’ The signature looked crazed.
‘Have you given him any money?’ she said.
‘No. Where is he now?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know. Sell the painting if you can, I bought it on impulse but it turns my stomach now. You can take your usual commission on the fifty thousand and keep anything you get over that.’
‘How’d you meet him?’ I asked her.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘This guy is involved in my personal life somehow and I’m trying to figure it out.’
‘Involved sexually?’
‘No, metaphysically.’
‘Well, different strokes for different folks, I guess.’
‘Was it sexual with you?’
‘Ladies don’t tell.’ Which meant that it wasn’t.
‘So anyhow, your first meeting with him?’
‘In the Green Apple. I was looking at a two-volume paperback Orlando Furioso when I noticed this smell and there he was. “Ever been to El Paso?” he said.
‘ “No,’ I said. Why?”
‘He got the Italian edition off the shelf and showed me the cover illustration. “They have this painting by Girolamo da Carpi in the museum in El Paso,” he said. “Ruggiero saving Angelica from the sea monster.” He was wearing a very dirty T-shirt with the short sleeves rolled up even shorter to expose his muscular arms. “Riding this guy,” he said as he pointed to the da Carpi hippogriff, riderless, tattooed on his left wrist. “He’s on my left because he got left, but one of these days …” The naked Angelica was on his right wrist. He crossed his wrists so that the hippogriff covered Angelica and leered at me.
‘ “Unusual,” I said. “How’d you come to choose that motif ?”
‘ “Saw it in a tattoo parlour. The tattoo artist had a print of the painting and he told me who the characters were. Right then I could feel how the hippogriff must have felt, so I told the tattooist to leave out Ruggiero when he did my hippogriff.” Once I had that part of the story on me I went to the library and borrowed the two-volume paperback.
‘ “You’re interested in art?” I said.
‘He seemed to think about it for a while, then he said, “I paint a little.”
‘ “Got anything to show me?” I said.
‘ “I could paint something for you,” he said, “but I’ve got nothing to do it with.”
‘ “Why not?” I said. “Are you on the run?”
‘ “Just walking around,” he said. “Do you want to see what I can do or not?”
‘The rest is history. Let me know when you sell the tiny, tinies.’
She glittered and tinkled out and there we were, wondering whether we’d ever find someone to take that painting off our hands. But more than that I was wondering about my Volatore: was he trying to reach me but unable to zero in on me?
Chapter 36
A Sudden Kind of Thing
There’s been a Mehitabel-looking cat hanging around the entrance to my building. I don’t know what she does for a living. Raids the garbage cans, maybe. Only one eye – she looks as if she’s knocked about a bit and been knocked about more than a bit. When I came home today she looked at me with a look that said, ‘Well?’
‘You talking to me?’ I said.
‘I don’t see nobody else here, do you?’
‘So?’
‘So are you taking me in or what?’
‘This is kind of sudden.’
‘Life’s a sudden kind of thing, baby.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you know what I’m saying, OK?’
When I’d been thinking cat I’d been thinking Persian maybe or Siamese, strictly upmarket felines. Now here was this upstart vagrant from nowhere with ideas beyond her station. A hardcore optimist.
‘OK, Cunégonde,’ I said. ‘We’ll give it a try.’
‘What kind of a name is that?’
‘You have to read Voltaire.’
‘Whatever you say, Boss.’ She rubbed against my leg, purring like an outboard motor with a bad cold.
‘You’ve got fleas, right?’
‘Gimme a break, I come from a broken home.’
‘What other kind is there? Wait a minute.’ I found an empty Napa Valley carton and put it in front of her.
‘I can take a hint,’ she said, and jumped into it.
I didn’t want to be seen in the elevator with my Napa Valley cast, so I carried her up the three flights to my apartment. When Cunégonde jumped out of the box I tore up Sunday’s Chronicle into strips, filled the box with my improvised cat litter, primed it and put it in a corner of the kitchen.
‘Your temporary bathroom,’ I said.
She sniffed it and said, ‘Roger that, Boss. Is it chow time yet?’
I spread the ‘Datebook’ of the paper on the floor, filled a bowl with milk, opened a can of sardines, put them in a dish, and said, ‘Your table is ready, Madame. I’m going out for supplies. If the phone rings, don’t answer it. Back soon.’
I went to Noe Valley Pet where I consulted with Annie and bought Frontline for the fleas, cat litter, a litter tray, a basket and blanket for my new friend’s bed, and some catnip for recreational use. I had briefly considered a rubber mouse but rejected it as being an insult to a cat who had probably dined on rats or indeed anything that couldn’t dine on her. I stopped off at Decamere for six cans of Whiskas, and thus laden arrived at my apartment.
‘Honey, I’m home!’ I called as I opened the door.
Chapter 37
Every Valley
Shall be exalted? Every single one, really? KDFC got a Handel on Easter with Messiah, all two hours and seventeen minutes of it. In spite of my outburst on the isle of Ebuda I am not a religious person. Jewish to the core, yes, but that’s my personal identity, nothing to do with God who, being omnipotent, has had the power to imagine Himself into being with all attendant perks and privileges.
He certainly convinced George Frideric Handel, who made a career out of his devotion to that exigent deity. It’s hard to be sure which came first. Did God invent Handel or did Handel invent God? Not forgetting that the same arrangement existed between Him and Johann Sebastian Bach. The whole thing is confusing and I dwell on it because there is more to it than meets the mind.
‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ sings the soprano. From what are we redeemed? Original sin? Unoriginal sin? I think uncertainty is what we are redeemed from by this redeemer whom we have invested with the power to redeem us. The extra-strength placebo. If you think it works, it will.
And, unaccountably, it does. Listening to Messiah I feel redeemed.
Chapter 38
Calamari, Hali But Not Really
‘Listen, Angelica,’ said Clancy when I finally stopped cutting him short on the telephone, ‘I know I behaved shamefully the other day, but is that a good enough reason to break off a long-standing friendship? I apologise wholeheartedly and I promise never to turn nasty again.’
‘OK, Clancy, I accept your apology and we can be friends again.’
‘Will you have dinner with me this evening? No improper advances, I give you my word.’
I said yes, and we went to a restaurant in the Mission, Delfina on 18th Street. It was crowded and noisy but cheerful. Although the lighting was not intimate the many ceiling lamps were friendly. Above the voices and the clatter of cutlery I could hear the nimble arabesques of John Coltrane’s saxophone in ‘Like Sonny’, one of the tracks I have at home.
‘It’s nice here,’ I said to Clancy, feeling as I spoke more than a little crazed. This place was here with us in it while somewhere else was a nowhere with Volatore in it.
‘And you haven’t even tasted the food yet,’ said Clancy.
‘You order for me, OK?’
‘Right, but first we need to get something sparkly down our necks.’
My attention wandered while he instructed the wine waiter who returned with a bottle and uncorked it, indicating by his expression that Clancy knew what was what. He poured a taster, and when Clancy nodded he poured the golden brightness for both of us.
‘Here’s looking at you,’ said Clancy.
‘Here’s looking right back,’ I replied dutifully as we touched glasses.
It was a very good dinner, with calamari followed by halibut, more sparkling wines, profiteroles, coffee and grappa. All of it delicious and all of it wasted on me. We took turns speaking but it wasn’t conversation. Reality, even when supported by sensory proof, is all in the mind. And the whole evening, Clancy included, was simply not real. No wings, no air rushing past me, no world unrolling below.
When he took me home he said, ‘Probably you’re not going to ask me up for a nightcap.’
‘I’m sorry, Clancy. It’s a reality thing.’
‘Yeah, right,’ he snarled, and drove away.
I was glad to see him go. I was looking forward to a little Jack Daniel’s, some Padre Antonio Soler with the volume down to a whisper, and a cosy chat with Cunégonde whose name no longer seemed right. This cat was more of an Irene. I’d Frontlined her fleas earlier, so she curled up in my lap and purred her satisfaction until it was time to call it a day. I put her in her basket, said, ‘Goodnight, Irene,’ and went to the bathroom. When I came out in my pyjamas Irene was comfortably arranged in my bed and purring so the windows rattled. A real mezzo but no seguidilla.
‘Move over,’ I said, and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 39
Lunarity of Volatore
Woe! Woe is me! Neither here nor gone, I wax and wane like the moon. And in the dark of the moon I wait in terror, not knowing if I shall ever reach the full again.
How did I dare to break through the boundaries of literary reality! I am a freak, a metaphysical anomaly, an existential desperado, an impossibility that slipped through the net of not-being. Angelica, let me be with you or let me die!
Chapter 40
Once There Was a King
‘Nothing happens on a Thursday,’ said Olivia. ‘Why don’t we close up and go for a drive?’
‘Where to?’ I said.
‘Ocean Beach.’
‘What for?’
‘I want to see the Giant Camera. I’ve never been to it before. Have you?’
‘No, but I’m not sure a giant camera is what I need right now.’
‘When in doubt, try something new,’ said Olivia. So
we shut up shop and off we went.
Olivia’s car is a 1941 Lincoln Continental, white. It’s a classic and she claims it pulls a more intellectual type than the Porsche she used to drive. The car’s name is Lucille.
‘It’s what B.B. King calls his guitar,’ she told me. ‘Seemed right for this baby.’
‘Lucille is in a country song too,’ I said. About leaving her husband with hungry children and a crop still to harvest.’
‘Takes all kinds of Lucilles,’ said Olivia. ‘Same as it takes all kinds of Angelicas. And dads.’
‘Aha! I noticed him scoping your legs.’
‘He’s going to do a portrait of me.’
‘Are you sure it’s your face he’s interested in?’
‘Jesus, Ange, what is it with you today? Why do you have to rain on my parade?’
‘Sorry, Liv. I’m a little down today and I guess I don’t want anybody else to be too up. But can I say something about your upcoming portrait session?’
‘Feel free.’
‘He’ll probably do preliminary sketches and most likely he’ll ask for quick poses, fifteen minutes or less.’
‘So?’
‘To get to the essential you he’ll want you to take your clothes off.’
‘Isn’t that what they all want?’
‘I just thought you should be prepared.’
‘I’m always prepared, Ange. Do you have some kind of problem with this?’
‘Right. Sorry, I’ll back off.’
We were driving through the Richmond. The sea was on our left, apartment blocks on our right. There’s just one kind of urban coastal sunlight, whether it’s in San Francisco or Atlantic City or Civitavecchia. It’s flat, it’s hard, there’s no give to it. Colours recede into glare. Trees look stupefied. Buildings and road signs and billboards spring up like toadstools in the darkness of that light.
‘Have we stopped talking now?’ said Olivia.
‘No, I just don’t have anything to say at the moment.’
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