‘I have in mind your fascination with sexual intercourse with animals.’
‘Only my hippogriff, and he’s imaginary.’
‘Quite: an imaginative displacement of your sexual longings for your father,’ said the Prof. ‘We’ve talked about this.’
‘You have,’ I said, ‘but you’re barking up the wrong tree.’
‘Which tree would you suggest?’
By then I was no longer listening.
‘Carmencita’, my father used to call me, ‘Zingarachen’ and ‘My little gypsy’. He loved opera and his favourite was Carmen. He had an album with Agnes Baltsa in the title role and when Mom got sick of hearing it — he always played it so the windows rattled — she threw it out, knowing he’d know he hadn’t lost it but ready to charge him with making it disappear if he said he couldn’t find it. There were tottering stacks of LPs and books in the studio; he had no indexing system, plus treacherous hands that did make things disappear. Regularly. About a third of his working time was spent in searching through the tottering stacks for the urgently needed opera, cantata or book, with cursing, whimpering and shouting. Then he’d buy again the lost treasure. He never lost Carmen though, always kept it on top of the opera stack. He knew Mom had thrown it out so he bought another one that cost three times as much as the one the garbage men had taken away. It was a recognised form of warfare between the two of them and they both knew the rules of engagement.
‘Listen to that mezzo,’ he would say. ‘It’s like silk but Baltsa puts a razor edge on it when the scene calls for it. If I could draw and paint the way she sings I’d draw and paint much better than I do.’ And he’d sing the seguidilla off-key:
“Près des remparts de Seville,
Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia …”
and dance me around with a lot of stamping and a rose in the buttonhole of his shirt if one was available. While Mom ran the vacuum cleaner to drown out the noise. So they each got some satisfaction.
Dad took nothing with him when he left, so I ended up with the tottering stacks. I listened through the operas and indexed them. It was nothing from Carmen that attached itself to my AWOL father, but the famous chorus from Nabucco, ‘Va, pensiero …’ ‘Fly, thought, on wings of gold …’ as the Jews, all of them named Greenberg, were led away into captivity. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows and tried to figure out whose fault it was.
‘Shit happens,’ said my best friend Rosie Margolis. ‘It’s called a mid-life crisis. My dad did the same thing.’
‘Lap dancer?’ It was Rosie’s mother who had reported the breaking news of Dad’s Entführung from the domestic hearth.
‘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 welclass="underline" 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.