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.