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 Carmen 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.’