‘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.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘That weird guy with the smell who called himself Volatore, he really got to you, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Him and that painting that almost made us fall over, and that business with Orlando Furioso — the things he knew. He said he must have read it but he didn’t strike me as that much of a reader. You said you were going to tell me why that whole thing hit you so hard when you found out yourself.’
‘OK, Liv. If I told you I’ve had sex with an imaginary animal, what would your reaction be?’
‘An imaginary animal?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of imaginary animal?’
‘A hippogriff.’
‘A hippogriff!’
‘Named Volatore.’
‘Volatore!’
‘Does repeating everything in italics help you to take it in?’
‘Yes. I’m trying to get my head around this imaginary business. Like, did you name your vibrator Volatore and build a whole fantasy around it?’
‘I haven’t got a vibrator. And I didn’t build a fantasy. He appeared at my window one evening. Emma Kirkby singing “Olimpia’s Lament” lifted him up to my apartment. Solid and real, in 3-D with a funky animal smell. One thing led to another and we had sex.’
‘Wasn’t he too big for you?’
‘He thought himself smaller.’
‘Ange, what kind of a relationship did you have with your father when you were growing up?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Might this Volatore be an imaginative displacement of sexual longings for your father?’
‘Jesus! Do they print that on the backs of cornflakes boxes now?’
‘Come on, Ange I’m only trying to help.’
‘Let’s leave shrinkable matters to our respective shrinks, OK? Can we talk about something else? Or maybe we could have a little music?’
Olivia had installed an up-to-the-minute radio and CD player in Lucille and there was a small rack of CDs fitted to the dashboard: Julian Bream; Peggy Lee; Teresa Berganza in Carmen, Alfred Deller singing Henry Purcell; Rossini’s La cenerentola, an opera not in my father’s collection nor my own. This was a 1994 recording with the orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera House of Covent Garden, London, Jennifer Larmore as Cinderella.