Angelica Lost and Found (20 page)

‘Here’s to you, Cyd,’ I echoed as my eyes filled with tears. We touched glasses and sat in silence for a moment.

‘Her death hit you pretty hard?’ said Jim.

‘I cry very easily, and about more things all the time.’

‘A burrito will dry your tears.’

I was crying because I was thinking of Ruby Keeler. My collection of DVDs of Hollywood musicals includes Fred Astaire and all the women he danced with, but further back too, the thirties and films like
42nd Street
,
Footlight Parade
and
Gold Diggers of 1935
. In
42nd Street
Ruby Keeler sings the title song and dances to it. Busby Berkeley of course designed the big numbers but this one looked as if Ruby Keeler was doing her own buck-and-wing, glowing with innocent pride in her tap dancing; her moves were such as a child might invent, full of high spirits and
joie de vivre
. This in the height of the Depression. But the general hope was that just around the corner was a rainbow in the sky. The atom bomb did not yet exist, nobody had heard of global warming and polar bears had miles and miles of ice on which to hunt seals. That’s why I was crying.

Angel Island seemed, as we approached it, more crowded than we required, so we anchored well offshore and ate and drank contentedly while gently rocked on the cradle of the deep. I must have fallen asleep then because I became aware of waking up. The sky was red with sunset and Jim was watching me.

‘You looked so peaceful that I didn’t want to disturb you,’ he said. ‘You must have been having pleasant dreams.’

‘I don’t remember.’ But there had been
something
: not a dream but an awareness that Volatore hadn’t lost me, nor I him.

‘I have a headline running through my mind like a tune that won’t go away,’ said Jim. ‘
“SHRINK PLIED PATIENT WITH DRINK IN DATE-RAPE”.’

‘If you’re having guilt fantasies please do it in your own time. This is still my picnic outing.’

So we picnicked and fooled around until the moon came up and we get under way again. It was a big round full moon, riding quietly in the sky with a big smile on its face.

‘I arranged this for you,’ said Jim.

‘You think of everything,’ I said, and kissed him. It was a little like faking an orgasm but you can’t always be completely honest.

Jim hauled up the anchor and we headed for home. He sensed a change and became thoughtful at the tiller. The sails filled and I could see by our wake that we were moving right along but the air seemed perfectly still.

‘That’s because we’re running now,’ said Jim, ‘and we’re moving at the same speed as the wind.’

‘Life is full of metaphors,’ I said, moving at the same speed as my stillness.

Chapter 55

Base Metal of Gold

So much to think about! I couldn’t separate my Jim thoughts from my Volatore ones. Alone in my apartment where Volatore had first appeared at the window, I went through my regular exercise routine, did my bathroom things, downed a large Laphroaig, put de Sainte-Colombe’s
Pièces de viole
in the Bose, moved Irene & Co over to give me a little room, and got into bed. Lying enveloped in those shapely shadow-sonorities centuries old. I put my mind back to that night when I saw Volatore at the window. Where was I in my life at that moment? Why was I go ready to let him in? I had to dig deep into my memory to come up with a name – it seemed to belong to a time long gone although it was actually quite recent: Michael Gold.
Dr
Michael Gold.

Everybody thought I was going to marry him. We were an obvious match: he was young, handsome, a brilliant neurosurgeon, the catch of the year, and I was considered the ideal wife for the above. It was a foregone conclusion that we were going to tie the knot pretty soon but it was not
my
foregone conclusion.

The peer-pressure and the Michael-pressure didn’t leave me much wiggle room but life is not completely predictable. I was rummaging through the unindexed remnant of Dad’s tottering CD stacks when I found
Der Freischütz
recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic under Joseph Keilberth with the redoubtable Rudolf Schock as Max plus a programme of the 1964 San Francisco Opera production. Also a torn-off bit of sketchbook paper on which my father had written ‘the white dove’. I wondered if Dad had seen the SFO production.

I looked at the cast list from forty-four years ago. Where were Richard Cassilly (Max) and Elizabeth Mosher (Agathe) now? And Malcolm Smith (Kaspar) and David Giosso (Samiel)? Forty-four years! Not doing opera any more, I should think.

I listened to the recording, then I bought a libretto and a DVD of the 1968 Hamburg State Opera production. They did it beautifully. The singers looked good and sounded great, the sets and staging were wonderfully atmospheric and the Wolf’s Glen was scary like anything, a proper place in which to invoke Samiel for the casting of magic bullets. The music – Weber is above all a colourist and the singers and the orchestra perfectly conveyed the mordant blues, the sombre browns and the darkling devilish greens of his forest and his story. Those colours were consonant with my mood at that time and I had a strong craving for them.

Here are the main elements of
Der Freischütz
:

1. Max and Agathe are in love but Cuno, Agathe’s father, will only let them marry if Max wins Prince Ottokar’s shooting trial the next day. If he does, he wins Agathe and succeeds Cuno as head forester. But Max has been missing all his shots lately and things look bad for him.

2. Kaspar, who has sold his soul to Samiel (the devil), sees Max drinking alone and says, ‘See that eagle high in the sky? Take my gun and shoot it.’

‘It’s out of range,’ says Max, but he fires and the eagle falls dead at his feet.

‘That was a charmed bullet in his gun,’ says Kaspar. ‘If Max wants such bullets he must meet him in the Wolf’s Glen at midnight.’

3. Despite Agathe’s fears Max goes to that haunted place where even the ghost of his mother tries to warn him away. Evil apparitions surround him but he goes down to where Kaspar, invoking Samiel, is casting seven bullets. Six will fly true but the seventh is meant to kill Agathe and give Kaspar three more years before Samiel collects his soul.

4. Agathe dreams that she is a white dove and Max is aiming at her. In the morning she hurries to where Ottokar is saying, ‘The white dove in that tree is your mark, Max.’

‘Don’t shoot!’ cries Agathe. ‘I am the white dove!’ But Max has fired. Agathe falls, but only in a swoon. Kaspar falls from the same tree, killed by Samiel’s charmed bullet.

5. Ottokar says that Max must be punished for consorting with Samiel but he asks the local holy man, a pious hermit, to decide on the sentence. Max and Agathe must stay apart for a year, says the hermit. After that they may marry. Everybody cheers and thanks God, and that’s a wrap.

‘The white dove’, my father had written, and I knew that for him the dove was more than Agathe but I was content to let it be his private bird.

I wondered what Michael would think of
Der Freischütz
and the white dove so I invited him over for pizza and a viewing. He arrived with a big smile on his face and an airline ticket which he waved in front of me.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘A weekend at the Grand Mayan in Acapulco,’ he chortled, ‘and two business-class seats on Aviacsa’s Friday-afternoon flight. One of the nurses has Mexican connections and she got me a big discount.’

Michael and I had never slept together and I’d made him keep his tongue in his mouth when he kissed me goodnight after a date. He was better at operating on other people’s brains than at using his own which was mostly in his pants.

‘I’m busy this weekend,’ I said.

‘Busy doing what?’

‘Busy not going to Acapulco.’

‘Come on, Angie, don’t mess with me like that.’

‘I’m not messing with you. There’s the doorbell, the pizza’s here.’

‘Pizza!’ he snorted.

‘Don’t snort,’ I said. ‘That’s what you were invited for: pizza and
Der Freischütz
.’

‘
Der Frei
-fucking-
schütz
,’ he resnorted, scorning italics.

‘This is Marco’s pizza classica,’ I said. ‘Don’t let it get cold. And there’s Chianti Classico.’

‘Pepperoni,’ he said when I opened the box. ‘But I like it with Hawaiian topping.’

‘If I’d known you were into that kind of perversion I wouldn’t have invited you. Shall I remove the pepperoni and put jam on your half?’

‘That does it,’ he snapped. ‘I’m outta here. And I won’t have any trouble getting somebody else for Acapulco.’

‘I hope you’ll be very happy together. Don’t slam the door on your way out.
Vaya con Dios
.’

That was how we parted. And that evening a hippo-griff appeared at my window. I’ll never forget my first sight of that strange beaked face and those eyes staring at me. Volatore! An imaginary creature but there he was, and in a matter of minutes I was naked on all fours under him and he covered me as the griffin had covered his mother. I screamed as his seed spurted into me, and all the while the music that had lifted him to my window was on the Bose, Olimpia lamenting her lost Bireno in the voice of Emma Kirkby.

Why and how had it happened? Had I ever since my limited reading of Ariosto nursed a subconscious passion for the hippogriff? And even if that were so, how had he broken through the membrane of his reality into mine?

Now Volatore and Jim were circling in my head like the figures in a little weather house. Who was fair weather and who was foul? I didn’t know, I was burdened well over my confusion loadline and my judgement was not to be trusted.

Eventually I fell asleep and the eyes that stared at me in the darkness of my dream were those of Volatore. In utter silence he brought his face close to mine and there were tears in his eyes.

‘Oh,’ I said, and woke up.

Chapter 56

Where from Here?

I didn’t see Jim or talk to him until our next session, two days later.
Dos Arbolitos
looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. ‘We go way back.’

But I was wondering what Jim was to me now; could a lover still be your shrink?
Was
he now my lover? Or had it just been a one-boat stand?

When I went inside Jim was wearing a cardboard smile.

‘Hi,’ he said, syncing his lips with his voice.

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘You look as if you’re expecting my dad to turn up with a shotgun.’

‘Nothing as simple as that.’

‘What, then?’

‘What did you dream last night?’

‘Ah! I see where this is going. Let’s do it like the song – you tell me your dream and I’ll tell you mine.’

‘I dreamed of your hippogriff, the same as you, right?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it felt as if it was coming from you.’

‘What was he doing in your dream?’

‘Looking at me with tears in his eyes. Was that your dream?’

‘Yes, exactly the same. Does that surprise you?’

‘Not really. When people are tuned to each other, that kind of thing can happen. It’s a sort of telepathy.’

‘Has it ever happened to you before?’

‘No.’

‘So then we’re tuned to each other, right?’