Angelica's Grotto (8 page)

On the appointed day at the appointed time he presented himself at Dr DeVere’s office. DeVere looked him up and down, saw no slings or casts, and said, ‘Well done! You’ve kept out of Casualty for two weeks. How’s it going?’

‘Variously. I think too much Internet can make you go blind.’

‘A new development?’

‘I’m not sure development is the word for it.’

‘Go on.’

Klein told Dr DeVere about the various websites he’d visited; he told him about Angelica’s Grotto, the homepage with the Ingres painting and the pictures in the galleries.

‘Interesting,’ said Dr DeVere.

‘She asked me onscreen if I wanted to take a walk on the night side. I clicked on YES and got a picture story called
‘Monica’s Monday Night’
in which a young woman on her way home from a late meeting at King’s College is pulled into a van by a black man and forced to perform oral sex, after which she’s anally raped. She has to do other things as well. Afterwards this person who calls herself Angelica and I had an onscreen one-to-one dialogue and she asked me if I’d enjoyed it.’

‘Had you?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you feel about the fact that you enjoyed it?’

‘Troubled. I’ve always thought I liked women but now I’m wondering if that’s really so. Maybe I’ve never liked them; certainly I’ve always been afraid of them.’

‘Did that contribute to your enjoyment?’

‘Well, if you see someone you’re afraid of being forced to submit to a more powerful person you can take pleasure in it, right? Or maybe, as they say, the enemy of the enemy is a friend.’

‘You think of women as the enemy?’

‘I’ve never thought I did. But I believe it’s generally accepted that men who sleep with as many women as they can don’t really like women.’

‘Have you slept with many?’

‘My opportunities were limited but I did what I could.’

‘Did your wife know about it?’

‘I tried to be discreet but I think women always know one way or another – you sound funny on the telephone or you come home smelling different or things fall out of your pockets.’

‘Were these one-night stands or something more?’

‘They were affairs that went on for a while.’

‘How did you feel about them?’

‘Guilty.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Successful.’

‘I think it might be useful if you tried to understand where you are with women in general.’

‘Where I
was,
you mean.’

‘Well, you’ve got something going with this Angelica woman. Can you say what it is?’

‘I can’t say because I don’t know. I’m pretty confused right now.’

‘Confusion is OK; confusion is generally the first step in the process of change.’

‘Confusion is nothing new to me; I’m like those people who divide their time between a house in London and a villa in Tuscany except that I do it between confusion and panic’

‘Can you describe the panic?’

‘Well, I used to wake up in the morning like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.’

‘And now?’

‘Like a man lost in a cave.’

‘That’s when you first wake up. What about later?’

‘At breakfast I settle into the day, read the papers, plan what I’m going to do. After breakfast I go to my desk and then it’s just the normal work panic’

‘What’s the normal work panic?’

‘It’s a state of not knowing each time whether you can make it happen. For a writer that’s an OK state to be in – it’s respectful of the unknowable thing-in-itself of whatever you’re writing about. If that goes I’m in big trouble. Winter is coming; in November there’s always a big rain that leaves the trees black and bare. This is the November of me – there’s no getting away from that. Sometimes I go to a bookshelf and stand there
with my hand outstretched, not knowing what I came there for.’

‘What can I say? Everybody grows old except those who die young. Naturally that’s part of your current problems but I’d like to get back to the sexual area.’

‘Me too.’

‘Please don’t be offended by my next question: when your wife was with you, how would you have felt about seeing her in a picture-story like the Monica one?’

Klein blushed. ‘That’s a very uncomfortable question.’

‘Don’t answer unless you want to.’

Klein took a deep breath. ‘Bear in mind that the Monica story was a fantasy – it wasn’t presented as something that really happened. I mean, I’ve had fantasies about murdering one or two people but I haven’t ever got those fantasies mixed up with reality.’

‘Understood.’

‘
A fantasy
like that with my wife in it – my response would have been pretty much what it was with the Monica story.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Ashamed.’

‘You didn’t feel ashamed of your murder fantasies but you feel ashamed about the idea of enjoying a rape fantasy with your wife as the victim, yes?’

‘Monica wasn’t altogether a victim; at some level she almost wanted it to happen and when it happened she found herself sexually responsive to the man who was mastering her.’

‘Are you saying that you’d enjoy a fantasy in which your wife wanted to be raped and was responsive to her rapist?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’d feel … ?’

‘Ashamed.’

‘Can you say why?’

‘I loved my wife and I’ve never gotten over her death. In her absence she’s a constant presence. I see or read something I want to tell her about and she’s not there. You don’t really know what someone is to you until that person’s gone.’

‘Would you say that the mind is capable of holding contradictory thoughts?’

‘I know that.’

‘I’ve talked to a lot of people and it seems to be true for all of them that you can have two opposing thoughts or images in your mind–really weird ones. A friend of mine, driving away from his wedding to begin the honeymoon, had a mental picture of himself strangling his beautiful bride. Yet he was truly in love with her and still is; for the five years since the wedding it’s been a good marriage with no signs of big trouble. Try to remember that kind of thing while you’re dealing with the loss of your inner voice. I want to stop there because I don’t want to put anything else on top of this. See you in a fortnight.’

‘Angelica,’ said Klein as he walked around her in his mind, ‘is not what she first appeared to be; she’s something else. I’m sure that her name isn’t really Angelica and I very much doubt that she’s the one in the photographs. She smells strongly of sweat plus her own funky odour. There is a mystery between us, however ridiculous. In her words on the screen there was someone trying to reach me while keeping her distance, someone talking hard while wanting to be soft, maybe wanting to be rescued from the rock of her hard self. Can I possibly be, in some way as yet unknown to me, her Ruggiero? I’ve not yet heard her voice. Shall I ring her up?’

Looking at Klimt’s nudes he saw Angelica naked except for her horn-rimmed glasses, Angelica saying, as she offered herself, ‘There are many ways of giving pleasure.’ It was only a fantasy of course. ‘Only a fantasy of course,’ he said, ‘but it’s a good one. Maybe she’s looking for father substitutes, wants to see Daddy’s face between her legs.’ Mentally he rubbed his face in her pubic hair, opened her, tasted her.

‘No word from Oannes,’ he said. ‘I suppose he’s just leaving me to it. I haven’t all that much time left and
I’ll die hungering for what I’ve never had enough of. What’s the title of that Courbet painting, the one looking up between a woman’s naked thighs?
L’origine du Monde.
In one of my books there’s a picture of a knickerless virgin lifting her skirt and scaring off the devil with a flash of her naughty bits. And Sheela-na-Gigs on churches – the stone female spreading her vulva to avert evil or promote fertility. It’s where the power is, it’s where life comes out of. Maybe Angelica will rescue me.’ He saw the imagined woman naked again and found her body beautiful, rich and well-fleshed like the one in the Courbet painting. He saw her nakedness close to his face, felt the heat coming from it. ‘They gave Abishag the Shunamite to King David for his bed but he gat no heat from her. Still, he must have liked having her firm young body touching his old one. This woman whose name isn’t really Angelica, what is her voice like? I think she speaks correctly but sensually, like some of those sexy female reporters on the TV news. They almost never show them below the waist but you can hear in their voices
L’origine du Monde
of them, the moist warmth between their thighs.

‘This is Sunday; I wonder if she’s answering at that number? She’s a night person, I think. I’ll wait till evening. He scanned the parts of the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
he’d not read at breakfast, worked on Klimt a little, and watched Walerian Borowczyk’s
Immoral Tales
on video, running the Lucrezia Borgia part twice. He napped a little, drank a little as the November dusk gathered in, and spoke to himself about the woman who called herself Angelica.

Finally he connected the telephone tape recorder, set it to start recording when he picked up the telephone, and dialled the number she’d given him. He heard it ring three times, four times. ‘I wonder if I’m interrupting
anything?’ he said. ‘Maybe she has a live-in girlfriend.’ He imagined the two of them in bed while the phone rang a fifth time.

‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice was not sensual, only clear and academic, the voice of someone correcting proofs for a scholarly journal. Or the voice of a reporter on the Six o’Clock News. The thought of her naked was maddening.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘This is Ruggiero.’

‘Ruggiero, you’re American!’

‘Everybody has to be from somewhere.’

‘You don’t sound seventy-two – you sound much younger.’

‘There’s a young man in me but he can’t get out.’

‘Hasn’t age given you anything to compensate for that?’

‘I enjoyed my mind until my inner voice went.’

‘You mentioned that before. When did it happen?’

‘About a month ago.’

‘What made it happen, do you know?’

He told her about the piece in the
Times.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe your thoughts were too much for your inner voice, so it quit on you.’

‘That could well be. Now you’re in my thoughts. I know you’re not the Angelica in the photographs. Can we meet?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want you to be only a voice and a mental image, I want you to be all of you.’

‘What’s your mental image of me?’

‘You know the Courbet painting,
L’origine du Monde?’

‘Very flattering. That painting stops just north of the tits. First I’m a naked blonde chained to a rock, then my hair goes dark, I lose the chains, put on a little weight, and get headless.’

‘Not headless – I see you with a clever face and hornrimmed glasses.’

‘Horn-rims do it for you, do they?’

‘They enhance the imagined nakedness of you.’

‘And you want to meet me so you can have the whole actual me in your mind to look at. With my clothes off, I suppose.’

‘If possible.’ He watched the little red light on the recorder fluttering as he spoke.

‘What kind of rock are you chained to, Ruggi?’

‘Rock of Aged. Rock of impotent lust and madness.’

‘Definitely my kind of guy but give me a better reason why we should meet. Convince me.’

‘I feel as if it’s Destiny: mine and yours.’

‘Destiny’s a funny thing – it could well be that we’ll meet and you’ll wish we hadn’t.’

‘Whatever. Can we make it soon?’

‘Tomorrow night – is that soon enough?’

‘Where?’

‘Surrey Street off the Strand. Be at the Arthur Andersen entrance opposite the old Norfolk Hotel and Surrey Steps.’

‘When?’

‘Quarter past ten – 22.15 hours. Does that work for you?’

‘I’ll be there. How shall I know you?’

‘You won’t need to know me; I’ll know you. There won’t be that many old Ruggieros standing in that particular spot at that time on a Monday night. See you then.’ She hung up.

‘See you,’ said Klein to a dead phone. ‘Harold’s Monday night. Destiny? Something’s moving me; it’s like being swept along by a fast-flowing river. Am I going to drown, be broken on rocks – what?’

He poured himself a large Glenfiddich, knowing that it would make him sleepy, and put on Astor Piazzolla’s
Tango Sensations.
The music was sombre, dark, fateful. He saw Hannelore walking towards him, smiling with the sun behind her shining through her hair. ‘I haven’t seen much of you lately, Hannelore,’ he said. ‘Mostly what I get are memories from further back. Much further back. Well, whatever’s happening now, things will be what they want to be.’ And he fell asleep in his chair.

Monday afternoon: Temple Underground Station. ‘“
Waltz me around again, Willy,”
’ Klein sang softly to himself as he climbed the stairs to WAY OUT, “‘
around, around, around. The music is dreamy, it’s peaches-and-creamy – oh don’t let my feet touch the ground
…”’ His meeting with the pornographer known as Angelica was almost seven hours away but he wanted to reconnoitre Surrey Street before dark.

The station was full of motion as people came and went, their various destinies intersecting and diverging. ‘“Look thy last on all things lovely,”’ said Klein, “‘every hour.’” Beyond the turnstiles he saw golden sunlight and the fruit and vegetable stall, brightly lit and festive, the gloss and colour of its offerings ticketed with white price cards. To the right of it was the flower stall, its blooms flaunting themselves under fluorescence and sunlight. To the left of it was the bright and cosy world of the newsstand, its wares ranked under the blazon of
The Economist,
the white title stentorian on a scarlet background.

Men and women waiting to meet someone stood by the station entrance. A
Big Issue
vendor, bearded and lonely, held up a magazine hopefully. Beyond him was the rush
of cars on the Victoria Embankment; beyond the cars the river with its boats and sunpoints in a golden haze. ‘Sunpoints on the water,’ said Klein, ‘sunpoints dazzling on different waters, different times, other rivers watched by faces speaking and silent.’