Russell Hoban - My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

‘Barbara.’

‘Yes, Phil.’

‘Till Thursday, then, Barbara.’

‘Till Thursday, Phil.’

We rang off and I poured myself another drink. The phone rang.

‘Barbara?’ I said.

‘I was born on 17 August 1967,’ she said. ‘In Exeter. At quarter to nine in the morning.’

‘You changed your mind about horoscopes!’

‘Yes, I’m tired of being afraid of everything. Show it to me when you get it, I want to know all there is to know.’

I e-mailed her details to Catriona. Then I went online and ordered a personalised baseball bat from the Louisville Slugger gift shop in Louisville, Kentucky. The Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, so this bat would have the Red Sox logo plus the engraving, in three lines:

GENUINE

Barbara Strozzi

LOUISVILLE SLUGGER

It would take a couple of weeks to get here.

While waiting for the bat to arrive I’d be seeing Bertha (Bertha/Barbara) whenever possible, teaching my classes, and cruising for Page One. Until now I’d always put events of my own life into my novels. This time I wasn’t going to do that; whatever was happening with Bertha/Barbara and me would be kept separate from my writing.

Here I am again, getting into something I’ll probably be sorry for. As always. What else can I do — lock myself up to keep from making mistakes? Why did I tell Phil to call me Barbara? There is something between me and Barbara Strozzi. What it is I don’t know. BS also means bullshit. Why did I kiss him the way I did? I guess I need to have a man wanting me. Pathetic.

He left the CD with me, and after he’d gone I put it on and listened to it for a while but I couldn’t really get with it. The singer sounded either fretful or miserable or both; she sounded like a victim, which is not what I am. Although I make a lot of mistakes. With men mostly. Both short and tall.

Professor Adderley is a good example of what I’m talking about. He taught drawing and painting at Humberside University and he also lectured on Art History. A big man, tall and broad with a beard. In his forties. He was very free with his hands and he liked to invite girls to his studio for private sessions. He was looking over my shoulder one day when I was painting a costume model, a girl in a flapper dress. ‘You’re missing the essence of flapper,’ he said. ‘Flapper is free and easy but your painting is tight. You need to loosen up.’ I said I’d try. He had whisky on his breath. Later he stopped me in the hall and said, ‘You have a very good walk. If you could paint like you walk there’d be a big improvement in your work.’

I said, ‘Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.’ I had a pretty good idea what was coming next. One evening he caught me coming out of the Union bar with a couple of pints in me and he breathed on me and said, ‘I’d like to paint you. Would you pose for me?’

Some of his paintings were hanging in the halls — they were harsh and raw, with garish colours, something like John Bratby. I was curious to see how I’d look in a painting by him so I said, ‘OK. With my clothes on, right?’

‘Any way you like,’ he said. This was on a Monday and I agreed to come to his studio on Saturday. On Tuesday he did a lecture with slides on Caravaggio, Carracci, Gentileschi, and other fifteenth-century Roman painters. Orazio Gentileschi had a daughter, Artemisia, who was the first woman to paint historical and religious subjects. One of the slides was her Judith Slaying Holofernes . ‘Very strong,’ said Professor Adderley. ‘She learned a lot from Caravaggio. But the power in this picture comes from her own experience. She’d been studying with Agostino Tassi and he raped her. So she cut off his head in this picture and her rage made it one of the best things she ever did. She enjoyed it so much she did a second version, with Holofernes’s leg visible as he struggles while the maidservant holds him down. Did two more with Judith and the maidservant sneaking out with the head — all four paintings first-rate.’

On Saturday I went to Prof. Adderley’s place. Middle of May but grey and rainy. Rode there on my bike with Marianne Faithfull in my head, singing:

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she’d never

Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair,

So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singing

Pretty nursery rhymes she’d memorised in her daddy’s easy chair …

Prof. Adderley had a house in town. Wife and two kids. The studio was a separate little building in the back. It looked like his home away from home: there were a skylight and a north-light window, a galley, a well-stocked bar, a fridge full of beer, and a sleeping alcove.

‘It’s not all that warm in here,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you something to take the chill off? A little Courvoisier maybe?’

‘Why not?’ I said.

He poured me a fairly large one and one for himself. ‘Here’s to Art and all who sail in her,’ he said, and we clinked glasses. ‘I’ll do some sketches first,’ he said. ‘See where it takes us.’ I was wearing jeans and a pullover. So he sketched for a while, then he shook his head and said, ‘Really, a body like yours, it’s a shame to cover it up. Plus I think that taking your clothes off would free you up generally.’

I could see what was going on in his head as if it were a video, and right there was where I should have put a stop to the whole thing but I didn’t. I thought I looked pretty good with no clothes on, and, as Zero Mostel said in The Producers , ‘If ya got it, flaunt it.’ So I flaunted it, stupid me. Prof. Adderley (‘Please, call me Brian’) gave me a kimono and a screen to change behind, then when I came out and took off the kimono he studied me from various angles before arranging me on some cushions. Setting the pose required a lot of handling and his hands tended to linger wherever he put them. Next thing I knew he’d unzipped his trousers and was on top of me. A heavy man, and strong.

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Put your Agostino Tassi back in your pants!’

‘Come on, Bertha,’ he said. ‘This can’t be that much of a surprise to you.’

‘You’re the one that’ll get a surprise if you don’t get off me,’ I said. There was a serious struggle, then I punched him and bit and scratched, I was in a real rage, as much at myself for being stupid as at him for trying to rape me. I was fighting as hard as I could, and without meaning to I jabbed my thumb into his left eye. Hard. He screamed and jumped up, and there was the eye half-hanging out of his head and blood pouring down his face. ‘You bitch!’ he said, trying to put the eye back where it belonged. ‘Get me an ambulance!’

I dialled 999 and hurried into my clothes but before the ambulance and his wife came I took his mahlstick — it was an aluminium one with a rubber ball on the end — and rolled it over his face to get blood on it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he yelled.

‘You had the mahlstick in your hand when you tripped over something and that’s how it happened,’ I said.

‘That’s odd,’ his wife said when she burst into the studio. She looked at the blank canvas and then at me. ‘He doesn’t ordinarily use a mahlstick at this stage,’ she said. He was moaning and groaning and cursing. ‘You never were very good at nudes,’ she said to him. ‘This one must have given you a lot of trouble.’ She was a good-looking brunette about twenty years younger than Adderley.

‘You’re a real comfort to me,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could get me a drink.’

She poured him a cognac and one for herself and stood looking at him while she drank it.