Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

Dos Arbolitos is both home and office for Jim, with books everywhere and various prints and posters, among them John William Waterhouse’s Naiad . He smiles approvingly, then moves on to Waterhouse’s Destiny , where he shakes his head in admiration. ‘Yes!’ he says quietly, because in those two paintings he’s looking at the face and form of Angelica Greenberg. Her beauty is Victorian and she is quite simply the definitive Waterhouse woman from top to bottom. Her figure is long and lithe, her limbs all sweetly rounded, her body ideal for such naiad activities as swimming and dodging around trees. As to her face, the nose is long and elegantly retroussé; the delicately modelled cheeks echo her other roundnesses and offer to the viewer her large and lustrous sea-green eyes with their shapely brows under that shining coppery hair. Her lips are made for kissing, and her firmly rounded chin completes the face that is poised on the long and graceful neck of Angelica Waterhouse Greenberg.

‘That whole first session with Angelica,’ says Dr Jim to himself, ‘I was showing off. The things I said were OK but when I play the session back in my head I can hear myself showing off. “It’s called life,” ’ he says, mimicking his show-off voice. ‘OK, she’s a Waterhouse beauty but she’s also someone who came to me for help with her problems and I’m her forty-one-year-old shrink who started with her like a sixteen-year-old high-school kid and have since abandoned all professionalism and indulge in sexual fantasies. Very good, Dr Jim. Felicity said when she moved out that I lived too much in my head and acted too much out of it. She’d have made a pretty good shrink.’

I hadn’t heard from Clancy since the evening of our dinner non-event and I felt a little guilty about not being kinder to him on that occasion, so when the preparations for the Przewalski show were well in hand I went round to Clancy’s Bar one afternoon. The place was crowded as usual and Himself was visible sitting at a table with a striking blonde who’d had some work done. She didn’t have a sign around her neck that said I’M SLEEPING WITH HIM but she might as well have. They were leaning towards each other in a sleeping-together kind of way while he lit her cigarette and she lit his fire. She had very thin arms.

I was hoping to disappear unnoticed but of course he saw me.

‘Hi, Angelica,’ he said with the front of his voice. ‘Come and join us.’ So I did. ‘The world doesn’t stand still,’ his face said to me very plainly.

‘Go for it, Clance,’ my face answered.

He interrupted our wordless conversation to introduce Blondie.

‘Angelica, this is Nikki. Nikki, Angelica.’ We shook hands. ‘Angelica is one of my oldest friends,’ he said smoothly.

‘Carries her years well,’ said Nikki.

‘And without surgical assistance,’ I replied.

‘Nikki’s published a monograph on Tanagra figurines,’ boasted Clancy.

Nikki was looking into the distance, humming the seguidilla from Act I of Carmen softly to herself. She was the right age for Dad’s ex-mid-life crisis, thirty-five or so, only five years older than I. Sitting there in her little cotton print with her thin arms and her worked-on face. The history-of-art lecturer who’d taken her to Rome, had he gone back to his wife?

‘Who was the publisher?’ I asked her.

‘University of California Press. Are you interested in Tanagra?’

‘My father had a couple of books on it. He said that although the pieces were small they had a bigness about them because of the wholeness of the artists’ vision. They reminded him of Daumier in the way the gesture contained the figure.’

‘What’s your last name?’ she asked me.

‘Greenberg.’

She nodded several times, made a ‘Whaddaya gonna do?’ gesture, and reached for a fresh cigarette.

‘Angelica,’ said Clancy. ‘What’re you drinking?’

‘Jack Daniel’s, please, a small one.’

‘Rocks? Water?’

‘No, just as it comes from the bottle.’

When Javier brought my drink I raised my glass to Nikki and Clancy.

‘Here’s luck,’ I said, downed it and left.

On the way home in the cable car I watched the motorman working the grip lever and brakes. Another metaphor: how do I grip my destiny cable? And what about the brakes? I could feel the movement of that cable under me but I didn’t know how to make my life-car do anything useful.

That evening I didn’t feel like going out for dinner and I didn’t feel like cooking so I ordered Chinese from the Kwan-Yin. I had most of a bottle of Cava with it, scanned the TV schedule and decided to watch Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai . Welles has never been venerated by me as much as he is generally thought to deserve but Rita Hayworth had married him and now they were both dead and she had outlived her beauty and her wits and was all gone, like champagne spilt on desert sands while her dancing flickered on demand for anyone with the necessary equipment. Fred Astaire said that she had been his favourite partner. ‘She danced with trained perfection and individuality,’ were his words. ‘Trained perfection’! From childhood up trained to delight an audience with the dazzle of her beauty, the grace and vividness of her movement, the spell of her charm, and to die knowing somewhere in herself that all of it was gone and she was alone except for her faithful daughter.

My mind drifted in and out of the twists of the plot, Welles’s dreadful brogue, the horrible voice of the actor who played George Grisby and the passionate whispers of Rita Hayworth. Part of the film was set in San Francisco, and Welles obviously liked the noirish melancholy of the horns on the Golden Gate Bridge because he kept them blowing even when there was no fog.

The picture wound up rather like the last act of Hamlet : Rita Hayworth died along with the evil husband and his evil partner, and she herself was revealed as no better than she should have been. Welles and his dreadful brogue survived the whole mess — after all, he directed. The film left me unmoved but internally I was weeping for Rita Hayworth of the Dancing Cansinos who grew up to become Fred Astaire’s favourite partner. I ejected the Welles film from my mind and inserted the scene from You’ll Never Get Rich in which she and Astaire are practising a dance routine from a show they’re working on. She was wearing rehearsal shorts that allowed her leg action to be fully seen. The gallantry of that trained perfection! It made the world seem a better place. Not content with my mental playback, I put the DVD of the film in the player and watched it tearfully. To give so much and end with so little! I poured myself a large Laphroaig and raised my glass. ‘Thank you, Rita Cansino,’ I said, ‘for making the world a better place while you were in it.’ Then I drank it down and woke up the next morning with a bad taste in my mouth but no regrets.

Dimness and silence. Everything is moving away from me. The world and Angelica, where have they gone? I am losing the idea of me, whatever it was. Smaller and smaller I grow. I am disappearing into the nothingness of things forgotten. My name, what is it? There was one who would remember me; where is she? Who is she?

‘Well,’ said Dr Long, ‘in our last session it emerged that you weren’t sure you wanted to be with Volatore again.’

‘I’m not sure of anything right now,’ I confessed. ‘I may be a figment of my own imagination.’