Free My Tango With Barbara Strozzi by Russell Hoban

Not exactly a beauty but the overall effect was impressive. She reminded me of champion athletes I’d seen on TV. She had the look of a winner and that made her face add up to more than the sum of its parts.
    ‘What are you?’ she said. ‘A hypnotist?’
    ‘Please forgive my staring. I’m a writer. What’s your name?’
    ‘Constanze Webber. What’s yours?’
    ‘Phil Ockerman. I doubt that you’ve heard of me.’
    ‘Oh, but I have. I was watching
The Culture Show
the other night and Germaine Greer said that
Hope of a Tree
was a shallow male fantasy that didn’t add up to a novel.’
    ‘An opinion shared by one or two others,’ I said.
    ‘Still, the title from Job intrigued me. Does your man feel like a tree that’s been cut down?’
    ‘Are you an Old Testament user?’
    ‘Now and then. Job is one of my favourite books. He bears his afflictions with style.
Does
your man feel like a tree that’s been cut down?’
    ‘Yes, he does.’
    ‘There’s a copy of
Hope of a Tree
at the house where I’m staying. I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.’
    ‘And you so young and apparently unafflicted. How old are you – twenty-four, twenty-five?’
    ‘Twenty-five. There are all kinds of afflictions, Phil. They don’t always show. How old are you?’
    ‘I’m forty.’
    ‘Forty seems very far away from where I am now. I can’t imagine where I’ll be at that age.’
    ‘The years have a way of sneaking up on you,’ She looked at her watch. ‘I must go.’
    ‘Can I see you again?’ I said.
    ‘All right – I’ll be with friends in Wimbledon for the rest of this week; you can phone me there.’ She wrote the number on a napkin. ‘Then I’m going back to Cape Town for a couple of weeks. Don’t get up, stay and finish your coffee. See you.’ And off she went. I’d have liked to walk her to Soho, all five foot ten of her, but she’d clearly told me not to so I finished my coffee and had another, this time with a cheese Danish.
    When I got home there was a card saying that Royal Mail had tried to deliver a parcel. I went round to the sorting office to pick it up: a bat-shaped box from Louisville, Kentucky. I carried it back to the house as if it were a loaded gun. I took it out of the box and there it was, my GENUINE
Barbara Strozzi
LOUISVILLE SLUGGER. Blonde wood. Ash? Thirty-four inches long. I weighed it on the kitchen scale: one kilo. Long, heavy, dangerous. I got a good grip on it, took up my stance, looked towards the mound, knocked the dirt off my spikes. Pitcher looks in for the sign, nods, goes intohis windup, and here comes Troy Wallis, right over the plate. No, no – only kidding. I leaned the Louisville Slugger in a corner and sat down at the word machine and thought about Job for a while, how one day Satan showed up with the sons of God and when the Lord asked him where he was coming from he said, ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’ That’s the heart of the matter right there – he’s always around ready to lead the unwary into mischief with the first available Constanze or whatever else offers. And of course idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, everybody knows that. ‘So let’s get cracking, Phil,’ I said. ‘OK,’ I answered, ‘just warming up in the bullpen.’ I put the
Enigma Variations
in the player, picked up the phone, ordered a pizza from Domino’s, opened a bottle of The Wine Society’s French Full Red and poured myself a glass. Put
The Rainmaker
in the video, and when the pizza arrived I ate it, drank about two thirds of the red, fell asleep in my chair halfway through the film, and dreamed that Constanze Webber was walking far ahead of me through a dim and narrow space. ‘Wait!’ I shouted, ‘I can explain!’ She looked back once, then turned and walked on. I woke up and dialled Barbara’s number. ‘Barbara?’ I said when the phone was picked up at the other end.
    ‘You have a wrong number,’ said a tight