Free Angelica's Grotto by Russell Hoban

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.’

16

Rock of Aged
    ‘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 andI’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