Free Angelica's Grotto by Russell Hoban Page A

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 interruptinganything?’ 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