My Tango With Barbara Strozzi Read Online Free PDF

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 torape 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.
    The paramedics arrived then. ‘Jesus!’ said one of them to Adderley. ‘What happened?’
    He showed them the mahlstick. ‘Got this in my eye,’ he said. ‘Hurts like hell.’
    They gave him painkillers but they didn’t seem to help much. When they put him in the ambulance his wife gave me a hard look and said, ‘Why don’t you go along and hold his hand – I’m stuck here with the kids.’
    All the way to the hospital he held on to my hand. One of the paramedics was with us while the other one drove, so the Prof, didn’t say anything to me but he squeezed my hand and mouthed the words,