Margin of Eros Read online

  MARGIN OF EROS

  Clare Hawthorne

  ISBN: 9781483556338

  For Jo Mitchell

  a goddess, only nicer

  ‘Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.’

  Henry David Thoreau

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  PROLOGUE

  On the golden shores of Aegae, just beyond the nautical pinball of the Scattered Ashes, a few miles shy of the Perilous Edgewater, the second most beautiful creature in the seven realms stretched out her leg and examined her pedicure. The color she had chosen, an orangey pink whimsically named ‘human nature’ by the coral nymph who ran the salon, was indistinguishable from all the other shades of orangey pink that had been on offer. That was the problem with coral nymphs; they suffered from a kind of inverse color blindness that translated every pigment they touched into a delicate shade of sashimi. To their eyes, the wall of varnish covered a full spectrum of fashion forward color choices. To everyone else, it looked like the inside of a trout. But as manicurists they were without peer, at least outside of East Hollywood, and what goddess had the time for a trip to Los Angeles every time she needed to get her nails done?

  ‘What makes you think,’ said Aphrodite, lowering her toes onto the sand, ‘that I would ever want to help you?’ Turning to face her mother-in-law, she raised a perfect eyebrow. ‘The last time we disagreed, you took out a full page ad in the Olympic Chronicle, cursing my vagina and expressing the desire that it shrivel up like a California raisin.’

  ‘Champagne raisin,’ said Hera defensively. ‘I was misquoted.’

  Aphrodite rolled her eyes. ‘So much classier,’ she said.

  ‘I was only trying to do what was best for Olympus,’ said Hera, shifting uncomfortably on her towel. ‘Anyway it didn’t work, did it? And look where we are now.’

  Aphrodite looked. As far as the immortal eye could see, sky blue sky and sea blue sea. Zephyrus dancing on the foam, curling his many lips, curating a surfer’s salty dream. Athenian sea eagles swirling on volcanic thermals, eyeing off the undercurrents, lazily contemplating a second course. A shoal of glittering kingfish, rolling underwater like a wayward disco ball. A puff of cloud or two. Aphrodite sniffed. ‘Doesn’t look so bad,’ she said.

  ‘Look closer,’ said Hera, pointing into the distance. ‘Out there, on the very edge of the sea.’

  Aphrodite took off her shades and squinted. It took her a while to focus, but when she did, the vision made her gasp. Far beyond the last jagged island, where the vast sea bruised from blue to black, tiny white hairline cracks were appearing in the bottom of the sky. There were only a few, and they were so fine than only a goddess as vain as Aphrodite, whose painstaking examination of her own appearance every morning had resulted in extraordinary focal acuity, could discern the fractures in the wavering horizon.

  ‘Holy goat,’ said Aphrodite.

  ‘Another Piña Colada, my goddesses?’ said a half-baked minor hero. The hero business was a competitive one, and during the off-season it wasn’t unusual to find a number of less successful heroes gathered in the resort areas, spruiking cocktails and rubbing down the pampered flanks of the Olympian elite.

  ‘Shoo,’ hissed Hera. To her, heroes were like so many mosquitoes, distracting impressionable young goddesses with their ostentatious accomplishments and diluting the gene pool with their pectorals. The hero shrugged and turned away, making a mental note to kick over the candles, next time he came across an offering to her munificence.

  ‘How long have we got?’ said Aphrodite, allowing the slightest hint of concern to crease her forehead.

  Hera shrugged. ‘Maybe a hundred years, maybe a thousand. It all depends on our rate of decline. Unless…’

  Aphrodite bit into a drunken cherry, frowning not only at the sour taste, but at the sense of having been trumped by her mother-in-law. She wasn’t used to being surprised by bad news. A salacious gossip, she relied on her many sources to get the heads-up on every rumor, baseless or otherwise, in order to preempt these kinds of dramatic revelations with some manufactured crisis of her own. With an effort, she managed to suppress her irritation. ‘Unless what?’ she said.

  ‘Unless we make a comeback,’ said Hera.

  ‘And how are we supposed to do that?’ sniffed Aphrodite. She had tried for over a millennium to reinstate her cult, before giving up to focus on adultery and ikebana, which, to be perfectly honest, were a lot more rewarding than endless supplications and headless livestock. ‘They think they don’t need us,’ she added sullenly.

  ‘Eros,’ said Hera, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘We deprive them of Eros.’

  ‘You mean banish him?’ said Aphrodite, a little shocked. Of all the horrible punishments she had been envisioning for Eros, she had never once considered banishment. Even for the blatant disregard of an Olympic decree, banishment seemed altogether too severe.

  ‘No,’ said Hera, beckoning to the hovering hero, ‘it has to be worse than that. We have to take away his desire. Without that, he won’t be able to function, and when Eros can’t function…’

  ‘…neither can they,’ finished Aphrodite, almost breathless with delight as the first whiff of deviousness took hold of her senses. The hatching of an underhanded plan always filled her with a dizzy euphoria, not unlike the sensation produced by diving for hallucinogens too soon after lunch. It was easy to get carried away under such circumstances, however Aphrodite knew from experience that there was still one major obstacle to overcome.

  ‘Don’t worry about Zeus,’ said Hera, reading her mind. ‘He’s a pussycat. Sometimes literally,’ she added, smoothing out her robe. Although, the last time he had taken on that particular form in order to encourage the seemingly innocent stroking and petting of a mortal, Hera had seen to it that he was torn to pieces by a coyote, so she didn’t think he would try that trick again any time soon.

  ‘But the punishment?’ Aphrodite had never been one to shy away from a challenge, but she was at a loss to think of anything cruel and unusual enough to emotionally cripple her son. He was so infuriatingly resilient.

  Accepting two cocktails from the minor hero, Hera handed one to Aphrodite. ‘That,’ she said, raising her glass in a toast, ‘is what I came here to discuss.’ And with a clink of glass that by rights should have be
en accompanied by a clap of thunder, or at the very least, an ominous discord, she sealed the fates of Eros and of everyone on Earth.

  Or would have done, had one of the Fates not been sleeping with the minor hero.

  1.

  The island of Tasmania lies 150 miles off the south east coast of mainland Australia. Violet had never been to Tasmania, but like many Americans, she had watched a lot of Warner Bros. cartoons and was familiar with Taz the Tasmanian Devil, a cartoon rendition of a small, vicious nocturnal marsupial which resembles its cartoon homage about as closely as a mouse resembles Mickey. Whenever she met a Tasmanian – which had happened only once, at a party in West Hollywood – she would profess a strong desire to visit Tasmania, see a Tasmanian Devil and ‘drink some Fosters’, little realizing that no one in Australia, let alone Tasmania, actually drank Fosters Lager and a request for ‘a glass of Fosters’ would have been met with (depending on the type of bar and whether she’d appended ‘mate’ to the end of her request) one of the following: a bemused smile, an icy stare, or a punch in the face.

  Beer etiquette aside, had she gone so far as to plan the trip, she may have noted that the shape of the island bore a passing resemblance to a particular region of a woman’s anatomy. Furthermore, she may have been unsurprised to learn that in the local slang, ‘map of Tasmania’ referred to that very area. Of course, this colloquialism was rapidly becoming anachronistic in the era of Brazilian waxes, a trend which, somewhat confusingly, had originated in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and not, as one might expect, in Rio de Janeiro. Although she didn’t know it, Violet was keeping the jargon alive with her roughly triangular pubic region, a shape she vastly preferred to the awful ‘landing strip’, which she’d once heard described as ‘Hitler’s mustache’.

  Violet was the most beautiful woman in the world. Not many people realized this, least of all Violet. But that didn’t make it any less true. Her relative obscurity did go some way to explaining why, on a Saturday night, she was at home alone drinking half a bottle of wine in order to take the edge off the pain she was about to self-inflict with a microwavable home waxing kit. Fashions sure had changed from those braless, bush-o-philic 70s porn days. Personally, Violet preferred 70s porn. The backlit feather cuts, the smooth grooves, Ron Jeremy. As a child of that decade, she liked to think she had been conceived as a result of an indiscreet encounter between a Pan Am stewardess and a well-hung (and well traveled) pool cleaner, but unless her adoption had been thus far concealed from her, she knew this to be far from the case. The reality of her conception was much more conventional; meanwhile strippers, stylists and internet dating sites had conspired to convince her that oral pleasure and a lushly foliated lady patch were mutually exclusive.

  Like many women, Violet enjoyed oral sex. But like many American women, she felt that, while it was often enthusiastically embraced by her suitors, and god bless them for trying, the play was often poorly executed and inevitably fumbled in the end zone. It was like an itch she couldn’t scratch – or rather could scratch, but was trying to get someone else to scratch using only exaggerated non-verbal cues. Kind of like trying to train an adorable yet slightly retarded puppy. She had a vague yet powerful suspicion that the real reason French women didn’t get fat was that they were exhausted from the multiple orgasms inflicted upon them by their chain smoking, snail slurping, Gallic-tongued boyfriends. It was the way they rolled their rrrrs. American men, on the other hand, chewed gum. It wasn’t hard to work out which of the two practices engendered superior oral finesse.

  In summary, then, being the most beautiful woman in the world didn’t spare Violet from the pain associated with ripping the hairs from the follicles to which they were more than sentimentally attached in the most exquisitely sensitive part of her anatomy. Nor did it guarantee her European-style climaxes. What, then, were the advantages of her unrivaled loveliness?

  Not one huge hell-of-a-lot, truth be told. Not a huge hell-of-a-lot.

  2.

  Olympic Studios was much like any other Hollywood studio. It occupied several clean and vigilantly patrolled blocks in Burbank, its high walls were imposing and sand colored, and its façades sparkled with the cheesy smiles of TV stars and anthropomorphized rodents. The only real difference between Olympic Studios and a regular Hollywood studio was that instead of the studio bosses thinking they were gods, they actually were gods.

  Most of the people who worked at Olympic were oblivious to the divine nature of their employers. This was because the gods looked and behaved pretty much like ordinary humans, albeit very good looking and eternally youthful humans. Neither of these factors attracted much attention in Hollywood, except among the local dermatologists and plastic surgeons, all of whom were convinced that their colleagues had the exclusive and secret contract on studio ‘work’. Had they known the truth, the plastic surgeons and dermatologists might have suffered the kind of collective crisis of cosmetic confidence from which it is impossible to recover, and the faces of the world’s favorite celebrities would have dropped half-an-inch overnight in horror. So it’s a good thing that no one was the wiser.

  Not to say that no one was suspicious. It was just that their suspicions tended to follow the well-established tabloid parabola of Botox, nepotism and closet homosexuality – as opposed to the Classical tangent of immortality, infanticide, and goat fucking. Violet, for example, was convinced that her boss (who claimed to have been christened with the unlikely name Aaron Martini) was not, as his company bio stated, a forty-five year old former head of marketing at Google, but a thirty-something trust fund kid who’d spent the past five years in and out of rehab on the parental dime. That his real name was Ares and that he was approximately five thousand years old would have come as quite a surprise to her, as would the fact that he was profoundly and desperately in love with her, and had in fact manipulated many circumstances of her life, including instigating a long and self-esteem crushing period of unemployment in order to get her to take a position as his assistant for a barely livable wage, just so he could say things like ‘Schedule that for me, Violet’ to her all day long, and therefore pretty much maintain a permanent erection.

  Like many people in Los Angeles, Violet hated her job. Unlike so many of those vocational callings, however, the tedious, underpaid work she did was not some delusional foot-in-the-door of the entertainment industry. Until Ares had gotten her disbarred, Violet had been a psychologist. An exceptionally good psychologist. To be fair on Ares, though, her competence was half the problem.

  Before Ares arrived on her office doorstep, complete with concocted substance abuse problems and (as it turned out) a non-concocted god complex, Violet had been struggling to stay motivated. This was because she had been diligently working to lessen the burdens of her clients’ various mental afflictions in order to help them live more balanced and meaningful lives. When what she clearly should have been doing was enabling their narcissistic personality disorders. Eventually, she realized that ‘a balanced and meaningful life’ was something that those who gravitated toward careers in ‘the entertainment industry’ had no intention of ever leading, and had indeed specifically chosen that industry because the two things were mutually exclusive. She was on the verge of moving to Oregon to build up a client base of mildly anxious micro-brewers when Ares secretly intervened, and the State of California made it abundantly (and legally) clear that her services to mental health would no longer be required.

  On a tediously perfect Thursday, approximately one year later, Violet was taking a new batch of interns through what would be their daily tasks for the next three months. Violet hated the idea of interns in general and the interns themselves in particular. Whereas a psychologist’s intern would never be expected to perform the kind of tasks considered beneath an entry-level office clerk, this was pretty much all Olympic Studios’ interns ever did. The one exception to this rule was ‘script coverage’, which required these unpaid undergraduates to read and comment upon the commercial and artis
tic strengths of screenplay submissions, based on a set of criteria jotted down on a napkin one Monday morning at Starbucks, when the line was particularly long and the weekend box office for Loose Fangs Sink Ships (pitched as ‘Twilight meets Titanic’ to the young executive now waiting in line for his caramel latte) had failed to register on the blockbust-o-meter. The resulting dot points were that executive’s attempt to explain, and therefore prevent, similar tankers. That it contained such insights as ‘Vampires are dead’ and ‘No lead characters called Kevin’ alerted no one to its potential pitfalls as a development tool.

  Occasionally, when she wasn’t scheduling, then canceling, then re-scheduling meetings for Aaron, Violet would flick through a script or two and check the coverage written by the interns against her own thoughts and feelings about the project. On average, she found that she was in total disagreement with the comments, 100% of the time. It was clear that the interns were aiming to please the unnamed caramel latte drinking executive (or some version of him) with the eventual aim of becoming him, in order that they too might one day be in a position to greenlight such Oscar gems as Loose Fangs and indeed, give up their weekend jobs at Starbucks.

  All this would have depressed Violet if she’d had any aspirations at Olympic Studios beyond surviving from day to day, and pay to pay. She didn’t, and besides there were many, many more worthwhile things in life to depress her besides the sorry state of the movie industry. But despite her sub-zero care-factor, every now and then an intern would come along whose confidence, charm and pathological personality would, Violet knew without a doubt, guarantee his rapid ascension to the role of junior executive and eventually division head. And she would get depressed anyway.

  His name was Henry, a name which, up until that point, Violet had been quite fond of. She knew he was different to the others immediately, because he looked her in the eye when he spoke to her and didn’t send instant messages on his phone while she was showing him how to use the photocopier. He was extraordinarily good looking and although clearly young, he looked like a grown-up. A 1950s 23-year old, neat and hardworking, as opposed to a 21st century man-boy, scruffy and indulged. It wasn’t his behavior or his appearance that depressed her; his charm was easy and natural, with just the right amount of self-deprecating humor. Not the charm of an infomercial host or aesthetician. It was the charm of a Brady Bunch boyfriend trying to reassure Carol and Mike that he was a devout catholic and a careful driver and he’d have their daughter home by midnight. When quite clearly he was an Elvis worshipper with a string of DUIs and a sticky, dog-eared Playboy in the glove compartment. He had the kind of looks and personality that would cause Carol to remark ‘What a lovely young man,’ as he disappeared out the door with Marcia, leaving only the Greek chorus of Alice to mutter her distrust as she scraped the T-bones into the trash. Years of clinical experience had alerted Violet to the deep psychoses inherent in this personality type, so it was no surprise to her when, at the end of the day, Henry invited her back to the unisex restroom to check out his huge cock.