Margin of Eros Read online

  Clearing a pile of post-it notes out of the way, Hermes sat down next to Violet’s keyboard and helped himself to a breath mint from an open packet in her in-tray. ‘Got ants in your pants?’ he said. For a second, Violet flushed the color of her carmine Sharpie. Then, checking herself, the sanguine rush receded as steel doors slammed behind her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Hermes, grinning. ‘Because I’d be happy to check for you.’

  Violet stared at him levelly. She was, at that moment, experiencing the kind of intimate discomfort more frequently associated with cycle touring, horseback riding and tropical honeymoons. On a whim, she had decided that morning to wear the pink thong that Ashley had picked out for her. To say that it was uncomfortable might suggest that it was like wearing a pair of three-inch spike heels for the first time, or perhaps an orthodontic plate. But such trifling sacrifices in the name of beauty had nothing on the razor wire that was casually dissecting her tailbone every time she moved.

  At the same time, her heightened level of arousal due to the proximity of Hunter Cole was sending a flood of hormones spinning in paroxysmal spirals through her dimly lit corridors of decorum. The thong, clearly, had to go. But if Henry wanted to help her remove it, then he could be her guest. Hell, he could even keep it as a fucking souvenir, so long as she never had to see the sadistic ass cleaver again. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘sure.’

  Hermes nearly choked on his Arctic Blast. ‘Really?’ he said.

  Violet took pause, all of a sudden caught in a flashback to a plate of spaghetti, thrown in a fit of pubescent rage across the dining room table. She couldn’t even remember what her mother had said to her at the time, only that it had seemed like the worst thing in the world.

  Calmly, Violet’s mother had turned to Violet’s startled and spaghetti-splattered father. ‘It’s just the hormones,’ she explained.

  ‘I don’t want the hormones!’ Violet wailed.

  ‘Tough,’ said her mother, a science teacher and pragmatist, ‘because you’ve got them.’

  Some twenty years later, the hormones, with their unhelpful procreational imperative and their whirling, cyclical agenda were no less forceful than they had been at thirteen, but at least they were more predictable. And in their predictability could be found a degree of control. Violet took a deep breath. And then another one.

  ‘No,’ Violet said to Henry, ‘not really.’ And she pushed her chair calmly away from the desk, not daring to focus on anything other than the leering picture of Aaron and his Oscar on the adjacent wall, in case she changed her mind.

  Hermes watched in amazement as Violet teetered toward the bathroom. To his highly attuned antennae, female arousal was like sonar and the signal Violet was giving off was like the feedback from a heavy metal meltdown. It wouldn’t take much, he was sure, to tip her denial back into the sweetest acquiescence. Hermes lived for these moments; in fact, he deliberately cultivated them. He was like a deviant gardener, sewing doubt and desire in the fertile valleys of nubile immortals. He liked to think of himself as a kind of expensive French cheese, confusing them with his slightly hardened and frequently disgusting exterior, then seducing them with his molten center. But in the lush Violet foliage, he felt about as charming as a chunk of orange cheddar and for this reason, he was in virgin territory. OK, sure, not literally, but his ambivalence was still troubling.

  Fortunately, at that moment the door to his father’s office swung open and the sizable bulk of Hunter Cole cast a shadow across his desire like a spectral vomit. ‘Hey, kid,’ said the actor, aiming his finger at Hermes in a friendly homicidal gesture, ‘seen Violet around?’

  Hermes shook his head fractionally.

  ‘Well if you see her,’ said Hunter, patting the pockets of his faux combat jacket, ‘could you send her in? We’ve got something we need to run by her.’

  Hermes nodded minimally.

  ‘Hey are those Arctic Blast?’ said Hunter, spotting the packet of breath mints in Violet’s in-tray. ‘Mind if I have one?’

  ‘Knock yourself out,’ said Hermes, watching with godlike indifference as Hunter opened his mouth and tossed back the rest of the packet. Either the action man suffered from chronic halitosis, or his trigger fingers were too pumped up to coordinate with his opposable thumbs. Hermes desperately hoped that it was the former.

  ‘Thanks, kid,’ said Hunter, slam-dunking the empty packet back into Violet’s in-tray. Then, with a nonchalant fondle of his manhood, added, ‘Guess I better go take that whiz.’

  Rarely had a reference to urinating produced such a swift display of divine intervention.

  26.

  Violet heard the restroom door swing open just as she was contemplating the best way to get rid of her underwear. As she had left her desk in a hurry, she hadn’t thought to grab her purse and was now faced with the unusual dilemma of rapid thong disposal. Unusual for Violet, at least. She was sure there were plenty of scenarios whereby consenting adults, who found themselves in possession of a superfluous and possibly incriminating wisp of polyester, might be forced to flush, jettison or otherwise conceal it.

  Unfortunately, flushing was not an option for Violet. In response to a cynical PR-inspired green image makeover, the plumbing at Olympic studios was some kind of new age self-composting high-efficiency rigmarole. In practice this meant that it blocked up when confronted with even the most innocuous foreign object, resulting in a number of large signs now placed strategically around the office:

  NO

  Condoms

  Coverage Notes

  Cocktail Umbrellas

  to be flushed down the toilets!

  Whether the blockage that precipitated the notices was the result of one night of particularly enthusiastic script assessing, or a series of separate transgressions, was never made clear to staff members. All the same, Violet was fairly sure that lingerie, although not specifically listed, was not among the sanctioned flushable items.

  After a brief moment of consideration, Violet realized that it was also pointless to linger on the jettison option. There was about as much chance of a low velocity projectile escaping from the studio as there was a decent movie. The reduced-emissions double-glazed recycled breathing policy meant that it was impossible to open a window. In the event of a fire, they would all die and in the event of an underwear emergency, a young lady was left with only one option: concealment. More accurately, then, Violet was contemplating the best place to conceal her underwear when the door swung open.

  She immediately smelled Hunter. Not the man, but the celebrity aftershave that had been developed by NASA and carried their logo as the only non-essential male grooming product approved for use in zero gravity. It was non-flammable and smelled of jet fuel, Jim Beam and gardenias. Prior to her encounter with Eros’ golden arrow, the smell of Hunter had made Violet want to regurgitate her lunch. Now it made her want to swallow a movie star’s sperm.

  Of course, Hunter himself never wore Hunter. He wore another man’s eponymous scent; conveniently produced by the same cosmetics conglomerate and therefore, like most consumables in Hunter’s life, free. There was only one person at Olympic studios with the audacity to wear Hunter, and that was Kurt Sivitz. With the possible exception of Hunter himself, Kurt was the last person that Violet wanted to encounter at that time. She was going to have to wait it out, as Kurt was not using a closed cubicle, it seemed, but was rather fastidiously washing his hands with who knew what OCD imperative. Perhaps he needed to wash his hands before he touched his penis; perhaps he was the kind of guy who could only do his business in an empty restroom. Whatever the reason, his washing was taking on both rhythmic and ritualistic proportions, to the point where Violet was beginning to suspect that he might be jerking off in the sink.

  As it happened, Kurt had indeed visited the restroom with exactly that intention, but the presence of another person in a cubicle was preventing the follow through. He was washing his hands while he waited for his erection to
subside, which was proving difficult because the inspiration behind the excursion had been an REI catalog. Kurt had a thing for wholesome women in sports sandals, dating back to his unrequited grade school crushes on Girl Guides who tormented him with their with bobble-tied pigtails and Christian indifference. And while Violet never wore sports sandals – and indeed, was never a Girl Guide – Kurt had often imagined her hiking through redwood forests wearing nothing more than a hot pink thong and a pair of Tevas.

  It may seem like an incredible coincidence that Kurt’s fantasies often involved the very item of which Violet was attempting to divest herself, but Kurt was nothing if not predictable. With the exception of his woodsy embellishments, his fantasies were identical to those of seven out of ten men of his age and socioeconomic bracket. Pink thongs merely featured prominently in a certain underwear catalog and those catalogs being what they unofficially are, were frequently fetishized by Kurt and his demographic.

  Although Kurt’s hands were as clean as they were ever going to get short of chemical dermabrasion, a kind of three-way Mexican standoff had developed between Kurt and his penis, and Kurt’s penis and the anonymous cubicle dweller. It was as if his penis could sense Violet’s presence. Kurt, on the other hand, was furious at both of them. While Violet, with her ill-advised foray into male fantasyland in her lap, silently prayed to Jesus for a fourth option.

  Unfortunately, Jesus was, at that moment, taking an emergency collect call from Olympus. So it was lucky that Hunter – the man, not the scent – blustered into the restroom with all the gravitas of a cardboard cutout. ‘Hunter!’ squeaked Kurt, hastily turning off the tap and managing, somehow, to spray foaming anti-bacterial hand cleanser onto the front of his pants. And therefore, inevitably, drawing attention to his groin. ‘K-man!’ said Hunter, raising his eyebrows. ‘Where’d you get that boner, dude?’

  ‘I –’ said Kurt.

  ‘Fuck off, Kurt,’ said Hermes. Standing in the doorway with his arms folded, Hermes appeared to phosphoresce slightly. In Olympus, this was his natural skin color but the combination of vast trans-dimensional distances and yogic breathing enabled Hermes to suppress it while on Earth and thus more easily blend in with the spray-on tanned. In times of extreme stress, however, Hermes forgot to breathe, which caused the cracks in his personal trans-dimensional pathway to widen. And thus his divinity was inadvertently revealed. Had he looked down, Kurt would have seen a feathery apparition emerging from the canvas heels of the Converse sneakers belonging to the intern known as Henry. Fortunately, he was too mortified to look down. Or indeed, speak.

  ‘Wha–’ he stammered.

  ‘I said,’ repeated Hermes calmly, ‘Fuck. Off.’

  ‘Whoa,’ said Hunter. He’d once played a UN peacekeeper, which had erroneously led him to believe that uttering such platitudes as ‘Peace, man’ while holding up two fingers was a legitimate mediation tactic. ‘Peace, man,’ he said. He was on the verge of busting out the hippie salute when he happened to glance down at Hermes’ feet. ‘Dude,’ he said, with a little more emphasis on the ‘u’ than the word strictly demanded, ‘what the fuck is that coming out of your shoes?’

  Violet had been listening to the trouble brewing outside her closed cubicle with the highly attuned ear of a couples’ counselor. She knew that eventually she would be forced to intervene and at that point, she would lose whatever credibility she had managed to gain at the studio by refusing to distinguish between the mating calls of her co-workers and the drone of the air conditioner. She also knew that what she held in her hand was not only the perfect diffuser for any situation involving too much testosterone, it was also an elasticized catalyst of her fate. When she heard Hunter say ‘Duuuuude’ she stood up. By ‘what the fuck’ she had unlocked the door. And by ‘shoes’ she was standing in front of her celebrity crush, offering him the balled up, ill-fitting expression of her love, like an entrepreneurial Japanese schoolgirl.

  ‘These are for you,’ she said, handing them over. Then, after an extended dumbfounded silence, added: ‘They’re my panties’. Violet had never in her life used the word ‘panties’, because it reminded her of bad porn and, inexplicably, those small pancakes that are often topped with smoked salmon and crème fraiche, but she reasoned that if ever there was an appropriate time to use the word, this was such an occasion.

  27.

  Eros paced around his room in the east tower, glancing every now and then at the doorway where a salivating Minotaur guarded his room with pre-digestive eagerness.

  ‘She’s up to something,’ said Eros. The line was bad, but at least Zeus had consented to the phone call. It was the only trans-dimensional phone in Olympus, and therefore sure to have been tapped by the Furies, the most salacious gossips ever to set foot on polished marble. But Eros was desperate for reassurance from a co-conspirator; and preferably not one whose ring tone was I’m your man by Wham!

  Jesus, whose ring tone was Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, listened patiently to Eros’ anxious babble. ‘But you knew she’d be angry,’ he said.

  ‘I knew she’d be angry,’ said Eros. ‘I didn’t know she’d cry.’

  ‘Crying is good,’ said Jesus. ‘She is obviously upset and will take pity on you.’

  ‘Crying is bad,’ said Eros. ‘She’s obviously faking it and will string me up by the balls on some craggy outcrop on the forsaken side of the Styx.’

  ‘Faking it?’ said Jesus, making room for Romeo on the Eames recliner. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’

  ‘I mean, do you mean that she is pretending to cry? Do you think she might do this at the trial?’

  Eros groaned, long and low. It had been a traumatic day, and every reminder of his upcoming trial felt like a physical pain ripping into his highly-strung pectorals. Fortunately, due to the bad line, it came across as a kind of soft woodwind note, so Jesus was not unduly alarmed. ‘Jesus,’ said Eros eventually, ‘I hate to break this to you, but you have no idea about women. They don’t always cry because they’re sad. Sometimes they cry because they want something. And sometimes they cry because they’re hiding something. In my mother’s case, it takes such a monumental effort for her to cry at all that the only time it’s really worthwhile is when the thing she wants is really, really big; or the thing she’s hiding is very, very bad.’

  ‘Really?’ said Jesus, scratching under Romeo’s chin. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  Eros groaned again and this time Jesus couldn’t help but catch the note of despair. ‘But don’t worry,’ he added hastily, ‘the only real option is to banish you, and once you’re here, everything will be OK.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Eros. A certain amount of pleading in his voice.

  Jesus was far from sure, but he was of the opinion that nervous anticipation was the biggest energy waster outside of tumble dryers. As it happened, he and Violet were in agreement about this. Both of them hung out their laundry on cheap Ikea clothes racks. And both used a similar technique to disarm anxiety in their clients and friends.

  ‘Breathe,’ said Jesus. ‘Just breathe.’

  ‘I’m breathing.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jesus. ‘Now count your breaths.’

  ‘I’m counting.’

  ‘Now keep counting and breathing while you hang up the phone.’

  ‘OK,’ said Eros as he hung up the phone. At which point he lost count, held his breath, and threw up the handful of olives he’d gulped down ten minutes earlier.

  28.

  By the time she got back to her desk after the fourth option had unexpectedly presented itself to her, Violet was shaking with the aftershock. She felt as if she had just taken a swing at her own life with a sledgehammer and the old Violet had not so much been liberated as annihilated. Now, the new Violet felt strongly that she needed to be a long way away from where the old Violet had just been. It took her twenty-one seconds to shut down her computer, grab her purse and begin the long march to the elevator lobby, past the intern
s, assistants and untitled underlings who stoked the fires and polished the glass of the studio smoke and mirrors. They all stared at her – the baby goths, the hipsters, the vintage victims and the wannabes – firstly in response to Henry, who called out her name just as she started to run, and secondly in response to Hunter Cole, who tried to follow her, tripped on what appeared to be a couple of mating snakes, face-planted the floor and knocked himself out.

  It was a desperate move by Hermes, who knew that he didn’t have time to chase her. He was also starting to look alarmingly god-like, his hair blazing indigo, his skin glowing alabaster. In a reflex action he had plucked his pet snakes from the family crest, which, conveniently, was mounted on the wall by the restroom. Now he had ten minutes to retrieve the snakes, make a last minute call to Jesus and settle himself into countdown mode, while avoiding any further confrontation. Although it was technically forbidden, the time had come for drastic measures. Scraping a little oil of amnesia from his cinnamon tin, Hermes rubbed his palms together and blew on his hands, causing a sickly maudlin scent to waft over the room. It was only enough to wipe out the last five minutes, which unfortunately wouldn’t make the underpants incident go away, but it would give him enough time to disappear before the movie star regained consciousness and Kurt emerged from his cubicle prison.

  As the assembled minions stared blankly into space, Hermes gave a sharp whistle. His snakes, who had only moments ago been made of bronze, were a little reluctant to give up their new found animation but with the promise of a trip to Disneyland at a later date, Hermes managed to curl them back into the crest.