Margin of Eros Read online

  ‘In a little over five months,’ Hera said quietly.

  ‘Five months!’ yelled Zeus.

  ‘A little over,’ admitted Hera. Judging by the strength and direction of steam coming out of her husband’s ears, a severe weather warning was brewing off the coast of Ireland. Either that, or pity the poor elephants in Dublin Zoo. Fortunately, Hera had several thousand years worth of placatory parlor tricks up her sleeve, not to mention a hidden agenda. ‘My darling husband,’ she said, propping herself up on one elbow and smoothing out a patch of pillows, ‘come and lie down. You look exhausted.’ Hera didn’t often bust out the ‘husband’ line, but when she did, a little tingle started at the base of Zeus’ spine, spread out in a sprinkling arc and settled somewhere near his kidneys. Like a stray kitten, he sank down to the floor, crawled across to his wife, and sniffed her armpit. ‘Kitty want a spank?’ whispered Hera. Zeus nodded, his head lowered submissively. Kitty did indeed. ‘But first,’ said Hera, ‘we have to work out what to do about the population problem.’

  Zeus groaned. ‘Can’t we do that afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards,’ said Hera, ‘you’ll be drooling like a baby.’ Tapping Zeus lightly on the flank, she elicited a preview of the response to which she alluded. Zeus grinned like a Minotaur. ‘You’re probably right,’ he sighed.

  ‘I was thinking,’ continued Hera, drumming her fingernails across her husband’s scapula, ‘that we should send Apollo down to Earth.’

  ‘Not Apollo,’ grumbled Zeus, ‘he’s such a softcock’. His voice was a little whiney, but quickly losing its authority as he surrendered to the tactile battery of his upper spine.

  ‘Which is precisely why we need him,’ said Hera. ‘We need to saturate the market with romantic comedies. That’s his division. He’s been off with the Muses paying that stupid harp of his for way too long. It’s time for him to go back to work.’

  ‘Mmm, I love romantic comedies,’ murmured Zeus.

  ‘I know you do darling,’ said Hera, giving him an unexpectedly vicious smack on the left buttock, as if to seal the deal.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Zeus, rolling over and offering up his right side. ‘When Harry Met Sally.’ He started to chuckle. ‘The orgasm scene.’

  Hera groaned inwardly. Personally she thought that stupid orgasm scene had a lot to answer for. Certainly, it had made her grandson’s job a lot more difficult and he had frequently complained to her about the concentration of pheromones he was now forced to use on his arrows, just so that newly infatuated couples could be inspired to similar performances. Anything less demonstrative and they were disappointed. Hera herself preferred to simply break the furniture, but her husband seemed to be impressed by such ego-boosting theatrics. She decided to smack him extra hard, as punishment.

  ‘Why don’t you ever go off like that?’ asked Zeus, his eyes closed, smiling in anticipation of the delicious sting of her fingers. Hera paused, her palm raised. With eyes of flint, she lowered her hand slowly, gathered her robes around her and extracted herself as elegantly as possible from the pile of cushions.

  ‘Why don’t you go to the palace games room,’ she said, yanking her hem out from under the sweaty thunder god, ‘and finish yourself off?’

  Zeus watched her leave in stunned silence. Goddesses, he thought. Truly, they were the most unfathomable creatures in all of the seven realms. He had nothing planned for the rest of the afternoon and now here he was, once again, with a chronic case of blue butt. For a moment he thought about traveling to Earth, borrowing Ares’ condo, ordering takeout and settling in for a 24-hour Meg Ryan marathon. But it all seemed like too much of an effort. Instead, he hoisted himself to his feet, polished off the rest of his cocktail and headed out across the courtyard, trying to remember where he’d last seen his badminton racquet.

  41.

  Leaning over Leo’s shoulder, Violet picked up the faxed copy of Foxhole Fury and gave it a cursory flip through. In doing so, she grazed his cheek with a tendril of hair that had broken free, boldly and provocatively, from her messy ponytail. For Eros, the effect was a little like having his testicles zapped by a toaster. Not that he had ever put his testicles in a toaster, but a recent altercation with an English muffin in Jesus’ condo had given him a taste of the kind of mild electric shock that now buzzed in his boxers. ‘Fizz,’ he said happily.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Violet, frowning at the document in front of her. With thick slashes across every page, the script more closely resembled a soldier’s heavily censored love letter than the fawning ode to combat it actually was. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘Um,’ said Eros. ‘Not really.’ Nervously, he started to swivel on the oversized office chair, oscillating silently on the seamless engineering. It was, without a doubt, the most comfortable chair Eros had ever sat in. Absurdly plush, it was like a fart in the face of Asceticism, a doctrine for which his (statistically likely) father had a low regard. On that matter, Eros was in rare and complete agreement. The moment the memory foam core had molded around his weary gluteals, he had vowed to sneak a prototype back to his (unlikely) father in Olympus. True, Hephaestus specialized in manipulating precious metals, but he was also a dab hand at soft furnishings and often made use of Aphrodite’s discarded goats in pursuit of upholstery innovation.

  ‘Oh,’ said Violet, flicking to the last page without much hope, ‘I thought you said something.’ Just as she had feared, the script had been reduced to a mindless montage of violence, jingoism and playground moralizing. If there was any hope of the script holding together in some kind of vaguely cohesive structure, it was going to take more than twigs and spittle. Clearly, in addition to reformatting, she was going to have to bulk out the explosions with some kind of filler material. This material would need to be so devoid of any emotional resonance that Aaron would fail to notice its presence in the script, and Hunter would be able to deliver the lines in a hefty monotone without unduly straining his larynx. Of course, Violet didn’t consciously acknowledge the lack of nuance in the voice of her beloved. She merely resigned herself to yet another couple of days of secretly rewriting one of Aaron’s hatchet jobs. That this contravened a number of hard won and vigilantly defended clauses in the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement had simply never occurred to Violet; nor had it occurred to her that, based on that same agreement and taking into account residuals, the studio owed her approximately three quarters of a million dollars.

  She put her hand on Leo’s shoulder. ‘Leo,’ she said, ‘stop swiveling.’

  Eros stopped, so swiftly and completely that all movement in the vicinity ceased with such spectacular deceleration that the subsequent hush felt like an avalanche of ghosts. Which is not to say that he stopped dead. To say that he stopped dead would be to imply that the end of life coincided with an explosive aeration of the soul. Although, explosion wasn’t quite right either. ‘Explosion’ implied a violent exothermic reaction, yet the aeration Eros was experiencing was more like the prickly tang of champagne bubbles, liberated from the bottle by the glorious ‘pop’ of love, which merely served to release a dormant, euphoric effervescence.

  And so on.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said Violet.

  Eros nodded. He felt like he was about to vomit constellations.

  Violet narrowed her eyes. ‘You look like you’re about to throw up.’

  Eros shook his head, apparently unconvincingly.

  ‘Well, if you are going to throw up,’ said Violet, ‘you should probably go home. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but this place is like a Petri dish for pungent odors. Any excretions that aren’t instantaneously flushed make this place smell like last week’s lunchbox.’

  Eros nodded, acknowledging that he understood. But as Violet’s hand was still on his shoulder, he wasn’t able to move any other part of his body, including his lips.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not going to throw up?’ said Violet. The handsome intern nodded, looking up at her with a baleful, slightly glassy stare. At this point, it had b
een Violet’s intention to hand back the script, pull up a chair, and give Leo a basic lesson in screenplay formatting software so he could at least produce a clean copy for her while she got to work deleting smash cuts. But for some reason, she couldn’t remove her hand. It wasn’t glued to his shoulder so much as adhered. It was the weirdest sensation. She suddenly understood what it felt like to be a roll of film, clinging weakly yet wondrously to a plane of static charge. The usual tactile sensations in her hand had been replaced by the absence of sensation, however absence didn’t really describe the lack of any sense of direct contact. It was as if she had suddenly become aware of subatomic space, and that all the atoms in her palm were merging with the atoms in his shoulder, intimately entwined, yet curiously remaining the same distance apart.

  Or something.

  ‘Leo,’ said Violet, ‘I need to take my hand off your shoulder.’ She had no idea why she said this. But some inkling, rising to the surface from a fleeting memory, told her that Leo had to give her permission to let go.

  A look of shock instantly flashed across his face. But before Violet could interpret or even confirm what she had seen, he closed his eyes. Shaking his head from side to side, he muttered something under his breath, as if to dislodge some memory of his own, or perhaps to break some kind of –

  ‘Leo!’ said Violet, as her hand flew away from his shoulder. Now she could place the memory. It was a demonstration, in her second year of college, on the power of subconscious suggestion. Specifically, on the techniques used by stage hypnotists, cult leaders, and particularly ruthless Tupperware ladies. ‘Did you just hypnotize me?’

  Eros didn’t want to lie to Violet. And yet, he knew very well that he had accidentally hypnotized her in order to get her to leave her hand on his shoulder as long as humanly possible, or godly possible, whichever was the greater. He was mortified, as his actions had been entirely unintentional, which simultaneously made him realize that he would have to remain ever vigilant to prevent any more ‘leakage’ of his powers; and that he had an erection. Backed into a corner, he did the only thing that he could think of doing at that moment, which was to tell her the truth. Then, using the same technique as he had used to accidentally hypnotize her, erase her memory from the past two minutes. He felt so guilty about deliberately using his powers to mess with her mind that his erection instantly subsided. And thus, disaster averted, he relaxed his clenched buttocks onto the memory foam cushion and casually plucked the script from her hand.

  ‘Do you want me to reformat this for you?’ he said.

  Violet frowned. She was suddenly very thirsty. Extremely thirsty. So thirsty that if she didn’t get hold of a drink in the next sixty seconds, she felt like she might pass out. ‘Wait here,’ she said, and rushed off to the kitchen.

  Violet didn’t know it, but dehydration was a symptom of divine intervention. All she knew was that the cool water coursing down her throat tasted unspeakably delicious, like the condensed dew of blueberries. Uncoincidentally, the condensed dew of blueberries was one of the most popular drinks in Olympus, after Ambrosial Ale and Piña Coladas. In particular, it was Ares’ favorite drink, which is why he had stocked the fridge with generic spring water infused with imitation blueberry essence. It wasn’t quite the same, of course, but at least it fueled his fantasy of rolling around in the high tarns with Violet, the two of them wearing nothing but a thin film of purple pulp, every time he took a drink.

  Eros wasn’t aware of this. He was, however, aware that Violet was probably gulping down a couple of liters of water, which, if she wasn’t careful, would give her a terrible stomach cramp in about an hour and a half. He was tempted to intervene, but at the same time he felt that the gods (and he included himself in their number) had already intervened in her life above and beyond all broadly accepted definitions of the word. In fact, he was pretty sure that they had crossed over the border into ‘meddle’ some time ago and were heading rapidly into the badlands of ‘fuck with.’ So he did nothing. At least until he couldn’t stand inactivity any longer and started clicking randomly on various icons on the desktop, thereby inadvertently opening the latest draft of Foxhole Fury.

  By the time Violet returned from the kitchen, feeling a little spongy, Eros had already reformatted the first five pages, highlighting in red anything obviously discontinuous or downright incomprehensible. Gingerly, Violet sat down next to him, burping softly under her breath.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said.

  Eros smiled tentatively at Violet, in a manner he hoped was at the ‘shy’ end of blatant desire. ‘No problem,’ he said. He was finding editing strangely calming. Half an hour ago, he’d been feeling so frustrated at his inability to behave normally around Violet that he’d almost called Jesus for advice. Only the knowledge that Jesus was on a date, and therefore dealing with enough romantic conundrums of his own, had stopped Eros from picking up his iPhone.

  So it was an incredible relief to find that transcribing his (genetic) father’s terrible edits into Final Draft was the clerical equivalent of Xanax.

  ‘Good job,’ said Violet, reading over his shoulder.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Eros. ‘But I don’t think it really makes sense.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ said Violet. ‘Which is why I’m going to rewrite it.’

  Eros stared at her in awe, amazement, lust, devotion and surprise. Then quickly checked himself before suffusing her subconscious with the uncontrollable urge to pick him up by the nape of the neck and scratch him like a puppy. ‘You write screenplays?’ he said.

  ‘Only when forced to.’ Squinting at the screen, Violet tried to place herself inside the unfeasible situation in which Hawke supposedly found himself, after being forced to run guns for Nepalese communists in return for the guaranteed safety of his illegitimate daughter by an exiled Russian princess. She came up blank. Leaning across in front of the sweet smelling intern, she took hold of the mouse and clicked ‘Save As’, causing a small flutter in between the floating ribs of the undercover god of love; but nothing he couldn’t disguise with a fake sneeze. There would be plenty of time to work on the draft tomorrow, Violet reasoned. But right now, she needed job satisfaction. ‘Leo,’ she said, turning to him with a grin that almost set off a fake asthma attack, ‘how would you like to order some stationery?’

  42.

  Jesus fiddled nervously with his coffee cup. He didn’t usually drink coffee but Hermes had suggested a fashionable café off Robertson Boulevard and because Hermes was the acknowledged expert in this area, Jesus had agreed without question. The problem with this particular shopping strip was that it attracted troubled actresses and their entourages of stylists, bodyguards and less famous but equally troubled friends. Jesus didn’t make a habit of meeting his younger celebrity friends socially, mainly because it attracted the kind of attention that, more often than not, was the common denominator that had prompted them to seek out his services in the first place. As a general rule, he preferred not to work with anyone under the age of twenty-five, but as he never said no to anyone recommended by another friend, this rule was fairly elastic.

  By the time his date arrived, Jesus had run into two former child stars and an Emmy winner currently trying to transition into movies. After the third chance meeting, during which flashing camera bulbs had temporarily blinded him and an autograph seeker had knocked salt into his macchiato, he gave some serious thought to catching the first northbound bus on La Cienega, jumping into his pool naked and drip drying under the shade of his Bougainvillea. But the cafe staff were so quick to replace his coffee and the Emmy winner so verbally demonstrative that Jesus felt it would have been rude to make a run for it. Besides, he knew he could never do that to a date, no matter how uncomfortable he was feeling under the scrutinizing glare of Gucci.

  Her name was Marie, and she had responded promptly to his tentative YiDate advances with wit and enthusiasm. Jesus was charmed by her overuse of the word ‘adorable’ and the variety of poses struck in her five profile photo
graphs. Jesus himself had only one photo, but Marie had pronounced it ‘adorable’ (of course) and had revealed no aversion to beards, beer or cats, despite having ample opportunity to do so. When she strolled into the café, small white dog in tow, no alarm bells rang for Jesus. Rather, he felt a dull chime, like the muted peal of a church bell on a foggy morning, strong but reserved, rusty yet resonant. She was tall – a good two inches taller that Jesus - and was wearing a white shirt with embroidered bluebells, a Tiffany keychain necklace, dark blue jeans and tan leather boots. She had her own nose and a figure that she had accurately described on YiDate as ‘curvy’, but that her mother described to her friends as ‘challenging’. Jesus thought she looked beautiful.

  ‘Jay?’ she said, smiling shyly. Like his Olympian friends, Jesus used a pseudonym on Earth, chosen at random from a list of Grammy nominees in 1997. Personally, he liked his real name – a sentiment he shared with many of the descendants of the original Californians. But rules were rules, and he had to admit that his new name made him sound like a DJ, which, given his style of dress and record collection, wasn’t a bad cover when he needed one. Even his tax forms – and indeed, his YiDate profile – listed his occupation as ‘independent entertainment professional’, a wonderfully broad description that covered everything from rodeo clowns to talking parrots. Sometimes, Jesus really loved America.

  ‘You must be Marie,’ he said, standing up. Unfortunately, the sound of his metal chair scraping against the polished cement floor sent the small white dog into a snarling frenzy. Its little white ears stood on end. Its little white teeth gnashed at nothing. ‘I’m so sorry!’ said Marie, ‘he’s never done that before. Stop that!’ she admonished, squatting down and grabbing the dog by the collar, ‘stop that! Do you hear me? Stop that.’