Margin of Eros Read online

  Although Violet declined Henry’s kind offer, she made the mistake of ignoring his counter offer to email her a picture instead. And before she could figure out how to reset her spam filter, there it was in her inbox like so much premature ejaculate.

  Violet didn’t know it at the time, but ‘Henry’ was yet another god; a point less important than their eventual friendship which would not only save Violet’s life, but introduce her to a few techniques that would set her up as a hugely successful couples therapist and celebrity ‘sexpert’, several years down the track.

  3.

  The first time Ares laid eyes on Violet, he was simultaneously arguing with and hitting on a yoga instructor at a party in West Hollywood. Pretty much every party he ever went to ended up with him arguing with someone young, lithe and spiritually erratic, until such time as he took pity on her ignorance and pretended to agree with her waffle in order to ingratiate himself between her hairless and super flexible thighs. Which invariably proved both brief and disappointing, particularly as Ares had a thing for hairy legs. Despite the pseudo-bohemian origins of the yoga movement in California, Ares had never found a single sun-saluting starlet who wasn’t waxed and plucked to within an inch of her life, yet he kept on looking, partly because he enjoyed listening to specious arguments and partly because his well-thumbed copy of ‘The Joy of Sex’ promised a return to hairier times, if not soon then someday. He was immortal; he could wait. It was therefore no coincidence that the first thing he noticed about Violet was her armpits.

  She was standing across the room from him with her face in profile, and while he found her nose appealing, it was her armpit that he was drawn to. As she lifted up her arm to take a sip of champagne, a couple of stray hairs extended towards her breast, the curl and color of which Ares could discern in intricate detail, because he was a god. It wasn’t that she had failed to shave her armpit, it was just that she had missed a bit, which he found incredibly erotic. Also, she wasn’t wearing any deodorant and was a little sweaty, which, again due to the heightened senses that were part of the divine tool kit, he could smell as clearly as if he had buried his nose in her mis-shaven pit. The scent was as deeply intoxicating as a Siren’s vagina, but much less treacherous, and for a moment Ares was caught with his mouth hanging open, unable to think of a single word of rebuttal to the absurd notion of karmic release.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Megan (they were always called Megan; or if not Megan, then something as close to Megan as made no difference), leaving her to contemplate the folly of her former lives while he made a beeline for the other side of the room, where the woman with the perfect armpit was talking to an incredibly boring-looking man from Tasmania, wherever the hell that was.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Ares for the second time, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing that this guy is boring you shitless.’ And then Violet turned to face him and he felt the full force of her beauty with such brutality that he dropped his plate of mini quiches on her foot. Unfortunately this set off a sequence of events which concluded with Ares being thrown out of the house, which turned out to belong to the gormless Tasmanian, who turned out to be a celebrity environmentalist. Who knew there was such a thing? At any rate it didn’t matter because by the time Ares was ejected onto the street, he had discovered that her name was Violet and that she was a psychologist; more than enough information to work with. As far as he was concerned, her profession was a gift from the gods as it gave him the perfect opportunity to insinuate himself into her life on a weekly basis, and all for half the price of a hooker. Since he was unfamiliar with the concept of professional ethics and totally unused to sexual rejection, he figured that it would only be a couple of sessions before he became her lover.

  Resisting as long as he possibly could, which was about two weeks, Ares called the clinic where Violet worked and was annoyed to learn that he would have to wait six weeks for the next available appointment. Still, that gave him plenty of time to manufacture a mental health crisis. It also meant that, when his session finally rolled around, Violet didn’t recognize him from the party; or if she did, she was polite enough to pretend that she didn’t, perhaps concluding that his opening line and subsequent reaction proved the need for therapy.

  And so Ares began what was to become the most blissful and frustrating two months of his long and combative life, before his impatience got the better of him and he set about fucking things up for the Earth and everyone on it.

  4.

  One of the disadvantages of being immortal is that there is no real incentive to grow up. Maturity is thrust upon mortals in the way that darkness is thrust upon the Earth in midwinter – with a predictably inky thud. Maturity comes to gods, if at all, in the same way that darkness comes upon a man who has left his house to go wandering in the forest a little too late in the day, and is suddenly surprised to find himself surrounded by towering shadows and beady eyes. Mortals, expecting the darkness, either learn to leave earlier or pack an emergency flashlight, or both, whereas the gods, fully expecting to have their paths eternally illuminated by the light from their own assholes, are often surprised to find themselves whimpering in hollow trees, fists and hearts jammed firmly into their mouths.

  At five-and-a-half thousand years old, Aphrodite was the kind of spoiled Olympian princess whose idea of a good time was to cruise maternity wards and randomly fling minor disfigurements at the prettier babies (a hooked nose here, a hormone imbalance there) from her grubby little ugly pouch, a nasty piece of sorcery she had stolen from the gorgon Medusa. In the days of plastic surgery and laser hair removal, however, such inconveniences did little to mar the beauty of the unlucky girls in the long run, but in the crucial ten years or so between the time they realized they were different and the time when their parents were prepared to cough up for plastic surgery, the damage was done. Like a fat kid who loses fifty pounds as a gym-obsessed, carb-fearing adult, they would always think of themselves as deficient in some way. As far as Aphrodite was concerned, a well-timed ugly phase was as good as permanent. Still, she did miss the days when a decent dose of warts could get a girl burned at the stake.

  Violet had slipped past Aphrodite’s ever-vigilant eye by virtue of being born kind of funny looking, to an entirely average looking mother and father in a middle class neighborhood in the most boring city in the continental United States. Thus, happily blending into the bland, she had lived an uneventful and slightly bookish life, until one day in the 90s she caught a reflection of herself in a pair of mirrored sunglasses and found to her surprise that she had emerged from adolescence not only unscathed, but bathed in the Benedictine loveliness of a monk’s naughty watercolors. She had the kind of small, perfectly round breasts that would never sag, the kind of dewy skin that never needed makeup, and the kind of knowing smile that made the Mona Lisa look like a compulsive over-sharer. Fortunately she lived in a country where this kind of subtle beauty was considered unpatriotic, so she was able to fly under the radar until such time as she moved to New York to go to college, at which point men, gods and lesbians began to sit up and take notice.

  It was a mere three thousand years into her on-again, off-again affair with Ares when Aphrodite discovered the existence of a woman more beautiful than she. In Olympian terms, three thousand years was a small blip on the radar and as far as Aphrodite was concerned, they were still in the honeymoon phase – or what would have been the honeymoon phase, had they not both been married to other gods. It had been ages – no, several ages – since she had come across anyone, mortal or otherwise, to challenge her widely agreed-upon mantel as ‘most beautiful creature in all of heaven and earth, not counting the underworld because let’s face it, once you’re dead no man will touch you with his ten foot pole.’ And she didn’t like it. Furiously jealous and microscopically shallow, she was the reason re-touching had been invented. She was the ugly face of beauty, a face whose perfect symmetry and flawless finish could, with a slight shift of focus, send small children screaming into the soft embrace
of their comely mommies.

  She was also a slut.

  Motherhood had not softened Aphrodite. Her only son, Eros, had been fathered by Ares (probably) and had quickly grown into a handsome and spectacularly buff archer of considerable renown. This gained him the coveted position of ‘inflamer of hearts’, which is not as cardiologically unpleasant as it sounds. Essentially, it meant that Eros was required to make frequent invisible excursions to Earth in order to do the work that alcohol alone could not. Unsurprisingly, this made him quite popular with the ladies, which only served to further fuel Aphrodite’s roaring green rage. Whenever Eros appeared to favor one of the sexy little nymphs with whom Aphrodite had entrusted his care, the vengeful bitch would immediately curse, maim or otherwise banish the creature from her son’s increasingly lonely and sexually frustrated existence. For a hot young god of love, he got preciously little action. His cousin Hermes, on the other hand, could regularly be seen blazing a sparkling spray of semen across the night sky. It was enough to make an astrophysicist blush.

  ‘So you just emailed it to her?’ Eros asked, incredulous. Stretched out under a mango tree, surrounded by a tropical palette of dew dappled, honey scented foliage, he took a long, satisfying swig of ice cold ambrosial ale. Next to him, Hermes picked his teeth with a piece of cinnamon bark. Recently returned from his first day of fake internship at Olympic Studios, Hermes was still feeling a little fuzzy from the trans-dimensional leap. ‘From my iPhone,’ he confirmed. ‘Is that emailing or texting? I can never tell the difference.’

  ‘Depends which function you used, but probably emailing,’ said Eros, although what would he know, he barely got to use his iPhone and certainly never to email pictures of his erect cock to the most beautiful woman in the world.

  ‘There you boys are!’ said Aphrodite, causing Eros to curse under his breath and Hermes to shove the cinnamon bark into the roof of his mouth.

  ‘Would you please, please, stop doing that!’ said Eros, gritting his teeth.

  ‘Doing what?’ asked Aphrodite, with uncharacteristic innocence.

  ‘You know what,’ said Eros. It was by far her most annoying habit, a notable achievement for someone who temporarily crippled from the waist down any young lady silly enough to meet his wandering eye. Only marginally less annoying was her ability to appear – with considerable precision – the moment he was about to masturbate. On this occasion, however, her goal was not to stunt the sexual development of her son, but to receive an update on the desperate affection her lover Ares still harbored for that overrated earth woman, the one with the crooked teeth and the insignificant tits.

  ‘I disagree,’ said Hermes. ‘Her tits are great.’

  ‘You’ve seen them?’ Aphrodite’s eyes flashed a dangerous jade as her nails sank into the flesh of the mango she’d idly plucked from the tree. She’d never slept with Hermes, of course, but like most of Olympus she had seen his penis and therefore considered that she was owed his loyalty.

  ‘Not yet,’ Hermes admitted ‘but those Gap t-shirts don’t leave much to the imagination. She wasn’t even wearing a bra today.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Aphrodite. Then: ‘Fuck.’ This wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She had been relying on the fact that Violet seemed to be the only celibate assistant in Hollywood, but such an overt display of breast jiggling could only mean one thing. Or could it? A blatant disregard for feminine support also had other implications.

  ‘She’s not a lesbian,’ said Hermes. ‘Anyone who appreciates c–’ he started to say, until he caught Eros’ desperate expression out of the corner in his eye. Clearly, Aphrodite didn’t know about the iPhone incident, and it seemed best to keep it that way.

  ‘–ooking as much as she does could never be a lesbian,’ he continued, not very convincingly.

  ‘Are you saying lesbians don’t cook?’ asked Aphrodite.

  ‘Only vegan food,’ said Hermes, ‘And she was eating a hamburger at lunch.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Aphrodite, temporarily appeased. ‘Maybe she’s bisexual,’ she added hopefully.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Hermes. ‘And anyway, there’s no such thing as bisexuality. In the long run, you either like vaginas or you like cocks. It’s one or the other.’

  Eros opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, then closed his eyes, letting it all wash over him: the sickly sweet perfume of endlessly ripening fruit, the eternal autumnal glory of the creaking trees, the lyrical caress of distant harps, the delirious hum of paradise. Here he was, a mere youth, divinely entrusted with facilitating the amorous unions of mortals and thus ensuring the survival of the human race. And this was the material he’d been given to work with in order to fashion his moral compass. No wonder the earth was screwed.

  5.

  As it happened, Violet hadn’t eaten a hamburger for lunch that day – Hermes, or ‘Henry’ as she knew him, had been mistaken about that. She had been eating a tofu burger. She wasn’t a vegan though, or even a vegetarian – she just happened to like vegan food. It was just a shame she couldn’t muster the same level of enthusiasm for vegans. Violet didn’t have much time for vegans, in fact it would be fair to say that she actively disliked them. This negative bias had begun when a vegan co-worker at the health center in Beverly Hills where she used to work had opined, one lunchtime, that eating an egg was like eating an abortion. As Violet had been eating an egg, lettuce and avocado sandwich at the time, the comment hadn’t gone down too well. Later, in the course of her professional practice she had come to treat a lot of teenagers with eating disorders, many of whom turned out to be the daughters of celebrity vegans. Violet felt that a special place in hell ought to be reserved for celebrity vegans – or veganorexics, as she liked to call them. They were a Hollywood phenomenon: body-obsessed actresses of a certain age whose careers had been gradually going down the toilet for the past ten years, along with their regurgitated meals, who had suddenly found that they could legitimize their restrictive eating practices by cloaking them in environmentalism, make some money by publishing a vegan cookbook, and cause their overweight daughters to feel worse about themselves, all at the same time.

  It was a pity the recipes were so good.

  The following day, Violet took her lunch of stir fried soba noodles with ginger, green beans and shiitake mushrooms out into the courtyard, where she sat down under what she assumed to be a statue of Apollo, complete with weathered appendage and marble-look concrete. Violet had always considered it to be a rather tacky and obvious fake, the creation of a bored props department during a production lull, rather than the priceless original, carved painstakingly from stone and excavated from a flooded ruin under the Aegean Sea, that it actually was. Crucially, though, it was large, and it provided significant relief from the California sun.

  It was here, in the shadow of the sun god, that Henry found her, chasing Japanese noodles around her plastic lunch box. Mistaking his wry smile for a suggestive smirk, Violet watched with a certain amount of unease as he ambled toward her, weaving in and out of the potted olive trees like Zephyrus himself.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ asked Violet. And for a moment Hermes was lost for words, because he had in fact been smiling derisively at the statue of Apollo, who he’d always considered to be a rather tacky and obvious fake. ‘Your flawless awesomeness,’ he said after a moment, a line he had stolen from Apollo but unlike his uncle, meant. ‘Mind if I sit down?’

  Violet looked up from her noodles, several of which were dangling from her mouth. The delicate tang of ginger and soy wafted between them. Not wanting to appear as if he had caught her off guard, Violet sucked the noodles in slowly, leaving a light trail of marinade on her chin. Hermes fought the urge to lean across and lick it off.

  ‘Be my guest,’ she said. ‘I was just leaving.’ She wasn’t really, but it sounded like the kind of thing people said in movies.

  ‘No you weren’t,’ said Hermes, and smiled at her with the penetrating authority of the deranged. Instantly, Violet r
elaxed. Insanity was something that she felt quite comfortable with – much more comfortable than, say, conversing with a perverted, angel-faced immortal with wings on his heels. With professional detachment, Violet attributed to Henry an addictive personality, which had caused him to seek out a career in entertainment and a lifetime supply of cocaine and blow jobs as a substitute for parental affection. As it happened, she was only half wrong in her diagnosis, but the kind of stunning fraternal rejection that Hermes had endured as an infant and then later as an airborne teen would have made Violet gasp, had she known about it, and possibly even knee her boss in the balls. As it was, the milder version she had envisaged made it easy to rationalize Henry’s behavior. Much more difficult to rationalize was the nagging feeling that their lives were intrinsically connected.

  ‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ said Hermes. Violet paused in pursuit of a recalcitrant green bean. Trying to hide her surprise, she shifted her weight from her left to her right buttock, which merely had the effect of magnifying her discomfort on the metamorphic rock.