Margin of Eros Read online

  ‘What part are you sorry about?’ she asked. ‘That you propositioned me, or that I turned you down?’

  ‘Neither,’ said Hermes.

  ‘Surely you’re not sorry that you sent me the photo? Because you strike me as a blatant exhibitionist.’

  ‘I’m definitely not sorry that I sent you the photo,’ said Hermes, grinning. ‘By the way, what did you think of it?’ At this point Violet almost blushed. That is to say, she felt the hormonal popping of cellular sunbursts as they took hold in her secret girl parts. But using a technique she had read about in Cosmopolitan, she managed to suppress it.

  ‘I thought,’ said Violet, lying, ‘that it was nice.’ In fact she had found it to be the second most perfect penis she had ever encountered. The most perfect – and here it got slightly esoteric – was a penis that featured in a recurring dream of hers. A penis with no body. Not so much a dismembered penis as a lost penis. She had no idea what this dream meant. Didn’t want to know. All she knew was that her dream penis was the most spectacularly beautiful male reproductive organ (she wasn’t wild about the term ‘reproductive organ’, but no other epithet, from the million or so she had to choose from, seemed fitting) she had ever seen. And she had seen a few. Thirteen in fact, not counting 70s porn.

  ‘Nice!’ said Hermes, offended. ‘What was wrong with it?’ Hermes wasn’t a vain god generally, but he was vain about his penis. He polished it every day – or, where possible, had it polished – with the mildly exfoliating yet deeply conditioning skin of Andalusian pomegranates. Violet shrugged. ‘Nothing’s wrong with it,’ she said, frowning at the brief yet alarming vision of Henry lying naked in a hammock, surrounded by stout, dark haired women carrying baskets of crimson fruit. ‘As I said, it was nice.’

  Hermes glowered. Violet shrugged. And for a moment the mood congealed between them like the remains of Violet’s lunch. Violet twirled a lonely noodle around her fork and contemplated putting it in her mouth, then changed her mind as some kind of gnat-like creature landed in the marinade, shuddered a little, then quietly and blissfully, drowned. When she looked up again, Hermes was picking his teeth with what appeared to be a piece of twig. ‘I hope you didn’t get that from an olive tree,’ said Violet, nodding at Henry’s toothpick. ‘The guard dogs piss on them all the time.’ Hermes smiled, shaking his head. ‘It’s cinnamon,’ he said. ‘Want some?’ He took what looked like a small cigarette case from his shirt pocket and handed it to Violet. Opening the case, Violet saw that it did indeed contain a neat row of cinnamon sticks. She smiled. ‘No thanks,’ she said, and was about to close the case and hand it back when she noticed an image embedded in the lid. It looked a little like a child’s novelty sticker, the kind where the superhero’s alter ego is revealed by holding the surface to the light and twisting it from side to side. It looked like a beach. Or if not a beach, then an island. No, mountains. She couldn’t quite make it out.

  ‘What’s this picture?’ she said, holding the lid out to Henry and pointing to the image. Hermes stared at her in alarm. He started to say something, changed his mind, then changed it again. ‘Fuck,’ he thought, unhelpfully. Snatching back the tin, he pressed the lid down firmly and shoved it into his pocket. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He was agitated beyond belief, and even more agitated for not being able to hide his agitation. Mortals weren’t supposed to be able to see what Violet had clearly seen. It was weird and…some other word that meant weird, with more syllables. ‘I have to go,’ he said abruptly, knowing that he was now making things worse, but unable to come up with a plausible explanation or a way to cover up his increasingly bizarre behavior. He was a messenger, for gods’ sake, not a thinker. Let her believe he was nuts – clearly she did anyway.

  ‘Wait!’ Violet called after Henry as he raced away, barely seeming to touch the grass. She had actually forgotten about the image in the cinnamon tin and was now concerned about his mildly psychotic behavior. She did think he was nuts, of course, but clinically, not comically. ‘You didn’t tell me what you wanted to tell me. Why you were sorry about yesterday.’ Hermes hit the brakes, his legs fluttering slightly as he came to a complete stop. With a sigh, he turned around, and for the first time in a long time he did feel deeply sorry. Violet didn’t deserve this. They were all meddling in her life and for what? Because she’d fluked the unfortunate combination of ethereal beauty and independent mind. ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ said Hermes, really, really meaning it, ‘because I think I may have gotten you into trouble.’ More trouble than you already were in, he thought, but didn’t say.

  6.

  When Violet returned to her desk after lunch there was a novelty post-it note from Aaron stuck to her iMac. Aaron favored brightly colored post-its shaped like animals. Violet never knew quite what to make of this preference. She didn’t think he was gay (and at any rate, the post-its were way too gay to be used by anyone who actually was gay), clearly he was good at his job which required him to be a ruthless asshole most of the time, and ruthless assholes generally stuck to the generic yellow squares – sometimes bright green squares if they were complete assholes. It had occurred to Violet that the post-its might be a way for Aaron to demonstrate his ‘softer side’ to the world, but that didn’t make any sense either, as she and the interns were the only ones who ever got to see them. And clearly he didn’t give a toss about the interns. Needless to say, the post-it notes were chosen for precisely that reason, and were entirely for Violet’s benefit. Love takes many forms, and the small sticky sonnets that he showered upon her daily were the only outward sign of his affection that Ares allowed himself. That, and his constant but well-disguised erection.

  ‘See me after lunch,’ said the mauve bunny. Violet glanced through the frosted glass wall that separated her desk from Aaron’s office. He didn’t appear to be inside. The clock on her computer said 1.55pm, which meant she still had five minutes – ten if she was lucky – to check her email and apply for a couple of jobs before her boss returned.

  Violet applied for a half-dozen or so jobs a day, more out of boredom than with any realistic expectation of success. At the time, the unemployment rate in California was hovering around ten percent, which might have deterred someone in a steady job (albeit a poorly paid job in a notoriously fickle industry) from risking even that level of security by both searching for and applying for other jobs during work hours. But Violet was not deterred, mostly because she thought Aaron was such a movie obsessed narcissist that he couldn’t conceive that his assistant would want to work in any other industry, or for anyone else. As it happened, Ares was well aware that Violet applied for other jobs, because he cyber stalked her. He was also the reason she didn’t get any of them. He was quite content to bide his time – and he had plenty of it – until the day that Violet learned to love both him and his movies, which were, without exception, gratuitously homoerotic combat-glorifying war movies. His aim, both as a war god and a movie producer, was not merely to entertain but to encourage young men to heroically suppress their emotions until such time as they were able to reveal them in their dying moments on a field of battle, after having blown to bits a satisfying number of other emotionally retarded young men.

  His movies were incredibly popular.

  The biggest action star in Hollywood, and frequent hero of Aaron’s movies, was Hunter Cole. Rippling with clichés, including his well-documented love of opera (which he never listened to), hybrid vehicles (which he never drove) and strippers (who he respected, deeply), he was a toxic fusion of deoxyribonucleic acid, Jack Daniels and hand sanitizer. He was everything that was wrong with the country that had spawned him under the torn awning of a Winnebago, and he would one day be its president.

  Violet had met Hunter Cole three times at Olympic Studios, and on each occasion she’d developed a pounding headache behind her right eye, possibly from having to squint against the blinding glare of his smile. So it was no real surprise when she looked up from applying for a job as night auditor at The Standard Downtown (why not
?) to find the action star striding toward her desk, followed closely by Aaron. In a well-practiced action, she closed her email account with one hand and flicked open a random script with the other. ‘You just smoked your last camel, cocksucker!’ she read.

  Hunter was wearing sunglasses. Unfortunately for Violet, she was not, but in addition to the sunglasses Hunter was sporting a thick, curling beard and a generous mustache that partially diffused his neon teeth. ‘Biblical epic,’ he explained to the staring interns, who hadn’t asked.

  ‘Violet, did you get my note?’ said Aaron, in the slightly impatient tone he always adopted in her presence. In reality, her presence took his breath away, and when she stood up and brushed a stray hair behind her ear, causing her right breast to shift upwards three quarters of an inch, it took all his willpower to stop himself from transmuting into a white stallion and scooping her onto his back, so that he might experience the frightened squeeze of her thighs and her terrified yet excited squeals as he galloped off into Griffith Park.

  It was getting worse. He had admitted as much to himself. But he had finally come up with a plan that would bring them closer together, so close in fact that not even Aphrodite could prevent them from making the beautiful-yet-frowned-upon mortal-divine love that had become his obsession.

  ‘You stuck it in the middle of my screen,’ said Violet, pointing to the pile of discarded sticky notes on the side of her desk. And I really wish you’d stop doing that, she added silently. Aaron’s presence lingered over her screen in grubby smudges, no matter how many times she wiped it down. It was as if he couldn’t resist the urge to grope it every time he walked past. Which, of course, he couldn’t. ‘Good,’ said Aaron, although what exactly was ‘good’ about anything was unclear. What it did seem to indicate was that Violet should follow Aaron into his office.

  ‘Nice biceps,’ said Hunter, lowering his sunglasses and leering at her upper arm. ‘Do you work out?’

  ‘Yoga,’ she muttered, as she picked up a yellow legal pad and a packet of multicolored Sharpies. Aaron had recently requested that she take multicolored notes in meetings. ‘I want you to feel as though you can express your artistic side at work,’ he told her. Aaron was beginning to freak her out.

  7.

  Hermes lay gasping on the beach, naked as the day he burst fully grown from the breast of an Athenian sea eagle. Strictly speaking he wasn’t entirely naked, as some of the feathers had stuck to his feet on the day of his spectacular birthing, and he would always have the option of covering his manhood – or rather, godhood – with his detachable ankle wings. He was yet to exercise that option, even on Earth, when the variability inherent in trans-dimensional jumping meant that he sometimes landed in heavily populated areas. This only added to the fun, as far as he was concerned, particularly if he happened to land on Sunset Strip after midnight or Venice Beach on a hot day. Landing in East LA wasn’t as entertaining, although being able to fly didn’t hurt on such occasions.

  Jumping anti-clockwise, from Earth to Olympus, was always more difficult. Jumping to Earth was a piece of cake, whereas jumping back home was stressful and disorienting, like the New York subway. Why this should be the case was something that had always mildly vexed Hermes. Going from immortal to (temporarily) mortal was surely counter-intuitive, especially as most major religions contended that mortality was a painful but necessary phase on the path to immortality. Why, then, did it feel so easy, when returning to the ‘natural’ state of immortality felt so much like the comedown from an Oscars after-party? He made a mental note to ask Jesus next time he was in Hollywood.

  Dragging himself into a sitting position, Hermes flipped open his cinnamon tin and pulled out a piece of bark. Violet had blown him away when she had pointed to the lid; pointed, in fact, to the reflected reality of the divine dimension. The tin was his portal, the cinnamon irrelevant. Hermes simply found that it helped with motion sickness. Some people preferred ginger.

  To Hermes’ eyes, the tin was like a telescoping three-dimensional lens into Olympus, expansive and complete. All Violet should have seen in the lid was her own reflection, which, although impressive, wasn’t nearly as impressive as what she actually had seen. At least, Hermes reasoned, her question had been casual and off-hand, which surely indicated that her sneak peek into his homeland was not the same as the sensory assault experienced by an immortal. Still, the fact that she could see anything at all was extraordinary, and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was she semi-divine? Was there such a thing? Certainly she was extremely beautiful, and she didn’t seem to age in the way that normal mortals did. Given what he knew of her background, he guessed that she was somewhere in her early 30s. But her skin was clear, translucent, and unlined. And her tits were fantastically perky.

  The thought caused his penis to move slightly. Hermes groaned, as a painful half-wood announced itself with a sandy twitch. Trans-dimensional hangovers were not good times for erections. And besides, an unfamiliar attack of maturity told him that Violet was someone he needed to protect, not fuck. If that meant lying to Aphrodite he would do it, although in all honesty he didn’t think it would help. That tired old whore was about as flexible as a Spartan’s garter and once she had her mind clamped around a vengeful scheme, trying to talk her out of it was like taking a crowbar to a Titan’s testicles.

  The eternal sun was dipping over the alabaster cliffs as Hermes trudged along the beach toward Mount Olympus, dragging his winged heels in the gentle wash. He was still too dizzy to fly, yet he didn’t really fancy walking the six miles back to the gates of Aphrodite’s mansion, especially as the jewel infused sand was chaffing the crap out of his feet. So it was fortunate that he came upon a gathering of sea nymphs taking their nightly bath in a rock pool, who wrapped him up in a special kind of deep blue seaweed that instantly cured his motion sickness, fed him sushi, sucked him off and sent him swiftly on his way.

  8.

  The smog-bloated sun was disappearing rapidly behind Mt. Lee as Violet trudged slowly along Olive Avenue toward the number 96 bus stop. As one of the eleven white people who caught public transport in Los Angeles, Violet liked to think she was bridging some racial divide and contributing to a cleaner California in a way that her Prius-driving rescue-dating neighbors in Silverlake were not. She liked to think that, but the reality was that if she hadn’t been forced to sell her Civic due to extreme poverty during her six month stint of unemployment, she would recently have joined the great on-ramp exodus out of Burbank and would, by now, be sitting motionless on the 105, endlessly hitting ‘seek’ on her stereo like a trained monkey until she came across an ad-free moment and a song she didn’t hate, just like everyone else.

  It had been a long day. Henry hadn’t returned to his wageless labor after lunch, and Violet had caught herself glancing toward the door with disturbing regularity, when she wasn’t actively resisting the urge to send him a quick email ‘just to check’ that he was OK. Modern technology was a curse in this regard. Then, to top it all off, Aaron had decided that tax breaks in Nevada meant that it was ‘financially imperative’ that they ‘explore the inevitability’ of shifting the production of Foxhole Fury to Las Vegas, which could mean at least six weeks holed up in The Venetian with the bazooka twins.

  It was times like these she wished she had a cat. If she’d had a cat, she would have been able to claim that it was impossible for her to leave her apartment for an extended period of time. Her last cat, Zeus, was a rather lovely ginger tom that she had inherited, along with its curious armpit licking and spanking fetishes, when she moved into the apartment. However, as Zeus had died a protracted and painful death as a result of a confrontation with a coyote, she didn’t think she could do it again, either to herself or to a pet. Perhaps if she had known that her cat was not merely named Zeus but actually was Zeus (or rather, a zoomorphic version of him), the great thunder god who had chosen that form for the simple reason that he could curl up in her lap, lick her armpits and encourage her to spank him by wavi
ng his cute little cat butt in her face, she might not have been so reticent. Then again, perhaps she would have been more reticent. At the very least, she wouldn’t have felt so guilty about the fact that she had inadvertently allowed him to be mauled by a coyote, especially if she had known that the coyote was a zoomorphic version of his estranged wife, Hera.

  As she sat down tentatively on the only seat in the bus shelter that didn’t look as if had been recently sprayed by a territorial vagrant, Violet wondered, not for the first time, what her exit strategy should be. It was simple. Had she been her own client, the first thing she would have advised herself to do was figure out an exit strategy. But every time she tried to jot down the wildest, most unlikely scenarios just to get the ball rolling (win the lottery, marry an octogenarian mining magnate) a choking brain-fog descended upon her like the angry exhalation of a dirty chimney. It was as if she had subconsciously programmed herself to remain in limbo – serenely loathing her day-to-day existence but unable to even contemplate a set of circumstances she’d prefer.

  It was true, the blow of disbarment had been heavy, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t deserved it. She had done something so fundamentally stupid and out-of-character that even a year later, on a balmy night in Burbank, she shivered at the thought of it. That her current boss – and former client – had secretly manipulated the circumstances of her life such that it would have been impossible for any sane person to behave in any other way, was a fact unknown to her. Had she known it, she might have been tempted to bludgeon him heavily about the head with his only Oscar, a craft category fluke for The Sound of one Tank Crashing (or, The Sound of One Crap Splashing, as it came to be known in cyberspace) for which he’d stolen the credit.