Margin of Eros Read online

  ‘Oh do put that thing away!’ said Aphrodite, feigning the indulgent maternal affection she had once read about in Martha Stewart. Playfully patting Eros on the head, she sashayed past him to the edge of the lake and dipped her perfect toes into the water. ‘Frearggggghhhhh!’ yelled Eros as he rolled over onto his stomach and struggled to pull his hunting pants over his throbbing erection. It was all he could do to stop himself from jumping up and stabbing his mother repeatedly in the chest with the nearest pointy object. However, as the nearest pointy object happened to be a heart shaped arrow and Aphrodite was at that moment gazing lovingly at her own reflection in the mountain tarn, the result of Eros acting on this urge would merely have been a hundredfold increase in Aphrodite’s self-infatuation. So it was a good thing that his penis was taking up most of his attention.

  All the same, he didn’t think he could take much more of this.

  ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this,’ said Aphrodite, lifting her foot from the water and watching the sparkling droplets roll across her ankle like liquid diamonds. It gave her an idea. ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this,’ she repeated, her voice trembling. Squeezing her eyelids together tightly, through sheer willpower she managed to produce what might have passed for a tear in a daytime drama, but in reality looked more like an allergic reaction. She turned to Eros, her eyes wide and wounded. ‘Ares is taking that slut to Vegas!’

  ‘Greeeeaaaaarghh!’ said Eros. In his haste to roll over, his pants had twisted into a contorted knot around his thighs and were now stuck at half-mast. This in itself would have been of minor concern if he hadn’t also inadvertently rolled into a patch of golden fawn urine. In addition to the secondhand eroticism of their mating, golden fawns produce urine that is an insanely pleasurable and extremely potent erectile enhancer. It is, to coin a phrase, catnip for cocks. Therefore Eros was caught in the delicate predicament of, on the one hand, desperately wanting to un-twist his hunting pants and reign in his manhood, and on the other, wanting to rub himself repeatedly against the grass until he passed out.

  ‘Eros, what in Olympus is the matter with you?’ said Aphrodite.

  ‘Fuck off!’ Eros explained. Wrestling with the front of his hunting pants, he finally managed to drag them over his crimson penis, which by now was throbbing like a cartoon impact wound. It was the single most difficult thing he could ever remember doing to himself, not counting the time he’d shot himself in the foot and tried to make out with his toes. But that had been an accident.

  Eros took a deep breath. And then another one. Finally he rolled over to face his mother. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. His testicles felt like they were in a vice.

  ‘I –’ Aphrodite started to say. Frowning, with her lower lip trembling, she stared at Eros so intensely and for so long that he was ready to start backing away while muttering soothing platitudes. ‘Damn it!’ she exclaimed finally. ‘I had one, and now it’s gone!’

  ‘Had one what?’ asked Eros warily. His hormones were no longer at code red but he was not feeling the better for it. In fact, he was beginning to feel the kind of alert irritation he always felt just before one of the Council – more often than not his mother – commanded him to do something he really didn’t want to do.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Aphrodite. Producing tears on demand was clearly much harder than Eris made it look, but now that she had done it once she felt confident that in future she would be able to wring out even more droplets – maybe even two or three – from the dried up faucet of her soul. The thought made her blissfully happy. Or perhaps it was more the subsequent thought that she was about to rid herself of the pesky mortal.

  ‘The girl,’ she said, ‘has to go.’

  ‘What girl?’ said Eros, distractedly scraping fawn shit off his sandal with a heart shaped arrow.

  ‘You know perfectly well who I mean,’ said Aphrodite. ‘Flower girl tiny tits what’s-her-name.’ And with a military level of detail that would have impressed even her sister Athena, she outlined a strategy that would crush Ares’ desire and entwine the mortal semi-permanently in the dumb yet loving arms of an all-American action hero.

  Eros scowled. ‘You don’t even know her name?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I know her name! It’s a flower. Like, you know…’ She waved her hand expansively, conjuring up the unhelpful image of a preschooler’s horticultural squiggles.

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Iris?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jasmine?’

  ‘No, no, no. Stop being obtuse, Eros, you know perfectly well what her name is.’ As a matter of fact, Eros did know her name, mainly because Hermes talked about her all the time. But he was vaguely disgusted with his mother, and even more disgusted with his (alleged) father for stalking some poor mortal to such a lascivious extent that even Aphrodite couldn’t fail to notice.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You want me to hook her up with some big dumb movie star so that Ares will finally admit defeat and come running back to you. You want to ruin her life, in other words, but you can’t even be bothered to remember her name.’

  ‘We’re hardly ruining her life,’ Aphrodite sniffed, carefully incorporating the complicit ‘we’. ‘Who doesn’t want to marry a movie star?’

  ‘According to Hermes, he’s a douche,’ said Eros. ‘A first class asshole.’

  ‘Even better,’ said Aphrodite, her face lighting up with girlish nostalgia. ‘Women love bad boys. We find them irresistible. And men love women who require constant attention. It makes them feel needed. That’s why Ares and I are so perfect for one another.’

  Eros stared at his mother in amazement. It seemed impossible that a goddess of her stature could be so completely clueless when it came to personal relations. In all other areas of her life, she was undoubtedly quite brilliant. As a socialite and community leader, she organized and delegated a full calendar of fabulous events, her causes ranging from frivolous to worthy in a perfectly blended potpourri of guiltless hedonism. As a politician, she was a superior strategist and devastating negotiator who made Survivor look like a Montessori summer camp. She was also great at poker. And yet her relationships were made of soap and Zoloft. It was like she was autistic, only more devious. And much, much more annoying. ‘You’ll never get it past the Council,’ said Eros.

  ‘Don’t worry about the Council,’ said Aphrodite. ‘By the time I’m through with them, they’ll think I’m doing what’s-her-tits a favor.’

  Eros grimaced. He knew she was right, and once the Council had issued their Decree, he was powerless to disobey. ‘You could at least do her the courtesy of learning her name before you start assassinating her character,’ he said, sullenly pulling up a long stem of grass and chewing on the end.

  ‘You mean Violet?’ said Aphrodite sweetly. Gathering up the hem of her flowing white robe, she strolled gracefully toward her waiting centaur, pausing briefly to pluck the stem of grass from her son’s hand. ‘Don’t put that in your mouth, darling,’ she said, tossing it to one side. ‘Those filthy fawns have probably pissed all over it.’

  13.

  Jesus eased himself slowly into his hammock and twisted the lid off a bottle of Miller Chill, being careful not to spill any on the beautifully embroidered Armani Casa cushion. The cushion had been a gift from a famous actress, who had come to see him on the recommendation of an English rock star after her Indian guru, somewhat unexpectedly, had turned up dead in a Bangkok brothel. The beer he’d had to buy himself, which was unusual, as his bar fridge was generally well stocked with the produce of obscure Canadian breweries or Icelandic ales infused with the melancholic ambience of the northern lights. Personally, Jesus preferred light beer, but he didn’t want to offend his friends by refusing their gifts. Clearly they put a lot of thought into the choice of beer (or had their assistants do so), as they often joked that perhaps they should have given him mineral water, and let him turn it into whatever kind of beer he pre
ferred.

  It amused Jesus that the ‘water-into-wine’ analogy seemed invariably to translate as ‘mineral-water-into-beer’. The logic being, he presumed, that turning H2O into CH3CH2OH with the wave of his hand was the easy part – getting the bubbles in was the rub. As it happened, Jesus had occasionally dabbled in home brewing, with mixed results. Sure enough, a foolproof method for achieving the perfect degree of aeration had eluded him. The main problem was that the interminably pleasant weather in Los Angeles meant it was difficult to maintain a temperate microclimate in which to ferment the brew. And therein really lay the rub.

  In the end he concluded that it was far easier to accept the gifts of his generous and thoughtful friends, and when (as seemed to be the case right now) a disproportionate number of them were on the wagon, he would simply wander down to his local Ralphs and pick up a 12-pack of Miller Chill. ‘What do you think about that, Alfa?’ he said, scratching his pure white cat firmly between the ears. Alfa narrowed her eyes into a blissful grimace and arched her neck against her master’s hand. Behind her, the day darkened through the plate glass windows. Burnt orange mist swirled around the downtown skyline, as the last trickle of dog walkers coaxed their puppies from the park and scooped their final poops. Ghetto birds clattered overhead, sweeping through Hollywood like a soothing sonic broom.

  Twilight was Jesus’ favorite time of the day – a time for reflection, a time for beer, a time for talking to his cats. He had two cats, both ten years old, who had thus far managed to avoid the usual fate of free range cats in the Hollywood Hills. He supposed that he may have subconsciously exerted some subtle influence on the Runyon Canyon coyotes that had kept them away from his beloved companions, but he also conceded that his cats might be using their own powers of mental persuasion to ward them off. This was his preferred explanation. Certainly all the evenings spent lying with Jesus in the hammock as he ruminated on the day’s events, his evolving theories on the fixed nature of reality, and his fixed theories on the evolving nature of reality, must have had some modest instructive influence. On Alfa, at least. On his black cat, Romeo, he wasn’t so sure.

  People often asked Jesus why he had named his cat after the famous Shakespearean tragic hero. The more biblically minded of his friends questioned his choice of ‘Romeo’ over ‘Omega’ – having assumed that ‘Alfa’ was in fact spelled ‘Alpha’. To which Jesus replied that he had never read the Bible, and even if he had, he would still prefer Italian sports cars to Roman novels.

  Names aside, Romeo wasn’t exactly the brightest tiger in the zoo. But Jesus persisted with his philosophical education because – well, because he enjoyed the company. Hollywood could be a lonely place, and despite the number of frequent visitors to his Mulholland loft, sometimes the high ceilings and halogen lighting made his home feel a little like a cavernous void in an empty shell. ‘Not that I am ungrateful,’ he reassured Alfa, stroking her back from neck to tail in time with the music drifting across the courtyard pool, a somber Russian adagio. ‘But perhaps,’ he said to Romeo, who had just joined them in the hammock with an elegant triangular vault, ‘it’s time I found myself a girlfriend.’ It was such an out-of-character digression that both cats broke their code of inscrutability and looked up at Jesus, shock clearly conveyed by their upturned whiskers. ‘I know,’ said Jesus, ‘I know.’ He stroked his cats reassuringly until they were both resting their heads flat against his stomach once more, their eyes closed in pampered repose. Jesus was the first to admit that he knew very little about dating. On the other hand, he knew exactly who to call for assistance in that department.

  14.

  Seventeen catalogs lay strewn across Violet’s doorstep. Seventeen publicity departments had decided on the content, seventeen layout artists had laid out the photographs, and seventeen printers had printed it all on semi-gloss newsprint in the hope that Violet (or current resident) would be moved to install cable TV, plus phone, plus internet for only $99.99, or to purchase a toaster-oven at twenty percent off its already low, low price. But Violet was not so moved. Scooping up the peeling skin of her sunburned planet, she shoved the papers under her arm and commenced her nightly ritual of trying to locate her front door key in the bottomless pit that passed for a handbag in contemporary society. ‘Hi Violet,’ said her neighbor, causing her to drop the catalogues and spill the entire contents of her handbag on the doormat.

  Violet strongly suspected that her neighbor had Asperger’s syndrome. A socially awkward genius, he designed software applications for overburdened mobile devices that legally could only be sold to those born after 1984. Along with his roommate, who did something equally complicated with ring tones, he was in a band called ‘The Nerds Next Door’. Violet had never heard of a better name for a band – or a more apt description of its members. ‘Hi Vance,’ she said, bending down to gather up her phone, wallet, gum, lip gloss, apple core, Kleenex, coins and – ah ha – keys. She straightened up to find Vance holding out a solitary tampon like a relay baton. ‘It landed on my shoe,’ he said, and without another word he passed the baton, unlocked his front door and disappeared into Generation Y.

  Violet’s apartment was dark. Her roommate Ashley, an aspiring comedienne, worked late nights as a cocktail waitress when she wasn’t deflecting hecklers on the local comedy circuit. A more unpleasant profession Violet could not imagine, but Ashley seemed to thrive on the abusive enthusiasm of strangers. And of course, her ultimate goal was not the stage, but the screen. Specifically, the small screen: a regular spot on Saturday Night Live, followed by her own talk show. These were the modern daydreams of the witty prom queen. The only problem, as far as Violet could tell, was that Ashley just wasn’t very funny. Her observational vignettes were always at someone else’s expense, and she had never once made Violet laugh so hard that her drink spurted out of her nose – the acid test for humorists as far as Violet was concerned. On her internet dating profile, Ashley described herself as ‘fun’ and ‘sarcastic’, whereas Violet felt that ‘immature’ and ‘bitchy’ were a lot closer to the mark. Violet also suspected that Ashley was bipolar, but she had never mentioned it for fear for incurring a one-liner about bisexual bears in Finland.

  And then there were her boyfriends.

  Violet sighed as she threw the catalogs into the recycling bin. It had been a long day at work, she was premenstrual, and it now seemed certain that she was going to have to move to Las Vegas for the duration of Foxhole Fury. The idea was already causing her anxiety, as evidenced by her overwhelming need to scrub the kitchen sink until it sparkled. The simplest solution would be to escape – to move back east and start a new life. But for some reason that idea seemed even less appealing than three months in a junior suite, living next door to Aaron. As she put away the bottle of bleach, she racked her brain for all the reasons she was still in Los Angeles. One: the weather. Searching around in the pantry she found a packet of readymade chick pea curry. Two: she had a job. Pulling out a pan from the pot drawer, she placed it on the stove and turned on the gas. Three: she had somewhere to live. Tipping the contents of the sachet into the pan, she stirred the curry slowly until the orange oil slick had blended into the hardy legumes. Four:

  Four:

  When Violet finished her dinner, she rinsed her plate and placed it in the dish rack. After a moment she thought better of it, dried the plate on a clean tea towel and placed it in a cupboard, silently acknowledging that her actions placed her somewhere left of center on the OCD bell curve.

  Four:

  She walked to her bedroom and unrolled her yoga mat. It had been so long since she had used it that several generations of microspiders had taken up residence in the inner spiral. As she hung in downward dog, the backs of her legs and her aching shoulders admonished her neglect.

  Four:

  A half-formed thought bubble was rising to the surface and no amount of yogic contortion could squeeze the life out of this newborn balloon. There was no four. And three reasons, even if they were perfectly compelling,
equally weighted pearls of persuasion, were not enough to chain her to a place that, for as long as she could remember, had been scraping away at her happiness with the sharpened edge of a platinum Amex.

  The ultimatum came to her in the shower. She would give herself twenty-four hours to come up with a fourth reason – and it had to be a good one – why she should stay. Otherwise, it was adiós Angelenos.

  15.

  When Violet climbed into bed that night she fell instantly into the kind of childlike slumber that is impervious to fire alarms and little yellow accidents. When she woke the next morning, she felt sure that this was due to the weight of indecision being lifted from her shoulders and not, as actually was the case, the sugary dusting of exotic opiates on her pillow. It was a mix that Eros had perfected over time, one that produced both uninhibited fantasies and imperfect recall, so that the dreamer was left with a sense of having made love in a vat of lemon sorbet, say, without having to ponder the fate of the ice cream cones. Which was why Eros was surprised – and a little alarmed – to see that what Violet was experiencing was clearly not pleasant. She ground her teeth. She grimaced. She whimpered. No, she complained, I don’t like cheese.

  Eros was in a quandary. His plan had been to get the whole unpleasant business over and done with as quickly as possible. Shooting Violet with a golden arrow dipped in the cloned pheromones of Hunter Cole had been straightforward, but now that he had completed the first half of his assignment, he was finding it hard to tear himself away from her. It wasn’t just her beauty, although he did feel that Hermes had rather understated it. This was surprising, given that Hermes was famously excitable and had a tendency to get an erection when, for example, he received an email from a Ukrainian mail order bride promising him delights unavailable this side of the Bosphorus. Or, indeed, an email promising him better erections. The only reason Eros could think of for this uncharacteristic reticence was that Hermes wanted Violet for himself, and the very contemplation of such a scenario catapulted Eros into unfamiliar territory. In all the years of hearing about his cousin’s erotic exploits, he had never once felt anything other than a sense of familial pride. Hermes’ approach to sex was generous, joyous, and ambitious. It was the kind of approach Eros himself aspired to, if only his mother would leave him the fuck alone. But the thought of Hermes together with this uneasily slumbering mortal filled his whole being with rumbling outrage. He had never experienced it before but had seen it often enough in Aphrodite’s eyes to be able to give it a name. It was jealousy. And it was about as much fun as a golden fleecing.