Margin of Eros Read online

  ‘Guess who I met last night?’ said Ashley, still peeing. It was as if a small camel had wandered into the room and decided to empty its bladder. ‘Tom Cruise,’ said Violet, massaging shampoo into her hair.

  ‘Ew, gross!’ said Ashley, as if that really would have been her reaction. ‘Guess again,’ she said. Violet pretended not to hear. How much could a bladder actually hold?

  ‘Come on, you’ll never guess!’ said Ashley.

  ‘I give up,’ said Violet.

  ‘Hunter Cole!’ said Ashley, squealing with excitement. In other circumstances, she might have peed her pants.

  Violet stopped breathing. The ghosts were suddenly in full view, no longer giggling but licking their lips, their camo gear stripped back to reveal neon red bodies, fluorescing with desire. ‘Oh my god,’ she said.

  ‘Oh my god, right?’ said Ashley. Pulling up her pants, she flushed the toilet, but even the burst of freezing water precipitated by this action couldn’t snap Violet out of her state of shock. ‘He’s so fucking hot it should be illegal,’ said Ashley, leaning toward the mirror to check her teeth. Now that she had completed her business, she was in no hurry to leave. Violet closed her eyes, her temples pounding. ‘Ashley, do you mind?’ she said. ‘I want to get out.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ashley. ‘Sure thing.’ She had a lot more to say on the subject of Hunter Cole, but Violet was weird about men. For example, there was the time when that guy from the band that supported the White Stripes had asked her out, and Violet was like, no way dude, and this guy was totally hot, and he was the singer, not like the keyboard player or anything lame like that, and she wouldn’t even make out with him, which was totally uncool, and, like, embarrassing because his friend Ryan, who wasn’t as cute but he knew Jack White, came over and –

  ‘Ashley,’ said Violet, ‘for fuck’s sake’. She didn’t often get annoyed with her roommate – at least not outwardly – but when she did, it elicited a predictably stormy response. On this occasion, a dramatic overreaction was just what Violet was looking for. Certainly it was worth the pre-negotiated price of Ashley’s forgiveness, which was, at that time, a ten-dollar Starbucks gift card.

  As soon as she heard the bathroom door slam, Violet turned off the water and stepped out of the cubicle. She looked down at her hands and saw them shaking. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw someone else’s face. This woman’s lips were fuller. Her hair was darker. And in her eyes there was a smoldering fire. It was desperate. It was deep. She remembered the dream clearly now. It was a sex dream. Like a porno made for prime time, it was flashy and brilliant and full of the perfect pectorals of Hunter Cole. And wrapped around his excessive physique, in more ways than she had previously thought possible, there was Violet, lusting after, longing for and loving him. ‘Oh my god,’ she repeated.

  It would be a long time before she truly understood the significance of that statement.

  20.

  Ares didn’t have many friends. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed being a movie producer so much. He saw no real difference between having someone pretend to be your friend, and actually being one. In fact if he were being perfectly honest, he would have to admit that he actually preferred pretend friends, because this implied that he had something that the pretend friends wanted. In other words, he had friendship leverage. Oh sure, he had read the Epicureans’ thoughts on the subject and was familiar with their lofty prescription for ‘happiness’. But that kind of philosophy only worked if you were in the business of growing your own vegetables. If you were in the business of inciting armed conflict, then friendship was about as useful as a lollypop in a labyrinth.

  Fathered by Zeus and pretty much ignored by him from that point onwards, Ares had grown into a surly adolescent, prone to violent outbursts and prolonged bouts of self pity which were only broken by episodes of rampant, unfulfilled lust. A trajectory common to many young males, certainly, but Ares also had the misfortune of being born to a father who was known as ‘the father of all gods,’ which, although not literally true, may as well have been. With so many offspring to keep track of, Zeus had parental negligence down to a fine art, until such time as he decided that one of them needed a kick in the pants. And all of a sudden he became a meddlesome yet effective guardian. In Ares’ case, this had happened around the time of his fifteen hundredth birthday.

  As usual, it was a perfectly balmy afternoon on the cusp of two lavishly abundant seasons. The air was fragrant, the fragrance was uplifting, and Zeus had decided to take a leisurely stroll around the palace gardens in an attempt to walk off a niggling back injury. Despite the enforced lull in his procreational activities, the sometime thunder god was in a good mood. Whistling a tune recently taught to him by one of the Muses (surely he couldn’t be expected to remember all their names), he rounded a long row of cypress pines bordering his favorite ornamental lake. There, to his horror, he came across his teenage son, furtively masturbating to a sacred scroll from the island of Lesbos. Zeus gasped. Ares gasped. For a few moments they stared at one another, father and son, caught in a situation on which Etiquette, in all her volumes, politely declines to comment. For want of something better to do, Ares dived skillfully into the pond, disappearing amongst the reeds and holding his breath underwater until he saw the wavering refraction of his father turn and retreat from the scene.

  Zeus was deeply troubled by the incident. It was not the theft of the precious scroll from his private collection that concerned him, nor his son’s sudden interested in pre-Sapphic poetry. It was just that young Ares had seemed a little – well, little. Zeus was, if nothing else, a man of action, and he quickly prescribed a century-long boot camp, from which Ares emerged stronger, if not a whole lot ‘bigger’. Crucially, though, his newfound skills in the more violent fighting arts, combined with his natural aptitude for leadership, made him the frontrunner for the newly created position of ‘inflamer of bellicose tendencies’ – or, in layman’s terms, ‘god of war’. His status among the Olympians thus assured, Ares was soon abundantly compensated for the lean years by various swooning beauties, all of whom were smart enough to ignore his shortcomings and indeed, after so much Dionysian pounding, often came to prefer them.

  To say that Ares was good in bed might imply that he was a lover, not a fighter. In truth, he was a lover and a fighter. He thought he might have loved Aphrodite if she had been more lovable, completely failing to notice that it was the very lack of this quality in her that he was most attracted to. He loved her cunning, her jealousy, and her spiteful rage, even as he ran from her palace, hurling abuse over his shoulder while the blood from his latest head wound singed the marble path. To Aphrodite, love was war, and for Ares, war was love. And so they were perfect for one another, for reasons that neither of them ever really understood.

  But even the most battle-hardened hero needs shore leave. A veteran of many a protracted campaign, Ares also knew when to retreat, and after a particularly emasculating tirade from Aphrodite one afternoon in the late 1980s, Ares licked his wounds and crawled through several dimensions into the garishly decorated corner of his Beverly Hills apartment. And there he remained, more or less, for the next decade, developing a fake cocaine habit and cultivating the kinds of connections that would enable him, along with his half-brothers Dionysus and Apollo, to establish an innovative film studio on the cresting wave of the ‘New Independent’ movement. Sadly and predictably, they were unable to resist the homogenizing spin of Hollywood and over the next ten years, Olympic Studios gradually morphed into the egregious trash factory that it was around the time he first noticed Violet.

  Oh Violet. That purple flower. That cruel siren with her tiny sighs, her fleeting smiles, and her curt replies signed merely ‘V’.

  V

  V

  V

  V

  V

  Oh.

  Ares noticed that he had been scrawling that letter, over and over, across the pastel pink post-it on which he had been attempting to compose his da
ily love note. His desk was covered with crushed butterflies, victims of the deeply un-poetic divide between his regimental brain and his capricious heart. As usual, he had an erection. Unusually, Violet was late. For the past half hour, Ares had been sitting at his desk, jotting down ‘brusque yet concerned’ bon mots as he impatiently awaited her arrival. He just couldn’t get the balance right. ‘Every second of your absence pierces my heart, you whore’ seemed to err on the side of ‘concern’; while ‘Where the fuck are you, my darling?’ seemed to err on the side of ‘brusque.’ And now he was down to his last butterfly. Smiling, he picked up his pen. ‘Please order more post-its. You know what I want,’ he wrote. And thus, perfectly satisfied, he walked over to Violet’s desk and stuck the note on her screen, pressing his groin into the back of her chair and rubbing, just a little, for good measure.

  21.

  Violet arrived at the office a little after ten, which was pretty good going considering the fifteen minutes she had spent staring into space, contemplating her ablutionary bombshell. She was shocked. She was nauseated. She was turned on. In rapid succession, over and over again. In the end, she’d had to search through her closet for her barely-used vibrator, in order to shut off the incessant imagery. She’d never been ashamed of masturbating before, but her orgasm was such that the simple arpeggio of ‘oh, oh, OH!’ or even ‘yes, yes, YES!’ was so insufficient an expression of her ecstasy that she was forced to come in silence, the white noise of pure bliss grinding her teeth to dust.

  Hunter Cole had done this to her. Ladies’ man, philanthropist, Paleo dieter.

  By the time Violet sat down at her desk, the protracted frustration of the daily commute had diffused the whole experience to a bad dream. Or good dream. No, bad, definitely bad. Whatever.

  And now, apparently, she was saying ‘whatever’.

  ‘Violet!’ barked Aaron, bringing her crashing down to Burbank with both engines screaming. It was exactly the reality check she need. ‘Aaron,’ she said, turning to him and smiling with such genuine affection that he nearly came in his pants. ‘Please call me next time you’re planning to be an hour late,’ he said, before rushing off to the unisex restroom to relieve himself. Truly, it was as if some masturbatory superbug had taken over LA, fueled by porn and promiscuity, growing stronger and stronger even as the sensory antibiotic of the 21st century tried to sap its virulence. A kind of blindness was the side effect, and sexting was its Braille.

  Violet, of course, was oblivious to the reason for Aaron’s sudden departure. This was normal behavior for him, and in its normality she found comfort. The world was just as she knew it to be. There were interns to be supervised, rejection letters to be typed, and post-its to be ordered. Switching on her computer, she peeled off Aaron’s note and added it to the pile.

  The thing was, she quite enjoyed ordering stationery. Pretty much every job Aaron ever had her do fell into one of two categories: ‘Sweet’ and ‘Shit’. Making any kind of bulk purchase fell squarely into the former category. If she was on her game, she could stretch out the process for a good couple of hours, skillfully combining sanctioned catalog browsing with inventory management, staff relations and company credit card flexing. She was, after all, an American, and if she couldn’t personally afford to spend with the kind of patriotic fervor she would have liked, she could at least do it at someone else’s expense. The trick was to not to over-purchase, but to purchase strategically. Small, highly specialized items that would only ever be used once or twice a year were her specialty.

  But first, a stocktake. Opening the stationery cupboard, Violet peered into the neatly stacked interior, giving it the once-over for any obvious shortages. Post-its, of course, were top of the list, because Aaron powered through them like peanut M&Ms and she always went for the largest possible bulk discount. Paper products seemed OK, but there was still room for some obscure shade of script cover. Pens –

  ‘Hello Violet,’ said a voice behind her. She nearly dropped her notepad. Spinning around, she came face to face with –

  ‘Henry,’ she said. ‘Thank god.’

  Hermes raised his eyebrows. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Violet. ‘I mean hello, Henry, hi.’

  Hermes frowned. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Listen, Violet, I really need to talk to you about something. Is there somewhere we can –

  ‘Oh my god,’ said Violet.

  ‘Why do you keep saying th–’ Hermes started to say, half a second before Violet grabbed him and pulled him into the stationery cupboard, slamming the door behind them. It was a tight squeeze.

  ‘This isn’t what I had in mind,’ said Hermes.

  ‘Shh,’ said Violet. Outside the cupboard, muted voices were approaching.

  ‘Those pussies don’t know shit about combat, man,’ said one.

  ‘Foxhole’s not about combat,’ said a second. The voice was smooth and self-assured, a mildly spiced southern drawl with a slightly Germanic twang, teetering on the brink of baritone and bass. A movie star voice.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Hermes. Violet put her hand over his mouth.

  ‘Foxhole’s about fury. It’s about powerlessness, the powerlessness we all feel in the face of impossible choices, choices in love, in war, in our shitty careers. It’s the fury we feel when we can’t make the right choice, because the choice we really want to make isn’t even an option. We’re on this parallel path, and to get back to the right path, we’ve got to go through a Nazi minefield. And what happens if we even make it across? We don’t know, and we’re never going to find out because the sacrifice is too great. The chains of society are too tightly bound. Foxhole might look like a war movie, but it’s a life movie.’ As it happened, Hunter was quoting pretty much word for word from the screenwriter’s original pitch to Aaron, some months before. He had been so taken with the bogus philosophizing and its sound bite potential that he had asked the writer to repeat it so that he could commit it to memory. Violet, who was looking for any excuse to legitimize her ridiculous crush, was thrilled to discover that a man she had previously thought of as intellectually compatible with a stoat, was in fact an eloquent and insightful social commentator.

  Even Hermes was impressed. ‘Not bad,’ he said, but as Violet’s hand was still over his mouth, it came out more like ‘Nmph Bvoo’. Violet glared at him, but it was too late. The door swung open with an ominous creak, and for the second time that day Violet felt as if she were trapped in a bad movie.

  ‘Violet!’ said Hunter, throwing her even further off guard. ‘And – work experience kid.’ Violet dropped her hand from Hermes’ mouth and wiped it on her jeans. ‘Hi,’ she said. She didn’t try to explain the situation. There was nothing she could say that wouldn’t further embroil her in the cliché soup she was clearly destined to wade through the entire day. Also, she was so thrilled that he remembered her name that she could barely speak. Beside her, Hermes was scowling like a petulant child, while directly opposite her, standing next to Hunter, a junior executive named Kurt Sivitz appeared to be having a mild epileptic fit. His face was twitching. His jaw was clenched. And his left hand was opening and closing with the involuntary spasms of a malfunctioning android.

  Violet was pretty sure she knew why.

  A weaselly sycophant, Kurt’s primary role at Olympic Studios was to kiss celebrity ass – which, incidentally, is not as easy as it sounds. Jaded by all that fawning adulation, the modern movie star quickly sees through the rampant insincerity of endless gifts, compliments, and blatantly rigged ‘most beautiful’ lists. To combat this excess, the successful studio toady not only needs to be able to fake sincerity, he or she must be able to imbue that fake sincerity with a genuine sincerity which transcends all previously known techniques of televangelists, luxury car salesmen and disgraced sporting icons forced to hold press conferences to apologize for their drug use, infidelities and/or singing careers.

  In this area, Kurt excelled. Where he fell down was in his assumption that, as the frequent first point of co
ntact within the studio for A-list actors and B-list musician-turned-actors, he was on an equivalent social footing with the celebrities who occasionally took his calls. This wasn’t such an absurd assumption. In a town where party planners, stylists and deejays could – and often did – ascend to celebrity status merely by association, it was not unusual for celebrity hangers-on to achieve a certain level of notoriety, especially if they happened to be handbag designers, bloggers, or heirs to a fortune. Kurt was none of these things, but he still felt that, due to his overripe Blackberry, his 1083 Facebook friends, and the word ‘executive’ in his job title, he deserved at least one date with his boss’s lowly assistant. What he definitely didn’t deserve was the excruciating brush off that Violet had given him not once, not twice, but on seven separate occasions.

  Technically, Kurt had to admit that Violet’s excuse that she didn’t date men she worked with could not be construed as a lie, since she was apparently not ‘dating’ this smarmy Tommy Hilfiger douche bag. Just making out with him in the fucking stationery cupboard. Kurt immediately vowed to get them both fired, little realizing that: a) his boss was a god, b) ‘Henry’ was his boss’ son, and c) Violet was the flame that seared his boss’ godly loins. And his chances, therefore, of a achieving this joint dismissal were somewhere in the region of fuckall to none.

  ‘So Violet,’ said Hunter, as if chatting to the most beautiful woman in the world as she shifted awkwardly from one foot to another inside a stationery cupboard was as natural as the triple-distilled spring water he had air freighted from Patagonia, ‘how have you been? Still doing yoga?’