Margin of Eros Page 8

  Violet opened her mouth to speak, and immediately felt a sharp pain in her side, as if someone had just lanced her with a drawing pin. Violet glared at Henry. ‘Sorry,’ he said, tossing the pin back onto the shelf. Although it was abundantly clear to Hermes that whatever was supposed to happen to Violet vis-à-vis Hunter Cole had already happened, he was not going to give up without a fight. Or at least, a thumbtack of resistance.

  He may as well have been urinating into a force ten gale.

  Violet could barely take her eyes off the action hero. And at the same time, she could not meet his. Staring intently at his left biceps, she managed a combined nod and grimace previously witnessed only by her dentist. In return, Hunter graced her with the dazzling grin of the orthodontically flawless. ‘Maybe we could work out some time,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my own studio on the beach.’ Then, slapping Kurt on the shoulder, he wandered casually toward Aaron’s office, evidently oblivious to the dozen pairs of eyes peering over their Apples like so many orchard bunnies.

  Rubbing his shoulder, Kurt turned to follow Hunter but somehow remained glued to the spot. A poker player he was not. The internal dilemma played out on his features like the simmering tantrum of a two year old. Clearly, Movie Star trumped Celebrity Lap Dog, but Creative Executive sure as shit trumped Intern. He felt the overwhelming urge to punch Hermes, but like many white men of medium build and exaggerated online credentials, he was desperately afraid of physical confrontation. Instead, he resorted to good old-fashioned empty threats. ‘You’re finished,’ he hissed at Hermes, in reply to which Hermes smiled cryptically. ‘Vere,’ he said in Latin, ‘ego non coepi.’ Roughly translated, this meant ‘Actually, I haven’t even started,’ however the ancient language was so foreign to Kurt’s ears that Hermes may as well have been speaking Klingon. ‘I never took you for a Trekkie,’ Kurt sneered. Then he scurried off after Hunter, feeling superficially superior but internally bereft.

  Violet turned to Henry. ‘Latin?’ she said. Of all the unlikely juxtapositions thrust upon her lately, this was by far the most incongruous.

  ‘Hunter Cole?’ said Hermes. He knew he wasn’t playing fair, since Violet had no more control over her feelings at that point than any of Eros’ other victims. The only difference was that, in Violet’s case, Eros had deliberately failed to ignite the same desire in her beloved and was now conspiring to keep her from succumbing to her own. ‘You realize he’s a thick as goat shit,’ said Hermes.

  Violet stepped out of the stationery cupboard with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘I think you’ll find that the expression is ‘pig shit’,’ she said.

  ‘Not where I come from,’ said Hermes quietly, as he watched her walk away.

  22.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best one that they had been able to come up with at short notice. Really, it had been Jesus’ idea. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether Jesus really believed that people were essentially good, as he continuously advocated, or whether he was being willfully naive. Eros supposed that it really didn’t matter. Whenever Jesus spoke at length, it was like being verbally assaulted with linguistic heroin. Coming directly from the source, his words produced an extraordinarily lucid high, an ‘ah ha!’ moment in a floating freefall. And even after they had been cut with the bombastic hyperbole of the god botherers, they still managed to retain an amber droplet of sweet analgesic. Eros was not surprised that there were so many Christians. He was surprised, however, that he had allowed himself to be convinced of the viability of a plan which included, among other things, an appeal to the maternal instincts of Aphrodite.

  All around him, blue and green stones winked and flickered with a kind of eerie phosphorescence. Living in his uncle’s underwater palace was a lot like living in the belly of a gay Italian whale. From the beaded floors to the mosaic walls, the seashell doorways and the dolphin decoupage, the palace resembled not so much a royal abode as the holiday house of an eccentric billionaire and his spectacularly untalented artist boyfriend. Eros hoped that Hermes had completed his part of the plan and that his mother would soon be arriving with the Council guards, if only because he didn’t know how many more sardine sandwiches he could stand to eat off hand-painted mermaid crockery.

  And then there was his uncle. Riding around on the backs of armored dolphins, frightening fishermen and whipping up tempests to impress a visiting hero might sound like a great way to while away eternity, but to Eros it just seemed like the sad posturing of a lonely old mariner. He had to admit, though, that the trident was cool.

  Leaning back on a pebbled day bed, he stretched out over the lumbar roll and felt his spine release with a satisfying crack. One of the nice things about living in a subterranean cavern was the minimal requirement for clothing. A little strategically placed seaweed and you were good to go. Rolling his body gently from side to side, he pressed his upper back against the uneven stones, manipulating his pressure points until all of his archer’s tension had completely unfurled. The sensation was extremely pleasant, and it brought to mind another pleasant sensation, one that would guarantee Aphrodite’s rapid appearance. Eros grinned. All he needed to do was reach down, buff the banana, and there she would be, talons sharpened and sandals blazing.

  But somehow it didn’t seem right. Since arriving at the underwater palace, he had been offered such a smorgasbord of salty delights by the Oceanids that he found himself in a constant state of titillated bewilderment. It was, quite literally, the wet dream of every young god and hero, forced to take refuge deep beneath the prying eyes and forbidding thighs of the surface world. It was the dying fantasy of the drowning sailor, sucked down into the depths then sucked off in the spa. Those slippery nymphs, with their greenish hair, their silvery skin and their delicately disguised gills were enough to drive any god – or at least, any god with an aquarium fetish – wild with desire. And yet, Eros had managed to resist them.

  He was not in the least bit interested in the Oceanids – or so he told himself – because he was only interested in one living creature, and she existed on the other side of a timeless divide. Violet. He wondered what she was doing, and whether Hermes had managed to convince her to stay away from Hunter. Sometimes it took a couple of days for the effects of his arrows to sink in. It was a long shot, but if, during that time, Hermes managed to sew a few seeds of doubt, or disgust, or even alternative desire then there was a chance that the arrow wouldn’t take.

  But deep down, Eros knew that was never going to happen. The shot had been perfect, landing directly in the center of her heart, not a millimeter to the left and not a millimeter to the right. And he had felt it, when it landed. The sensation was something akin to biting into a perfectly ripe peach. The heart was ready. It was tender. And now it was pouring out its sweet nectar into a jumbo Slurpee cup.

  To make matters worse, Eros could feel a tiny fissure of career crisis beginning to form in the bedrock of his Olympian loyalty. The logic went something like this: If he hadn’t fallen in love with Violet himself, would he have cared, or even noticed, that he was condemning her to an affair with a thoughtless buffoon? And how many other couples had he carelessly thrown together, giving less than a billygoat’s gonads whether the union would result in a mutually beneficial relationship? In fact, hadn’t he once rated these unions on a scale of one to ten, taking into account both the decibel levels, frequency and duration of their make-up sex? Just who did he think he was, anyway?

  ‘Shut up!’ Eros screamed at his annoying internal monologist, ‘shut up shut up shut up!’

  ‘Is everything alright?’ said a voice as delicate as the tinkling of tiny shells on sand. Eros looked up to see a beautiful Oceanid splashing lightly across the surface of the shallow rock pool that formed the floor of his sleeping chamber. Personally, Eros found it a bit annoying that every floor in the palace had to be covered by a couple of inches of seawater, for no apparent reason other than the (admittedly spectacular) effect of the dancing aquamarine lightshow it reflected ont
o the ceilings. His feet were permanently wrinkled, but the Oceanids managed to avoid that fate by gliding improbably over the water.

  Her name was Eudore, and she was probably a relative of some sort, but far enough removed that Eros felt absolutely no guilt in gazing appreciatively at her naked breasts, shimmering with rainbow scales like a couple of plump mountain trout. Around her neck she wore a crimson scarf woven from soft coral, and her waist was adorned simply with a cheap turquoise sarong she had picked up in Mykonos. The effect was striking, and when she sat down next to Eros and brushed her green hair slowly behind her ears, he felt a dangerous stirring in his seaweed. ‘Is there anything I can do for you,’ she said, tinkle tinkle, ‘that would help you forget your worries?’ Trailing her fingers along Eros’ lower leg, she left a slightly slimy residue. A remarkable substance, it doubled as both lubricant and stimulant, which therefore made the ‘hand relief’ of an Oceanid one of immortal life’s great pleasures. For the first time ever, Eros had a horny shin. Then knee. Then thigh. ‘Stop,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Eudore. Her sea green eyes swam with concern, while Eros struggled with the age-old question of whether a hand job really ‘counted’. ‘Er,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ said Eudore hopefully.

  ‘Could you perhaps do the other leg?’

  Eudore smiled with the pure pleasure of an artist exhibiting her skills to an appreciative audience. ‘Like this?’ she chimed.

  ‘Wheeeeee,’ said Eros. Eudore had finished his second leg and was now starting again from his ankles. With both hands.

  Looking back, Eros could not identify a point at which he could have stopped Eudore from completing the act that it was obviously her intention and her pleasure to complete. And indeed, there was no concrete reason why he should have stopped her. But some part of him knew – the same irritating part that was having the career crisis – that in going down that path, he had endorsed it as an option. And it was a slippery, slimy and slightly scaly slope into the willing, webbed fingers of this excruciatingly pleasurable sea nymph and her sisters.

  For half an hour or so after the luscious amphibian had so expertly milked his love juice, Eros lay inert on the pebbled lounge, his penis softly lolling to one side, crisscrossed with tiny shimmering paths, as if he had recently been molested by snails. Vaguely, he wondered about the collective noun for snails. He didn’t think it was ‘bunch’. ‘Booger’, perhaps, or ‘snot’. A snot of snails. That had a ring to it. Smiling, he flicked his penis to the other side, feeling the painful tug of viscid pubic hair. He really needed to go for a swim. But he couldn’t be bothered. The urgency of Violet had wilted, leaving in its place a kind of erotic apathy. What, after all, was the point. Moments of fleeting pleasure strung together with a lot of boring bits, the occasional decent meal, job satisfaction if you could get it, and the burden of procreation weighing heavily on your testicles. Resistance was useless. And also pointless.

  ‘You silly boy,’ said a voice. Eros looked around the empty chamber in shock. The voice was tantalizingly familiar, but also tantalizingly unfamiliar. It didn’t sound like another manifestation of his own psyche – unless his psyche had undergone a secret sex change. But he couldn’t discount that possibility because, quite clearly, he was the only one there. ‘Just wash it off,’ the voice continued, ‘and it will go away.’ Eros swung his head around wildly. ‘What will go away?’

  ‘The come down,’ said the voice. ‘Although it looks like you may be too late.’

  Eros looked down at his penis. The snail trails had somehow been absorbed into his skin, leaving behind a slightly bluish stain. His eyes widened in alarm.

  ‘They do it on purpose,’ the voice went on. ‘If you don’t wash your pollywaffle before it turns blue, you’ll start to feel worse and worse until you’re just about ready to cut it off. Then lo and behold, who should come splashing along but some squamous sea slut, and it suddenly occurs to you that only one thing will make you feel better. And so on and so on, until you literally don’t know whether you are coming or going…’ The voice trailed off, its tone of amused condescension leaving Eros in an even darker funk. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Look up.’

  Eros tilted his head back and looked up. Spread across the ceiling in a vast watery monochrome was a face he immediately recognized. ‘Grandma?’ he said, somewhat perplexed. ‘What happened to your voice?’

  ‘It’s the sea phone,’ said Hera. ‘The refractive index needs adjusting. I’ve been at Poseidon for months but he tells me he’s too busy with his dreadful ceramics.’

  ‘They are pretty bad,’ agreed Eros. He had no idea that his entire room could be converted to an ephemeral web-cam. Or, come to think of it, that anyone knew he was staying there. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

  ‘Please,’ said Hera. ‘It’s the worst kept secret in Olympus. Your cousin is the biggest blabbermouth this side of the Sirens. Really, you should know better than to tell him anything – unless it’s a deliberate strategy to get the information out there.’ A sonically distorted cackle reverberated around the room. Clearly, the idea that her two grandsons could ever pull off such a sophisticated double bluff was inconceivable to her. Eros suppressed the urge to smile, which wasn’t difficult, since his penile despondency was still sapping his joie de vivre. Still, it gave him a certain amount of satisfaction to know that their plan was working. Even though the whole thing was quite obviously pointless.

  ‘Oh do stop sighing, Eros,’ said Hera. ‘It only makes things worse.’

  ‘How could anything possibly get any worse,’ said Eros. Glancing down at his penis, he noticed that it was now the color of mouthwash.

  ‘I’ll tell you how it could get worse,’ said Hera. ‘Your mother could show up at any moment with an army of palace guards and drag you kicking and sniveling before the Council.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t she?’ sniffed Eros.

  ‘Because she’s afraid of dolphins.’

  This took Eros rather by surprise. ‘She’s afraid of dolphins?’ he said. Who was afraid of dolphins? It was like being afraid of Labradors or Buddhists.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed that she refuses go anywhere near Delphi? Even when it’s her turn to cover a shift at the oracle?’

  ‘I thought that was because she hated Apollo.’

  ‘No,’ said Hera, ‘it’s the dolphins. Anyway, it’s almost impossible to get a seahorse escort at this time of year, so she’s hanging around on the beach, working on her tan. The point is, things could get infinitely worse for you my poppet, and very soon, if you don’t take the olive branch we’re offering you.’

  Eros frowned. This wasn’t part of the plan, and although his confidence in the plan was sinking faster than a whiz in the sand, at least it had been signed off in triplicate. With some effort, he propped himself into a sitting position, gathering his seaweed around his waist in a belated attack of modesty. ‘What olive branch?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Complete your assignment,’ said Hera. ‘Go back to Earth, impale the movie star, and let nature take its course.’

  ‘Nature?’ said Eros, his voice rising as a wave of panic began to surge through him. His grandmother was not offering an olive branch at all, but a rusty rope of barbed wire, typically offered to only the most dangerous subversives. The ‘last chance’ before an unspeakably severe punishment. ‘It’s not nature,’ he protested. ‘It’s me.’

  Hera laughed, her apparition suddenly hideous with a distorting resonance that stretched her smile to a clownish leer. ‘Oh sweetie, you know your arrows only work when it’s what the mortals really want. And who are we to stop them doing what they really want to do?’

  ‘But…’ protested Eros, struggling to reign in his anxiety. ‘But how do we know it’s what they want? I mean, that’s what everyone always tells me. But how do I know it’s what they want if the only way to prove it is by saying ‘Oh, look, it worked, therefore that’s what they must have wanted all along?’’ He w
as sure he could have put it more succinctly, but eloquence was evading him along with hope, purpose, and a fundamental passion for living.

  ‘You mean, how can we prove it if the only way to prove it is retrospectively?’ said Hera, who wasn’t the goddess of politicians and confidence men for nothing.

  ‘Er, maybe,’ said Eros.

  ‘Let me give you an example,’ said Hera. ‘Your uncle Ares –

  ‘You mean my father Ares,’ interrupted Eros.

  ‘Your uncle Ares,’ countered Hera, a little too strongly, ‘is obsessed with a mortal woman who is not in the least bit interested in him. This is causing untold problems in Olympus, and so –’

  ‘Such as what?’ said Eros.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Hera. Like most bullshit artists, Hera’s arguments were often based on illustrative examples and/or one-trial generalizations that proved precisely nothing. To overcome these hurdles, she required a carte blanche acceptance of her premise, a captive audience and above all, continuous delivery. She did not, in other words, appreciate interruptions.

  ‘What ‘untold problems’?’ asked Eros.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Hera.

  ‘Precisely what?’

  ‘They are untold,’ said Hera, her voice rising as she adopted the liar’s default of speaking very loudly with a slight tone of derision, ‘because they are unspoken.’ Eros opened his mouth to say something, but quickly changed his mind. He knew he was being led around the garden path, logically speaking, but as he had skipped over Aristotle’s Prior Analytics in favor of Alcaeus’ Another 101 Great Drinking Songs, he felt less qualified to argue a point than to belligerently harp on it until he passed out in the middle of an Alcaic stanza.

  ‘My point is,’ Hera continued, feeling the shaky ground firm up beneath her sandals, ‘that the simplest solution would be for you to facilitate the union between Ares and the mortal, let Ares get it out of his system until he inevitably tires of her and returns to your mother, or possibly your aunt in the unlikely event of a reconciliation.’