Matching Wits with Venus

by Therese Gilardi

  He looked up at the stars.

  “We have a bit of time before midnight. I want you and Amelia to get to know each other.”

  ****

  At five of twelve, Cupid crept close to Amelia and put his arms around her waist. She looked up at him and smiled, her hazel eyes luminescent in the moonlight.

  “It has to work,” Cupid said.

  “Don’t worry,” she replied, patting his curly hair. “Justin knows what he’s doing.”

  “For sure,” Jennie chimed in as she joined them.

  Justin stood near the outbuilding, studying the tip of an arrow sticking out of Cupid’s quiver. He hoped Jennie and Amelia were right. His idea would work according to the computer model he’d created at the sound studio. But if there was one thing he’d learned during his years in Hollywood, it was that no story was ever complete until the final edit.

  He patted the pocket of his red jacket, where a bus ticket to his parent’s home lay folded neatly in thirds. He’d purchased it with the money he’d earned cleaning for Esmeralda. If his plan failed, the natural and mortal worlds would continue their descent into chaos; he’d overheard Cupid and Inuus saying that they weren’t sure Aphrodite had what it took, after all these years, to assume the title of goddess of love even if she succeeded in her grab for power. He couldn’t allow the world to come to an end without telling his parents the truth about what had become of his life and begging their forgiveness for his deceit.

  “You ready?”

  He hadn’t heard Cupid approach. He took one final look at the arrow tip then slid it back amongst the others. He nodded and Cupid made a low whistling noise. A dozen marksmen appeared in front of them.

  “Tell them what to do,” Cupid said.

  Justin stepped forward.

  “Each arrow tip contains a high frequency sound pattern that,” he turned to Cupid, “Can they hear it?”

  Cupid shook his head.

  “Every tip will emit a frequency audible to all mortals and animals within its range. It will also transmit a subtle pattern of vibrations, able to be discerned even by the hearing impaired, that will blanket the earth, like the beams from a cell phone tower or a satellite. The sounds and vibrations have embedded within them a program custom designed by Amelia that will drive all who hear or feel their sensations to seek a partner and mate. Your job is to shoot the arrows so that their tips activate the program when they come into contact with penetrable wooden surfaces,” Justin said.

  Cupid looked at the coterie of messengers, all personally trained by Mercury, and nodded.

  “My father always said you were the best. You pull this off and there’ll be great rewards for all of you.”

  The small army nodded. They didn’t need Cupid’s reminder. They all knew that great rewards would follow should they succeed. They also knew the price should they fail.

  ****

  Amelia, Jennie and Concordia tried to amuse themselves by roasting s’more after s’more on the little campfire they’d built on the hillside. They told each other ghost stories, and tried to identify every constellation in the sky in an effort to keep their minds off of Cupid and his messenger crew. Justin busied himself sweeping and re-sweeping the little outbuilding until it was clear he was only stirring up dust.

  “Let me get this straight. If the plan works, then Aphrodite and the Greeks retreat and everything goes back to normal for us. Chubby cheeked babies, puppies, chicks and bunnies at Easter.” Jennie said, with a glance at Amelia.

  “We’ll have June brides. Plus no more earthquakes. Well, at least until So Cal gets hit with the big one,” Jennie continued.

  “That’s right,” Concordia replied.

  “But what about you, the Roman gods and goddesses?” Jennie asked. “I mean Cupid helped and everything but come on, it was Amelia and Justin’s plans.”

  “Based on my father’s advice,” Amelia said.

  “Yeah,” Jennie said.

  Concordia picked up the stick she’d been using to roast marshmallows and poked the ground. Although she wasn’t sure what impact having their salvation delivered by a couple of mortals would mean for the Romans of one thing she was certain. Her mother was going to go berserk when she found out it was Amelia who saved her. She envisioned Venus’s face in her bathroom that day they’d talked about Amelia, contorted with rage.

  “I don’t know,” Concordia said softly.

  She may be the goddess of harmony, but even Concordia was aware that there were limits to her ability to placate her mother.

  ****

  The sun hadn’t yet begun to rise behind them when Cupid returned, grinning.

  “We did it! I’m sure,” he said, sweeping Amelia into the air and swirling her around before kissing her on the lips. “It’s going to succeed. As we were coming back, I passed over Paris. I saw men and women beginning to pair up near the Eiffel Tower and beneath the Arc de Triomphe.”

  “I’m glad it’s all over,” Jennie said.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Now what?”

  Cupid dropped onto one knee and took Amelia’s left hand.

  “Amelia Coillard, now that you’ve saved the world, will you marry me?”

  Concordia, Jennie and Justin clapped wildly and cheered as Amelia nodded.

  ****

  Gerard watched the fleshy brunette nurse who always had a tuft of hair hanging from the sloppy bun at the black of her head as she tidied up his room.

  Although Trudie knew it wasn’t part of her job description, she just couldn’t bear to think of her patients lying in bed, driven to distraction by those gold plastic water pitchers all hospitals seemed to insist had to sit atop the faux wood trays and tabletops adjacent to their beds. Plus, as she often reminded herself, the view her patients had of their rooms was far too often their last vision of the earthly world. She wanted to make it a pleasant memory. And wasn’t that really a large part of the reason she’d become a nurse, to bring beauty to a place of ugliness? Besides, she told herself, what else was she going to do on nights like tonight, when she had to work the graveyard shift.

  Trudie hummed as she worked, old spirituals her mother and grandmother had taught her while they polished the small collection of family silver beneath swirling fans too slow to move the still-humid Alabama air. She looked over at Gerard, who was pretending to be asleep.

  “What y’all doin’? Can I fetch somethin’? A cold drink?”

  Gerard opened his eyes. “Thank you for cleaning my room. I appreciate it. You’re the only one around here who treats me like I’m human, more than just some number on a color-coded chart.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Doctor.”

  “Could you please help me turn on channel five?”

  Trudie handed him the remote, which the night nurse had moved beyond his reach. That Samantha Yolandez, the one who’d caused him so much heartache with her sensationalist claims was on the screen again.

  Gerard studied her face. He recognized the faint outlines of stress-induced adult acne, not quite covered with her heavy stage make-up. He looked at her anxious eyes and saw the fear he’d seen in animals that knew they were about to be captured and had no possibility of escape. She was no different than the cornered creatures that’d bitten him over the years out of a sense of self-preservation.

  His head felt heavy and his eyelids seemed to have weights attached to them. He let them fall, slowly, like the red velvet curtain that descends at the end of a play, as the newscast reported that despite the fact that it was June, birds’ nests full of tiny eggs had been spotted in the forests above the city. His mission, Gerard thought, had been accomplished.

  ****

  “I promise this won’t take long. We’ll just head down to the underworld to deliver the message that the plan is in motion and we’ll be back before your mother is even awake. She’s got to take you to see your father so you can give him the good news in person. As soon as word gets out about the animals mating, he’ll be freed.”

>   “All right.” Amelia slipped her hand into Cupid’s.

  Though they’d been up for many hours, she was running on an energy she never knew she had–perhaps it was due to the baby, who seemed to want to make its presence known again with his or her faint movement. She brushed her other hand across her stomach as they hurried to Venus’s villa, where Enrique congratulated them on their engagement.

  “Finally some good news around here. I could not be happier, Signorina.”

  Amelia smiled and Enrique blushed.

  She wasn’t as confident as she followed Cupid into Jupiter’s palatial home. Vases of tiger lilies as tall as a kindergartner lined the long columned hall that led to the library, which was lined with red leather bound volumes of Italian poetry, which Amelia longed to hold, ornate tapestries, and gold trimmed velvet curtains. A large leather couch stood against the far wall beneath what looked to be a portrait of Venus as a young girl. Again Amelia found herself wondering if her child would resemble the Roman goddess.

  “Children.”

  Cupid and Amelia turned at the sound of Jupiter’s voice. He was carrying a long walking stick, which he set against the wall. He stepped toward them and kissed them each on the left cheek.

  “Please,” he said, motioning toward the couch.

  He walked across the deep blue Persian rug, toward an ornate desk handmade in Florence from the finest fruitwood. He leaned down, opened its drawer, and pulled out a cappuccino machine like the one Amelia had given Jennie for Christmas last year. Amelia chuckled.

  “You take a cappuccino?” Jupiter asked with a smile. “I see you admire my machine. There are many things you mortals do quite well.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Cupid said. “To let you know that Amelia’s plan worked. We will no longer need to worry about Aphrodite.”

  “That’s splendid,” Bacchus called from the doorway.

  He entered the room with Inuus by his side.

  “Of course.” Bacchus turned to Cupid as he spoke.

  “Your good friend here completed his task as well. Tell them.”

  “The Greeks weren’t even expecting us. We had to use very little force. They just folded when they saw us coming. Several of them even said that with Aphrodite in charge, capture was what they should’ve expected all along.”

  Jupiter nodded. “They’re nothing like they used to be when Zeus took a firmer hand.”

  “Anyway, they laid down their arms. I didn’t even have any trouble capturing Aphrodite. She was floating around in the Aegean with a crew of cabin boys young enough….A lot younger than us.”

  “What about Venus?” Jupiter asked, his hands in the air, holding the novelty sized coffee cup he was about to prepare for Amelia.

  “Seems Venus and Mercury had already escaped. One of my men saw them wandering around the catacombs. Hand in hand.”

  Jupiter groaned.

  “Now Jupe, how ‘bout making it five cappuccinos? That way we can toast our new world order. We’re going modern. No more of Venus’s messy arrows, and all those injuries Cupid was always getting from the sharp tips.”

  Bacchus turned to Inuus.

  “Some of those were really bad, weren’t they? I always thought it was a matter of time before he developed blood poisoning,” Bacchus said, as he looked at Cupid.

  “Remember that gash on him, Inuus? He’d stabbed himself in some mortal’s garden, when he fell after tripping over a flowerpot….”

  Amelia looked at Cupid. She hoped that, somehow, she had misinterpreted what Bacchus had just said, that Cupid had shot himself while prowling about in her garden. She bit her lip as she recalled the way he’d confided he had been spying on her the first night they met, watching her from her garden in an attempt to read her computer screen. That must have been when he shot himself, why he’d been such a different man when he returned to Happily Ever After By Amelia. He’d been under the spell of one of his own arrows.

  Amelia leaned toward Cupid, hoping to see that she was wrong. But all of the color had drained from his face. He shifted his eyes to Amelia, then down to the floor. She sat completely still, her back not touching the leather sofa, her chest rising and falling rapidly with each breath.

  Cupid turned to Amelia.

  “We’d better….”

  “Go,” she said.

  They stood up.

  “We have to get back to the upper world right away.”

  Jupiter stepped forward and took Amelia’s hands in his. He held them firmly.

  “Come back soon,” he said, looking into her eyes. “You are always welcome here.”

  “Thank you,” she replied softly as he squeezed her hands.

  Cupid and Amelia stepped inside the gilded cage of Jupiter’s elevator with Umberto. After seeing their face, Umberto nervously rolled back and forth on the balls of his feet as the elevator made its quick journey to West Hollywood.

  “Buon giorno,” he called out as they left the lift.

  “Grazie,” Cupid mumbled.

  Amelia, however, made no response, as she was too afraid to trust her voice. It wasn’t fair, she thought sadly. What had she and Cupid done to deserve this? Only hours ago, they’d been planning for a life together, and now they had no future.

  “Cupid.”

  “I know,” he said, his blue eyes creased. He pulled her to his chest. She sank into him, taking in his familiar scent for the last time.

  “We’ll see each other,” she said. “For the sake of the baby.”

  “Of course.”

  “But neither of us can bear….”

  “A meaningless match made by my arrows,” he finished.

  Amelia pulled away. She bit her tongue so hard she was certain she had drawn blood. She crossed her fingers, like she had when she was little, although she knew her future would be just like her past. She would once again be part of a family broken in two.

  “I’ve got to get home,” she said, struggling to see through her tears.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Stella was asleep when Amelia reached her place. She decided to let her mother rest. After all, Gerard wasn’t going anywhere and they’d need all their strength to try to talk their way in to see him again. Stella had returned the “doctor” costumes to the prop shop where she’d rented them and the odds were that the kind nurse who’d admitted them under false pretenses was not going to look the other way a second time.

  She sat down at her mother’s kitchen table and pulled Petal from her little bed in the corner. Stella had proven to be quite reliable where the little dog was concerned, insisting that Amelia drop her off whenever she would be gone all night.

  Amelia hoped that meant Stella could be relied upon as a babysitter; she was going to need all the help she could find now that she would be living on her own with the baby. She withdrew her little notebook from the bag sitting on the table next to her and tried to write, but it was no good. None of her old methods worked; she had merely line after line of scratched out words. Near the bottom of the page Amelia had grown so frustrated, pushed her pen so hard, that she’d torn the paper in several spots.

  Finally, Stella awoke. “I didn’t realize I unplugged the phone and my alarm clock last night. No wonder I slept so soundly.”

  Amelia pushed a plate of fruit and a bowl of non-fat yogurt toward her mother. Stella looked marginally better than the last time she’d seen her–some of the little lines on her face were slightly faded–but she still had a long way to go until she resembled her old self. Amelia never thought the day would come when she would long to hear her mother’s fake Southern accent, but as she studied Stella’s now deflated lips she realized how much she wished to hear her call her “darlin”. She knew she should tell Stella what had happened with Cupid but she simply didn’t have the energy.

  “As soon as you’re ready I want to give Dad the good news that his plan worked.”

  Stella smiled as she plugged the phone in. Its shrill tone broke the temporary truce Amelia was h
aving with the sunny morning. She’d always had a hard time with the fact that sunny days stacked one upon another, no matter what her emotional climate. She looked at Stella’s face as she held the receiver.

  Amelia felt like she had the time she’d been pulled under by a wave at Playa Del Rey. She’d known she lacked the strength to fight the inevitable, and she’d been right; if the lifeguard hadn’t been looking in her direction she would have been washed out to sea, another victim of the strong Pacific undercurrent.

  She kicked at the floor as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, telling her something she knew deep in her heart: that the only time everyone got a happy ending was at a Hollywood movie. All her life, Amelia had believed her father to be an unlucky man, no matter what he said. Amelia wiped her eyes as her lower back began to cramp.