Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I heard roaring in my ears.

  My heart thudded, as if a door had slammed open.

  “Never,” he breathed.

  My lips tickled. He was that close.

  “Never what?” I said faintly.

  “Never take it off.” He gave another gasp. Then he took my hand in his, kissed my forefinger and my silver ring, leaped up, knocked over his chair, scattered the pages of his transcript all over the floor, and fled.

  I’d like to think it was his dramatic exit that left my heart hammering and my thoughts in a whirl.

  But it was the touch of his lips to my ring.

  I felt I’d put that finger into an electrical socket. A lightning bolt ran through me and stuck me to my chair, froze my feet to the floor, and fused my heart into juddering confusion.

  One word growled out of me.

  “You!”

  I glared after him, wondering why I’d said that, and why I felt so much indignation, sorrow, hunger, rage, and…joy?

  I ran the fifty blocks home to the Lair. After a couple of blocks I had to take my jacket off and carry it, squeezing it in my fist at every step. I was running sweat, but not from the heat or exertion.

  I was full of fear.

  Every time my left foot hit the ground I thought, flubbed…flubbed…flubbed…flubbed. How could I have flubbed it? Already!

  A few blocks later, I realized how.

  I wasn’t prepared.

  I simply had never expected to find her.

  I’d talked a good line to women, of course. Talked too much to Baz once, damned Baz, with his nosiness and his mother-hen complex hidden under fathoms-deep sarcasm.

  It was Baz who had suggested I start advertising—tell the women I bed who I really am.

  “Put the word out,” he’d said two years ago. “You miss her. She’s out there. Women talk. She’ll hear sooner or later. If nothing else, she’ll e-mail you just to tell you to fuck off and die.”

  What if she did? That was what lent wings to my feet.

  Obviously RathiRaani—Desire Queen—does it get more obvious, you slacker dumbshit?—obviously Rathi didn’t remember a thing.

  Who she was. Who I was. What had parted us.

  As I ran, I found myself unpeeling layers of oh-shitness.

  To reach her, I would have to seduce her. As I thought of that, my feet touched the ground only about twice per block. I relived the scent of her breath, fresh and powerful and new after all this time.

  That would be the fun part.

  Then would come the scary part, the pit bull at the bedroom door. The first of many places where I could totally fuck it up.

  Because eventually I would have to remind her who she was.

  Me, I’d spent the past four hundred and fifty years working at forgetting. Karma was something that happened to other people. I was no expert on prati-prasav, waking someone’s memories of past lives. It can be very dangerous. Rathi had a reason for forgetting, and I, of course, knew quite well what that reason was.

  I felt helpless and underprepared.

  I ran on, sweating, stirring cottonwood fluff and scaring pigeons with my trainers.

  Rathi had clearly been reincarnating the old-fashioned way all this time.

  That hurt. She’d really wanted to forget me.

  She’d apparently sworn off sex, too, going by who she was today.

  That was just fucking tragic.

  If I flubbed everything else, I vowed as my feet hit the sidewalk, I would bring her kundalini back to life. No woman that hot should have to live without joy.

  Chapter Three

  I dreamed that night of a city that was American and not American, both orderly and brash and full of cars, and tangled and ancient and full of spicy smells.

  I’ve had those dreams since I was nine, shipped from Delhi to Los Angeles, lost, confused, homesick, terrified of my new freedoms, wary of strange foods, and appalled at my aunt, who seemed more like another child than a parent surrogate.

  In this dream, I felt a new emotion: hope. I blundered through darkness toward a light that dodged behind buildings, always just ahead of me.

  I looked up in my confusion. I saw a brick building, maybe a factory, and on top of it, a scaffold of rusting iron. The building was wider at the base than at the top, like a stupa, a square-sided pyramid. The scaffold on top continued up, as if it were the skeleton of more layers of factory, maybe invisible layers.

  I realized then that the scaffold was meant to support a water tower. I squinted. Against a strangely swirling sky, now cloudy, now midnight blue, now starry, I saw the water tank—but it was so tiny! How could they manage with so little water?

  Then I saw that the tank was really enormous—as large as the building under it, but upside-down, invisible, funneling the waters of endless warm monsoon rains down into the factory.

  They had not too little water, but too much.

  I realized that I was standing directly under that giant, invisible funnel. Afraid of drowning, I woke up.

  My whole body hummed. Especially my female parts.

  I never allowed myself to be distracted by sex. I had a guaranteed fix: more hard work.

  I got up and microwaved a glass of milk. By the time I sat down at my computer, I felt calmer.

  Instead of working, I wondered about the dream.

  Dreams of India came seldom these days. When I first arrived in LA, I’d dreamed often of home, waking in tears, Auntie Lakshmi holding me and rocking me back to sleep. As now, my parents had called almost daily, leaving me crying and begging to be brought home. What had I done wrong? Why was I sent away? No one ever told me. Instead I was told to be grateful.

  Auntie Lakshmi wouldn’t make excuses for them. She thought they were being unkind. So I made their excuses.

  This was an opportunity for me to get an American education. I would broaden my knowledge of the world. I could make invaluable contacts for my work in later life. And so forth. I must be grateful for my exile.

  I had tried so hard to feel grateful.

  Eventually I became grateful, as my auntie’s feminism sank in. I realized what freedoms I had in LA. I could listen to my mother scolding and preaching and know that however much she hovered by phone, she could not actually make me live the stifling Indian girl’s life of duty, obedience, and purity. I had been cut loose of all that. But unlike Kama I was not adrift. I had always been driven. I drove myself.

  College had been another shock. I lost my auntie’s comforting presence. Dreams of the endless sunshine of LA got mixed up with steamy Delhi dreams.

  Law school had completed my exile. I stayed in phone contact with home, but I no longer felt that sick, swirling yearning, mixed with a confusion of anger and loss and betrayal and rejection. I buried all that under a relentless drive to make the best of my American education.

  I drank my hot milk and thought of poor Kama, probably not the brightest bulb in his family chandelier, packed off to America to fulfill his parents’ dreams. Or, more likely, since they no doubt knew him pretty well by then, to get him out of their hair. His slacker tendencies had not emerged overnight upon his arrival in the US. Of that much I was sure.

  Still, my heart bled for him. They don’t want me back, he had said. They don’t care.

  What dreams might he have on nights like this?

  At this point I drained my glass of hot milk and my brain woke up fully.

  Don’t be an idiot, Rathi.

  Feeling street-smart and pleasurably guilty like a fan-girl looking up a movie star, I opened my laptop and Googled the mail-room boy.

  Then I realized I didn’t know his last name.

  Ah, but it would be on his transcript.

  Then I realized I had left his transcript, which I had collected and neatly piled, on a tray on a table in the State of Illinois Building rotunda, where it had no doubt gone straight into the Dumpster.

  Well, the name couldn’t be that common.

  It wasn’t. There were lot
s of references to history of religion, the Kama Sutra, blah blah, hundreds of years ago. Apparently nowadays nobody named their son “Kamadeva,” not even in India. Just as my own name was uncommon. Another small thing we shared.

  I checked Facebook. Half a dozen young men on Facebook claimed the name and trolled for women. None of them was my mail-room clerk.

  Then I found a site that did not seem to be a scholarly journal or a predatory single male. By now I was curious about the history—why wasn’t anybody named Kamadeva these days?—so I settled down to read a page entitled “How the Cult of Kamadeva Came to an End.”

  As has occurred around the world in many religions, the mythos of the Hindu pantheon underwent constant revision, or iconotropy, to accommodate changes in earthly demographics. The following story is told to account for the eclipse of Kamadeva worship and Kamadeva’s conversion into a divinity subordinate to, and more acceptable to, the conqueror Shiva.

  Upon his wife Sati’s death, Shiva went into mourning and meditated long, disregarding the affairs of gods and men. So long did he meditate that the rest of the gods became impatient. A new demon had arisen who was stealing all the gods’ wives, and a divination had been performed, and a prophecy had revealed that only a son of Shiva and Parvati, who was Sati reincarnated, could defeat him. Indeed, Parvati was already born and waiting for her husband. But Shiva would not rouse from his solemn meditations.

  The gods sent for Kamadeva and begged him to cause Shiva to fall in love with Parvati. Only thus could the prophecy be fulfilled.

  Accordingly Kamadeva took his bow of sugarcane and his arrows of asoka, mango, navamal lika, pink lotus, and blue lotus, representing the five senses by which love ensnares the soul, and he shot them into Lord Shiva.

  Shiva, thus roused from his meditation, was enraged. He opened his third eye and sent forth a bolt of fire, which he directed upon Kamadeva, reducing him to ashes.

  Here the story has differing endings. In one version, the crops, trees, flowers, and fruits refused to grow until Shiva restored Kamadeva to life. In another, Kamadeva’s wife went to Shiva weeping and pleading for her husband’s life; in another, it was his mother, and Shiva, repenting of his intemperate behavior, restored him.

  However, all versions agree on one thing: Shiva restored Kamadeva to his spiritual body, but stopped short of giving him physical form again.

  Thus the lusty god of love, whose arrows of the senses could arouse even the supreme god from meditation, was converted into a deity representing purity, spiritual affection, and chastity. His name was changed to Kama the Bodiless.

  No one records what his wife thought of this.

  Well, that was all very boring. I clicked on Home.

  There, in living color, a photo of the mail-room boy, my Kamadeva, grinned out at me.

  Above the photo was a caption in big brilliant red letters:

  HAVE YOU SLEPT WITH THIS MAN?

  Chapter Four

  Baz was out and Veek was in the kitchen, trying to make cappuccino. I danced around the kitchen, impatiently waiting for him to sit down so I could blurt out my news, while he struggled with the machine.

  “Sheesh! Let me.” I took over making coffee. “I’ve found her, Veek!”

  He looked sleepy. “Found?”

  “My wife.”

  He looked at me for a long moment without expression. Then his rare grin broke. “C’est bon, eh?”

  I waved my hands. “It’s stupendous!” Somehow it felt realer, now that I could tell someone. “She’s still gorgeous. She doesn’t hate me…so far…yet.”

  Veek pointed his bare black scalp at the cappuccino machine. “Make my coffee and tell me about it.”

  I told him everything. The zing. Her ring—our wedding ring. Her name. “Her name translates as ‘Desire Queen,’ Veek. It’s like destiny put a big neon sign over her saying ‘This time you’ll find each other!’” I told him about her sweet breath. And the headache-inducing bun she made of her hair. “I wonder if her hair is as long as ever? Naw, it couldn’t be. She could stand on her hair back then.”

  I was so excited I squirted hot foam all over the counter instead of into Veek’s personal bone china demitasse.

  “She even smells the same.” This time I got the foamy milk into his cup. I put two biscotti on the plate and presented it all to him. “She’s here. I’m so happy I could shit.”

  Veek seemed amused at my enthusiasm. “Suppose you wipe the counter instead?”

  I waved a hand. “Baz’ll get it. Oh, Veek.” I shook my head, suddenly speechless, bouncing on the balls of my feet to the rock band playing in my heart.

  “What does she do now? I presume she has employment?”

  I started myself some espresso with a shot of brandy. “She’s a lawyer.”

  Veek burst out laughing.

  “I know, right?” I made a face. “She’s not married. She probably hasn’t ever had a boyfriend.” I thought of the clean, bright fire of her aura and the hopelessly naive suspicion in her snapping eyes. “Doesn’t trust anybody.”

  “Lawyer,” Veek said.

  I slugged brandy while the coffee beans ground. “There’s something in there.” I remembered the zap I’d had off her ring. “She has my ring, Veek. After all this time.” A tear, probably the brandy talking, came to my eye.

  “Such things have minds of their own,” he said. I knew he spoke from experience. “The ring would not leave her.”

  “The way she left me?” My mood began to sink as I remembered all the danger spots ahead. “I guess she had a right to be mad.”

  “So far, so good, though, eh?” he said, as if trying to jolly me up. Veek had to listen to women complain about their husbands all day.

  I quit whining. “Yeah. So far, so good. If I can get her to like sex, I’m halfway there. She looks like she’s been getting by on good works her whole life. I’ll swear her lady parts aren’t dead yet, though.”

  “No woman’s lady parts are dead.”

  I thought of my Rathi, wrapped in lawyer clothes with her hair bound up, yearning and not even knowing what for. I wanted to strip her naked and see what time had done with her. I wanted to free her from her cocoon.

  “They raise girl children pretty rigidly back home,” I said, and laughed without humor. “Feels weird to talk about India as home after all this time. I told her I was an exile like her. That got to her, for some reason. So, hey, that’s another question. Why is she an exile? She couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. She has ‘somebody’s good girl’ written all over her. But she went all soft and runny when I told her I couldn’t go home.”

  Veek grunted. He’s an exile himself. He eyed me across the rim of his demitasse. “So? What’s the plan? To carry her home in triumph to resume the throne of desire?”

  I got up and fidgeted restlessly.

  “You have no throne back there,” he reminded me. “They burnt you to death.”

  My back rippled. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Will you have to remind her?”

  I turned on him, snarling. “Yes, I’ll have to remind her. I have to tell her everything. Unless I can somehow wake her memories, which is fucking tricky to do. They call it prati-prasav, reverse birthing. It could drive her out of her mind.” I looked at him hopefully. “Any suggestions?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I teach women to forget the bad times, not to remember them.”

  I sat down at the table and poured more brandy into my coffee. “Yeah. We spend ninety percent of our time fixing women’s fucked-up sex lives. It’s job security for us.”

  Veek nodded. “I never run out of customers.”

  “And hooray for that,” I said, raising my cup in a toast. “I’m gonna need everything I’ve learned to unkink the bowknot they’ve tied in her kundalini.”

  “What about your worshippers? Are they ready for your goddess to return?”

  I scoffed. “What worshippers? Nobody knows I exist.”

  “Yes, th
ey do.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Je vous assure. May I use your computer?”

  “Yes.” I usually left it on the kitchen table, to everyone’s complaints.

  He opened it, tapped for a moment, and then swung it to face me.

  I looked.

  I saw my own face, caught in a candid photo, probably from a phone, laughing and looking up, with the lake and sky behind me and a seagull going by. And in a large, bright letters was the question: HAVE YOU SLEPT WITH THIS MAN?

  My jaw dropped. “Whut th…?”

  I read on. “Kamadeva…Hindu god of love…restore him to his rightful place in heaven…What is this?” I clicked on a link called History and found the usual story—Shiva’s version, of course.

  …reducing him to ashes…

  Instinctively I looked over one shoulder at the window. Fuck. I hadn’t had to worry about that bastard since I came to the States. I clicked back to the home page.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” I muttered as I scanned it. “Membership requirements. Requirements?”

  I clicked through. Apparently you had to prove you’d slept with me if you wanted to join. “List of special effects in bed. Holy fucking shit. What is this?”

  “You have been talking, mon frère.”

  I surfed quickly through the site. There were plenty of links—to old temple carvings, to the Kama Sutra, even to a description of how they’d rewritten my book around the time Shiva demoted me with a flamethrower.

  “There seems to be only one person behind this,” I said. “Look—all the contact links refer back to this high priestess person, Lotus Bride.” I finally found her picture. Masses of black hair, a soft, brown-eyed, wannabe-magnetic glare, a soft, round face. She was soft and round all over, with the kind of cleavage you get with overflowing scholarship and an underperforming love life. Studying her photo, I couldn’t say it rang a bell. I get a lot of those girls. They tend to be surprisingly flexible yet tight, a great combination.

  In a zaftig, all-white, suburban American way, she kind of resembled Rathi.

  My heart thumped unpleasantly. “But why?” I said.