Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  With considerable relief I pushed her doorbell and was admitted to the building.

  Lolly had decorated her living room with great swags of bright-colored silks. Panels of patterned, sequined sari fabric were stapled to the walls and ceiling. As I entered from her tiny front hallway, I passed through a curtain of bells. Scented candles burned everywhere. Along the walls were piles of huge, bright pillows.

  And everywhere, there were women.

  To my astonishment, I found nineteen women crammed into her living room. Most of them were dressed in a kind of “seraglio chic”—diaphanous trousers, strings of tinsel and bangles around their bellies, and the fanciest Victoria’s Secret brassieres, fringed and beaded and sequined. They all looked like Lolly somehow, and they all seemed very excited.

  I was introduced to each of the apsaras, as they called themselves—“celestial nymphs.” At first I thought they were identical to Lolly, round and young, with big hair and flushed pink skin. Then I noticed two in their thirties and one surely in her fifties or even sixties. Five were brown-skinned. One was rail-thin, and three more appeared about size eight or ten.

  So why did they all seem like sisters?

  Their eyes shone with excitement. They seemed elastic and full of energy. Indeed, a grandmotherly white woman was showing a girl who looked part Asian some mysteriously athletic-looking maneuver, putting one leg behind her head and balancing on the other foot.

  Lolly seemed reserved. When she had us all seated and quiet again, she said to me, “Tell us everything!”

  At first I thought I couldn’t. I looked at their eager, unfamiliar faces and felt a shiver of distaste.

  Then I thought, Kama slept with every one. And it did something to them.

  I knew what that felt like.

  I told them nearly everything I had told Auntie Lakshmi.

  Burning up my panties got me the most sympathy.

  “Doesn’t he ever think?” said the grandmother with exasperation.

  “He should be flogged!” declared Gina, a chubby beauty with frizzy blonde hair.

  I said, “Well, he did bring me new ones. Very nice ones. And he never made fun of me or told anyone about it.”

  “He wouldn’t dare!” said Clepha, a light-brown woman with a short, businesslike Afro.

  “Oh, wouldn’t he? He bragged enough to us,” Gina said.

  “Never mind, go on,” said Lolly.

  I didn’t speak of my emotions, nor of the strange and glorious impressions I had felt while kissing Kamadeva, but I did tell them about the pigeons, both on the bridge and flying through my invisible fountain of fire in my apartment.

  As I related my experiences, I felt the heat begin to build in my belly again.

  “Right through your window?” said the Asian girl, Deb.

  “I—I think I melted a hole in it,” I confessed.

  Deb made a skeptical face.

  “Show us,” commanded Lolly. Her eyes were stormy. It occurred to me that she, more than any of them, felt something personal for Kamadeva. Maybe she wished she were his long-lost bride.

  I was sorry for her. If I needed any proof that my unconscious mind had completely accepted Kama’s story, this was it: that I felt no guilt or shame for coming upon Kama and allowing him to seduce me as I had. A week ago I had concealed that from her, feeling I might be poaching.

  Now I had only compassion for her disappointment. As I looked into her half angry, half marveling face, the fire bumped up into my heart. I wanted only to comfort her.

  The storm still spattered rain against the windows of her living room.

  I didn’t think she wanted so much proof that she had to call her own janitor to put plywood over a hole. Instead I looked around the room at the gorgeous sari fabrics stapled to her walls.

  There—a pattern of ringnecked green parrots with scarlet beaks was embroidered on a cream-colored background.

  Every woman in the room fell silent. I felt all eyes upon me.

  The heat rose up into my throat.

  I looked at an embroidered parrot and thought of my compassion for Lolly’s envy and jealousy. Come forward, I said silently to the parrot. Soothe her, fill her with wonder, let her know my compassion, and let her not fear or feel hatred for me on account of my situation.

  A high, musical squawk tore the air. A parrot’s head popped out of the cloth as if it were poking its head through a hole in a hollow tree. The bird wriggled its shoulders free. It gripped the hole it had torn with its claws, and then it burst forth and began to fly around the room over our heads, squawking shrilly.

  It was followed by more parrots.

  Soon the air was full of them, making a din like a thousand squeaky rocking chairs.

  The sari on the wall was full of holes.

  All the other women ducked and screamed. The parrots seemed to fill the crammed living room. Candles fluttered and went out.

  Lotus Bride called out in a voice like a trombone, “Peace! Peace!”

  The apsaras stopped screaming.

  We all held still.

  The parrots began to settle around the room. One landed on my shoulder and nibbled at my hair, making little purring, cooing noises. Soon each of Kama’s devotees had a bird perched at her ear.

  Without wings darkening the room, I could now see faces of wonder all around. Lolly’s eyes were big. Her mouth made an O.

  “I apologize for the mess,” I said. “And I fear your beautiful sari is ruined. If it’s any comfort, you should see my living room.”

  The high priestess looked around the room, at her perforated sari, now parrotless, and at the bird walking upside down along her own arm. “Holy shit.”

  I nodded. “That was my feeling, too.”

  After that, the atmosphere became more comfortable.

  I told them about my strange childhood—which had not seemed strange to me at all. How my parents had raised me strictly, yet revered me and taken all my advice most seriously. How I had been sent away so young to live with my radical auntie, at the same time being told I was betrothed to a man who never existed. How my mother had lied to me. How my father bade me goodbye. The things my cousin said to me.

  And then, since it seemed as though Lotus Bride was recovering from her ambition to be the next consort of Kamadeva, I told them how Kama had declared me to be the avatar of his wife, reincarnated so often that I had forgotten everything.

  “And what a perfect line I thought that was! If a man insists he is a love god, of course he tells the woman of the hour that she is his goddess, only you don’t remember. What a—what a—”

  “What a crock!” said the grandmother, Annette.

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “Only it turns out to be true,” Lolly said.

  I looked at her with exasperation. Of course she wanted it to be true. When one has accepted the lies of a fraud and used them to transform oneself, one holds on as long as possible to each lie, even as it is exposed.

  “I don’t know that it’s true,” I said. “I know that something extraordinary is happening to me. I am willing to concede it might be the so-famous kundalini, which everyone talks of but never makes sense. Kama—” I paused as a memory of our last kiss, and the disappointment in his eyes, returned to me. I blinked and drew breath. “Kama has caused me to feel some extraordinary things. But I have no proof of his claim.”

  The apsaras looked at one another.

  Lolly said to me gently, “You’re still a virgin, right?”

  I felt heat rise in my cheeks that had nothing to do with kundalini. “So what?”

  Clepha said, “If you weren’t a virgin, you’d know ‘so what.’”

  “He won’t even bed me!” I blurted. I clapped my hands over my mouth. They looked at each other again. I was getting annoyed by that. “He says he doesn’t want to—” I waved a hand. Suddenly I couldn’t remember precisely why Kama had claimed we must not make love yet. “I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “But I refuse to swallow another
lie all because of one strange—very well, a few strange things.”

  In the silence following this declaration, Lotus Bride said, “Tea, everybody?”

  They began murmuring and not-looking at me. This was very like looking at me, only more secretive, and equally annoying.

  Someone offered me a chair. I sat, keeping my knees together as I had been brought up to do, feeling an utter fool.

  Lolly brought me tea.

  Outwardly calm, inside I was flopping around like a severed snake, full of annoyance, raging hormonal imbalance, and all the special effects reserved for a woman whose past lives might be catching up with her.

  The apsaras told me their stories.

  Deb had been whimpering in emotional pain after a breakup when Kamadeva came along to soothe her. Now she trolled the bars along Michigan Avenue, looking for someone to match his kindness and his prowess. She hadn’t found anyone yet, but she said she was being much pickier.

  Annette, the grandmother, had met Kama at a crafts fair. He bedded her, fixed her arthritis somehow, and then advised her to look for buried treasure—and she had found it in her mother’s old junk drawer in the back of her garage, and sold it through an antiques dealer whom she was also now dating.

  Clepha reported having delayed dumping her ex-husband because he was the only man who satisfied her. After Kama, she’d given the ex his walking papers. And joined a masters’ gymnastics team.

  Gina had introduced Lotus Bride to Kama after he had led her past her terror of sex into the promised land. She admitted that she hadn’t actually noticed anything odd during her sexual encounter with him, although she was possibly biased, since her earlier encounters had been with an uncle when she was ten. When Lotus Bride came over for girl talk after her own encounter, however, the two of them had recognized the extraordinary nature of their recent bedmate. Lolly had been inspired to start the Kama Kult. Gina had designed the web site.

  I had to admit, they all reported positive experiences. They seemed to like him, but they were impatient with his hit-and-run thing. They wanted more.

  I ignored my own craving for an infinite supply of Kamadeva. Looking around the room, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  The man I had chosen to deflower me was obviously ideal for the job.

  If I could just get him to do it.

  Annette sat down beside me. “You’ll have to talk to him, you know.” A green parrot with a red beak walked down her shoulder and hopped onto the edge of her tea mug. “He’s a man, but I think he means well.”

  I thought of Kama’s disappointed eyes again. “I—I feel shy,” I confessed. This time I didn’t feel so bad saying it. “I would probably end up scolding him.”

  “That seems appropriate,” Annette said. She looked across the room at Lolly.

  Lolly stood up and clapped her hands.

  Instantly the apsaras began forming a circle around the edges of the small living room. Lolly stood at the center with a supervisory eye on them. I found myself sitting, somewhat alarmed, inside the circle.

  I frowned. “What’s happening?”

  “We worked out a summoning,” Lolly said. “We thought if enough of us did it, you know, his past lovers all assembled in one room, he would have to come. It hasn’t worked so far. But,” she said, with a triumphant look at me, “I bet it works now.”

  Annette laid her hand on my shoulder. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  I chewed my lower lip. I had plenty to say to Kama—most of it private. Yet every time we had met, I had begun with questions that never got answered. He may have felt the way I did, but those feelings hadn’t stopped him from evading my questions.

  The apsaras didn’t strike me as particularly powerful.

  They might distract him, however. Kama might be an ancient god of lust, but he was also, not to put too fine a point upon it, a flake.

  For a moment I wondered what it would have been like for his long-lost wife to be married to a charming, bouncy, infinitely sexy, young-at-heart flake.

  She probably would have scolded him a lot, too.

  “Go ahead,” I said grimly.

  Lolly called them to attention and started them chanting. It was musical and moving and sung in an unfamiliar language. The tune, however, I recognized: “The House of the Rising Sun.” The only English words I remembered were, It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl, and I, God knows, am one.

  I shivered.

  Lolly moved to my side when she had them all singing. She whispered in my ear, “Concentrate on Kamadeva. Imagine him appearing here in the circle.”

  I nodded.

  She moved back into the command center, directing with flowing arms and scarves. The parrot on her shoulder mantled its wings but it held on.

  I closed my eyes. The candles burned with the scent of Night Queen and lilies of the valley, a potent, sharply discordant combination that made me loosen my tight eyelids and made my sinuses and earlobes tingle. The song rose and fell. The women’s voices were light but energized—full of hope, I thought. And no wonder. They might, just might, meet their deity again at last. I found myself sighing slowly with each falling phrase, filling my lungs with air on each rising phrase.

  Oh, Kama, I thought, why can’t you be a normal boy? Just a sweet, eager, bouncy, foolish boy full of delight in his own adorableness? I remembered kissing him in the park, soft nuzzling kisses. I remembered kissing him in Judge Green’s restroom, slamming him against the wall and growling into his mouth like a she-bear. I remembered him wrapping himself around me until I couldn’t tell his arms from mine, while my foot came up to plant itself on his thigh, and we sucked and tongued and savaged one another’s mouths. It seemed I could feel these sensations as if it were all happening again.

  An image came unbidden to my mind. I stood underneath the invisible water tower. Above me the unseen waters shuddered and shifted, as if the tower might split open at any moment.

  The hairs rose on my arms.

  The parrot shrieked shrilly in my ear.

  “What the fuck?” I heard Kama say.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in my life—six thousand years’ worth—but apparently I’d gotten soft, living in the land of mac’n’cheese and daytime TV.

  One minute I was drowning my sorrows in microbrew and giving my motorcycle an oil change, the next I was in a crowded, smelly room full of half-dressed women and shrieking parrots.

  Then I noticed I was naked. Cool!

  I was burning up. I remembered I was at T-minus-blowtorch and counting. I needed to get laid, stat.

  They were singing something I recognized, an old, old Vidyapati Maithili love poem that I hadn’t thought of in ages:

  Today my house is again home,

  today my body is my body.

  The god of destiny smiled on me.

  No more doubt.

  Let the nightingales sing, then,

  let there be myriad rising moons,

  let Kama’s five arrows become five thousand

  and the south wind softly, softly blow:

  for now my body has meaning

  in the presence of my beloved

  It’s beautiful if you sing it slow the way they were singing it. I was overwhelmed with nostalgia. The air was so thick with incense, the parrots squawking, the women of all sizes and colors with all their sweaty skin showing, all I could think was that I must be dreaming.

  Then a parrot flew across the room and nearly bapped into my head. Okay, probably not a dream.

  Had Indra called me? I remembered once getting invited to an orgy with him and forty nymphs—

  Wait a minute. That music—the poem was Vidyapati, but the tune was…the tune was by…Eric Burdon and the Animals?

  Either this was a dream, or I was hallucinating an orgy from the past. Either way, it seemed like a great idea. I hadn’t had sex in weeks.

  “Welcome, Kamadeva, lord of love!” intoned a woman’s voice.

  I
turned around.

  A big girl with big dark hair stood behind me. She made a flourish with a long scarf and the singing stopped.

  I smiled. A long-forgotten sense of duty arose, and a familiar train of thought: How many of them are there this time? and Here we go, and Damn, I love my job.

  My month-old boner throbbed.

  “Okeedoke,” I said. “Who’s first?”

  “You horndog.” The chick with the scarf frowned at me. “There’s someone here you need to talk to.”

  She swept the scarf around and moved aside, and holy shit, there sat Rathi, her knees and ankles together, and a green parrot with a red beak sitting on her upraised hand, just like in my favorite portrait of her.

  Clearly I was asleep and dreaming.

  I smiled. “Hi, honey.”

  She seemed steamed up. “You.”

  I looked around me. Room full of half-naked, ready women, incense, candles—it all seemed perfectly in order. “Nice party,” I ventured.

  A phone rang, and an answering machine clicked on. “Laura Cranston is not available right now. Please leave a message.”

  I did another double take.

  Okay, this wasn’t a dream. Or an orgy arranged in heaven.

  And apparently I hadn’t been dragged back to India, or back in time, either.

  I looked around me. The women looked back. I looked at the girl with the scarf. She seemed familiar. Big hair, lots of pink skin, with a googly-eyed, wannabe magnetic glare—holy shit, it was that crazy chick from the Internet! The high priestess of the new Kama Kult!

  Then I realized Rathi was wearing those pleated tan linen shorts.

  This wasn’t my Rathi of three millennia ago, hot and ready and happy.

  This was my Rathi of four hours ago, who couldn’t find her love button with both hands and still didn’t remember the last time she threw a chair at my ghostly head and screamed, I hate you!

  I swallowed. “I can explain.” All the women stirred and murmured. “Okay, no, I can’t. I have no fucking idea what this is.”

  Rathi floated out of her chair and came toward me. With a musical sound, the spring on one of her hair clips snapped, and then the other. Her hair unwound itself, fluffing out around her like a black hole into hell.