Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  This was my husband as I remembered him: gentle, impulsive, irresistibly tempting, packed with energy and fun. It seemed I hadn’t seen him that happy in ages. I needed to kiss him once more. I trembled, needing to hold him in my arms and whisper lovers’ mockery in his ears to make him smile.

  He let his arrow fly.

  Our eyes met.

  A ray of white heat passed between us.

  In an instant, he was gone.

  But that instant lasted a very long time. That’s the way of it with gods. Every instant is forever, because there is only now.

  I saw his eyes as he burned. I saw his hair catch fire, then his skin. I saw the tears sizzle on his cheeks. I watched his blood burn. His mouth opened, but there was no time for sound. I saw the pain in his eyes.

  Now is a very long time.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I woke trembling violently just as the electric blanket clicked off.

  My alarm rang.

  The mouse in me groaned. “You’re joking. I have to go to work?”

  The mountain in me was calm.

  How on earth was I to get dressed and go to work with this…this enormous goddess going on?

  But when I uncurled from my big chair and stretched, the mountain moved with me, as if it weighed nothing. I padded to the bathroom and showered. The smell of my shampoo both thrilled and irritated me, because for the first time in a long time I noticed its intense mango scent, and for the first time ever I realized it was an artificial scent. My nose easily detected the chemical compounds that had been used to counterfeit mango. On an ordinary day I might have spent hours completely preoccupied with analyzing this experience. But the mountain absorbed all this awareness in an instant.

  The next instant, I was enravished by the sensation of bath gel—real jasmine—gliding over my skin. And the next instant, the warm water battered me, washing the gel away.

  I could count the individual drops as they hit my skin.

  Now.

  Now.

  Now.

  Now is a very long time.

  I turned the water off and covered my eyes and shook myself until my ears rang. “Stop it! Stop that! I have to go to work!”

  The mountain receded. It faded into a vapor, just a watermark on my day.

  This was in my power, I realized. I could decide to be the mountain, eternal and attentive and serene, or to be everyday Rathi, dripping and naked in her bathroom with sixteen pounds of wet hair and the clock ticking.

  “Brrr!” I shook myself again. Then I got myself off to work.

  The bus was a miserable experience. It was too crowded. Everyone on it seemed unhappy. I wanted to push them all away. At the first stop after I entered, half the bus riders did in fact get off, looking at me while they did.

  I realized that I had not been sufficiently vigilant. I had let the mountain grow too solid, too present.

  With an effort, I pulled myself inward, as I had done in my office that day when I spooked Janine with my too-large aura.

  The bus filled up again.

  People slowly pressed nearer to me, although there was still airspace about me that no one entered.

  I shivered with the effort of containing my size.

  “Wake up, buddy,” I heard Baz say.

  A splash of something cold fell on my lap. I yelped and opened my eyes.

  My roomie stood over me with a mostly full margarita pitcher. He said gruffly, “C’mon. Up. I don’t want you melting a hole in that thing.”

  I looked around me. The hot tub had only an inch of water left, and that water was steaming. Where it touched my skin, it sizzled. I realized I had spent the night in the cold hot tub again…only the water had boiled off overnight.

  I moaned. “Just throw the hose in.”

  He put the pitcher down on the edge of the hot tub and stumped around it toward the hose.

  I sipped. “Nice mix. What time is it?” Behind thin clouds, the sun was directly overhead.

  “It’s Getting Fired O’Clock. You were supposed to work today.” Baz flopped the end of the hose into the hot tub. Cold water started gushing out.

  I directed the stream onto my johnson. Bliss! “Took the day off.”

  “Your boss called your cell about a million times. I told her you had the flu,” he said, plucking the pitcher out of my hand.

  “Thanks.”

  He looked into the tub. “Am I gonna scald my feet in that?”

  “Probably.” I swished my legs around. The tub was getting fuller, but the water was cooler. “Probably okay now.”

  He dipped a toe in. His skanky white dreads swung around his bony face.

  “Drink that or give it back,” I said.

  He handed me the pitcher so he could clamber into the tub, and I drank again. Alcohol doesn’t cure this condition, but it sure makes it more bearable. When Baz was sitting in the tub, I handed the pitcher back and he slugged some down, smacked his lips, slugged some more, and returned it to me.

  “My need is definitely greater,” I admitted.

  “So. You’re gonna die again.”

  I shut my eyes and cooled my forehead against the pitcher. “Looks that way.”

  “Why don’t you just bone her?”

  “It could kill her. It could make her nuts. She’s been celibate thirty-odd years, all this lifetime, and I’m betting it isn’t the first life she’s spent that way.”

  “Bone somebody else.”

  I smelled melting plastic and put the pitcher down. “Don’t want to,” I said somberly. I couldn’t believe I’d walked out on a roomful of slippery-ready apsaras last night. It was beginning to sink in that I really was going to die. Maybe forever this time.

  “You think she’d rather watch you go up in smoke?”

  I made a face. “It might soften her heart a little. She’s a tough cookie.”

  “And you’re a fucking coward.”

  “Guilty.” I thought of what could happen to her if she remembered too much too soon…or to me, if she remembered enough to hate me again. Another groan escaped me. I covered by showering myself with icy water from the hose.

  Baz extended a leg and prodded me in the nutsack with his toe. “Can I have your bike when you’re a pile of ash again?”

  I slapped the hose down into the rising water. “Look, Mister Sensitive, I can die for her if I want to.” I met his eyes.

  Baz’s cold, pale blue eyes narrowed at me. He said softly, “Do you want sympathy, or do you want a constructive suggestion? Because I’m out of sympathy.”

  It occurred to me that Baz didn’t have the temperament to live forever. He needed company. I was the oldest. He must have counted on me to outlast our other roomies.

  “What’s your suggestion?”

  He told me.

  “I like my idea better,” I said finally, when he’d laid out all the details.

  He threw his hands in the air. “You’re more afraid of your wife’s anger than a god with death-ray eyes.”

  “I’m pragmatic. If she’s mad at me, life sucks.”

  At the office, the looks I got from my coworkers all followed a strange pattern. First I saw an avid curiosity, which made me blush with shame as I remembered Kama shutting my office door last week. Then I saw shock. Their eyes widened. If they stood near me, they stepped back. Then, if I seemed not to be looking in their direction, their faces softened, their pupils widened, and their bodies opened slightly toward me as if they had seen something marvelous and good.

  I walked teeteringly on my sensible low heels as if I had never worn shoes before.

  My senior partner stuck her head out of her office. “The settlements are in.”

  In what felt like slow motion, I turned my head. “All right.” An age passed between those two words. “Be right there.”

  “Good.” Irene, too, did a double take, and then her head disappeared.

  I tottered to my office. “Hi, Janine. Can you? Thank.”

  What did I just say?


  Janine turned toward me in slow motion. Her face passed through the same pattern. Her deodorant smelled intolerably strong. Her jaw dropped. “What happened to you?”

  I just fluttered my hand and ran into my office. I shut the door. I put down my briefcase and leaned against the door, panting with the effort of staying in ordinary time.

  Closing my eyes, I spoke to the mountain, whispering so Janine wouldn’t hear, but speaking aloud to help myself stay here…wherever here was.

  “Look, I have to work. I cannot do that if I am paying attention to every little thing around me. I cannot be feeling all this…this everything at every moment. Do you hear?” I sounded just like my mother, only whispering.

  My heartbeat calmed. If I listened to the space inside me, I could hear silence, unlike the sounds outside my office: the deafening clatter of footsteps, voices, doors opening and closing, Janine’s cough and her long fingernails on her keyboard, the hum of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

  Inside me was silence.

  I felt very odd. Outside my office, people would be whispering about me. My senior partner waited with the Sandsreicht settlement papers on her desk. Inside my office, my briefcase leaned against my leg, full of work wanting to be done. On my desk, the curly tip of the potted asoka vine bobbed in the breeze from the air conditioning. Its soil was drying out. On my desk lay a fistful of While You Were Out slips. I felt all these things as a pleasurable pressure, the urgency of the day’s work.

  Inside my self, all was quiet. That part of me that was goddess waited. I wondered why she didn’t speak to me, and then I knew immediately. She was me. We were not we, we were me. One person. An iceberg with a very tiny tip.

  I slipped into goddess, feeling the immensity only for a moment, feeling the ambivalence of transition during my passage through the door. Then I was calm.

  If I pushed a bit, I could push the everyday Rathi until she was ever-so-slightly separated from me. There. That’s better.

  *don’t panic. all this will become comfortable.*

  “I don’t see how,” the little Rathi hissed petulantly. “No one can look at me without boggling and losing their train of thought. I can’t work!”

  *why do you want to work? you should be with Kamadeva.*

  “Because I have to eat. I don’t know what goddesses do for lunch, but I was planning to hit Starbucks for a scone and a latte. And I have to pay for them.”

  *the barista will give them to me for free.*

  I laughed, then slapped my palm over my mouth. I was little lawyer me again, not the mountain. So confusing.

  “That would not be fair to the barista,” I said severely.

  The mountain had nothing to say to that.

  I plodded through my paperwork all morning. I was determined to find a way to live with the goddess part of myself—to live and work. At ten, I went downstairs for coffee and a scone, even though Janine offered to get it for me. I felt all eyes on me as I walked through the office, in the elevator, in the lobby at the coffee stand, all the way back upstairs to my desk. I concentrated on being my everyday self, just Rathi, a thirty-something attorney with a nice manicure and a condo mortgage.

  I had accepted completely that I must learn to live with my goddess part. Kama had achieved that, at least. This was me. So far I had shied away from approaching the mountain too closely, but all the time I could feel it—her—me—inside. Thousands of years, built with millions of little moments, one by one, the same way I had built this life since my birth in Delhi. My most recent birth, I reminded myself.

  As I stared blindly at the pages of the Sandsreicht settlement, I thought, This is just another me. She is no bigger or more important, even if she’s been alive longer.

  Yet that wasn’t true. If we were alike, why did people see me differently? Why did they make way for me as if my glance could shove them aside? Why did I feel this immense sense of connection?

  And what was I connected with?

  I stared around my office, testing, asking everything I saw. Am I connected with you?

  Not really. The furniture, the pictures on the walls—even the photographs of my parents and my aunt on my desk—I felt nothing for them. I felt affection for what the photographs represented, but not for those bits of paper.

  Kama’s little asoka vine, however—it burst out at me, almost shouting its life to me. Kama had given it to me, but that was not why I felt connected to this scrap of a plant. I loved it for its own sake, so brave and green, earnestly pushing out new leaves under the fluorescents and the patch of sun from my office window. While I watched, its new growth fell over and began inching across the desk toward me.

  When Janine knocked on my door I must have made a sound, for she came in with the mail and more telephone messages. I stared, amazed at her blazing glory: her hair dyed a sandy blonde but still kinky under the relaxers, her worried eyes squinting nearsighted, she can’t afford new glasses, the scars on her arms and hands from when she used to cook beignets in New Orleans—

  You’re doing it again, I told the goddess, and pulled her back inside me, the way I would pull a dog’s leash, the way I would pull a child closer to the center of the sidewalk.

  “I’m giving you a bonus,” I said before Janine could speak. “For helping me get acquainted with this case. You can buy those new glasses.”

  She did a double take. I wondered if she had ever told me she needed new glasses, or if that was only something the goddess had seen in her.

  “Thanks. My baby needs his teeth fixed, though.”

  “It will be enough for both,” I said. Even as I spoke, I saw that she would be dead in nine years from complications of emphysema. The disease didn’t show yet, beyond a persistent cough. It was karmic—carried over from several lifetimes ago. There was nothing I could do. Unless I told her—if we could talk—

  *it will not do. she will live four more lives before she sheds that burden and can breathe again.*

  Janine shifted from one foot to the other. “Um, your messages.”

  I held out my hand for them. “Thank you.”

  She handed them to me, reaching a little too far, as if across a fire. Oh, the goddess must be big in me. I pulled in my aura and took the messages from her.

  That reminded me. “I haven’t seen Kama today.” I had only just noticed his absence.

  “He called in sick.” Her expression darkened. “Kama never calls in sick.”

  That fully awoke the everyday Rathi.

  “What?” I remembered those scorched footprints on Lotus Bride’s carpet. “What’s his problem?”

  “He’s got some kind of fever. He says he’s burning up.”

  “Oh!” Suddenly I was out of control. “Is he at home?”

  “He went to the health club.”

  I leaped out of my chair. “Which health club?”

  Janine backed away. “I don’t know. Maybe Midtown Racket?”

  “They won’t have a pool!”

  “I guess he’ll try to sweat it out in the sauna,” she said, looking puzzled and alarmed.

  “Come, which clubs have swimming pools? Answer me quickly!”

  “I-I could Google it for you,” she began.

  “No.” I picked up my purse and locked my desk. “Never mind. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  I left by the emergency exit. For a moment I thought the alarm would go off, but I reached inside the quick-release mechanism, exploring with the goddess part of myself, and convinced the alarm not to panic at my touch. I ran down twenty flights of stairs, bolted into the street, hailed a cab, and threw myself into it.

  I shouted at the driver, who had not spoken a word, “Wait, will you wait a moment?” I shut my eyes. If I thought about the heat, the flames dancing on Kama’s palms, the feel of the whirlwind around us as we kissed on the bridge…there.

  “North,” I said. “Just drive. I’ll tell you where as we get closer.”

  Traffic was dreadful. We crawled along, and whe
n we weren’t crawling I was forced to ask the driver to slow down because I was struggling to feel Kamadeva out there.

  “It is that you are trying to find someone, yezno?” said the driver.

  I pulled my fingers out of my ears. “What?”

  “Why don’t you call them? You have cell phone?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him to shut up…and remembered that I had Kama’s number in my cell.

  After a deep breath, I said, “Thank you.”

  Kama’s voicemail came on. You’ve reached Kama’s phone. If you are Rathi, press nine. Everyone else, leave me alone.

  I hung up, stunned.

  I redialed.

  The voicemail message played again.

  He had changed his voicemail for me! Tears sprang to my eyes. It was the most romantic thing I could imagine. I pressed nine.

  Rathi, I love you. I’ll always love you. I’m sorry I’m such a coward. I’m still trying to think of a way out of this. Please, please don’t be angry. For what it’s worth, I’m yours.

  I bit my lip. Too late. Tears ran down my face. What had he done? What was he doing now? I thought bitterly of the goddess inside me. What good is being a goddess when this sort of thing can happen?

  I had a sudden thought.

  *follow the signal.*

  What signal?

  *his message to you is a cry for help,* came the thought, which I realized emanated from my goddess self.

  I swallowed and took a deep breath. If I kept redialing—and replaying the message—I’d stay in closer connection with him. I could find him that way.

  With a little help from my higher self.

  I pressed the button again and listened, while tears ran down my face.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I was in the coldest pool at the East Bank Club, trying to figure out a way to have my love without blowing her mind or having her hate me. I swam underwater languidly to keep my heart rate down.

  The water was seventy-five degrees, normally uncomfortably cold. Now I wished it was thirty degrees colder. Should have gone to the lake after all. I surfaced, filled my lungs with cold, chlorinated air, and dove deep, frog-kicking slowly along the bottom. The pressure as well as the cold water snuffed the flames that threatened to break out along my skin. I flipped over on my back and did a squid stroke, watching bubbles of steam rise to the surface in my wake.