Margin of Eros

by Hawthorne, Clare

  Right on cue, a shaft of red light illuminated the room. Like cheese wrapped in cellophane, it cut a swift, bloody wedge into the cavernous dark. Then, just as quickly, it disappeared. At least Hermes had been able to identify the direction of the light shaft, and its probable source. If only he could crawl towards the doorway, then all his problems would be solved. Well, one of them, anyway. Unfortunately, his limbs had suddenly decided not to cooperate with him in a general sense, or with each other more specifically. Still, getting to the doorway qualified as some kind of loose plan of action, and having a plan made Hermes feel a whole lot better, if not a whole lot more capable of carrying it out. Before he was able to hammer out the details, however, the door opened a second time. This time a figure entered, closing the door quickly behind it. Hermes watched as the roughly human-shaped figure struck a match, briefly illuminating a roughly female-shaped face. The face had the garishly painted smile of a sideshow clown, but the head was not revolving smoothly on its axis. Rather, it was sucking on what looked and smelled like a cigarette. ‘Hi,’ croaked Hermes.

  The roughly female, roughly human-shaped figure jumped back against the door. ‘Who the fuck is that?’ she demanded. ‘Raul, is that you? That better the fuck not be you.’ Fumbling with her book of matches, she tried to light one up, failed, and tried again.

  ‘It’s not Raul,’ said Hermes. Finally, the figure – which Hermes now felt he could confidently identify as ‘a woman’ – successfully managed to light a match, which she held out in front of her like a crucifix. ‘What the fuck?’ she said, staring at the filthy, crawling, stunningly beautiful man in front of her. With difficulty, Hermes managed to pull himself to his feet, covering his penis with the first object that came to hand, which turned out to be an empty chicken bucket. He needn’t have bothered. The young lady in front of him had seen more male members that day than the local YMCA.

  ‘I take it,’ said Hermes, swaying slightly, ‘that we’re not in Hades?’

  ‘Hades?’ said the woman. Evidently she had judged him as non-threatening enough to shake out the match and reapply herself to her cigarette. ‘What in the hell is Hades?’

  Hermes breathed a deep sigh of fried chicken. It seemed that he was still on Earth, after all. ‘Hades is hell,’ he said, smiling. ‘Or close enough, at any rate.’ The woman started to laugh, a long raspy cackle that so closely resembled one of the Harpies that Hermes momentarily reconsidered his conclusion. ‘Oh honey,’ she said, exhaling a long, white plume of smoke. ‘This isn’t hell. This is Las Vegas.’

  47.

  For his second date with Marie, Jesus took her to a sushi restaurant in a strip mall off Beverly Boulevard. It wasn’t the most glamorous restaurant in Los Angeles, but in Jesus’ opinion, and in the opinion of his cats, they served the best sashimi salmon in Southern California. Since Jesus had fallen in love with Marie, he had decided to offer her only those experiences that he could personally vouch for as the very best. It was a strategy that, had he run it by Hermes, would have been met with a withering stare and a fifteen minute lecture, with diagrams, on why this was an amateur’s mistake. Jesus knew this, so although he was slightly worried by Hermes’ recent disappearance, he wasn’t exactly sorry about it. All the same, he had been incredibly nervous before the date and was grateful to have Eros around to give him fashion advice, even if Eros had been incapable of concentrating for more than a few minutes before drifting into a faraway place, softly crooning something about a thrill in his head and a pill on his tongue. Fortunately, the combination of Japanese hops and omega-3 fatty acids had settled Jesus’ stomach to the point where he was free to simply savor Marie’s presence. He was a bit relieved, however, that she hadn’t brought along Jimi Hendrix.

  ‘You know,’ said Marie, as she took a delicate sip of sake, ‘you don’t really strike me as a Jay.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jesus, dipping a tempura shrimp, ‘why is that?’

  Marie flushed slightly. Evidently she hadn’t planned to be so forthright, but with the warm wine spreading in her stomach, she had become emboldened. From Jesus’ perspective, the color of her skin at the beginning of the night could not have been more perfect, until it became even more so with her subtle self-consciousness which had appeared, liked a rosy dawn, midway through the meal. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ she began.

  ‘There’s no one incontrovertible way,’ said Jesus, ‘to interpret anything.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Marie. ‘With a name like ‘Jay’ you should be more dogmatic. Opinionated. You should be a Jewish rapper.’ Working as an in-house counsel for Capitol Records, Marie had come across a number of artists called Jay, in its many iterations, none of whom ever used the word ‘incontrovertible.’

  ‘Actually I’m not Jewish,’ said Jesus. ‘But I see your point.’

  Marie’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘You’re not Jewish?’ she said. ‘You sure look like it.’

  Jesus shook his head. Feeling embarrassed, he took long sip of his Sapporo. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘Not really?’ said Marie. ‘Either you are you aren’t.’

  ‘Then I’m not,’ said Jesus. He sensed, somehow, that this was not going well. With a quiet sigh, he rested his empty beer glass on the table. ‘Does it really matter?’

  ‘You were on YiDate,’ said Marie. ‘Which means that you lied to me.’

  Jesus was taken aback. He didn’t think that he’d ever lied to anyone, and now here he was, being told by the woman he loved that he had lied to her. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Jesus.

  ‘What part of it doesn’t make sense?’ said Marie. Jesus noticed that the color in her cheeks had changed from rose to fuchsia, which wasn’t necessarily an improvement.

  ‘I never said I was Jewish, on YiDate or anywhere else.’ Now he was defending himself, something he didn’t really like to do but Marie had suddenly developed a combative spot fire in her eye that Jesus wasn’t sure that he could smother, simply by being peaceable.

  ‘You implied that you were,’ said Marie, pointing an accusatory chopstick at Jesus.

  ‘No,’ said Jesus, looking down to avoid losing an eye, ‘you inferred that I was.’

  ‘Inferred, implied, what’s the difference!’ said Marie.

  Jesus didn’t think that now was the time to explain. ‘Please put down the chopstick,’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Marie, laying the chopstick down on the table, but keeping her hand over it, just in case. ‘Just tell me why you lied to me.’

  ‘I think you are confusing lying with full disclosure,’ said Jesus. Immediately he realized that this was the wrong thing to say, as Marie’s fingers started to curl around the chopstick and Jesus had an alarming flashback to a Takeshi Kitano movie that Romeo had particularly enjoyed.

  ‘I’m a lawyer,’ said Marie, through clenched teeth. ‘I think I know the difference.’

  Jesus felt the strong urge to sigh. The human tendency to claim innate knowledge on the basis of an external label always struck him as a bizarre. But he didn’t say that to Marie. Instead, he poured himself a thimble full of sake, drank it down in one gulp, and slowly exhaled the mellow heat. For a moment he thought about excusing himself and making an emergency call to Hermes, but then he remembered that Hermes was missing. Also, it was likely that going to the bathroom for any other reason than to relieve oneself would be considered lying, under Marie’s all-encompassing definition, and he didn’t want to provoke her further. ‘I can’t,’ he said, spreading his hands out on the table.

  ‘Can’t what?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ said Jesus, ‘why I lied. Because I don’t think that I did.’

  Marie stared at him for a good fifteen seconds, her face hardening into a pale, inviolable mask. ‘Fine,’ she said, impaling a shrimp with the chopstick and shoving it into her mouth, tail and all. Jesus wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by the gesture but he didn’t think it was anything good. As the
rest of the meal crawled along with all the momentum of warm tar he couldn’t help wondering where it had all gone wrong. Marie had variously described herself as ‘secular’ and ‘non-practicing,’ so he didn’t think his lack of religious conviction was the cause. It was something else, something he had seen in her eyes.

  Jesus fully expected Marie to brush him off after dinner, but to his considerable surprise she seemed keen to continue on to the Beverly Center to see a movie, as they had originally planned. Taking advice from Eros, Jesus had researched a couple of romantic comedies and settled on a lighthearted romp called B is for Bachelorette, in which a party planner becomes a terrorist suspect due to a hilarious mix up with a bunch of balloon gas canisters and ends up falling in love with the FBI agent who’s tailing her. However, when they arrived at the cinema, Marie insisted on seeing Last Saddam Standing, the latest release from Olympic Studios, which was on its way to breaking all opening weekend box office records, despite unanimous critical agreement with the New York Times’ three word review: ‘A mental enema’.

  Of course, Jesus hadn’t seen every movie that had ever been made by a major studio, or even every movie that had ever been given a commercial release. He had, however, seen quite a few of them and he felt fairly confident that Last Saddam Standing would rank right up there with the worst Hollywood movies of all time. The only reason he didn’t walk out was that for the first third, he thought it was a parody and for the remaining two thirds, Marie had unexpectedly clamped her hand on his thigh, digging her fingers in at every devastating explosion, small scale massacre or pinpoint assault with a deadly weapon. The resulting bruises were a painful reminder of an already painful evening, made all the more so by Marie’s gushing postmortem.

  ‘Incredible,’ she enthused, as they made their way through the crowd and out onto the street, ‘absolutely brilliant. And oh my god, Hunter Cole! Is he hot or what?’

  ‘Um,’ said Jesus. Suddenly Marie seemed to remember that she was on a date. She giggled. ‘Oh I’m sorry!’ she said, grabbing hold of Jesus’ upper arm. ‘But Hunter Cole is like, well, every girl’s dream. He’s so, you know, violent.’ Letting go of Jesus, she gave him a playful punch. ‘No offense,’ she said.

  Jesus rubbed his arm. There were a few human expressions that made Jesus want to stick his fingers in his ears, close his eyes and recite the dictionary backwards. ‘No offense’ was one of them. ‘I should probably get going,’ he said. The movie had been an excruciating two and a half hours long, and it was now close to midnight. If he didn’t hurry, he would miss the last bus home.

  ‘Really?’ said Marie. ‘OK, well thanks for dinner.’ Pulling out her phone and flipping it open, she gave a small wave as she turned away from him and started to head toward the bright lights of Beverly Hills.

  ‘Can I walk you to your car?’ Jesus called after her. Marie turned around, her phone to her ear. ‘No, that’s OK, I’m going to go meet some friends. I feel like going dancing, or, I don’t know, getting into a fight or something.’ Clearly, the growing sense of alarm that Jesus was feeling showed on his face, because Marie stopped walking, pausing long enough to give Jesus a sympathetic, if slightly sharp-knuckled, punch on the arm. ‘I’m kidding, Jay!’ she said. ‘The movie just gave me all this energy.’ To prove her statement, she gave a little one-two with her fists, shadowboxing under billboard lights. ‘I’ll call you!’ she lied, and with a wiggle of her phone, she rounded the corner into Robertson Boulevard and brutally dissolved from his life.

  48.

  There are few problems in immortal life that can’t be relieved by a long bath. At least, that’s what Eros had always believed. Jesus had a particularly nice bath, too – a deep curving trough of polished wood, like an oversized seedpod. In Archimedean terms, the effect was probably identical to soaking in the giant clams of his uncle’s underwater palace. Only this time, when Eros finally overcame his buoyant force and wrapped himself in a burnt orange bath sheet, he felt a million times more stylish and significantly less salty.

  He did not, however, feel happier. Despite spending the best part of a week working closely with Violet on the Foxhole Fury script, he felt more distant from her than ever. She liked him, that was clear, but even accounting for her all-consuming infatuation with Hunter, she seemed about as likely to fall for him as a unicorn was to fall out of the sky.

  And now, to top things off, she was leaving for Las Vegas.

  Nor was the pervasive gloom confined to the young god of love. Wandering out onto the balcony, Eros found Jesus rocking quietly in his hammock, a white cat sleeping on his feet and a bottle of Brother Thelonious poised halfway to his mouth, as if enthusiasm for the beer had waned the moment his elbow hit a right angle. The faraway look in Jesus’ eyes gave little indication of the depth to which his heart had recently plummeted, but Eros was particularly adept at reading the physiological symptoms of romantic despair. Although, to be strictly accurate, Jesus was not so much despairing as contemplating his despair, feeling for its edges and boundaries, watching it roll and tumble across the brand new world of longing that had sprung up, fully formed, the moment he met Marie.

  Eros, on the other hand, was despairing.

  ‘Would you like a beer,’ said Jesus, giving no indication that he intended to get up and find one for Eros, or indeed, move his own any closer to his mouth.

  ‘No thank you,’ said Eros. Settling himself into a Philippe Starck plastic sofa, he adjusted the towel around his waist so as not to inadvertently scare Romeo, who had started slinking around his feet.

  Jesus sighed. And then, chastising himself for momentarily sliding from ‘observation’ to ‘experience’, tried to cover it up with a cough and a sip of beer. But a sigh, once sighed, is like a damp patch on a sock, conspicuously neither dry nor warm, a subtle chill against the sole. Eros felt momentarily compelled to mutter some truism on the nature of love and loss, but wisely kept his mouth shut. He knew from experience that this would be about as effective as applying a novelty bandaid to a gunshot wound. Also, had Jesus offered up anything similarly trite in return, Eros might have been tempted to respond with the kind of brutal power and agility that had won him the Pan-dimensional Division 1 Wrestling Championships, five hundred years running. And the last thing he wanted to do was pin Jesus.

  In fact, he wanted to help Jesus. He wanted to help him so badly that his shoulder blades ached with the absent strain of wood and wire. If anyone deserved an uncomplicated path to champagne and roses – or in Jesus’ case, craft beer and hibiscus – it was Jesus.

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ said Jesus, reading Eros’ body language and therefore, mind. ‘The arrow wouldn’t take.’

  Eros paused, his arm wrapped around his body in a deep infraspinatus stretch. ‘Sorry,’ he said, lowering his arm. ‘Force of habit.’

  ‘There is something afoot which is undermining the fluid matrix of desire,’ said Jesus, taking a long, slow sip of his beer. ‘Something dark and powerful.’

  Eros frowned. ‘Are you sure you’re not just saying that to justify being dumped?’ Normally, he wouldn’t be quite so frank with Jesus, but as he wasn’t exactly gamboling in the fluid matrix himself, he felt disinclined to mince words.

  ‘I wish I was,’ said Jesus, ‘but no, I’m not.’ Polishing off his beer with a last forlorn chug, he shifted in the hammock until Alfa, somewhat reluctantly, unfurled from her snowball, stretched, shuddered, and sniffed the air. The resulting look on her face was a complex synthesis of surprise, distaste and confusion. Leaning forward, Jesus stroked her back with a firm hand. ‘Even Alfa can smell it,’ he said.

  Eros flared his nostrils, straining his geometrically perfect but olfactorily challenged nose. It was true, he didn’t have the greatest sense of smell around, thanks to the formative years spent trying to avoid inhaling the overwhelming scent of infidelity in his childhood home. But even he could detect the slightly musky, slightly barbequed flavor on the breeze. Now that he thought about it, the smell
had been hanging around for days but he had simply attributed it to some kind of backwash from the Santa Anas through Koreatown. Eros had never smelled anything like it before, but as it turned out, he was closely related to someone who had. Someone who had, in fact, described the smell to him after turning up on his doorstep naked with a nasty case of sunburn and badly singed ankle wings. Like a hamster doing back flips through a miniature flaming hoop, fragments of memory leapt and whirled until Eros suddenly linked the smell to Hermes, although he couldn’t quite place how or why the two were related. It did, however, remind him that it was now over a week since he had seen or heard from his cousin. Even for Hermes, that was unusual.

  ‘I’m starting to –’ he started to say, but was interrupted by the saxophone solo from Careless Whisper, whining seductively from Jesus’ iPhone. ‘Hermes,’ said Jesus, glancing at Eros as he switched to speakerphone. ‘Eros was starting to worry about you. Are you OK?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Hermes, ‘I’m in Las Vegas.’

  ‘Vegas!’ said Eros, his heart hammering against his chest. Surely it wasn’t possible that Hermes had somehow found a way onto the production crew, when Ares had made it abundantly clear that the presence of his offspring (legitimate or not) on set, would be met with the ruthlessness of Sun Tzu. ‘What in Hades are you doing in Vegas?’