Margin of Eros

by Hawthorne, Clare

  And so the long day wore on.

  51.

  When Leo followed Violet to her rental car at McCarran airport, she assumed that he was planning to catch a ride into town. As it turned out, he was planning to take the keys and insist on driving. Or more accurately, he was planning to refuse to let Violet get behind the wheel, which basically made him the default driver. Technically, Eros had only been driving cars for a week, although he didn’t think it would be prudent to mention it. Just as he didn’t mention that he was the first person in Olympus to perfect the single-wheeled 720 in a chariot. That would have been showing off. Apart from the difficulty of keeping under the speed limit, he had found the whole process of learning to drive Jesus’ Alfa Romeo GTV significantly simpler than learning to use the bulk bins at Whole Foods. Just when he’d finally come to terms with the oatmeal flow velocity, he couldn’t get the hang of the twist ties. Although Jesus himself never drove, he was, unsurprisingly, a patient and skilled teacher which made mastering the Accelerator, Brake and Clutch of the GTV, as Michael Jackson once put it, as easy as 1-2-3.

  Violet opened her mouth to protest, but found that the will to do so had been beaten out of her by the relentless Nevada sunshine. When they left Los Angeles, she was feeling like a windless kite in a downward spiral. But now she was feeling uplifted, especially after they were unexpectedly bumped up to business class and Leo had forced her to eat a ham and cheese croissant, which had turned out to be crisp and delicious. To her surprise, Leo had revealed an assertive side to his personality that had hitherto been hidden under his tufted Canadian halo. It wasn’t altogether unattractive, but it did make Violet feel as if she had somehow been demoted to intern’s assistant. ‘Fine,’ she said, handing him the keys.

  ‘You’ll have to direct me out of here,’ said Eros, sliding into the driver’s seat, ‘I’ve never been to Vegas before.’

  ‘No kidding,’ muttered Violet, pulling on her seatbelt. Then somewhat more sweetly, added: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got sat nav.’ She pointed to the dash, while Eros looked on uncomprehendingly. ‘Please don’t tell me they don’t have GPS in Canada,’ said Violet.

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Eros, who had absolutely no idea what he was looking at. To cover his confusion, he slid the key into the ignition, felt around in vain for the clutch, glanced at the automatic console, and was stumped. His face fell. ‘Sheep,’ he sighed.

  ‘What?’ said Violet.

  Eros glanced across at her nervously. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to swear.’

  Violet stared at him in amazement. ‘Sheep isn’t a swear word.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘No,’ said Violet. Truly, he was the strangest guy she had ever met. ‘Shit is a swear word. Not that anyone even cares these days.’

  ‘Then that’s what I meant to say,’ said Eros. Unlatching his seatbelt, he opened his door and started to climb out of the car.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Violet called after him.

  Eros paused. ‘I can’t drive this car,’ he admitted.

  ‘You can’t drive an automatic?’ said Violet.

  ‘A what?’ Eros was halfway out the door, one leg on the asphalt, the other caught in a rather awkward twist under the steering wheel. If he was going to make a run for it, the time was nascent. On the other hand, if he was going to make a complete fool of himself, that moment was also in the ascendance. He vacillated.

  ‘Honestly Leo,’ said Violet, twisting her head awkwardly and squinting up at him, ‘I can’t work out whether you’re really dumb, really funny, or really weird. Or just pretending to be dumb because you’re so good looking. Except that’s usually a girl thing.’

  Eros slid into back into the car. ‘You think I’m good looking?’

  Violet rolled her eyes. Give me a break, she thought. The idea that this teenage dream should need validation from her was ludicrous. He was the classical ideal, styled by Teen Vogue. Unless being too perfect was, paradoxically, an imperfection, his appearance was impossible to fault. ‘Give me the keys,’ she said.

  Somewhat reluctantly, Eros took the keys out of the ignition. ‘I still don’t think you should drive.’

  ‘I’m not going to,’ said Violet, grabbing the keys and throwing them into her purse. ‘Look, I’m assuming you can drive a stick, right?’

  ‘Um,’ said Eros.

  ‘A stick shift!’ Violet’s patience was rapidly dissolving. ‘With a gear stick!’ With both hands, she grabbed Leo’s open palm and squashed it into a fist, guiding it through an imaginary gear change. ‘And a clutch!’ Letting go of his hand, she grabbed his leg and shoved it forward towards an imaginary pedal. Eros closed his eyes and whipped through the Greek alphabet backwards in and attempt to divert the blood from his lap. ‘Yes,’ he said, opening his eyes. ‘I can drive one of those.’

  ‘Great,’ said Violet, opening the door. ‘Then we’ll go swap the automatic for a stick.’

  As Violet was soon to discover, the rental car market in Las Vegas is geared towards two types of customer: overweight middle aged men on a family vacation, and overweight middle aged men having a mid-life crisis. Those in the former category were physiologically incapable of changing gear, and thus it proved impossible to find a compact/economy or mid-sized vehicle of any description that was not an automatic. The same scenario applied to luxury sedans and SUVs. Violet had just about given up on the exercise and was on the verge of insisting that she drive, given that several hours had now passed since her ham and cheese croissant, she was getting hungry, and there was nothing wrong with her mental state that a strong cup of coffee couldn’t fix, when Eros shaded his eyes, squinted into the searing sunshine and pointed across the lot. ‘What about that one?’ he said. The rental agent grinned.

  ‘The Mustang?’ he said. Built like a small topless tank, the silver and blue convertible was a favorite among the V8 and Viagra set.

  ‘Does it have a gear stick?’ asked Eros.

  ‘Does it ever!’ said the agent, slapping the young guy on the back and grinning like a game show host. That is, until he caught the look on the face of the young guy’s lady friend. ‘But it’s kind of expensive,’ he added soberly.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Eros, pulling out Jesus’ platinum Amex.

  ‘Jesus, Leo,’ said Violet, ‘that thing probably gets ten miles to the gallon.’

  Eros shrugged. ‘He won’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘He’ll have a shit fit!’ said Violet. Her head was starting to throb and she was beginning to wish that she had missed the flight after all. She didn’t need this. She needed caffeine. She needed miniature shampoo and shower gel. She needed sleep.

  ‘He said I could use it as much as I wanted,’ said Eros.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Eros, somewhat perplexed.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Aaron,’ yelled Violet. ‘Aaron is going to fire me if I spend more than thirty dollars a day on a rental car.’ Of course, the likelihood of Aaron firing her was about as remote as the likelihood of the production relocating to a frozen base camp in Nepal, but Violet wasn’t to know that.

  ‘I thought I was paying,’ said Eros.

  Violet pressed her palms against her forehead and shook her head from side to side. ‘I don’t understand,’ she moaned.

  The rental agent, who had been watching the exchange with a professionally non-committal veneer, felt that now was the perfect time to disappear. ‘Why don’t I give you folks a moment to talk it through?’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Eros, with godlike certitude, ‘we’ll take it.’

  With her arms crossed and her face set in stone, Violet rode shotgun as they pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway. Thus she remained, until the hot air blasted her defenses into dust and the tumbleweed untangled her heart. And then she smiled, like a beneficent desert princess. That vision, that image of her hair trailing behind her
in the breeze as they roared down the interstate became one of Eros’ most cherished memories of Violet. At the time, it had seemed liked the perfect embodiment of freedom and possibility, the open road behind them, the decadent city ahead. Much later, when Las Vegas was over and his life may as well have been, Eros would come back to that image, cup it in his hands and stare at it like a dying firefly. Even then, even as it grew fainter by the day, he wouldn’t have swapped it for all the neon in the casinos.

  52.

  Under the red lantern glow of a Chinese brothel, Hermes rolled over and pulled himself into a roughly seated position on the black satin pillows. It wasn’t really a Chinese brothel, of course, but it sure smelled like one. The pervasive aroma of five spice and jojoba oil was vaguely nauseating yet strangely comforting, like the smell of freshly clipped fingernails. He felt like he had been asleep for days, which curiously made him feel even more sleepy. Too much massage could do that to you. In a strange twist of fate, he had ended up staying with a bunch of hippie strippers above the only oriental-themed massage parlor in Vegas – possibly the world – that didn’t provide happy endings. How this had come to pass had been the subject of much speculation on the part of Eros and Jesus, but Hermes would only say that he was experiencing the longest stretch of celibacy since he lost his virginity to Nike in a running race, shortly after his fifteen hundredth birthday. And was feeling all the better for it.

  Still, it was going to be hard to leave such voluptuous surrounds. The strippers knew a thing or two about hospitality, that was for sure. Every morning, one of them would bring him some kind of liquid detox, which he would drink through a straw while another of them, usually Luna, would massage his calves and ankles. He had never realized just how much tension he was carrying in his lower legs. Years of flying around in the winged equivalent of a rear-wheel drive had left his tendons strung out like a concert violin. After a week of acupressure from spherical breasted masseurs, they had only just started to loosen up.

  Tying his silk robe immodestly around his waist, he rubbed his eyes and wandered towards the kitchen. He was kind of disappointed that none of the girls had materialized with an energizing smoothie. Although he had always been a cranberry juice kind of god, at least on Earth, he was becoming accustomed to the slightly yeasty, slightly citrus funk of the dirt colored concoctions that his new friends insisted on feeding him, day in and day out. If nothing else, they did wonders for his morning erections.

  But on his last morning, it looked like he was going to have to fend for himself in the organic wheat grass jungle. The strippers, it seemed, were still sulking. True, he had told them that any attempts to keep him there would be futile, even dangerous, but he’d meant it more as a come on than a genuine threat. And to be honest, he was a little disappointed that they hadn’t even tried.

  ‘Surprise!’

  Hermes leapt a foot in the air, his robe and ankle wings aflutter. Truly, he had never been so surprised in his life. Five nubile Vegas veterans, their bikini bodies glistening with expeller pressed flaxseed oil, threw streamers into the air and twirled around their houseguest like well oiled maypole dancers. ‘We wanted to give you a decent send off,’ whispered Luna as she slid past his robe, untying him with a well-practiced flick of the wrist.

  ‘We thought you might like a champagne breakfast,’ purred one of the twins, Celestial or possibly Nautica. ‘Non-alcoholic, of course.’

  ‘We’re so sorry to see you go.’ Nautica, or possibly Celestial.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Sliding her arm around his waist, the girl with the unpronounceable name and the affected Gaelic twang.

  ‘It’s golden delicious,’ said their nominal leader, with the Turkish lips, the magic hands and the unfortunate stage name ‘Venus’. Holding the glass to Hermes’ mouth, she tipped it up and poured back the golden liquid, which looked disconcertingly like a urine sample but tasted like Etruscan pears. ‘Nice,’ said Hermes, wondering whether he actually got a say in what was about to happen and deciding, on balance, that it was best not to ask. He did wonder, briefly, why none of them had made the slightest move on him in the previous week, but maybe that was just the way they did things in Nevada. He might have gotten closer to the truth if he’d thought to wonder why they had been feeding him on little more than blended nuts and berries, and why, despite his every intention to explore the hedonistic potential of the Strip, he had felt too lethargic to try.

  As it happened, the hippie strippers were also practicing witches, and when Hermes had turned up on their doorstep, like a box of Christmas candy from the neighbor who had found him, groggy and disorientated in the storeroom of her whorehouse, they saw an opportunity not to be missed. As a precaution, they had milked his love juice while he slept and had it tested by a pathologist client (the barter and exchange economy was alive and well in sin city), only to find that despite being disease free, his sperm was mildly radioactive. Believing as they did that all reproductive ailments could be cured with a raw food diet, they set about cleansing his system with ginseng, goji and chia seeds, diluted with fruit juice and spiced up with a mild sedative. And now they were cashing their chips.

  ‘What’s with the candles?’ Hermes murmured, steadying himself on the edge of the kitchen table. ‘It’s not my birthday.’ There had to be a hundred candles in the room, flickering with an odd intensity. Not just the candles, but the shafts of light splintering through the blinds and the whites of the eyes of the twirling strippers. Everything seemed supernaturally bright. If it wasn’t for the omnipresent scent of oil and incense, he might have mistakenly assumed he was back in Olympus. But there were other differences too, like the crazy orbs bobbing on every chest and his painfully pulsating erection. Of course, he was no stranger to erections in Olympus. It was just that this one didn’t seem to have any connection to the way he was feeling.

  He was feeling terrified.

  ‘Have a strawberry,’ purred Luna. Teasingly, she rubbed it against his lips, and when he didn’t take the bait, she bit into it herself, and a bright trail of crimson juice trickled down her chin. Hermes recoiled. He was struggling to stay on his feet now. All the blood in his lower body was fighting for front row position in his penis, which felt like an overcooked yam. ‘What’s wrong?’ said Luna with a pout. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  ‘Not really,’ croaked Hermes. His mouth felt incredibly dry and his testicles were burning. Not only that, they seemed to have ballooned into a decorative pumpkin. ‘I think I need to sit down,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you lie down?’ said unpronounceable name.

  ‘Yes, lie down,’ chorused the twins.

  ‘Let us give you a massage,’ said Venus.

  So this was what it was all about? A massage? Somewhat relieved, Hermes let them lead him into the massage room, where his body collapsed onto the table and his spinning head fell backwards onto a scented pillow. The strippers quickly set to work, covering Hermes with warm towels to preserve his modestly, to the extent that this was possible with the tent pole between his legs. His erection was still extreme but they politely avoided that area, leaving it to cool off in the rhythmic breeze of the ceiling fan as they each began work on a limb. Venus, meanwhile, took her position at the head of the table, slipping her hands under his neck and kneading away the tension until a wall of sand slipped into the sea.

  ‘Feeling better?’ said one of them. Hermes was having trouble telling them apart now. They all seemed to have removed their bikini tops at some stage, but their long hair extensions covered their breasts, like so many Lady Godivas. ‘Kind of,’ said Hermes. There was no denying that simultaneous massage was a natural wonder but no matter how many mental tricks he tried, he couldn’t get rid of his erection. ‘I think there’s something wrong with it,’ he said to no one in particular.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Venus, ‘it’s perfect.’

  ‘So perfect,’ chimed the others. It was clearly some kind of cue, as they all immediately abandoned whatever secondary mu
scle group they were working on to concentrate on the main event. ‘Sheep,’ said Hermes. He would have been lying to himself if he said that the quadraphonic stroking was not pleasurable. But unlike the pleasure of, say, an Oceanid or even a self-administered caber toss, this pleasure was a guilty pleasure, a cross between an affair and an overdose. Also, it was really starting to hurt.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ said Hermes.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Venus soothingly. ‘Just close your eyes.’

  It was an injudicious thing to say. Hermes’ eyelids were leaden, but he knew from experience that there was only one reason why anyone with her hand on your penis ever told you to close your eyes. And that was because she was about to do something sinister. His eyes flew open just in time to see Venus reach forward with what appeared to be a conical flask. ‘Holy goat,’ he squawked, and leapt off the table.

  ‘Stop!’ yelled Venus. And when he clearly wasn’t going to: ‘Stop him!’

  Due to their fanatical diets and core strength workouts, the hippie/stripper/witches considered themselves to be in fairly good shape and a reasonable chance in a chase. But Hermes had wings on his heels. He was out of the house and down the garden path before his pursuers had managed to form a cohesive single file. By the time they had squeezed through the front door and started to give chase, Hermes had hastily ejaculated into a storm water drain and was bounding towards the interstate. With great presence of mind, he had thought to grab a towel on the way out, which he was now haphazardly clasping around his waist. It was a good quality towel, but as a casual garment it was unlikely to pass dress code at any of the casinos. So it was lucky for him that a silver Mustang convertible with a blue racing stripe rounded the corner, slammed on the brakes and screamed to a halt in front of him, stopping for the exact amount of time that it took him to leap into the back seat.