Chimera (9 page)

“I went weekending once with Ammon down the Nile to Pharos,” Calyxa remarked. “We swam a lot. It’s the only time I’ve fucked under water.”

“It’s not so great, actually, didn’t you find?” I asked her in her humor, delving at the same time down to recollection. “The natural lubricants get washed off, and it sort of hurts. I knew this sea-nymph once…”

“I liked it anyhow,” Calyxa said.

Next night, too, we made less progress with each other than with the templed exposition. “If only Medusa had petrified just
that
part!” my priestess sighed—but would not let me repeat what she declared went without saying, that what fired my bolt like a green recruit’s before the issue was fairly joined was not inexperience of artful love but inexperience of novel partners. “You’re like some of the holiday tourists we get,” she once declared: “bold as brass back home but all tinsel and tiptoe here.”

When I had been Perseus proper, I told her then, I’d flown the known world over, Hyperborea to Hesperia, yet never heard of tourists to the country of the gods. Part of every morning, afternoon, and evening Calyxa disappeared into the temple’s outer whorls with strict instructions, as she said from Zeus, that I was not to follow past whichever mural she’d last laid on me. Where did she go? I asked her now. What do? Was she slipping off to Ammon and Sabazius, or tourist-tupping in my heavenly precinct?

She was not annoyed until I apologized (at once) for my impertinence. “If you’re going to be quarrelsome, be quarrelsome: don’t take one step forward and two back.”

I apologized for my apology, attributing my too-tameness to long years of Andromeda’s house-training, and that in turn to her father’s domination by Cassiopeia, while at the same time admitting that, as Andromeda herself had charged in the Sabazius affair, a better man would in the first place never—

“Stop
that!” Calyxa cried. I did, began to apologize, stopped
that,
reflected a moment, and then declared her under no obligation to attend me if she found my manner, mind, or manliness disappointing; but if she chose to stay she must accept me on my terms—which for better or worse included (unlike Sabazius’s or Ammon’s, I daresaid) permitting me to accept her on hers. No drachma but had its other side: Andromeda in my opinion had near henpecked me out of cockhood; but I had learned from her what few men knew, fewer heroes, and no gods: that a woman’s a person in her Independent right, to be respected therefor by the goldenest hero in heaven. If my pet priestess was unused to parity as was I to novelty, then we had each somewhat to teach the other.

Calyxa sat up and closed me in her lap (these conversations were all postcoitally, anyhow epiclimactically, couched); but all I could get from her was “You, you! You’re leaving something out.”

“No help for that.”

“Those
letters,
Perseus, that she threw overboard …” I groaned. Had voyage in nautic history, I asked rhetorically, ever begun so crossed as ours whose wreckage that day’s mural had fixed forever? We’d set out when spring gave way to summer, neither of us yielding to the other. Andromeda stormed at me it must be Joppa without sidetrips, or she’d go it unburdened of her had-been hero; I stormed back, If she’d wanted a lackey instead of a lord, she should’ve stuck with her Uncle Phineus. Thus we raged and counterbaited as we cleared the port. I perhapped our problem to be mixed marriage: Argives and Ethiopians were oil and vinegar, I declared, palatable when right-proportioned but never truly mixable. Pah, she spat: all marriages were mixed, a man and a woman; but there was my insufferable ego again, proposing three parts Perseus to one Andromeda, when in truth it was her rescue from monstrous Cetus had made the reputation I’d grown so purled upon: she had as it were laid her life on the line to make me famous! I replied, not unfairly I think, that even the bards who sang our story were wont to call her both the cause of my labor and its reward—which was but putting prettily (I went on less fairly) that had I by-passed Joppa altogether I’d’ve spared myself two hard battles (with Cetus and with Phineus’s gatecrashers), plus the sustained one of our recent years together, and found me a more congenial princess somewhere else, whereas she’d’ve been fishfood. That always got to her: she bawled back that what I’d freed her from were but the chains in which my forebears caused her to be put (she meant Uncle Poseidon, who’d given Ammon word to cliff her when the jealous Nereids complained to him of Cassiopeia’s boast et cetera); she owed me nothing, more especially since I’d manumitted her into the bondage of my tyrant vanity, a mere bedpartner and accessory to my fame: it was but a matter, in her view, of exchanging shackles for shekels, or iron manacles for gold. That always got to me: I stormed back, unfairly now, that even read as I read them the poets were wrong: freeing Mother Danaë, not Andromeda, had been my mission; regaining my lost kingdom; resolving, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus, which dated from the womb. To this end Medusa, not fishy Cetus, had been my true adversary and chief ally; I hadn’t even employed her in the Cetus engagement, to dispatch which wanted but my trusty sickle and a bit of shadow-feinting. In short, the whole Joppan adventure, charming as it was, could be regarded as no more than a couple of sub-panels, as it were, in the mural of my life: an interlude in, indeed a diversion from, my hero-work proper.

“Danaë Danaë!” then had shouted Andromeda. “You should have married your mother!”

Calyxa clucked her tongue. “You two really went at it, didn’t you?”

I agreed, my face burning afresh. “That’s when she pounced upon the brassbound sea-chest on the poop,” I said. “We had lots of traveling-bags, but I’d decided to do the trip right—
my
trip—and had packed my things in the same old trunk that Granddad had shipped me off in, forty years past. For one thing, I thought Seriphean Dictys would be pleased to see it again, so I’d kept in it all my souvenirs: a piece of the net he’d fished us ashore with, the crescent scabbard of Hermes’s sickle, couple of rocks from giant Atlas after I’d stoned him, fern-corals from Joppa (I’d laid Medusa’s head on seaweed while I skewered Cetus), Andromeda’s leg-irons, the Larissan discus, and the letters.”

“Those letters, Perseus…” I was left-flanked on the couch; naughty Calyxa, propped on her elbows at my hip, amused herself as I spoke by scribing capitals on her forehead with my flopped tool as with an infirm pen.
R, S,
Something,
P:
the scramble uncials of my name.

“Fan letters, mostly,” I said. “Nut mail, con letters, speaking invitations, propositions from women I never heard of—sort of thing every mythic hero gets in each day’s post. I swear I didn’t save them out of vanity, as she claimed; I almost never answered them.”

“Mm.”

“It was partly habit, I’m afflicted with orderliness, they were even alphabetized, starting with
Anonymous.
Partly for amusement, to pick me up when I was feeling down, remind me I’d once got a few things done worth doing. But mainly, I swear, it was for a kind of
research,
what I mentioned once before: certain letters especially I read and re-read: half a dozen or so from some dotty girl in Chemmis, Egypt. They were billets-doux, I admit it—but along with the hero-worship was a bright intelligence, a lively style, and a great many detailed questions, almost as if she were doing a dissertation. How many had been the Stygian Nymphs? Had Medusa always been a Gorgon? Was it really her reflection in Athene’s shield that saved me from petrifying, or the fact that Medusa had her eyes closed; and if the latter, why’d I need the shield? How was it I’d used the helmet of invisibility only to flee the other Gorgons and not to approach them in the first place? Did everything that saw Medusa turn to stone, or everything Medusa saw? If the former, how explain the sightless seaweed? If the latter, how came it to work when she’d been beheaded? Was my restriction to the adamant sickle and the shadow-trick in the Cetus episode self-imposed or laid on by Athene, and if the former, was my motive to impress Andromeda with skill and valor rather than with magic? And if the latter, why? Considering the crooked sword, the Graeaean subterfuge, the rear-view approaches to Medusa and Cetus, the far-darting Hermean sandals, even the trajectory of the discus that killed Acrisius, would it be fair to generalize that dodge and indirection were my conscious tactics, and, if so, were they characterological or by Athenian directive? Similarly, considering Danaë‘s brass tower, the sea-chest, the strapping tasks of Polydectes, Danaë‘s bondage to him, and Andromeda’s manacles on the one hand, and on the other, my conquests of Atlas, Phineus, Polydectes, and the rest by petrification, could not one say that my goal for myself and gift to others was typically release from immobility, and my punishment—of both my Medusa’d former enemies and my latterly tied-down self—typically its opposite? O Calyxa, this nameless girl, she had no end of insightful questions! Which I pondered and repondered as I’ve done these murals, to find if I could their meaning, where they pointed, what it was I’d lost. One question alone—whether I felt my post-Medusan years an example of or an exception to the archetypal pattern for heroic adventure—set me to years of comparative study, to learn what that pattern might be and where upon it I currently was. Thus this endless repetition of my story: as both protagonist and author, so to speak, I thought to overtake with understanding my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and thus pointed, proceed serene to the future’s sentence. My trustiest aid in this endeavor was those seven letters, at once so worshipful and wise; I’d’ve given much to spend an evening with their author! Hence my fury when Andromeda, herself unhinged by wrath, tore open the chest-lid just off Hydra and threw them to the fish. For the first time in our life, I struck her.”

My eyes filled at the double memory; Calyxa curled me in her way until my salt tears filled her navel. Post-swatly, I went on, I took from the chest my only correspondence with Andromeda, love-letters written during my youthful trip to Larissa, and posted them with the others in the Gulf of Argolis. Then Andromeda, in a perfect tempest of outrage, fishfed the entire contents of the chest: shore me of my valiant past as a steering drover ballocks a bull.

“I could listen all night to the way you talk,” Calyxa said.

“We were so busy storming at each other,” I went on, “and the crew and galley slaves enrapt in our battle royal, none noticed the natural tempest till it struck astern like the fist of a god, as if Father Zeus were counter-punching for smote Andromeda. All quarrels went by the board with mast and tiller; we were stove in a trice, sunk and drowned—all save my wife and me, who, still wrestling with the relatched ruin of my chest, were washed with it the way of its contents. Empty, it floated; our grapple became a grip; the storm passed, the sharks were patient; two days the currents easted us, as in your picture, clutched and quarreling in the Sea of Candia; on the third, as if caught in a repeating dream, we were netted by a fine young fisherman, more the image of my golden youth than my own sons were. He congratulated us on our survival, complimented Andromeda on her brined beauty, introduced himself as Danaus Dictys’s son, and home-ported us with the rest of his catch to Seriphos.”

Calyxa squeezed me. “When I drew that panel for the sculptor from your sister’s sketches, I was afraid you and Andromeda were embracing over the sea-chest.”

Embarrassed, she acknowledged under my amazed interrogation that all the murals in the temple were rendered from her drawings, after careful instructions delivered her from time to time over the years by couriers from Athene. She was not, then, merely maid, minister, and mistress of her deities, their temples, and devotees, but artful chronicler of their careers as well! I refrained from asking whether Sabazius and Ammon were similarly shrined, but praised her artistry to the skies.

“I’m no artist,” she demurred. “Anyhow, I’m not interested in me.”

But I would not let her off so modestly; with real appreciation I kissed her from crown to sole, which flexily she enjoyed, and pressed her tell me how far the murals went—for while I myself could predict, I thought, the next couple of panels, my memory of an odd dark passion in the desert just prior to my demise was still obscure to me, as was the manner of my death itself.

She shook her head. “Tomorrow, or the next night, maybe, I’ll tell you, if you haven’t guessed.” Her tone grew graver. “What do you think the next panel will be?”

I supposed it would portray the famous “sculpture museum” at Seriphos, now the isle’s chief tourist attraction, which we foursomed—Andromeda, Danaus, Dictys, and I—soon after, in what became the cycled dream’s continuation. King Dictys himself was in declining age and health, but overjoyed to review the source and cause of his ascendancy. Andromeda, unsalted and refreshed, seemed to have lost five years and kilos in the sea; she basked in the gallantries of her yet-younger life preserver. The famous statues, of course, were no sculptured likenesses at all, but the stoned originals of Polydectes and his court, fixed forever in their postures of insult and abuse which I had countered with the Gorgon’s head. There in the center sat the false king himself, still gloating at his declaration that my whole laborious adventure had been but his ruse for my riddance; that he had never intended to bed any but my gold-girt mother, whom presently he was starving from her sanctuary with Dictys in Athene’s temple. Those had been his last words: fascinated, I pointed out to my companions that his tongue was still tipped to his teeth to make the theta of N
αῷ
’A
θἠνηϛ
, to whose eta he would never come.

“Remarkable,” young Danaus had agreed, and added with a trace of tease in his own teeth-tipped tongue: “If Uncle P. was forty when you froze him, and has been lisping that same theta for twenty years, you and he must be about the same age now.”

Andromeda laughed, her first mirth in months; then the two of them went off at smart Danaus’s suggestion to find something less boring to look at than his petrified progenitors. Dictys and I watched them go, my wife merrily accepting her escort’s elbow, and then went round the remaining figures pensively summoning names and patronymics from that glorious morning for half the afternoon. Returning at last to the now-cool shadow of Polydectes, we sipped from silver beakers of Hippocrene and traded troubles.