My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (69 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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After a particularly disappointing tea with an online woman who looked nothing like her profile picture and had no real interest in the things she had mentioned in her profile (yoga, reading, foreign films, spirituality—she was an atheist and a personal trainer, who knew only what downward dog was; she had never heard of Wim Wenders or Eckhart Tolle), Cupid began to focus on his true work instead of on relationships. He remembered how Psyche had encouraged him to find an acting class during their late-night talks, and one day he did. He played Oberon from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in one scene. His Oberon was charming and savage. When he was acting Cupid felt alive. His skin glowed, his eyes sparkled, and his stomach stopped churning. People began to flourish in his presence again. When Cupid made the students in his class laugh or cry, during a scene or an exercise, he felt like he was flying.
Nine months had passed since Psyche had seen Cupid. One day Psyche woke up from a dream of being kissed by an invisible man and sat down at her computer and e-mailed Cupid.
“Just thinking of you, hope you are well,” she typed.
Cupid wrote back almost immediately. “I’ve been thinking about you, too. Have you been dancing under the moonlight in your garden with the fairies? I felt it.”
“I would like to see you again sometime to talk,” Psyche wrote back the next day. She made herself wait twenty-four hours, just to be cool.
“What is your schedule like on weekend days?” Cupid wrote.
He figured that she had already seen him in the light and that now that they weren’t having sex it would be okay to hang out during daylight hours. He sensed that Psyche was the one lost in the darkness now and he wanted her to feel better so he chose to meet her at the Roman villa overlooking the sea.
Psyche drove up the road among the laurel and sycamore trees with the Pacific Ocean glittering mirthfully beneath her. It was a perfect day of blueness everywhere. She met Cupid in front of the villa and they hugged lightly and looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. Psyche told herself, Don’t fall into his eyes. You are a different person than he is. She understood, finally, why Cupid had wanted it to be dark when they were together.
Cupid thought how lovely Psyche looked in the daylight. With her long brown curls loose around her bare, pale shoulders and her cream-colored silk vintage dress with its red watercolor roses, she looked as beautiful as her soul had felt in his arms. He wondered why he had never gone out with her in the day before.
Psyche thought that Cupid looked tired but peaceful except for the deep crease between his eyebrows. She wanted to smooth it with her finger.
They walked up the wide steps and wandered through an herb garden, under a grape arbor, past a fountain with theatrical masks spouting water, and along a walkway with walls painted with trompe l’oeil architecture in pale, clear colors. They walked around a long reflecting pool where black bronze statues with eerie, pale, painted-on eyes lined the pool among the hedges and fruit trees.
The inlaid marble floors of the villa echoed with their footsteps. Black figures—nymphs and Satyrs with erections—caroused on terracotta urns. Unself-consciously nude marble gods and goddesses observed Cupid and Psyche coolly from pedestals.
There was a giant statue of Venus; Psyche stood below her. With her flawless marble skin and curves, Venus intimidated Psyche. As Psyche gazed up into Venus’s blank eyes, she had to keep tears from filling her own. Haven’t I done enough yet? she wondered. How long will it take?
Cupid looked up at Venus, winked and thought, pleasantly, Bitch.
Cupid and Psyche went to the museum café and sat and drank tea and shared a piece of carrot cake with a tiny orange carrot drawn on it in cream cheese frosting, and talked about what they had been doing. Psyche told Cupid about some of her tasks. She spoke breezily and laughed a lot, even though thinking of her life suddenly made her feel weary and close to tears again. (She had no real friends anymore, her job was low-paid and tiring, she had been through a series of bad relationships, therapy was hard.) Cupid told Psyche he had cut back the hours of his day job so he could take acting lessons again. He was auditioning for student films. He tried to sound positive for Psyche’s sake and his own, but he was filled with self-doubt. (What if he couldn’t even get a part in a student film?)
Psyche felt so happy for him when he said that he had returned to acting that she wanted to hug him again but she refrained.
Instead, as a way to convey warmth and affection, she said, “When I was leaving my apartment my neighbor was walking her dog, Pegasus. He wanted me to scratch his belly but I was running late so I told him, ‘Pegasus, I’m sorry but I can’t scratch you. I might have to get used to seeing big, beautiful boys and walking away from them.’”
Cupid smiled and blushed. Psyche was surprised that he blushed; she’d never seen him in the light before, remember. She hoped the story had conveyed what she meant it to—that he was a big, beautiful boy and that she might have to let him go but not that she wanted to let him go. She thought the blush indicated the story had been understood.
Since they were on the subject of dogs, Psyche told Cupid about a party one of her students had invited her to where the parents brought in a bunch of puppies to play with the children. (It was, significantly, the party that the little girl had been crying to Psyche about and everyone had come and had a great time.) Psyche had held a small dachshund named Wendy on her lap and it had immediately fallen asleep there. It had long eyelashes and delicate, feminine features. Psyche was in love and wished she could have kept it.
Cupid, who had spent his childhood feeling closer to his dogs than to his parents, told Psyche that he wished he could hire the puppy people to come to him so that he could just spend the afternoon petting puppies.
“Want to join me?” Cupid asked.
Psyche restrained herself from reaching out and touching his hand.
Cupid asked kindly, “What did you want to talk to me about?” and so Psyche began.
She apologized for overreacting when they had been together last. She said, “When you said you wanted to have tea with other women I heard you say you wanted to find someone prettier, someone you would be proud to be seen with in the day. But you didn’t say that and it was my own fear that made me shut you off like that.”
Cupid said, “Before I said that I felt like you were trying to get me to define my feelings for you and, for whatever reason that I should probably take a look at, when people do that to me I have trouble with it. But it’s not about finding someone prettier or someone I’m proud to be seen with.”
“I was pressuring you,” Psyche said. “I got scared. I’m sorry.”
“Part of relationships is communicating like this, talking about shadows in the light,” Cupid said. “Not that I know that much about it but that’s what I’ve heard.” Since he had stopped seeing Psyche he had sought out advice from the few happily married couples he knew and this is one thing he had learned from them.
“When I’m with you I lose myself,” Psyche said. “It’s like I’m watching the Cupid show.” (Here Cupid couldn’t help but smile; he was, after all, a performer.) “I forgot I’m there. I think that’s part of what happened.”
“I understand,” said Cupid. “I want to be with the person all the time and then after a certain amount of time I start feeling really bad and I have to go find myself again.”
They talked for a while more and then Psyche had to go to the yoga class she had promised she would make herself attend that afternoon—she would rather have stayed with Cupid. Cupid walked her down the steps and into the parking lot to her car and kissed her on the lips. She kissed his neck with a succession of rapid kisses. She had done this at night, in the dark, while he came, praising the beauty of her soul, but never in the light.
“Just in case,” she said. Which meant both just in case I never see you again I want to remember what it feels like to kiss your neck and just in case we are going to be together again I am going to kiss your neck as a promise of things to come.
Cupid did not say anything to let her know what he thought would happen because he really did not know, but he squeezed Psyche’s small body in the watercolor rose dress to his broad chest and when he looked at her for the last time his eyes were gentle as blue irises and Psyche, even in her fear, thought she would probably see them again. Maybe she would even be able to give him his shirt. She had come to think of the man’s shirt hanging in the back of her closet as his. But, of course, she wasn’t sure if she would ever see him or give him the shirt.
Cupid walked away whistling to himself. He felt lighter, almost buoyant. He didn’t mind this kind of uncertainty; in fact it comforted him. He would like this state of noncommitment, warmth, and hope to go on forever.
Psyche, on the other hand, wanted clarity and reassurance and plans for a second date, but for now she did not turn her head and longingly watch Cupid walk away. Instead, she checked her own eyes in the car mirror.
They looked big and bright. They belonged to her and they could see.
Both fairy tales and myths have guided my life and my work. I have always loved the story of Cupid and Psyche but considered it more of the latter than the former. However, I am starting to see the interconnectedness of all cultures and stories and so I decided to explore this favorite tale as the märchen that it was often considered to be.
I am particularly fascinated with the idea of the tasks the soul must accomplish, the journey it must take, in order to be prepared for the rigors of romantic love. The story has a contemporary setting (Cupid and Psyche meet online and go on a date to the Getty Villa in Malibu, California) and I have written it through a third-person point of view that shows the inner experience of both characters. As always, it layers my life experiences with the guiding force of ancient story.
As an addendum, I suddenly, dramatically, and permanently lost a great deal of the sight in one eye after this story was written. I find it interesting how our work often knows things before we do.
—FLB
LILY HOANG
The Story of the Mosquito
ONCE, IN A PLACE FAR AWAY FROM THIS PLACE, IN A TIME THAT WAS before this time, a woman named Ngoc lived in a village. Although she lived in a village, she wanted to live in a city. Cities, you see, offer riches and rich men and rich husbands and rich suitors, and villages, you see, offer none of these things.
Ngoc means “jade” or “treasure.” It’s a fitting name. Not only is she a treasure in and of herself—a real gem of a gal!—but she also desires treasure.
This is a story like all other magic stories. Don’t be fooled. Just because our characters have different names does not make them fundamentally any different from the archetypal characters you’ve come to know and love. These names are just markers, a way to signal to you that they are set in a place that is not this place. These names are just markers to explain that their values and culture may be slightly variant from yours, but you really don’t need to be scared. We understand: things that are different can be frightening, but this is not a ghost story. This is a magic story, and although it ends with sadness, those who are good will be rewarded and those who are bad will be punished. We are a just people, even though we look different and speak a different language and our people have different names. We, too, believe in justice.

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