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Bad, Bad Love Has A Plum Cobbler Apotheosis

Episode VI of our serialized, bite-by-bite novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen) is all about poison. Poison and partridge and plum cobbler. Bad, Bad Lovers, if your sister is married to an incorrigible, bloviating, womanizing cad, what can you do? Well, if you’re a chef, and you’re making dinner, you could always poison the sod. And we shall learn whether Livia does or she doesn’t. But first, Aunt Pearl’s apotheosis. FYI, at the very, very end, reference is made to a pay phone. A public telephone, for which one needs coins. If you’ve never seen one, maybe ask your mother. And if you’re just joining us, a warm and poisoned-cobbler welcome to you–if you’re of a mind, you can start right from the beginning, by going here.

~

Aunt Pearl’s Apotheosis                    

When Pearl died, she did so, fittingly, in the kitchen. Cornelia had gone on before her almost exactly a year earlier. It was after a Thanksgiving dinner, the last one Livia and Danae had eaten together. Livia came from college, and Danae drove over from New Orleans (Bretton had backed out at the last minute), to share one of the finest meals either could ever remember eating. They had left Pearl sitting at the kitchen table just after midnight, to savor one more glass of mulberry wine–she’d be up in a few minutes.

Livia woke early the next day to a glorious fall morning only barely begun. The air bit like the finest of new wines and the leaves on the trees seemed to shimmer in utter delight at having first been melted into honey and then molded into marzipan replicas of their former selves. She ran down the stairs, hoping for a cup of coffee with her great-aunt before Danae spoiled the mood with actress talk and anecdotes about Bretton which painfully revealed his cloddishness to everyone but his wife.

There was a heavenly aroma of plum cobbler wafting up from the kitchen. Plum cobbler. That was what she’d have for breakfast.  With clotted cream.

In the hallway, Livia noticed a silence deeper than the one she usually associated with early mornings; a hushed tension hovered over the still downstairs, draping itself gently over the worn velvet chairs in the entry hall where no one ever sat.

Pearl was slumped over the table, the last drops of mulberry wine still clinging to the bottom of her glass. At first, Livia thought her great-aunt was sleeping, but the peaceful expression on her face did not alter when Livia tried repeatedly to wake her. There was no cobbler in the oven (Livia checked, even as the tears rolled down her cheeks. The oven was empty). But the heavenly aroma persisted.

Livia had heard stories of medieval saints whose deceased bodies emitted the aromas of roses or lilies, or lilacs, or even gardenias. Never of food. But if anyone was a saint, it was Aunt Pearl, and if she was going to smell like anything, nothing more fitting than plum cobbler.

Livia ran up the stairs to wake Danae, both to inform her of their loss and to ask her opinion on the plum-cobbler aroma. Perhaps they should call a priest. Danae took half an hour to get dressed and put on her make-up, half an hour during which the smell of plums deliquescing beneath crunchy, flaky pastry with burnt sugar on top became almost unbearable in its delicious intensity. Livia, to her great chagrin, felt her mouth begin to water.

When she finally came down, Danae claimed, as she dried her eyes (gently, so as not to muss her mascara), not to notice anything, and Livia finally desisted. But she did think about that aroma sometimes and had definitely been inspired by it when she created her own version of plum cobbler for the restaurant. She had simply replaced the pie crust with a phyllo pastry to lighten it up a bit and make it appealing after a heavy meal. It was the only dessert she did for them. They served it every Thanksgiving.

Danae insisted that they call the doctor immediately, not because he could do anything (Pearl’s cheeks were already cold to the touch), but because they should. It was what you did when people died. Livia would have preferred to be alone with Pearl a little longer, to enjoy the aroma and her aunt’s peaceful, slumbering face there in the kitchen, but could think of no good reasons to oppose her sister’s practicality.

When the doctor arrived, Livia learned that Pearl had suffered a heart attack, one which he had warned her wouldn’t be long in coming. She had merely to wait, for she had a defective heart. An operation would have been possible, had Pearl been willing to travel to Baltimore. Pearl had answered that she had never traveled more than fifty miles from the farm and she saw no reason to start now. God would call her when he wanted her, and not before.

Livia never mentioned the plum-cobbler aroma again to Danae; any reference to the supernatural made her sister squirm. But Livia did notice the doctor, as he was packing his bag to leave and assuring them that a representative from the funeral home would be along soon, sniffing about expectantly. He had already finished his coffee; he was probably wondering why they hadn’t offered him a piece of cobbler.

~

Wanda

Partridge. That was the last item on Livia’s list. It was almost seven; she had wasted a lot of time thinking, without coming to useful conclusions. She seized the sharpest of her knives and began to prepare the tiny, defenseless bird-bodies for marinating. She still had to plan the menu for Danae’s dinner; perhaps partridge would make a suitable main course. Bretton disliked raspberry marinade (the motions of Livia’s knife became more vehement, less precise, as she thought of her sister’s husband). She would make raspberry marinade.

Livia’s small mouth curved into a malicious smile. Bretton was such a glutton (he preferred “gourmand”–he pronounced it “gore-man”), with his big potbelly. He avowed that sit-ups were anathema to any Shakespearean actor worth his salt–they tightened up the voice cavity–but now that he taught and directed and only acted occasionally, Livia saw no reason that an occasional sit-up might not be permitted to him. Bretton would be livid (and, Livia felt, properly served) if the main course of the opulent meal to which he had looked forward since his wife’s last significant birthday (that was, her thirty-fifth) were something he disliked.

Or. Bretton adored plum sauce. Perhaps plum sauce laced with arsenic for Bretton and an irrevocable loosening of the marital reins for her sister. Livia thought she knew where to obtain arsenic. She worked in a steady, contented rhythm for half an hour or so, enjoying intermittent visions of Bretton choking, Bretton’s potbelly pointing sky-upward after she and Danae had lain him on the floor, Danae would have called the emergency room…

No, she couldn’t allow her sister to call the emergency room. They’d discover the poisoning in no time. She’d have to tell Danae about the plan beforehand. That would make her sister an accomplice; she would have to quietly allow Bretton to die, and then pretend to discover him the following morning. Maybe Danae would wish to return for a few weeks with her to New York. Maybe she would even stay.

But what if Danae resisted? She was still devoted to the sod; that, Livia theorized, was precisely because of the shoddy manner in which he treated her. It is always easier to want something one will never have (the love, for example, of someone never meant to love us) than to decide what to do with that something once we are assured of it. If she told Danae of her plan and Danae were against it, Danae was even capable of warning Bretton (Danae would take Livia’s plan very seriously; if Livia planned to do something, she generally did it). Bretton might call the police. She would be searched, and there she would be with the arsenic. Guilty. No, too risky.

She had to think of something. The raspberry marinade was already beginning to turn the flesh of the partridges a pale pink. Like the lips of a young girl, or like Danae’s bathwater if she decided to cut her wrists after all. If she didn’t think of something, Danae would do it. Maybe not on the night of her fortieth birthday (she would be aware of Livia’s intentions of stopping her), but she would do it. Livia couldn’t watch her forever.

Livia furiously scrubbed down her workstation. There had to be a solution. Something she could do. She rinsed the sponge, dried her hands, and reached for the bottle of brandy. Her shift was over; tonight she would have a full shot. As she headed toward the subway, Livia felt in her pocket for change; she needed to call Wanda about some hors-d’oeuvres she had promised to provide for a gallery opening the following week.

Wanda. She would ask Wanda. Wanda had helped her find a satisfactory mode for the living of that trickiest of aspects of one’s life, the sentimental one. Danae’s situation was of much greater import than was the issue of how often, with whom, and with what consequences Livia would have sex, and Wanda’s solutions to problems were not rational, but Livia was desperate. She found a pay phone, deposited the coins, and dialed her friend’s number.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all, be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

The post Bad, Bad Love Has A Plum Cobbler Apotheosis appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Loves Her Some Good Eats

Welcome, Bad, Bad Lovers, to this, the fifth installment of the serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). This week, it’s time to talk food. Maybe your momma was a terrible cook (Livia’s and Danae’s was), but surely there was someone in your family who made biscuits and gravy or oyster casserole (my daddy’s specialty) or strawberry shortcake that became the stuff of family legend. Whose Thanksgiving turkey was to die for, whose stuffing recipe provoked international trade wars and attracted Chinese spies. Whose kitchen seemed to produce marvels no matter what he or she (likely she, let’s face it) did in there. For Livia and Danae, this person was their Aunt Pearl (who, incidentally, helped to clean up the mess Marta had made out of her life, and her daughters’)… But before we talk food, we’ll have to hear a little bit about Livia’s bedroom closet. And her lingerie.

If you need catchin’ up, that’s easy: Installments I-IV are found here (I), here, here and here (IV).

~

The grown-up Livia’s bedroom closet was filled with black garments–wool trousers, cotton ones, all sorts of pants (she was so thin she could buy them in the men’s sections of discount stores rather than the women’s), and jeans.  She also favored men’s shirts over women’s, particularly the kind without collars. They looked like they were made for a pirate. White was acceptable, as was beige, but only as an accent. She had a black cape for rain, a black wool coat for winter, and a second-hand motorcycle jacket (black leather) for in-between.

Livia only wore boots. Black boots. She had a pair of black patent leather boots, made especially for her. They had cost her five-hundred dollars and she had only worn them three times. They would last forever. In her bedroom closet, there were short boots the height of her ankles, boots with platform heels and soles, and one pair of boots with pointed toes and five-inch stiletto heels. Even in the summer, Livia wore boots. Livia was able to get away with it because she did not sweat. One of her boyfriends (back in the days when she had them) had marveled at this trait (for which, if the truth were told, Livia could accept no credit). He had finally explained it to his satisfaction by her paleness, the fragility of her ivory skin, the spun-copper tints of her hair. Valkyries, he opined, didn’t sweat.

Livia’s everyday footwear, however, was limited to hiking boots or army boots with metal pieces over the toes. She was wearing the army boots, with her black jeans, as she sipped her café con leche and thought about Danae’s telegram. Underneath the black jeans was a pair of emerald green panties, lace around the legs, tiny at the sides. The pert, economical contours of her breasts were contained by a brassiere of the same color as the panties, entirely of lace, imported from France. Livia needed two of the four drawers of her armoire for her lingerie. Brassieres–underwire, strapless, half-corset, corset. Silks, satins, elastic, hooks, lace-up. Greens, turquoise, lavenders and eggplant, peach, beige, white and black. Especially black. Livia liked to drink her coffee in her underwear. She generally threw her jeans and a tee shirt over the lovely undergarments in order to run down to the coffee shop; when she returned, she took them off again.

Today was an exception. Since the arrival of Danae’s telegram the day before, Livia had been distracted. This morning, after buying her café con leche and climbing the stairs, she had forgotten to take her clothes off.  She kicked the scarred corner of the filing cabinet with the metal-clad toe of her army boot (she always kicked it in the same place) and stared up at Ophelia. Irrevocably dead Ophelia. Livia’s mission for the weekend consisted of preventing Danae from doing something irrevocable.

It was time to go, she had to work in less than an hour. Livia uncrossed her legs and stood up. She sighed and grabbed a pair of chopsticks, filed to deadly points and varnished, which she used to skewer her wavy hair into place once she had wound it into a loose beignet. She searched for her sunglasses. Danae wanted to take laudanum, wanted to end up like Ophelia, or like Elizabeth Siddall. Or like Marta.

Livia would rescue her.

But that would happen this weekend. Livia plucked her keys from the nail beside the door and grabbed her bag. She was going to be late. She hurried down the stairs, out the door, and down Broadway toward the subway.

~

Louisiana

All of the important decisions in Marta’s life, the ones that had most positively or adversely affected her–like the time her father decided she should drop out of high school to go to work (adverse) or even when the intense young man with pale gold hair married her (positive, at least until the first disappointment)–had been made by men.  But if it had been men who had always decided for her, nine times out of ten it was a woman who threw her a line when she was really on the point of choking to death in the quagmire she (well, the men) had made out of her life. A collect call made from a public telephone at the bus station—Marta’s bags and boxes at her feet, her two daughters flopped atop them like twin duffle bags—to her dead mother’s twin cousins resulted in free lodging for herself, Danae and Livia, and more home-cooked food than they could possibly eat.

Marta’s contacts with Cornelia and Pearl had been sporadic at best since her own mother’s death. Her efforts to stay in touch had dwindled to cheap cards at Christmas, with her signature and a blurry Polaroid of Danae and Livia in their best school dresses. Her daughters’ dresses were always of very good quality–she had earned that much by moving in with the handsome man and pretending to be his wife even though she really wasn’t–but because of something in her that she was never able to identify (Marta wasn’t given to introspection), she just couldn’t spend money on certain things. Buying her Christmas cards at the drugstore was perhaps the only family tradition Marta carried on, and it was one that Livia would later break with gleeful seasonal overspending at the stationers.

Cornelia and Pearl had inherited their mother’s farmhouse and a small plot of land when they were still in their teens. After their father was killed in World War II, their mother sold produce from her gardens at local markets until she died of cancer just after she turned forty. Cornelia and Pearl had gradually sold off the land, bit by bit, until they were left with the house, in need of extensive roof repairs and a coat of paint, and a three-hundred-foot margin of arable land around it on all four sides, of which Pearl gardened every available inch. There were trellises along the wide front porch and flat up against the back walls.

Tomatoes and creeping zucchini occupied the closely spaced trapezoidal grid up to waist height; above were honeysuckle and nasturtiums, a variety of flower which didn’t ordinarily climb trellises, but had been coaxed by Pearl into emitting curling, tendril-like vines instead of its habitual thick stems. The strong, pungent, almost acrid scent of the nasturtiums kept tiny, gnawing bugs away from the tender leaves of young basil and lettuce.

There were window-box gardens on every sill, some quite deep, as is often the case with old houses, where Pearl planted radishes, and even a curious breed of miniature eggplant an eccentric friend had brought her as a souvenir from California. There were apple trees all across the front limit of the property, which bordered a dusty dirt road. The city of Baton Rouge had once allotted funds to pave the road, but the money had mysteriously disappeared before the job was even begun, so dusty it had remained.

The proper Cornelia had at first resisted the unseemly addition of chicken coops beneath the front porch, complaining that visitors would be put off by the squawking and the smell. But Pearl had declared (rightly) that they never had visitors, and had installed the birds, coops in stacks one above the other as high as space would allow, that very afternoon. Pearl religiously collected the chicken and rooster droppings every morning and deposited them into a rusty, dented bucket which she remembered seeing in her mother’s hand. The chicken droppings were combined with the collected scrapings from hers and Cornelia’s plates and used to fertilize window-boxes and vegetable gardens. Pearl thought of this series of actions as a miniature cycle of life and the thought pleased her.

Both Cornelia and Pearl were virgins. Pearl had been pretty in her youth, even into the first decades of middle age, and you could still detect traces of neglected beauty in her face if you looked closely. The rounded face of her twenties, thirties and forties had gradually expanded into a pumpkin shape, with rosy cheeks and a permanent tan from the many afternoons she spent gardening without a hat. Her brown eyes were bright and wide, her lips still a dark brown-red.

When Livia thought of her, she thought of tilled earth, of sweet potatoes laced with cinnamon and cream. Of gingerbread cookies, fresh from the oven, wafting forth their aromas of nutmeg and cloves, of apples picked from the trees in front of the house in the fall, of mashing them and making apple cider. All of Aunt Pearl’s teeth were fine and white, large and carnivorous, except for one gold cap on her left canine tooth. Her hair hung down her back in a gypsy-braid, dark and silky-black, with surprisingly few strands of gray for a woman her age.

Pearl had had a beau when she was young. She had been engaged to marry him–a dress had even been chosen from a book of Vogue patterns only a year or so out of date. All of which gave her sister heartburn.

Cornelia, always their mother’s favorite because of her domestic inclinations and docile nature, had begun, at the tender age of ten and a half, to amass bits of china, linen, and underclothes–many were her mother’s torn or worn cast-offs which she industriously mended and dressed up with hand-crocheted lace. At nineteen, however, despite her assiduous attendance at church socials, potluck dinners, corn-huskings, and hayrides, the chestless, long-faced, nearsighted Cornelia had still been without aspirants to her hand. Her self-righteousness vis-à-vis her younger sister, manifested in supercilious examinations of Pearl’s “trousseau” (consisting of scandalously few garments and almost no linens), was laced with a considerable amount of envy.

Cornelia’s lack of sympathy for her sister’s prostrate grief upon learning that Emmett was to be sent to the front, from whence they had recently been informed that their father would not return, was immediately forgiven, as was her overly-solicitous pampering of Pearl with calming herbal teas and homemade poultices upon their reception of the news that Emmett would also be remaining permanently overseas. Pearl, however, who hadn’t a petty bone in her body, had appeared not to realize that the recently re-opened channels of friendship and sisterhood were at least partly due to the fact that she, like her sister, would probably never marry.

After Emmett’s death, Pearl took to walking barefoot about the nearby fields (which no longer belonged to them) after the moon had risen, when her sister had gone decorously to bed. She never prayed (her sister did enough of that for both of them); she simply drew comfort from the land and the air and the night, her body compensating for its loss by forging an almost erotic tie with the earth and its fruits. And her love was requited. Her tomatoes were redder and plumper than any of the neighbors’, her gardenias like whipped cream; her zucchini greener, her vines curlier and leafier, her green beans crisper and crunchier. She sold her hand-made fertilizer to the local farmer’s market but no one could ever duplicate her results.

Formidable gardener though she was, Pearl’s greatest talent, as far as Danae, Livia and Marta were concerned, was culinary. In the window boxes above the kitchen sink, she cultivated herbs whose names none of them knew (only Livia would come to know them.  She had been hired at the restaurant because of her reputation for herbal witchery–her specialties were sauces and roast meats, poultry, and fish).  Pearl said that herbs liked the shade, with just a little indirect sunlight. The rusted metal awnings that shaded the exposed southern windows provided the perfect protection for their dark green, curiously shaped leaves.

Just before cooking, Pearl would harvest some of the leaves from one, or sometimes several, of the plants, making her choices according to criteria gradually imparted to the fascinated Livia. The leaves washed and arranged on a piece of brown paper, Pearl made the trip out to the front porch and placed her offering in a patch of direct sunlight in order to get the flavor started. When Livia helped Pearl wash up after supper, she could smell their pungent, individual aromas blending into one delicious scent, better even than wild onions.

Pearl’s body lost its heaviness in the kitchen; her feet floated above the cracked linoleum floor as she hurried from cutting table to stove to icebox and back again. She seemed to cook effortlessly–Livia never saw her consult a recipe–adding a pinch of this or a spoonful of that to her sauces, soups, cassoulets, and meats throughout the cooking process, following minute tastes of her creation which she rolled around on her tongue as though tasting from a priceless bottle of wine. Pearl told Livia that there were two reasons she looked like she wasn’t really working while she cooked. One was that she knew how to find things; the other was that she never let herself run out of anything. Those were the marks of a true cook–you knew where everything was in your kitchen, right down to the most insignificant wooden spoon, and you kept your cupboards, your flour jar, your sugar bowl, your basket for onions and garlic, fully stocked.

Pearl, although she carefully hid it, had at first been surprised by the silent, insistent presence of Livia in her kitchen. Thin, pale Livia, the sort of child you would expect to find hiding atop a tree, the kind of little girl who picked at her food and left her plate practically untouched. If anything, Pearl would have expected interest (if only superficial) in things culinary from Danae. Danae spent her afternoons in her room practicing hairstyles and trying out Marta’s makeup, or drinking sodas in Baton Rouge with her friends (she took the bus home just as it was getting dark, steadily pushing at the envelope of the definition of “dark”).

When she was thirteen, Danae had announced that she had a boyfriend; she would probably, before long, be thinking about husbands. At least she should learn how to scramble an egg to a man’s satisfaction, Pearl had often mused to herself, but once Danae’s body began to show signs of what it would one day become—the spitting image of her mother—Pearl had changed her mind. With her looks, she’d probably be able to get by without ever lifting a spoon.

Cornelia had been barred from the kitchen for decades. Her sis, according to Pearl, had only to look at a soufflé and it would never rise. If she accidentally touched a bowl of bread dough, Pearl firmly believed that the bread would come out flat and tasteless. A sort of balance had eventually been achieved between the two sisters: cooking and gardening were the only two domestic chores in which Pearl would condescend to engage. Her sister kept floors, windows, and other surfaces free of dust and grime, content to reap Pearl’s outstanding meals as a reward for her labors. Cornelia, during meal preparation, was banned to the sitting room to work at the pair of socks or scarf she was always knitting for some charitable organization or other.

Livia, nervous and meticulous, with her books that she left lying about the house in the oddest places, would not, to Pearl’s seasoned eye, make marriage material. But Livia’s appetite was voracious, her appreciation for subtle differences in texture and flavor sophisticated, and her culinary aptitudes quickly became apparent to her great-aunt. If she wanted to learn, whatever her reasons, Pearl would certainly teach her. Soon Livia was the only member of the strange little household admitted into the sacred precincts of the kitchen while food was being prepared.

Marta, for her part, never demonstrated even the slightest interest in learning the arts of the kitchen from Pearl. She detested anything domestic. Livia still retained sharp-edged memories of the hodgepodge of canned and frozen foods that had made up the few meals her mother prepared when they still lived with her father. Her mother claimed that her dislike for anything to do with housekeeping stemmed from the years she had spent serving food to disagreeable clients in a restaurant every night with no day off, and from cleaning the houses of their bored, complaining wives during the mornings. Pearl always nodded sympathetically and said she was sure that was so, Marta, don’t worry your head about it, why don’t you go on outside on the porch and have a bit of mulberry wine before dinner?

Livia and Danae suspected that their mother had more than a bit, because her speech was slurred by the time she sat down to the table, and she disappeared upstairs to her room as soon as dessert had been cleared away. Pearl and Cornelia pretended not to notice, Cornelia out of a rigid sense of propriety that refused to even acknowledge the possibility of someone’s not abiding by her rules, and Pearl out of a sweet-faced sympathy for her niece’s frustration and boredom. And besides, as Pearl used to say with a wink in Livia’s direction as they sat down to chat and play cards after the dishes had been dried, the pot has no business calling the kettle black.

Pearl’s hands were so rhythmic and methodical as they shuffled and dealt the cards for another round of black-jack or gin-rummy that Livia was hardly conscious of the swift, graceful detours they made toward the bottle on the far side of the table, of their brief stop and hovering above Pearl’s old crystal wine-glass, the only survivor of a set she had bought thirty years before in anticipation of her married life with Emmett.

But Pearl never touched a drop until after dinner had been served, eaten, and cleared away, until after the plates had been scraped, washed, dried, and returned to their shelves (likewise, Livia only allowed herself a tiny shot of brandy once her shift was almost finished). Like a great pianist who pales before the very idea of giving even the most unimportant performance while inebriated, Pearl’s very particular sense of proprieties demanded that every morsel of food prepared by her hands be the most succulent, well-seasoned, browned or braised, that it could possibly be. Such masterful performances as hers had to be executed with a clear head.

After the applause and the encore, she plumped her body, with its pronounced concavities and convexities (Livia was to remember Aunt Pearl many years later when she studied the Venus of Willendorf), into the rickety kitchen chair and took up the cards and the bottle of mulberry wine with a smile that bordered on smug self-satisfaction.

And she had every right to her smugness. Rare was the meal to which the five women sat down without someone emitting an involuntary, inarticulate moan of pleasure as a sauce, a bit of tender beef, or a perfectly seasoned stalk of asparagus made contact with her tongue.

Once, as she tasted the delicate flesh of a partridge sauteed in butter after a two-day soak in raspberry marinade, Aunt Cornelia had emitted a long, drawn-out guttural noise, followed by a shuddering sigh the likes of which Livia had never heard before.

Cornelia’s sigh made Marta start from her own rapt enjoyment of the luscious, raspberry-flavored flesh of the young bird and turned her face a brilliant red. Livia stared down at her plate, away from Aunt Cornelia’s loss of control; Danae giggled and dropped her knife. Only Pearl smiled, flashing the gold gypsy-tooth in a soundless laugh, as she observed her sister’s reaction.

~

To be continued, Bad, Bad Lovers, to be continued.

Right here, next week.

Same bad time, same bad, bad place.

Come on back, now, y’hear?

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook, and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

The post Bad, Bad Love Loves Her Some Good Eats appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Has A Classical Heritage

What’s in a name? A lot, as it turns out. As we shall see in this, the fourth installment of my little gift to you, a serialized novella entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). Livia’s and Danae’s names were chosen by their high-minded painter-daddy. One particularly famous Livia was a Roman empress; Danae, well…Zeus and his golden showers? Coins, you gutter-minded Bad, Bad Lover, coins. Sure, the coins are a metaphor (isn’t everything), but all the great paintings show coins: art lovers, this post is for you. If you’re late to the Venus party, not to worry, you are more than welcome. There are three previous installments, and you can git caught up on ’em here, here and here.

~

When she left the green lawn for the train station, departing to New York on her honeymoon with the intense young blond man from the coffee shop, Marta was wearing a lilac-colored linen suit and a matching pillbox hat. Jackie Onassis favored lilac; Jackie was dusky, like Marta, and the lilac pillbox hat sat provocatively on top of the elegant waves of Jackie’s dark hair as, Marta knew, it did on hers. For several years, Marta had yearned for a lilac suit, for a pillbox hat; she knew that, from a distance, people would do a double take …is that Jackie? She bought the suit at a downtown boutique with tip money, emptying her neglected bank account and putting herself $9.37 into the red. The suit would come in handy once they moved to New York. And, in fact, on her wedding night, at a restaurant on one of the tiny side streets you could discover in that fascinating city without even trying, someone had asked for her autograph.

After Danae’s birth, Marta had difficulty closing the zipper on the skirt, but it could still be managed. Marta wore the suit when she went visiting, with the pillbox hat; in buses or on the crumbling street corners of downtown New Orleans, tourists made the familiar comments in accents Midwestern, Bostonian, Californian, or even foreign. Comments without serious intent that, before, had reaped the tourist a reward in the form of a light laugh and toss of dark head. Now they were jealously guarded in Marta’s broken heart, memorized, rehearsed like a litany in her stupefied mind as she scrubbed the floors of someone else’s mansion (it should have been hers) or walked the short distance home from the restaurant in the silent hours just after midnight because she couldn’t afford a taxi.

After Livia’s birth, Marta was unable to zip the lilac skirt; she tried for some months and then, in a fit of rage, threw the skirt into the trash, along with the jacket and the hat. She could have given them to Goodwill, but Marta was determined that no other woman should have the pleasures their wearing afforded. When her husband asked about it–why don’t you wear the lilac suit?  You look so lovely in it–Marta cried.

Danae (via Wikimedia)

~

Livia’s father’s studio filled up, little by little, with the products of his sleepless nights, tokens of his wife’s absence even as he made her present with his brushes. The canvases and the heroic, almost life-sized figures they contained were large, much too large to fit comfortably onto the walls of most people’s living rooms. Livia’s father’s figures were hopelessly classical, hopelessly real and identifiable, defenseless before the abstract competition of such as Jackson Pollock or de Kooning. Livia’s father’s figures were perfectly executed, perfectly balanced, and this perfection did not escape the eyes of those few potential purchasers who crossed the grass-jungle, commented on the butterflies, and climbed the rickety steps to the studio. But it was, in a way that no one could quite explain, a disturbing perfection.

No one wanted Livia’s father’s perfect figures to occupy their living rooms.

Livia’s father was from New York. That, as he had often told his daughters, was where most painters wanted to go. He was from there–a rueful, slightly defensive smile, particularly if Marta were present–so he had no need to go back. He had gone to art school in New Orleans. He met Marta in a coffee shop where she served café au lait and buns whose freshly baked aroma mixed with her scent as she leaned close with the pretext of serving him. She asked, and he told her he was from New York. The gazelle leaned even closer to the thin, intense face when she handed him the check.

The delicate balance of his neatly organized days and nights was decimated by the gazelle, her velvet eyes and her rough hands (a woman like you should never have rough hands; she never got rid of that roughness). They were engaged a month later and married on a beautiful spring afternoon on the green grounds of the school where the young man had learned to paint his perfect figures. Marta wore flowers in her hair. They spent a deliriously happy honeymoon in New York, where Marta convinced him with the silent insistence of her body that they must return to his native city to live. She was going to be an actress.

But it never happened. Marta’s thwarted desires to live in New York, theorized Livia, were perhaps behind her own flight north to its labyrinthine streets and minds: she had done something that Marta had always wanted to do and never managed. The intense young man was offered an adjunct position within the gray buildings behind the very green lawn on which he had plighted his troth to Marta’s. It would only be for a year, for two, for five, forever. Marta continued to work at the café, and the delirious happiness of her honeymoon was transformed by the volatile humors of her discontent into a memory, a recollection of something one had done once, of which one was not particularly proud.

She refused to pose for her husband once she was visibly pregnant with Danae–perhaps the justified modesty of a young mother, perhaps the convenient pretext for a decision made on the anniversary of the first disappointment, to mark the memory of her disillusion. Those paintings would never see New York (they would, most probably, never leave the studio at the far end of the grass jungle). Neither, she was beginning to realize, would she.

No, after her pregnancy with Danae became visible (and now her body was ruined anyway), Marta saw no further need for posing. Her husband’s hungry eyes had ritualized every detail of her breasts, the warm ripeness of hips, mouth; he vowed he could paint her from memory, so let him.

And so he did. His masterpiece was a particularly fevered product of his insomnia, Marta’s lush body disposed on a large canvas of somber colors in the attitude of the Venus of Cnidos, one hand coyly hiding the fleshy nipples of her breasts, the other covering the dark, crisp hair over the firm pubis. One potential collector had commented on the astonishing way Livia’s father’s paint-on-canvas seemed to have breathed life into the famous sculpture. Perhaps, in the end, the man hadn’t bought the painting because it was disturbing to see something that one knew very well to be a sculpture hewn out of the coldest of marbles look so alive.

The Venus of Cnidos, that particular Venus, had a special significance for the silent young painter. On the second day of their acquaintance, unable to believe his good fortune, he had awaited the terrifying apparition of Marta’s loveliness on a bench outside the coffee shop (he was to have the pleasure of her company at dinner). His first words to her praised her likeness to Venus (Aphrodite in Greek), goddess of love, of sensual pleasures. Since that evening, he had called her Venus. His Venus. During their courtship and before the first disappointment, Marta had smiled sweetly in answer to that word. She could, in truth, think of no other reaction that might be appropriate–Marta had never been inside a museum.

~

Livia

Danae’s and Livia’s teachers expressed surprise over their names. So, well, erudite. Their puzzlement was doubled after they made Marta’s acquaintance. Not that there was anything bad about her, but, well, she cleans houses and, well, you know. Marta, of course, hadn’t chosen the names (neither, for that matter, had she chosen the girls; she’d always thought boys would be more her style if she had to have children at all).

The names had been chosen by the girls’ father.

Who had spent a year in Rome, before he met Marta. He had won a scholarship and had studied at an Italian academy. Because of the months he had spent among places and things older than anyone could imagine and proudly redolent of their past, Livia’s father evoked the melancholy of old things, irretrievable things, of loss even when he was present. Livia’s father could speak Italian, haltingly, almost in whispers so that, if he were to choose the wrong word, no one would hear him. In Rome, he had gone to museums every day. You could do that in Rome.

Livia, as they’d been told on as many occasions as they asked to hear the story, was named for the beloved wife of the Emperor of all Emperors, Augustus. Danae was named for a mortal woman of surpassing beauty who had excited the desire, or the love, of Zeus, king of the Gods.

At their ages, their father had thought “love” was a more appropriate euphemism than “desire” (the literal term would have been lust); the substitution had been made. Only years later did Livia learn that Zeus’ interaction with the hapless Danae would fit neatly under the modern rubric of the one-night-stand. As a child, she had felt prickles of jealousy toward her older sister as the stories were told; Danae was the wife of a God, while she must content herself with a mortal emperor. Once she learned that Zeus had not been after anything permanent with her sister’s namesake, she felt better.

There was a painting of Danae by a famous painter named Correggio in a beautiful house in Rome, a mansion called the Villa Borghese. Danae was naked, plump, blonde (blonde? But Danae is…no, painters can make things any color they wish), her white breasts tipped with nipples like pink rosebuds. She sits on a disheveled bed, holding a piece of fabric over her lap (and, incidentally, over her pudenda), in the form of a basket or some other receptacle, in order to collect the individual coins making up the shower of gold for which Danae is famous.

The shower of gold (and this part had been left out by their father; Livia had learned about it in an Art History Class) represents, metaphorically, Zeus and his taking of the girl’s virginity. Danae’s father had vainly endeavored to protect his daughter from the God’s lustful eye, but to no avail; the shower of coins easily penetrates the roof of her tower-prison, her bower, and her lap. Livia’s father had visited Danae’s painting hundreds of times during his stay in Rome, and he had chosen that name for his beautiful daughter.

Livia (via Wikimedia)

 

Livia, when she learned that the bedroom walls created for her namesake, housed in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, were relatively more accessible than Danae’s painting (in Rome) or Marta’s statue (in Paris), had felt somewhat compensated for the slight committed (certainly unwittingly) by her father. Livia’s bower was painted to resemble a garden, full of trees, flowers, and fruit, with birds perched on the walls, pecking at seeds. Everything seemed so real that, if you forgot, one day you might reach out your hand to take a tempting peach, only to have it slap into the hard surface of a wall.

Livia’s friend Wanda, when she learned of the history of Livia’s naming, had offered to paint the walls of Livia’s bedroom in the same manner as those which had belonged to Augustus’ wife; she also promised accuracy, given that the real thing was only a subway ride uptown. Livia had accepted and she now slept her dreamless sleep nestled between Wanda’s faithful replications of the trees, birds, and fruits created to delight that other Livia, the emperor’s wife.

~

Livia was almost thirty-seven. She wore it well–she was slim with fine shoulders and clavicles and a long neck that set off her oval face. Her eyes were so blue you almost couldn’t believe it, and they slanted slightly downward at the outer corners; the effect was melancholy, on the verge of sadness, especially when she thought no one was looking at her. Her eyebrows were high, fine arches over the eyes, echoing their faint downward sweep and arching into the elongated curves of the nose with its delicate, flared nostrils.It was more a Modigliani face than a Botticelli one, although less perceptive observers often compared Livia to the timeless Venus on her half-shell, probably because of the undulating waves of blonde hair, with hints of copper, which hung down below her shoulders.

The oval of her face was wide at the forehead and narrow at the chin, a chin just rounded enough to contain the sweetly mannered delineations of a small, perfect mouth, framed by barely detectable creases defining the trajectories between the straight, cuttingly perfect nose and the corners of the cupid’s bow.

A faint network of lines was beginning to appear in the skin surrounding the stained-glass blue pools through which Livia looked out at the world, but they were just barely noticeable, and only when the light washed over her face in a certain way or from a certain angle.  This only happened in the early morning, when the sun was especially bright when Livia was drinking her café con leche in the kitchen of her Harlem apartment. But there was never anyone in the kitchen with her in the mornings–Livia saw carefully to that–so no one saw the way the web of tiny lines fanned out from the blue eyes like the traces of half-remembered journeys.

Until Danae left the aunts’ farmhouse, no one had ever called Livia anything but Danae’s sister; Danae was the only one who had made much of an impression around there. A group of ill-at-ease suitors would show up on Pearl’s and Cornelia’s porch every Sunday afternoon around four. They sat gingerly on the edges of the rickety lawn chairs and tried not to sweat too much or look too hard at Danae. Those unlucky enough not to receive Danae’s full attentions sometimes talked to Danae’s sister. The brilliant fanfare of Danae’s lips and hair silenced the gentle, sweet notes of Livia’s paleness; Livia had wondered sometimes if they knew her name. Danae was a cheerleader and once, just before she left, a football player came to visit her. Everyone whispered at school that he cried when he heard Danae had left for New Orleans to become a famous actress.

After Danae left, Livia became Livia again (or maybe she was Livia for the first time), and she was quiet, and meticulously organized, and her hopeless, silent crush on the star football player vanished into the thick, humid Louisiana air.  She did her homework with thorough care in the late afternoon hours when the sun was still strong, when other girls were walking around the tired, dusty downtown of Baton Rouge, wearing summer dresses with wide skirts and thin straps instead of sleeves even though it was only May. Danae had had dresses like that, and she had had a strapless bra to wear under them because her breasts were full and if she didn’t wear a bra they moved suggestively under the thin flowered fabric.

Aunt Pearl would have made Livia dresses like that (Pearl had offered), but Livia turned her face toward her school books and said that she was too skinny and that she didn’t like that sort of dress anyway. As a matter of fact, she didn’t like dresses, period.

In Louisiana, she had only worn jeans. Jeans with sweaters, jeans with tee shirts, jeans with blouses when someone insisted she dress up, but always jeans. Aunt Pearl made her a beautiful green dress–silk, lace, a belt at the waist–for her high-school graduation.  Livia wore the dress to the party after the ceremony, to please Aunt Pearl. Her date had vomited on it in the still hours of a Louisiana dawn’s deceptive coolness after he drunkenly tried to shove his hand between Livia’s thighs. Ashamed (because of the vomit, but also because of the memory of the boy’s hand, his breath, and she didn’t even like him), Livia took the dress to the dry-cleaner’s the next day. She never picked it up.

~

To be continued, Bad, Bad Lovers, to be continued.

Right here, next week.

Same bad time, same bad, bad place.

Come on back, now, y’hear?

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook, and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

 

The post Bad, Bad Love Has A Classical Heritage appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

The Art of Bad, Bad Love (and Its Momma)

Bad, Bad Love presents to you Installment 3 of the novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). Wherein Livia the Bad-Ass Chef muses on Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites, Ophelia (as in, Hamlet’s fiancée and Laertes’ sister), Lizzie Siddall (as in, Millais’ “Ophelia”), Livia’s long-lost daddy, and her very own Bad, Bad Love of a Momma. NB: contains references to telegrams and to telephone books (Google is at your disposal should you need it). It’s the ’90’s, remember? This is historical fiction. If you need catchin’ up, you can hit Installments 1 and 2 here and here, respectively.

~

Ophelia

Livia held her sister’s telegram up to the matter-of-fact light of mid-morning.

“Liv, 40 dinner Sat. Come Friday. D.”

It didn’t say much.  It really didn’t say anything at all.  Maybe it was the nothing at all that disturbed her.  She had already let one of the few remaining days go by, the days between now, or yesterday, and Danae’s birthday.  She had let a day go by without doing one single thing.  Livia looked up at the beautifully framed print hanging above the table where she sat. Millais’ “Ophelia.” Hamlet’s sister, Ophelia. Her prone form floated in the water amid a riot of just-plucked flowers.  The blooms were so alive and vibrant (it had been May when Ophelia died) that Ophelia’s death seemed all the more final.  Irrevocable.  Ophelia had drowned–some would say, perhaps, that she had drowned herself–but Elizabeth Siddall, the young woman who portrayed her in the painting, had committed suicide by drinking laudanum.

Livia’s eyes dropped back to the telegram and a sickening twist of guilt grabbed her stomach.  Not only had she given Danae the print, but she had told her the story. Told her the story, of course, before Danae had confessed her fascination with laudanum.  On that irrevocable Christmas night, as they were opening the bottle of Drambuie, filling their glasses and taking the first sips, Livia had told the story of Elizabeth Siddall, in lavish detail, to her fascinated sister.  The order of events argued, at least technically, for Livia’s innocence, but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that the whole thing was at least partly her fault.

~

Elizabeth Siddall was a little-known painter who had, for a brief period, belonged to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Livia had written a paper about her in college for an Art History course, noting the inappropriateness of continuing to call the pre-Raphaelite association a brotherhood once Elizabeth Siddall had been inducted into it. The professor had slashed through that sentence with a red pen and written, to the side in the margin, “irrelevant”.  Livia did not agree, and would not agree, despite the mediocre grade she received for the paper.

Elizabeth Siddall had been the lover of at least two members of the Brotherhood. For one of them–Millais–she had posed for hours in a bathtub filled with water and greenery collected furtively from friends’ gardens and lawns after midnight. In Millais’ painting, Miss Siddall wore a heavy gown of brocade that kept pulling her feet under the water (it wanted to take all of her down, with the weight of its heavy skirts, beads, brocade, but it wasn’t far to the bottom of the bathtub).

Miss Siddall, with her pale, porcelain face, had lain there resisting the weight of that gown for just a little longer while her periwinkle-blue eyes stared upward. She would, Livia imagined, have tried not to blink while she allowed her hands to float at her sides, lifeless, as if she were dead. Her lover would have told her that he wanted her to look dead.  He had been thoughtful enough to light several oil lamps beneath the curved porcelain surface in order that his lady love, his muse, might not be cold; after that, he’d have given the matter no further thought.

Elizabeth Siddall, who had caught a cold, or maybe it had been pneumonia, during the implacable hours she’d spent dead in the bathtub, was not known to have left behind any paintings (despite the fact that she figured in several). For that reason, and for the “impertinence” of a number of her observations, Livia’s paper on Elizabeth Siddall had received a C. Elizabeth Siddall, wrote the professor, was irrelevant.

Livia did not see the irrelevance at all–there she was, Elizabeth Siddall, Ophelia, looking like Livia (and Livia had, at that time, aspired to become a painter), Elizabeth in that heavy gown, her pale face like the most fragile of eggshells amid all the red-gold tresses that floated in dead abandon around it. Who knew? She had probably lain there in the bathtub, with the ineffectual lamps beneath it, thinking about suicide, about how Ophelia had thought it the only way out, so perhaps she should consider it, too.

Miss Siddall’s forehead was high, Elizabethan. Livia deduced that she must have plucked the baby-hair from the tender scalp around her hairline to achieve a more Elizabethan effect (Elizabethan beauties, it seemed, had often resorted to that ruse). In protest over her grade (and, in truth, for the oblivious professor’s benefit), Livia had begun to painfully pluck the baby-hairs from just beyond her own hairline. For several months of her sophomore year, the skin around Livia’s hairline was noticeably irritated, and her roommates complained bitterly of the hours during which Livia occupied the bathroom. When one of them asked if she was getting eczema, Livia had desisted. She consoled herself with the idea that perhaps Millais had simply painted Ophelia that way, even though Elizabeth Siddall’s hairline was lower.

Livia had not considered Elizabeth Siddall at all irrelevant to the development of 19th-century painting.  Especially given the fact that her life had been ended by a self-administered dose of laudanum.  Livia was certain that Elizabeth Siddall’s suicide (and the fact that she had left behind no paintings) had been Millais’ fault.

~

Well and good, but she should have been more responsible with that information.  Danae, like a child (or—Livia reluctantly allowed the thought to formulate itself—like Marta) was one of those people who shouldn’t have too much information.

Livia was drinking café con leche from a paper cup. She bought her coffee at the diner on the corner, her corner, the corner of 146th and Broadway. Livia never made anything to eat or drink at home in the mornings, although sometimes during the evening she prepared chocolate tarts—heavy cream, foreign liqueurs, baker’s flour, chocolate from Switzerland. She usually bought Swiss chocolate, although they make chocolate every bit as well as the Swiss in a little-visited region of Argentina, and Livia used this chocolate in her desserts from time to time. They made chocolate in Chile; Livia had read Isabel Allende not long before, underlining with a chocolate-brown marker the lyrical passages in which a chocolate-town was rendered a metaphor of passionate coitus.

She was allowing her mind to wander. When she had time, after she rescued Danae, she could think about the Chilean chocolate.

Livia carefully folded the crisp telegram and returned it to the envelope in which she had received it. She didn’t question her automatic, meticulous gestures; she had taught herself that one kept things in their containers, in their envelopes, in their places. She had learned early on that, if her organizational efforts were persistent enough, the chaos would have no choice but to fall into line.

Telegraphs were old-fashioned, and one had to go considerably out of one’s way to send them. Danae could have called, but that wasn’t the sort of solution that would appeal to Danae.

Livia placed the envelope on the table, squarely on top of her other correspondence, and reached for the telephone book. She found a listing for Delta and made a reservation on a flight to New Orleans for Friday at noon. It was Wednesday.

~

Venus

It wasn’t all Livia’s fault. Livia had merely given the print and told the story, and she had done those things in complete innocence, if not in complete ignorance—she’d had all her life to acquaint herself with Danae’s theatricalities and, yes, she probably should have known better. But Marta also got a share of the blame–certainly a greater share of it, Livia comforted herself, than hers.  Danae’s desire to take laudanum on the night of her fortieth birthday had probably originated with the volatile humors of Marta’s chronic dissatisfaction, with her determination to get the most in exchange for her beauty.

If they’d only stayed in the little wooden house with a jungle in the backyard and her father’s studio at the end of that treacherous tangle of plants, it was at least possible that none of the astonishing events which were to take place within the next seventy-two hours of the thirty-sixth year of Livia’s life (and of the thirty-ninth of her sister’s) would have come to pass. If Marta had just stayed put, just allowed life to give her what it chose to and accepted the absolute adoration placed reverently at her feet by her husband, Danae wouldn’t have hidden a tiny vial with no label behind the mirror on her dressing table, just beneath the print of Ophelia. If Marta hadn’t set her sights too high for her own good (or anyone else’s), Livia might still have boyfriends, she might own more dresses (there were dresses in the hall closet, but they were for a very specific purpose), and she wouldn’t be mulling over the preparation of exquisite dishes into which her sister might try to slip deadly drops of laudanum.

~

Livia couldn’t remember her father’s name. Once she had asked Danae, but her sister had claimed not to know it either. While they lived in the little wooden house with the jungle of grasses in the backyard, Livia and Danae spent the afternoons playing in their father’s studio. You had to walk across the backyard to get there, an arduous journey through thick plants and grasses that always seemed as though they might be hiding something terrifying. The backyard, the grown-up Livia realized, had actually been quite small, but to her five-year-old eyes, it was endless—tall grass, higher than her waist, and strange, beautiful flowers that looked like lace and had no names. Butterflies played there, alighting like miracles onto the lacy blooms. Marta was always asking Livia’s father to mow the backyard, but he never seemed to get around to it. And, he said, the butterflies would go somewhere else if there were no more jungle.

When they finally reached it, the studio door was always closed.  Danae knocked because she was the oldest, the tallest. It was a game. Silence for half a minute or so, then Danae’s voice, self-consciously mature,

“Looks like there’s nobody home…I guess we’ll have to come back another time.”

Making noise on the rickety steps with their feet, as though they were wearing high heels (you had to wear high heels when you went visiting), as though they were leaving, and then the door would open to reveal their father’s gentle, serious face brightened momentarily by a smile of feigned surprise, his pale-gold eyebrows raised.

“Oh, how very nice to see you, please come in. I hope you haven’t been waiting long; I was in the back room…”

Danae and Livia giggled; there was no back room.

Livia’s father had pale blond hair, like very pale gold, the color some of the jungle grasses turned in autumn. It was long; he wore it tied back with a fine strip of leather. He was very tall, very thin. He had very white teeth, and dimples that you could see when he smiled. Livia knew that, if they had stayed in the little house with the jungle in the backyard, everyone would have said she was her father’s daughter.

Livia’s father could repair just about anything. The neighbors brought their broken toasters, clocks, even television sets, to the studio and then came back for them a few days later, to find them shining like they never had before, better than new, they always said. The shop was full of wonderful bits and pieces of the appliances Livia’s father had taken apart—metal things with black grit in the crevices of their screws, shiny things made of something silver that always felt cold to the touch.

Livia would pick out a group of cold, shiny, silver things to play with, and they would be hers for a few days, their shapes and meanings intelligible only to her. She was allowed to keep her things in a small pile on the end of her father’s worktable. When she arrived, breathless, after the journey across the jungle, they would be there waiting, separate and hers. Her criteria for choosing them appeared, to her father or anyone else who might be watching her, arbitrary, but Livia’s game had very definite rules. The things had to feel right together, and they had to warm quickly in her hands.

Livia’s playing was studied and deliberate. And very quiet; such quietness would have disturbed more observant parents. First, she would contemplate her things with a very old frown on her small face. After several minutes of frowning, she might reach down a hand and slowly, deliberately, change the position of one of the things, or pick it up and hold it for a few minutes, studying it and frowning before returning it to its former position.

Everyone had always said Danae was Marta’s daughter, the spitting image, as one neighbor had opined.  Danae was not interested in the unidentifiable metal bits that sparked her sister’s imagination. She kept her dolls in the studio. She only played with Barbies (Skipper was too young; she wasn’t a grown-up yet. Danae was only interested in grown-ups). She had a Ken doll.  Which of the Barbies would be his date to the cocktail parties and balls Danae prepared for them beneath their father’s paint table was capriciously decided according to criteria as mysterious as Livia’s, but the Barbie favored with Ken’s plastic attentions for the afternoon was always an actress, a movie star. The cocktail parties and balls were held in Los Angeles and New York (Danae had not yet been aware of the vast continent which separated those two capitals). When Danae grew up, she was going to marry a man who looked just like Ken.

Danae had a book about Cinderella, which she also kept in the studio. She loved the real glitter sprinkled on Cinderella’s ball gown. Most of it had come off, but if you squinted, the glitter that was left sparkled and it looked like it was all over the dress. Every afternoon, before even allowing her father to help her off with her coat, Danae headed straight for the metal shelf and waited for her father to hand the book to her, so that she could run her fingers over the rough glitter-diamonds. Livia noticed that this made even more of the glitter come off, but Danae didn’t seem to care.

Sometimes, when Danae was invited to friends’ houses to play (Livia had very few friends, and none of them lived in the neighborhood), she surreptitiously touched Cinderella’s gown with her own thin fingers, and then took the glamorous dolls out of their boxes and arranged them in tableaux-vivants. They only moved or spoke in her mind; her imagination’s version of adult actions and words was much more satisfying without inevitably wooden and doll-like gestures.

The little house with the jungle behind it always smelled like cigarette smoke and old cooking grease. Livia had been conscious, even then, of the fact that her father kept strange hours, and that he allowed her and her sister to keep them with him. Livia and Danae always saw several hours of nighttime darkness, while other children, in the summer, were sent to bed while it was still light outside. Their father never seemed to mind—or notice—what time they went to sleep, and sometimes he forgot to tell them to brush their teeth, so Livia started remembering for herself, and reminding Danae. The meals at odd hours, the clothes that were too big when they got them and much too small when they had to stop wearing them…Livia, as soon as she had started to theorize, had satisfactorily explained the orderly arrangement of shoes on the floor of her closet.

In the studio was a large wooden screen, just beyond Livia’s father’s workbench, and behind the screen were Livia’s father’s paintings. He painted at night, sometimes until dawn, while his daughters slept, while he waited to hear Marta’s steps on the gravel leading up to the house. During the young months of their marriage, the sounds produced by those steps had sometimes disappeared for a few moments (while she crossed the front lawn, which he did keep mowed). Then the swishing sound of her body as it moved through the jungle of grasses on the treacherous journey to the studio. There was always a spasm of inspiration after he had penetrated her, his hypnotizing, beautiful, maddening Marta.  Dark, musky, like a doe, like a gazelle (sometimes he called her his gazelle, softly, murmuring the words against her dark hair, darker than her skin, as he moved inside her).  She was like an animal, his Marta, a young, innocent animal.

~

And, because of her innocence, sometimes she was savagely brutal. During the last year of their unfortunate union, while the volatile humors of Marta’s insidious and incurable discontent worked their dark magic in her soul and she stopped loving him (if, indeed, she ever had), she didn’t visit the studio. There were no kisses into the oil and turpentine-smell his embraces had given her (that smell had lingered on her body as she lay naked between the rough sheets of their bed. Her warmth distilled it and diffused it through the air like perfume). During the final months, the steps of his gazelle-wife stopped once the gravel had been traversed. The steps came later and later each evening, their once-fluid rhythm marked by the exaggerated counterpoint of drunkenness until, finally, they did not come at all.

Marta’s likeness to a savage, wild thing that neither reasons nor is responsible for the consequences of its actions was what led Marta to do what she did.  And it had probably led her to finish up the way she did.  That was Livia imagined her patient father telling himself as he watched purple dawns dilute into the cerulean blues of early morning, blue with sweet white wisps of cloud curling fresh across it, bright blue like water to dilute the whiskey he had drunk during the dark hours, he didn’t remember how much. Blue and white and purple, if you mixed those colors together, you got lilac, delicate and sweet, like the flower itself, its perfume tenuous and penetrating all at once. Once his wife had had a lilac suit, and she hadn’t come home last night.

~

To be continued, Bad, Bad Lovers, to be continued.

Right here, next week.

Same bad time, same bad, bad place.

Come on back, now, y’hear?

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook, and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

The post The Art of Bad, Bad Love (and Its Momma) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

The Art of Bad, Bad Love (and Its Momma)

Bad, Bad Love presents to you Installment 3 of the novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). Wherein Livia the Bad-Ass Chef muses on Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites, Ophelia (as in, Hamlet’s fiancée and Laertes’ sister), Lizzie Siddall (as in, Millais’ “Ophelia”), Livia’s long-lost daddy, and her very own Bad, Bad Love of a Momma. NB: contains references to telegrams and to telephone books (Google is at your disposal should you need it). It’s the ’90’s, remember? This is historical fiction. If you need catchin’ up, you can hit Installments 1 and 2 here and here, respectively.

~

Ophelia

 

Livia held her sister’s telegram up to the matter-of-fact light of mid-morning.

“Liv, 40 dinner Sat. Come Friday. D.”

It didn’t say much.  It really didn’t say anything at all.  Maybe it was the nothing at all that disturbed her.  She had already let one of the few remaining days go by, the days between now, or yesterday, and Danae’s birthday.  She had let a day go by without doing one single thing.  Livia looked up at the beautifully framed print hanging above the table where she sat. Millais’ “Ophelia.” Hamlet’s sister, Ophelia. Her prone form floated in the water amid a riot of just-plucked flowers.  The blooms were so alive and vibrant (it had been May when Ophelia died) that Ophelia’s death seemed all the more final.  Irrevocable.  Ophelia had drowned–some would say, perhaps, that she had drowned herself–but Elizabeth Siddall, the young woman who portrayed her in the painting, had committed suicide by drinking laudanum.

Livia’s eyes dropped back to the telegram and a sickening twist of guilt grabbed her stomach.  Not only had she given Danae the print, but she had told her the story. Told her the story, of course, before Danae had confessed her fascination with laudanum.  On that irrevocable Christmas night, as they were opening the bottle of Drambuie, filling their glasses and taking the first sips, Livia had told the story of Elizabeth Siddall, in lavish detail, to her fascinated sister.  The order of events argued, at least technically, for Livia’s innocence, but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that the whole thing was at least partly her fault.

~

Elizabeth Siddall was a little-known painter who had, for a brief period, belonged to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Livia had written a paper about her in college for an Art History course, noting the inappropriateness of continuing to call the pre-Raphaelite association a brotherhood once Elizabeth Siddall had been inducted into it. The professor had slashed through that sentence with a red pen and written, to the side in the margin, “irrelevant”.  Livia did not agree, and would not agree, despite the mediocre grade she received for the paper.

Elizabeth Siddall had been the lover of at least two members of the Brotherhood. For one of them–Millais–she had posed for hours in a bathtub filled with water and greenery collected furtively from friends’ gardens and lawns after midnight. In Millais’ painting, Miss Siddall wore a heavy gown of brocade that kept pulling her feet under the water (it wanted to take all of her down, with the weight of its heavy skirts, beads, brocade, but it wasn’t far to the bottom of the bathtub).

Miss Siddall, with her pale, porcelain face, had lain there resisting the weight of that gown for just a little longer while her periwinkle-blue eyes stared upward. She would, Livia imagined, have tried not to blink while she allowed her hands to float at her sides, lifeless, as if she were dead. Her lover would have told her that he wanted her to look dead.  He had been thoughtful enough to light several oil lamps beneath the curved porcelain surface in order that his lady love, his muse, might not be cold; after that, he’d have given the matter no further thought.

Elizabeth Siddall, who had caught a cold, or maybe it had been pneumonia, during the implacable hours she’d spent dead in the bathtub, was not known to have left behind any paintings (despite the fact that she figured in several). For that reason, and for the “impertinence” of a number of her observations, Livia’s paper on Elizabeth Siddall had received a C. Elizabeth Siddall, wrote the professor, was irrelevant.

Livia did not see the irrelevance at all–there she was, Elizabeth Siddall, Ophelia, looking like Livia (and Livia had, at that time, aspired to become a painter), Elizabeth in that heavy gown, her pale face like the most fragile of eggshells amid all the red-gold tresses that floated in dead abandon around it. Who knew? She had probably lain there in the bathtub, with the ineffectual lamps beneath it, thinking about suicide, about how Ophelia had thought it the only way out, so perhaps she should consider it, too.

Miss Siddall’s forehead was high, Elizabethan. Livia deduced that she must have plucked the baby-hair from the tender scalp around her hairline to achieve a more Elizabethan effect (Elizabethan beauties, it seemed, had often resorted to that ruse). In protest over her grade (and, in truth, for the oblivious professor’s benefit), Livia had begun to painfully pluck the baby-hairs from just beyond her own hairline. For several months of her sophomore year, the skin around Livia’s hairline was noticeably irritated, and her roommates complained bitterly of the hours during which Livia occupied the bathroom. When one of them asked if she was getting eczema, Livia had desisted. She consoled herself with the idea that perhaps Millais had simply painted Ophelia that way, even though Elizabeth Siddall’s hairline was lower.

Livia had not considered Elizabeth Siddall at all irrelevant to the development of 19th-century painting.  Especially given the fact that her life had been ended by a self-administered dose of laudanum.  Livia was certain that Elizabeth Siddall’s suicide (and the fact that she had left behind no paintings) had been Millais’ fault.

~

Well and good, but she should have been more responsible with that information.  Danae, like a child (or—Livia reluctantly allowed the thought to formulate itself—like Marta) was one of those people who shouldn’t have too much information.

Livia was drinking café con leche from a paper cup. She bought her coffee at the diner on the corner, her corner, the corner of 146th and Broadway. Livia never made anything to eat or drink at home in the mornings, although sometimes during the evening she prepared chocolate tarts—heavy cream, foreign liqueurs, baker’s flour, chocolate from Switzerland. She usually bought Swiss chocolate, although they make chocolate every bit as well as the Swiss in a little-visited region of Argentina, and Livia used this chocolate in her desserts from time to time. They made chocolate in Chile; Livia had read Isabel Allende not long before, underlining with a chocolate-brown marker the lyrical passages in which a chocolate-town was rendered a metaphor of passionate coitus.

She was allowing her mind to wander. When she had time, after she rescued Danae, she could think about the Chilean chocolate.

Livia carefully folded the crisp telegram and returned it to the envelope in which she had received it. She didn’t question her automatic, meticulous gestures; she had taught herself that one kept things in their containers, in their envelopes, in their places. She had learned early on that, if her organizational efforts were persistent enough, the chaos would have no choice but to fall into line. Telegraphs were old-fashioned, and one had to go considerably out of one’s way to send them. Danae could have called, but that wasn’t the sort of solution that would appeal to Danae.

Livia placed the envelope on the table, squarely on top of her other correspondence, and reached for the telephone book. She found a listing for Delta and made a reservation on a flight to New Orleans for Friday at noon.  It was Wednesday.

~

Venus

It wasn’t all Livia’s fault. Livia had merely given the print and told the story, and she had done those things in complete innocence, if not in complete ignorance—she’d had all her life to acquaint herself with Danae’s theatricalities and, yes, she probably should have known better. But Marta also got a share of the blame–certainly a greater share of it, Livia comforted herself, than hers.  Danae’s desire to take laudanum on the night of her fortieth birthday had probably originated with the volatile humors of Marta’s chronic dissatisfaction, with her determination to get the most in exchange for her beauty. If they’d only stayed in the little wooden house with a jungle in the backyard and her father’s studio at the end of that treacherous tangle of plants, it was at least possible that none of the astonishing events which were to take place within the next seventy-two hours of the thirty-sixth year of Livia’s life (and of the thirty-ninth of her sister’s) would have come to pass. If Marta had just stayed put, just allowed life to give her what it chose to and accepted the absolute adoration placed reverently at her feet by her husband, Danae wouldn’t have hidden a tiny vial with no label behind the mirror on her dressing table, just beneath the print of Ophelia. If Marta hadn’t set her sights too high for her own good (or anyone else’s), Livia might still have boyfriends, she might own more dresses (there were dresses in the hall closet, but they were for a very specific purpose), and she wouldn’t be mulling over the preparation of exquisite dishes into which her sister might try to slip deadly drops of laudanum.

~

Livia couldn’t remember her father’s name. Once she had asked Danae, but her sister had claimed not to know it either. While they lived in the little wooden house with the jungle of grasses in the back yard, Livia and Danae spent the afternoons playing in their father’s studio. You had to walk across the back yard to get there, an arduous journey through thick plants and grasses that always seemed as though they might be hiding something terrifying. The backyard, the grown-up Livia realized, had actually been quite small, but to her five-year-old eyes it was endless—tall grass, higher than her waist, and strange, beautiful flowers that looked like lace and had no names. Butterflies played there, alighting like miracles onto the lacy blooms. Marta was always asking Livia’s father to mow the back yard, but he never seemed to get around to it.  And, he said, the butterflies would go somewhere else if there were no more jungle.

When they finally reached it, the studio door was always closed.  Danae knocked because she was the oldest, the tallest. It was a game. Silence for half a minute or so, then Danae’s voice, self-consciously mature,

“Looks like there’s nobody home…I guess we’ll have to come back another time.”

Making noise on the rickety steps with their feet, as though they were wearing high heels (you had to wear high heels when you went visiting), as though they were leaving, and then the door would open to reveal their father’s gentle, serious face brightened momentarily by a smile of feigned surprise, his pale-gold eyebrows raised.

“Oh, how very nice to see you, please come in. I hope you haven’t been waiting long; I was in the back room…”

Danae and Livia giggled; there was no back room.

Livia’s father had pale blond hair, like very pale gold, the color some of the jungle grasses turned in autumn. It was long; he wore it tied back with a fine strip of leather. He was very tall, very thin. He had very white teeth, and dimples that you could see when he smiled. Livia knew that, if they had stayed in the little house with the jungle in the back yard, everyone would have said she was her father’s daughter.

Livia’s father could repair just about anything. The neighbors brought their broken toasters, clocks, even television sets, to the studio and then came back for them a few days later, to find them shining like they never had before, better than new, they always said. The shop was full of wonderful bits and pieces of the appliances Livia’s father had taken apart—metal things with black grit in the crevices of their screws, shiny things made of something silver that always felt cold to the touch.

Livia would pick out a group of cold, shiny, silver things to play with, and they would be hers for a few days, their shapes and meanings intelligible only to her. She was allowed to keep her things in a small pile on the end of her father’s worktable. When she arrived, breathless, after the journey across the jungle, they would be there waiting, separate and hers. Her criteria for choosing them appeared, to her father or anyone else who might be watching her, arbitrary, but Livia’s game had very definite rules. The things had to feel right together, and they had to warm quickly in her hands.  Livia’s playing was studied and deliberate. And very quiet; such quietness would have disturbed more observant parents.  First, she would contemplate her things with a very old frown on her small face. After several minutes of frowning, she might reach down a hand and slowly, deliberately, change the position of one of the things, or pick it up and hold it for a few minutes, studying it and frowning before returning it to its former position.

Everyone had always said Danae was Marta’s daughter, the spitting image, as one neighbor had opined.  Danae was not interested in the unidentifiable metal bits that sparked her sister’s imagination. She kept her dolls in the studio. She only played with Barbies (Skipper was too young; she wasn’t a grown-up yet. Danae was only interested in grown-ups). She had a Ken doll.  Which of the Barbies would be his date to the cocktail parties and balls Danae prepared for them beneath their father’s paint table was capriciously decided according to criteria as mysterious as Livia’s, but the Barbie favored with Ken’s plastic attentions for the afternoon was always an actress, a movie star. The cocktail parties and balls were held in Los Angeles and New York (Danae had not yet been aware of the vast continent which separated those two capitals). When Danae grew up, she was going to marry a man who looked just like Ken.

Danae had a book about Cindarella, which she also kept in the studio. She loved the real glitter sprinkled on Cinderella’s ball gown. Most of it had come off, but if you squinted, the glitter that was left sparkled and it looked like it was all over the dress. Every afternoon, before even allowing her father to help her off with her coat, Danae headed straight for the metal shelf and waited for her father to hand the book to her, so that she could run her fingers over the rough glitter-diamonds. Livia noticed that this made even more of the glitter come off, but Danae didn’t seem to care. Sometimes, when Danae was invited to friends’ houses to play (Livia had very few friends, and none of them lived in the neighborhood), she surreptitiously touched Cindarella’s gown with her own thin fingers, and then took the glamorous dolls out of their boxes and arranged them in tableaux-vivants. They only moved or spoke in her mind; her imagination’s version of adult actions and words was much more satisfying without inevitably wooden and doll-like gestures.

The little house with the jungle behind it always smelled like cigarette smoke and old cooking grease. Livia had been conscious, even then, of the fact that her father kept strange hours, and that he allowed her and her sister to keep them with him. Livia and Danae always saw several hours of nighttime darkness, while other children, in the summer, were sent to bed while it was still light outside. Their father never seemed to mind—or notice—what time they went to sleep, and sometimes he forgot to tell them to brush their teeth, so Livia started remembering for herself, and reminding Danae. The meals at odd hours, the clothes that were too big when they got them and much too small when they had to stop wearing them…Livia, as soon as she had started to theorize, had satisfactorily explained the orderly arrangement of shoes on the floor of her closet.

In the studio was a large wooden screen, just beyond Livia’s father’s workbench, and behind the screen were Livia’s father’s paintings.  He painted at night, sometimes until dawn, while his daughters slept, while he waited to hear Marta’s steps on the gravel leading up to the house.  During the young months of their marriage, the sounds produced by those steps had sometimes disappeared for a few moments (while she crossed the front lawn, which he did keep mowed).  Then the swishing sound of her body as it moved through the jungle of grasses on the treacherous journey to the studio. There was always a spasm of inspiration after he had penetrated her, his hypnotizing, beautiful, maddening Marta.  Dark, musky, like a doe, like a gazelle (sometimes he called her his gazelle, softly, murmuring the words against her dark hair, darker than her skin, as he moved inside her).  She was like an animal, his Marta, a young, innocent animal.

~

And, because of her innocence, sometimes she was savagely brutal. During the last year of their unfortunate union, while the volatile humors of Marta’s insidious and incurable discontent worked their dark magic in her soul and she stopped loving him (if, indeed, she ever had), she didn’t visit the studio.  There were no kisses into the oil and turpentine-smell his embraces had given her (that smell had lingered on her body as she lay naked between the rough sheets of their bed. Her warmth distilled it and diffused it through the air like perfume).  During the final months, the steps of his gazelle-wife stopped once the gravel had been traversed.  The steps came later and later each evening, their once-fluid rhythm marked by the exaggerated counterpoint of drunkenness until, finally, they did not come at all.

Marta’s likeness to a savage, wild thing that neither reasons nor is responsible for the consequences of its actions was what led Marta to do what she did.  And it had probably led her to finish up the way she did.  That was Livia imagined her patient father telling himself as he watched purple dawns dilute into the cerulean blues of early morning, blue with sweet white wisps of cloud curling fresh across it, bright blue like water to dilute the whisky he had drunk during the dark hours, he didn’t remember how much.  Blue and white and purple, if you mixed those colors together, you got lilac, delicate and sweet, like the flower itself, its perfume tenuous and penetrating all at once.  Once his wife had had a lilac suit, and she hadn’t come home last night.

~

To be continued, Bad, Bad Lovers, to be continued.

Right here, next week.

Same bad time, same bad, bad place.

Come on back, now, y’hear?

~

 

The post The Art of Bad, Bad Love (and Its Momma) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Cooks Up Some Onions

Welcome, Bad, Bad Lovers and new friends alike, to this second installment of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen)! A little novella-thing I threw together in the mid-’90s, just after I threw Husband #1 out and put my foot through that painting. If you think you detect a certain, umm, resentment toward the male sex in general, well, consider the context. In this segment we ruminate a bit on Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller (don’t worry, it’s lite, and they’re salacious), and watch Livia, our Bad-Ass Chef and protagonist, in action, for the first time, in a kitchen… as she tries both to do her prep for the day and to come up with a plan that will stop her self-centered sister from offing her self-centered self because she’s not happy. If you’re new to this party and want to catch up, you can find the first installment here.

~

It was funny.

Where was the train?  Really late stood in real danger of becoming preposterously late. Livia sighed and tapped her foot.  She wished for a cigarette, but it was before noon.  Livia never smoked before noon.

After that drunken Christmas night and the sober morning coffee, the topic of the laudanum had never come up again. But it was there, beneath the surface, like a rip-tide waiting to pull you out to sea on a July afternoon so calm and sweet such things don’t even seem possible. It was there when Danae had her eyes done; it was there when she stopped auditioning for parts.  And it was there when she stopped complaining about Bretton’s lovers.

Where had Danae even heard of laudanum?

The train was taking forever.  Preposterously late had now tipped over into being so late that something truly out of the ordinary would have to have happened–they might even be worried about her.  Livia relaxed and accepted the lightness, the blameless feeling of lateness that she really could not have prevented, even if she had left on time. Besides, it would give her more time to think.

Danae had played Mimi once in a low-budget production of La Dame aux Camélias–translated into English of course; Danae’s French was atrocious.  But Livia hadn’t gone to New Orleans to see the show. Neither had she read La Dame aux Camélias, so she wasn’t sure whether laudanum figured in that work or not, but it was certainly possible.

Laudanum. The word was sweet, lyrical. It didn’t sound like death. It sounded like sleep.That was what Danae would desire in the waning hours of the night before she turned forty. Just oblivion, just the heaviness of thick, midnight-blue curtains made of velvet falling gently over the stage on which she had just taken a graceful bow. Nothing could be easier, and there was no other way–once something has reached perfection, it has nowhere to go but down, toward imperfection, and Danae’s face and body were nothing if not perfect.

Danae had been beautiful all her life, devastatingly beautiful, like Marta. And everyone knows that beauty doesn’t age well. Or at least men don’t think so, and men were all that had ever counted for Danae. Well, men and acting, but the acting, if the truth were to be told, was really for the men. All that beauty and all that acting in vain. Danae had married Bretton, and she had eyes only for him.

Danae had always made bad choices. When they were little, sometimes Marta had to take them to work with her in the mornings. They would watch game shows in the blue silence of someone else’s living room while Marta scrubbed and vacuumed. The lemony scents of cleaning fluid reached them like echoes from far off down the hall, with hints of furniture wax that smelled like things were just right in absent housewife’s world. The game shows lasted all morning; there was nothing else on. Livia was an expert at choosing the door that hid the prize, or the category of questions that would be easiest to answer. If she had collected all the prizes she had rightfully won, she wouldn’t be on her way to work right now, and she certainly wouldn’t be waiting for a train. But her sister was hopeless when faced with choices. The buzzer sounded long before Danae had read and considered all of the possible categories of questions, or even gotten a good look at all three doors.

And even if her sister had chosen more wisely when picking a husband, it had been proven so many times that Livia was bored with the subject:  a woman could have all the beauty in the world, classic beauty, beauty that just takes your breath away, beauty like Danae’s, but men would infallibly fantasize about youth. It didn’t even have to be particularly attractive youth–although attractiveness was certainly alright with most of them, run-of-the-mill would also do.  It was the youth that counted. Even the ancient Chinese had written about it, and the Arabs after them:  young women kept old men from getting older. Or so they thought.

Finally, the train. It pulled to a sluggish stop and Livia congratulated herself on the fact that she happened to be standing exactly in front of a door. She would definitely get a seat.

Livia was willing to wager that nine-tenths of women’s suicides were traceable, irrevocably, ineluctably, back to a man…well, she would actually be willing to go out on a limb and say one-hundred percent. For that very reason, she would never consider such a gesture as the one contemplated by Danae.  The blame would ultimately belong to some man, and Livia wouldn’t be able to stand that, not even dead.

~

Livia looked at her watch. She would be almost an hour late; the subway had stopped for fifteen minutes between 110th and 96th. She took a long, deep breath, reminded herself that it wasn’t her fault and pulled her book from her bag–she should try to think about something else for awhile, or she would have to face the consequences at work. Livia was a chef who firmly believed that emotional turmoil (which she diligently avoided) was reflected in creative output. That might be fine for paintings, but was definitely not an advantage where soufflés were concerned. On days when she was upset or agitated, she had noticed an inexplicable flatness in her dishes that no amount of herbs or spices seemed to remedy.

She pushed Danae to a far corner of her mind and turned her attention resolutely to her book. She was reading her favorite volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, for the fourth time, the volume in which Anaïs’ friendships with Henry and the impossible June are narrated. Livia, theorized Livia (Livia was fond of theorizing), was fascinated by June because June reminded her of Marta. June could have been Marta–beautiful, dissatisfied, destructive. Anaïs had said, referring to Henry, that men of genius often fell desperately, irrevocably in love with terribly beautiful but otherwise unexceptional women. Anaïs thought, and Livia agreed, that this was owed to the fact that men of genius were so preoccupied with their own genius that more than superficial dealings with a woman of genius would be unthinkable, destructive to the masculine genius, unquestionably the more significant of the two.

The terribly beautiful but otherwise unexceptional women who so fascinated men of genius were convenient to masculine creativity.  They could be placed onto pedestals from which they would never (of their own accord, at any rate) descend. They could be touched, revered, kissed and admired at the whim of the man of genius before being packed off across a jungle of grasses to bed, smelling of linseed oil and turpentine (Marta–Livia’s father had been a painter), or sent back to New York from Paris on a slow-moving ocean liner because their presence was too terrible (June). They might then be desperately missed, and their presence would not dilute the creative juices their absence had set in motion.

Terribly beautiful but otherwise unexceptional women were often ambitious in superficial and ultimately harmful ways (they want to be actresses, or movie stars). The unthinking acts they were capable of committing in service of their ambitions were, again, convenient to the masculine genius because of the pain, sweet and cutting, which they inflicted. This pain, too, resulted in spasms of creativity such as those which produced Miller’s Tropics or Livia’s father’s perfect figures.

Livia was also of the opinion that unions between a man of genius and a woman of genius were, more often than not, tormented and destructive. Anaïs had been married to an unexceptional man who never seemed to have gotten in the way of her genius.  That, opined Livia, was the way to go. Camille Claudel and Frida Kahlo would have done better marrying some anonymous and hardworking banker who departed each morning for his office and left them in peace with their genius. Anaïs never discussed her husband in her diaries, at least not the volumes Livia had read. She went out without him and stayed until the first hint of peacock blue brightened the sky and told of the coming dawn. Pale and solitary, she would take the train back to Louveciennes in the early morning and write in her diary until the train reached the small suburban station. Livia was sure that, once Anaïs reached her somnolent house, her unexceptional husband would have abandoned it for his office. Anaïs could then have breakfast alone, in her underthings if she so desired, and not be perturbed by the unexceptional man’s presence.

What was more, the unexceptional man seemed not to have gotten in Anaïs’ way with regard to much of anything at all. Anaïs had sometimes slept at Henry and June’s apartment in Clichy. She had certainly been Henry’s lover, and maybe even June’s. She drank champagne with unknown Russian painters who kissed her neck surreptitiously on the crowded dance floor of a boite de nuit. Anaïs talked of making love, but she never indicated that her husband had been her partner.

Danae was a woman of terrible beauty. Danae again. Livia tensed–there were still several more stops before hers. Her tranquility was being destroyed. But it was probably inevitable; it wasn’t every day that a woman had to stop her sister from drinking laudanum. Livia was forced to admit that her sister, despite her beauty was, like June and like Marta, otherwise unexceptional, and perhaps even a bit neurotic.  Livia would have liked to believe otherwise; her sister had, happily, lived under the delusion of her exceptionality for the past thirty-nine years. In Danae’s case, however, it had not been she who was the destructive force in her union with masculine genius (Bretton was a pompous ass, but Livia was forced to concede that Shakespeare, under his direction, was breathtakingly alive). It had been her partner. Bretton was an incorrigible and indiscreet womanizer. He felt that a right to as many women as he could convince to shed their clothes before his wolfish gaze was the prerogative of his genius (he had even said as much to Danae), and he liked them younger all the time.

Columbus Circle. Time to focus. Livia closed Anaïs’ diary, and put it back inside her bag. She exited the subway station and headed toward 57th.

~

Wild Onions

Livia’s work station was scrupulously clean, meticulously organized. She liked to work alone, in silence. The other chefs were men. If she talked to them at all, it was to ask for a bit of ginger, a pinch of cloves, if they had any extra garlic, but even the perfunctory interchanges necessary for such requests were infrequent. If she engaged them in conversation, they might get in the way of her genius.

Livia’s shift began at one and ended at eight. During her first months at the restaurant, she had been on duty during the dinner hours, when the world beyond the metal door with its ship-like porthole bustled with the sophisticated conversation of nighttime diners. Livia preferred the preparatory shift; she liked to work calmly and methodically, without the pressures of orders that arrived haphazardly, whose individual demands destroyed the lovely symmetry of the succession of tasks she had devised for herself. Good cuisine required order, and individual orders which required filling then and there were disorderly.

No theorizing was necessary in order to account for Livia’s love of order in a kitchen. There were two very obvious explanations for this preference. One was the chaotic way in which Marta had ripped the foundations out from under her young life–not just once, but repeatedly, beginning with the summer dawn when Marta packed her and Danae’s things into paper grocery bags and shepherded them down the gravel path toward the road. If they had waited a few more hours to leave, Livia’s father would have been awake and he could have come with them.  If it had been just a little later, the sun would have begun its daily ministrations to the grasses and plants that grew in the front yard, and Livia would have been able to smell the wild onions.

Maybe it had been the wild onions that made her want to cook. You knew they weren’t for people to eat because the grown-ups told you. But the smell, the delicious smell! How could something smell like that and not be delicious? Marta hated wild onions–she said they stunk and called them nasty old weeds. But then Marta was a terrible cook; she couldn’t smell their possibilities, and she didn’t know about scallions. Livia’s father hadn’t minded. He laughed when he said that Marta couldn’t even fry an egg, what good was working in a restaurant for six years straight if you never learned to fry an egg? Livia could fry eggs to perfection, and she made desserts and she made them well, but she didn’t feel divinely inspired as she prepared them. No, her entire career had grown out of a childish desire to create something that tasted as heavenly as the smell of wild onions.  (Livia was chopping scallions).

She had gotten used to the instability–in a way, the uncertainty itself had come to constitute a sort of stability. Toward the end, though, just before she left and took them with her, Marta’s comings and goings became less and less predictable. That had been stressful–Livia and Danae had never known when their mother might appear.  (Livia’s strong hands deftly peeled garlic, inserted the tear-shaped teeth into the garlic press, squeezed and then neatly extracted the perfectly diced, strong smelling flesh and placed it into a small white bowl. She would prepare all of the garlic before sauteeing it. She reached for ginger. Thai beef.)  No, toward the end things had not been right, and her father’s breath had had the sour-sweet smell of brandy-drinking almost all the time.

(Brandy. That was the secret to her sauce. She kept the bottle in the small storage cabinet underneath the pristine, white-tiled surface of her work station. You had to add the brandy when the sauce was already boiling, but it mustn’t boil too long. The brandy should boil off, two minutes were enough. Sometimes Livia had a small shot of the brandy at the end of her shift. Livia wasn’t sure what mark of brandy her father preferred, because she had never seen the bottle.)

It had been very early the morning they left–the sun was just coming up, but inside it was still dark, and everything was covered in thick purple shadows (Eggplant.  Livia liked her Thai beef served with a side of tiny eggplants–some people called them Chinese eggplants, but they weren’t really from China. Her own oyster sauce for the tiny eggplants, and more garlic. She liked the rich purple of the tiny eggplants). There had still been deep, eggplant-purple shadows when Marta woke her and then Danae and told them to be very quiet, to go to the bathroom if they had to while she packed their things, they were going on a trip.

The paper grocery bags crackled; Livia had been sure, had hoped, they would wake her father. (Sometimes she prepared quail with rosemary and new potatoes. You had to roast the quails inside thick brown paper bags. When she first learned the recipe in France, she had been sure the bags would catch fire. The chef laughed. Livia had studied in Nantes. Nantes was just above where the Loire opens its river-mouth and joins it to the Atlantic in a deep, salty kiss. The flesh of the tiny birds should be rubbed with garlic and salt before you put them in the bags.)

Livia had noticed that her mother was in the same clothes she had been wearing the day before (the Thai sauce was for beef to be served in it the following day; the flavors, which were all strong, were more unified if you left them sitting for a day). Maybe she had just come through the kitchen door, her shoes in her hand so she wouldn’t wake Livia’s father. Livia had liked to imagine her mother in her side of the bed, sleeping next to her father, but she’d realized then that the soothing image with which she coaxed herself to sleep after her father turned off the lights–of her mother’s peaceful face upturned, her dark hair framing it against the dirty white of the pillowcase–was exclusively a product of her imagination. She didn’t want to replace it with the one of her mother in the red dress.  (Red.  The veins of shrimp sometimes look almost red, especially after they are sauteed.  There was butter melting in a shallow skillet; some garlic.  Which wine to use? Livia was making bisque). Of Marta carefully opening the squeaky kitchen door in the red dress with the scuffed red shoes in her hand, the first soft rays of not-yet-dawn making a halo around her hair and showing up the red lights in it, and her mother not knowing Livia had seen her. She’d tried not to think about it, and she never told Danae.

When they got to the end of the wooded gravel path, there was a car. It wasn’t her father’s truck and there was a strange man inside it. (There was a crackling sound, like her mother’s feet on the gravel path the last time she had walked down it, as Livia attacked the claws of a lobster with crackers, in order to extract the tender, succulent flesh and add it to the bisque). Tender, like her feet. Her mother had forgotten to tell her to put her shoes on. The man was very handsome and he kissed Marta on the lips after she had settled Livia and Danae on the wide, clean back seat and told them to go back to sleep. Livia saw the kiss (there had been a sound, too, echoed by Livia’s own lips now as they separated from the end of her forefinger. She was tasting the bisque. It was time to add the wine). She pretended she hadn’t seen the kiss, but Danae watched avidly until she received a dark look of warning from her mother. Livia had soon fallen asleep, lulled by the quiet hum of the handsome man’s big, sleek car, by the forward motion she only barely felt.  She dreamed about Cinderella. In the dream Cindarella’s entire gown was covered with diamonds.

The second explanation for Livia’s love of an orderly kitchen was Aunt Pearl. Living in the handsome man’s big house, Marta and her daughters had become accustomed to the regulated temperatures provided by powerful heating and cooling systems, to the pitiless shine of stainless steel appliances that did all the work for them, to the delicious sensation of expensive fabrics against their skins.  Aunt Pearl’s house was different. The grown-up Livia now knew that she had preferred Aunt Pearl’s house to the handsome man’s.

The handsome man had been a lawyer; he handled important cases. Sometimes the cases were in Biloxi, where they lived. (Biloxi.  The word, followed by a comma and the four-letter abbreviation for Mississippi, was stamped on the cases in which shipments of crab arrived at the restaurant. The crabs were flown in specially; they left the warm, salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico at midnight and were at the restaurant by five o’clock the following morning. Next Livia would make crab and leek filling–the two principal ingredients united by a peppered cream sauce–for brioches a la mariniere). Other times the handsome man had to absent himself from the big, silent house for three or four days to handle cases in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. He was famous; he was a criminal lawyer. Marta had had to explain to a nervous Livia that, no, those words didn’t mean that he was a criminal. He prosecuted criminals, put them in jail so that they couldn’t be criminals any more.

Once the handsome man left on a trip to New Orleans and he never came back. A week later they found his body in a swamp. (Livia was stirring the peppered cream sauce; it needed thickening. She extracted a bit of sauce from the pan, placed it in a small bowl.  Added flour.  Stirred it). There was a sucking sound as the thickening mixture separated itself from the sides of the bowl, probably like the sound made by the boots of the hunters who had found the handsome man as they made their way back to town through the swamp. They would have carried him on a stretcher. Maybe his face had been covered by a rough blanket.

They never saw his dead body.  Not even Marta had gone to his funeral; she had learned that his estranged but not yet divorced wife would attend.  After the handsome man disappeared, Marta and her daughters stayed on for several months in the big house. The house felt empty, even though only one of its four habitual occupants was absent.  Marta said this was because the absent one was the man. There was no more man-smell in the luxuriously-tiled master bath.  And it seemed absurd to call it a master bath since only Marta was using it, so after awhile it became just the bathroom and, after a little longer, Danae and Livia were even allowed to use it.  Livia had never seen Marta cry after the handsome man’s disappearance. Marta just kept on doing what she always did, as though he were still there.  Livia’s therapist (Livia had done a few years of therapy just after college) called this being in denial.

But there were no more elaborate meals, no more dinner parties. All of Marta’s elegant friends vanished, one by one. The suspect circumstances of the handsome man’s disappearance–if somebody knifes you in the back, they generally have a pretty good reason for doing so–made Marta’s continued presence in certain social circles of doubtful advisability. At first there had been sympathetic phone calls, invitations to luncheons or discreet teas with delicate, crustless cucumber sandwiches in the back salons of Biloxi ladies’ sprawling homes (cucumber sandwiches. Livia began to peel cucumbers.  She would use heavy sour cream and fresh dill.  On Wednesdays and Sundays the restaurant featured high tea. Everyone else did brunch; the high teas were one of the restaurant’s trademarks).

But there were no more nighttime invitations. In Biloxi society, nice ladies only went out after dark with their husbands. And gradually even the daytime invitations dwindled to nothing. The phone was cut off because Marta hadn’t paid the bill, but they didn’t even notice, since no one ever called them and they never picked up the receiver to dial a number. The Biloxi ladies, with their teas and solicitude, faded from their lives like a recording of a familiar song. The voices sing the refrain, or a single phrase, over and over, softer and softer with each repetition until the sounds finally become silence and you know the song is over.

Marta had started chain-smoking then. (Livia was outside taking a break. She was smoking a cigarette. She only bought them in boxes, because she carefully rationed her smoking–no more than three cigarettes a day. A pack often lasted her a week or more. If she bought soft packs, the cigarettes would be broken or crushed). Marta had chain-smoked her way through the weeks during which she and her daughters lived on in a sort of cushioned limbo, in a cocoon of luxury that wasn’t really theirs. The smoke put a soft cloud over everything and those weeks just bled together into one long, strange day. The things they touched and used, although comforting, were somehow illusory, unreal, and they weren’t surprised at all when a real estate agent, accompanied for good measure by a man from the county, came to inform them that they would have to leave within ten days. The house was being put on the market by the handsome man’s estranged but never divorced wife.

It had never occurred to Marta to question the agent’s assertion, to demand her rights, to squat, or go on a hunger strike and chain herself to the banister (all of which were protests with a dramatic flair which would have appealed to Livia if she had been experienced enough to dream them up). Marta just packed up everything she could carry–things which were hers and things which weren’t–and piled them and her daughters into a cab.

“Bus station, please.”

Marta’s dignity was paper-thin, and the cab driver allowed himself a lingering look at her breasts.  She might be coming out of that house, but the haphazard combination of bags, suitcases, and boxes indicated that she wouldn’t be going back in.

~

To be continued, Bad, Bad Lovers, to be continued.

Right here, next week.

Same bad time, same bad, bad place.

Come on back, now, y’hear?

~

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Bad, Bad Love Welcomes a Mysterious Guest Host

As promised, Bad, Bad Lovers, and threatened, and teased, herewith the first installment of the novella, by the Yours Truly of some two decades ago, entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). Just as a reminder, to the young or the forgetful among you, we are back in the ’90s. There were things called pay-phones, and you needed a token to ride the subway…

Laudanum

Less than a week. Less than a week. Danae was turning forty in less than a week. The words came faster and faster, rolling through Livia’s head at a pace that picked up steadily with the metallic clanking of the train, with Livia’s feet pounding down the subway stairs. 

Less than a week, less than a less less less less. Going instead of coming, and Livia had missed it, all because of the telegram. She should have booked her flight as soon as she received it, but there hadn’t been time. She would do it tomorrow. 

When Livia reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw the line in front of the token booth. She resigned herself to being late for work.

~

Seven years before the telegram, three-quarters of the way through a bottle of orange liqueur on an irrevocable Christmas night, Danae had told Livia that if she wasn’t satisfied with her life by the time she hit forty, she would do it. On the night of her fortieth birthday, the last night of the last day on which she would not yet have begun the forty-first year of her life, Danae would swallow a lethal dose of laudanum.

Earlier, in the pale grey light of a too-warm Christmas morning (it never got really cold in Louisiana), Livia had given her sister a beautifully framed print of Millais’ “Ophelia“. Ophelia was the very image of a romantic death, the kind that Byron or Shelley would have killed for. She floated sweetly there in the still water, so young and lovely, you couldn’t really believe she was dead. Her hair was bright and coppery, and her open eyes were the pale blue of a baby’s blanket. And the flowers hadn’t even begun to wilt. She still held some of them in her left hand.

The painting had always fascinated Livia, but as a gift, and a gift to Danae, it had been a stupid choice. Livia knew that now, but now was not then and, moreover, now was too late. Hindsight is just tardy foresight come back to haunt you, Aunt Cornelia had always said; worse than being blind altogether.

~

Livia’s relationship with Ophelia, and particularly with Ophelia as she had been painted by Millais, had a long history. She had bought a print of that painting during her sophomore year at college, and it had accompanied her ever since. The year she gave the same print to Danae, there had been an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Livia went with Erik. That was back in the days when she had boyfriends. Erik had been one of the last ones, the last one but one, in fact. He was a graduate student in comparative literature. He traveled once a week from New York to New Haven, where he listened in raptured awe to Derrida lecture about différance and the fact that words weren’t really words (they were much more arbitrary than that), that différance was more important than similarity, and that words weren’t really yours after you had said them–they were Discourse. Erik had been enamoured of Derrida.

Livia and Erik went to the exhibition on a gelid day late in November, when the wind blew from all directions at once, when you needed a heavy coat even though it wasn’t Thanksgiving yet. They stared together for what seemed like hours at the painting of Ophelia. Erik had noticed in a soft, awed voice.

“She looks just like you”.

Just before taking the train uptown, Livia and Erik had made excruciating love in the early twilight, and her hand hadn’t left his since their pale cheeks first made post-coital contact with the frigid November air. On their way out of the exhibition, Livia bought the print, just like the one she already had, but much bigger. She needed something big enough to contain Ophelia’s lavish new significance. The print in her apartment wouldn’t bear up under the weight of all that significance, but this one, she’d thought, would do nicely.

Three days later, Erik broke up with Livia. He was in love with a dark-haired girl with full breasts and a foreign mouth. He saw her every Tuesday when he rode the train to New Haven to attend Derrida’s lectures. He and the girl talked about différance.

Livia hid the print in her closet for several days, ashamed of the swelling, tender significance she had lavished on it, mortified by her stupidity, her gullibility, and by the sheer size of the thing. Then she had the idea of giving it to Danae for Christmas. Danae was an incurable romantic; she would adore it. Livia took it to an expensive frame shop the very next day, and now Danae had it in her bedroom, just beside the mirror above her dressing table.

~

“Well, I’ve thought of laudanum. I’m just sick of everything, Liv. Really sick of it. I figure I can stand it, oh, I don’t know, a few more years, I guess…”

Danae’s voice had trailed off into a whisper. Bretton was asleep (Livia could hear snores; she’d been certain they were his). His sister, come down for the holiday from Connecticut with her husband and their two precocious children, had also been asleep. No one could hear, but Danae spoke as though someone might be listening.

“Laudanum?”

Livia remembered laughing at first, not because she’d seen anything funny in what Danae was saying, but as a sort of nervous reaction, a facile replacement for saying something, because she had no idea what to say, and her sister couldn’t possibly be serious anyway. Danae was a maudlin drunk.

But the laughing had stopped as Danae’s level of investment became increasingly evident. At first, Danae hadn’t been sure where she would get laudanum, she told Livia in her hurried, breathy voice, because people didn’t really use laudanum anymore for suicides, but she had found some. Danae, as she informed Livia in absolute, hiccupping confidence, had read about laudanum. Laudanum was clean, bloodless. And it didn’t disfigure, like other, harsher substances that might leave her face frozen forever in an anguish of rigor mortis which would ruin its symmetry and lessen the effect of the terribly perfect jawline. And, best of all, it was difficult to diagnose, and therefore difficult to combat with antidotes. It was, Danae slurred into her sister’s ear, irrevocable.

Irrevocable was one of Danae’s favorite words; just like Marta (Marta was their mother but she had always insisted on her daughters’ calling her Marta), she had her words, bigger and more complex words than were most of the ones she used, words to be taken out and dropped with a portentous thud into a particularly important place in a particularly important sentence, but only from time to time in order to maintain maximum signifying potential. Danae couldn’t get her mouth around the double r’s at the beginning of irrevocable when she was drunk, and to another listener, it might have been unintelligible, but Livia had heard her sister say the word often enough to know what she meant.

~

Livia had her token. She walked onto the platform and kept going, toward the end. There were always more seats at one end or the other of the train, and Livia liked to read on the train. She couldn’t do that standing up; it gave her vertigo.

~

She’d tried to change the subject, but Danae had drawn her relentlessly, drunkenly, back toward the laudanum.

“For awhile, I thought about wrists. You know, razor blades…”

Livia had listened with mounting consternation as her sister enumerated the steps toward the annihilation of her soul in a bathtub. First, she would listen to the waterfall sound of the soothing, lukewarm water as it raged out of the tap, a sound prefigured then by ice cubes and more thick, sweet liquid into her glass. Danae would listen to the water while she sliced the soft skin of her wrists open with one of Bretton’s razor blades before climbing in and watching the water turn a pale, questioning pink and then a final, irrevocable crimson.

There had been a silence then. They both drank, and Livia drank more because she was beginning to realize that her sister meant business. Danae was at least flirting with serious contemplation of suicide. Not for today, not for tomorrow or even next month (Danae had been thirty-three then–forty was forever). No, the laudanum was for some time in a future that probably still seemed so distant to Danae that she couldn’t quite envision it. Livia had been somewhat heartened by the thought; she remembered a short story by someone or other about a man who had determined to commit suicide at sixty. He grew much older and much greyer than sixty while he thought and thought about it, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The story had ended with him still alive, and quite happy to be that way, thank you.

But then there was “Harold and Maude”. Livia had gone to see it during her freshman year of college, at Bard’s Friday night film series. That, she remembered, was the first time she had realized that people, well, women, were capable of living (as opposed to merely existing) after the age of thirty.

It was a wonderful revelation for young Livia; she was light as wisps of winter cloud as she left the darkened gymnasium, deliriously happy at the first contact between her face and the stinging air of a star-studded January midnight.

Maude was seventy and she was still thrilled by daisies and green fields. Until the very end, when she tells the devastated Harold that she’s done it, that she’s taken the pill or swallowed the liquid (Livia couldn’t remember that detail), you really didn’t think she would do it. Especially once she found Harold–imagine finding love (and an adolescent lover) at sixty-nine. But she had done it anyway, on the night of her seventieth birthday, just like she’d promised herself. She had done it quietly, without drama, but she had done it.

Livia had felt suddenly sober in spite of the Drambuie as she looked at her sister. There was a new determination in the set of Danae’s full lips. This might be the one resolution Danae stuck to.

“But it’s too messy…” Danae’s voice slurred the s’s.

“What?”

“The bathtub, Liv! You never listen to me. I was talking about the bathtub, about how it won’t work.”

What if she lost consciousness so quickly that she didn’t manage to turn off the taps, and what if the crimson water, like cherry Kool-Aid, flooded the hand-cut beige tiles of the master bathroom? That wasn’t the sort of scenario Danae wished for the discovery of her lovely corpse.

~

When they were almost through the bottle of orange liqueur, Danae confided to her sister in melodramatic abandon that she had hidden the laudanum behind the mirror on her dressing table. She was going to hang Livia’s gift as close to the laudanum as she could get it, probably just beside the mirror.

~

Ophelia’s beautiful, startled, dead face, would thus–Livia felt a pang of remorse as she glanced impatiently at her watch, calculating–be within her sister’s field of vision for several out of the twenty-four hours of each and every day.

~

Livia had tried to laugh the next day, as they nursed hangovers over cups of black coffee while everyone else returned Christmas presents at the mall. But Danae, her face sallow with the hangover, sober because of it, insisted. She would do it. She would drink the laudanum and just get out and cut her losses if something special, something portentous, didn’t happen by midnight of the night of her fortieth birthday.

Something wonderful and irrevocable that would split the tired earth of her life right down the middle, so that a new plant with riotous green leaves and fantastically colored flowers could spring up and delight her. If that marvelous, portentous something were not forthcoming, she would do it.

~

 More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all, be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, find her book Birds Of Wonder here and learn more about Cynthia here. 

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Bad, Bad Love Needs No Sex to Be Bad

He called me selfish, and needy, and ungrateful, and cold (is that possible? needy and cold?). He said my writing was stilted, my characters wooden. After having lavished me with attention, and gifts, and adoration, and support, of my person and my habits and my writing, and just…me, he stopped. Stopped answering my emails, stopped taking my phone calls.

Obviously, the adoration stopped too, and I’m willing to bet large amounts of cash that that’s exactly what kicking crack cold turkey feels like.

Bad. Really, really, really bad.

No. Not Husband #1. No, no, no, no, no. All y’all Bad, Bad Lovers who’ve been with me for a bit on this little nightmare of a trip know it wasn’t Husband #1 because adoration was not in his playbook, at least where I was concerned. Not a post-Husband #1 rebound pick-up (of which there were many, and all of those went south), nope. No.

This was a friend. Emphasis on the ‘was.’ This was that friend that all straight women want, the slightly younger, brilliant, worldly, bilingual, bicultural, handsome, witty, hilarious, irreverent, insanely talented and very-very gay BFF. The one you drink with, the one you pick up guys with, the one you dance with and go to Halloween parties with, planning your matching costumes for weeks in advance. This was the consort with whom you ruled West Village nightlife, the one who knew half the bartenders in Manhattan-south-of-Union-Square (and you knew the rest). This was your Most Fabulous Friend, and in his company, in his aura, you were most fabulous, too.

This was also the Most Fabulous Friend who had a bit of a disappearing habit (for months rather than—as in the case of Husband #1—hours), and a penchant for really badly chosen boyfriends. You felt a little twinge when he disappeared on you, it was hurtful, but when he reappeared, which he always did, it was with hilarity, fanfare, festivity and fabulousness, and things were back on track, even better than before.

During one of his reappearances, shortly after I had left Manhattan for the badlands of New Mexico and my first tenure-track job, he announced that he had established his own press (self-publishing is a badge of honor in the graphic novel world, always so much more cutting-edge than the publishing world proper). He wanted that press to have a literary fiction imprint, and he wanted the first novel of that imprint to be a little thing I had written during the early days of our friendship. This was a novella rather than a novel—it wasn’t even 200 pages long—entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as A Fairy Tale for Super-Women), which he had always love-love-loved.

I began to write Venus—my second novel, actually; the first one is lost, and that is probably a good thing… if you’re interested in my long and twisty history as a writer, I tell you all about it in the ‘About’ section of this here website—during the period immediately following the ouster of Husband #1. In fact, I think I may have begun it the very day I put my foot through that painting and threw his shit out of the third-floor window of our East Village apartment. It is a product of the first half of the 90’s. The only cellphones on the street were owned by fabulous dot-com-ers like my Most Fabulous Friend (back before dot-com-ers were a dime a dozen, when you could still make a fortune being one), and they weighed about five pounds. There was no Grinder, no Tinder, no Match.com or OKCupid or, god help us, Eharmony (if that is even spelled correctly–I take pride in not knowing). If you wanted to fish about for a lay or a love, you either went to a bar or put an ad in the Village Voice, and I did both. I wrote Venus during the wild, drunken, rebounding period of “Kurt-not-Kurt.” When I was young and beautiful and angry and hurt and determined to wreak vengeance upon the entire male sex, but mostly ended up getting kicked around (though there was also quite a bit of fun and a non-negligible quantity of better-than-average sex mixed in, and a whole lot of nights out being fabulous with my Most Fabulous Friend).

I had an Ivy League PhD and I was slinging hash and pouring drinks, as a cater-waiter—I actually have a story published in Stone Canoe about this wild, funny, sad period in my life, which you can read, absolutely for free and in its entirety, right here on this purdy little site. I thought anywhere outside the limits of the Five Boroughs was not worth even considering as a possible habitat, and I was prepared to do anything and everything not to have to leave. Including bucking my advisor’s urgent call to apply for an academic job at Ball State, somewhere in the bleak hinterlands of Indiana (no way was I going to teach at an institution of higher learning with a name like that, even assuming they’d have me). I was prepared, even eager, to stack my academic chops on the pyre of partying and decadence and promiscuity, douse them with lighter fluid, and set fire to the bitches. I was dancing atop the cars of the Train of Self-Destruction in stilettos, drunk, and too close to the edge.

I was reading Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and Carson McCullers and eleventh-century Arabic love poetry (and even managing to crank out an academic article or two between stints of breakfast service, cocktail-slinging, and bar-hopping). I was also writing The Will of Venus.

Which I am going to serve up to you, dear and faithful reader of this fine, fine blog of Bad, Bad Love, in blog-post sized increments over the coming two months or so. Yes, the ex-friend theoretically owns the copyright (I think), and it may or may not have been him who removed it from the site of his press (sometime after the blow-up described in the opening paragraph of this post) and linked it up to some gay porn site (I mean, who else…?)–if you Google it, let me know what comes up. Someone who is definitely not me claims it as hers on Goodreads. Along with a bunch of other stuff I’d never want within a mile of me (to which she is welcome, and it may very well be hers). Rest assured, Venus is mine. Proof of that is: A) the fact that the one rating it has is from someone I know, and B) the fact that the manuscript is in my possession… And as proof of that, you shall read it here.

Why am I doing this? Well, because that last post really took it out of me. Writing about Husband #1 in general really takes it out of me and that last one was a heavy load. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for writing about Husband #1, and #2, and all of the random men that came between ‘em. And I plan to continue doing just that. This brief hiatus of actual creative production, however, will allow me to finish the draft of the new novel that I am trying oh-so-hard to have in some sort of decent shape to hand over to my agent toward the middle of this fall (I’ve said 15 October, and am still very hopeful that that self-imposed deadline will be met). Venus graciously offered to step in (as it were–not to worry, the shoes aren’t going anywhere), so I said okay. In fact, Venus takes place almost entirely in Manhattan, where it just so happens that I am headed for a wee city-break/DIY writer’s retreat this very Sunday. The shoe will come along, and will pose in various locations, together with various props, for pictures for Venus posts.

Yes, this will be a bit of a guilty-pleasures read for summa y’all—there’s drinking and sex and even some magical realism, some santería and a ghost—but I do believe you will enjoy. I can’t give this to my agent because it’s dated as hell (though I suppose it could be packaged as historical fiction, the 90’s being now twenty years ago, how the eff did that happen!?). Perhaps the bigger impediment is that it has, technically, already been published.

But it belongs to me, in spirit if not in the letter of the law, and so I’m-a-gonna do with it what I please.

I will, from time to time, give some contextualization, for younger readers who might not have ever seen a pay phone, or know what the Personals were or how they worked, or perhaps to indicate to you when a particular character is based on a real person (several are). But mostly I will just let my words from twenty years ago speak for themselves. I won’t edit, I don’t think that would be honest, and the point of this is to let me take some brain space back for the finishing of the new novel. So I will serve it up raw.

The first installment will be next Friday–do stay tuned…

Before I leave you, I know you’re wondering, though you are perhaps too polite to ask. Whatever happened to the formerly Most Fabulous Friend?

Well, I couldn’t really say, because he no longer speaks to me. I wrote to him once a year or two after our final blow-up, just after a friend of mine had died, far too young, of cancer. I said I would hate for that to happen to one of us without us ever resolving whatever had torn us apart (okay, that was melodramatic, but the sentiments were sincere). I happened to be down in Brooklyn at the writers’ conference hosted by the wonderful editoras of SLICE magazine (which really was instrumental at setting me on the path toward becoming, once again, a writer). A story of mine, “La Crisis,” had won the little in-house contest for fiction and I had $100 of prize money burning a hole in my pocket. I was staying in a hotel, literally, blocks from his apartment. I proposed a drink, dinner, anywhere he wanted, I was buying (he had always bought, he’d always insisted, and I had always let him: I am not guiltless here).

And then I went down to the hotel bar, with my device, which I refreshed every three seconds or so, certain I’d hear from him. He has every electronic device known to mankind, and he lives permanently plugged in to all of them, even when sleeping, so I was sure he’d see my message. And I am still sure that he did.

I ate by myself at the bar, I got very drunk on my $100, I stayed there all night, and he never answered. That hurt just as bad as any shitty thing any straight man ever did to me. Maybe worse. And you know what? If he called right now and said let’s go out for a drink, I know for a fact that I would forgive and forget in a heartbeat. That I would drop everyone and everything right this second and go running out the door, just to be in his fabulous company once more (something I absolutely would not do for any straight man alive, with the possible and partial exception of one, and no you haven’t heard about him on here).

Maybe that will happen someday. I can hope, right?

And, in the meantime, I can also hope, perhaps more realistically, that you will read, and enjoy, The Will Of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy Tale for Superwomen).

Please do.

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Bad, Bad Love Through A Glass Darkly

I knew they had disappeared. Were disappeared. Husband #1’s brother and then his sister. I knew they were desaparecidos. Think that movie, with Cissy Spacek, and her disappeared husband. I knew this because Husband #1 told me, early in our relationship, while we were still in Spain, maybe even during our idyll in Sotillo de la Adrada. I believe we were eating, when he told me, and I also think we were drinking (if we were in Sotillo, we were definitely drinking).

I know that we were alone. Which was remarkable—as readers of this sad little blog of Bad, Bad Love will know by now, Husband #1 and I were rarely ever alone, and I’m pretty sure this was one of the biggest of our very long list of problems. In Sotillo, the default would have been for us to be surrounded by other expat Argentinians, but I know that, when he told me, we were alone.

Most Argentinians, in the early ‘90s, knew desaparecidos. Most expat Argentinians in particular. Many had become expats because of the desaparecidos they knew, particularly if those desaparecidos belonged to their immediate family. In that case, it could be dangerous not to become an expat, and the vast number of those expats headed for Spain. Which is some kind of through-the-looking-glass, history-repeating-itself phenomenon, considering the traffic back and forth between Spain and Argentina during the former’s civil war and its immediate aftermath.

Argentinian expats, as I’ve told y’all a couple of times, Bad, Bad Love friends that you are, or at least the Argentinian expats I knew, spent a whole lot of time talking about Argentina. Missing it, loving it. But they never talked about the desaparecidos. At least not around me.

So I know that we were alone when Husband #1 told me about his own desaparecidos, during that part of a relationship when stories are still being told, pasts still being revealed, wonders still pulled out of velvety storage, to be held close, marveled at, together. Where he’d studied, where I’d studied; why he painted, why I wrote and translated. Favorite foods, favorite pets. Favorite places in backyards to dream, favorite kinds of make-believe.

The fact that I was adopted, and hated my brother.

The fact that his country had existed, for nearly a decade, under an iron-fisted military dictatorship masquerading under the anodyne acronym, the “National Reorganization Process,” shortened in Spanish to el proceso militar.

Why am I talking about this here, now? Short answer: It’s been bugging me this week. I felt like I needed to.

Isn’t this blog supposed to be funny? Sure, maybe, for the most part. But I have spent a good part of it taking the piss out of Husband #1—and I am not about to deny that he deserves it: just because shitty things have happened to you in life, doesn’t grant you carte blanche to go through life being a shit. But the more distance the decades put between me and this sad relationship, the more convinced I become that this particular factor was a potent ingredient in the recipe that made of Husband #1 someone who could never find what he was looking for. Someone who reached for yet another woman, yet another self-help book, with the desperation of an addict. Of someone desperate to escape, or lose himself, or dissolve himself, and come out on the other side, unrecognizable even to himself.

It would, I think, have been a relief. For both of us. I’m not excusing his treatment of me (or my own acceptance of it: I brought my own little suitcase full of trauma to the table about which I’ve had a bit to say on here, but I don’t consider that acceptance excused by its contents). I’m just trying to contextualize it.

I don’t remember whether Husband #1 brought up what had happened to his siblings—significantly older than he, by about a decade, maybe a little more—unbidden, or I asked, the usual questions you ask about brothers and sisters.  But I knew, the way you know things about your partner, throughout our relationship. That his brother—married, or at least with a live-in girlfriend and progeny; involved with labor organization—and his sister, whom he’d idolized—a university professor, or a post-doc, or a grad student, I can’t recall the exact details; she was an out lesbian—had been “taken.”

And never seen or heard from again.

There was another sister, sweet and unremarkable, living in a town to the north in the pampas, whom I would eventually meet. How she’d escaped, I don’t know—she was of an age with the disappeared brother and sister—but I had the sense of her hanging on to her normalcy the way you might grab a shield, or a life raft. Her house, even as they weirdly celebrated me, and Husband #1, and our marriage, which I think I knew, even then, was not a ‘real’ one, was as dark and somber and full of ghosts as the place Husband #1 called home in La Plata.

Things about what might have happened to the disappeared brother and sister were known. I’d read about some of them, even before meeting Husband #1. There were prisons, tortures, rapes, mass murders. Mass graves. Occasionally someone returned to her or his family, thin and damaged and scarred, tormented by nightmares. Usually through connections or massive bribes, neither of which means of leverage Husband #1’s parents, or extended family, were able to marshal.

It was the not-knowing-for sure, as well as the knowledge of what might have been–probably had–that brought Husband #1’s father, an Italian immigrant, owner of a sort of general store that he ran out of the first floor of his house, to an early grave. If I remember correctly, it was his heart. And the same extended form of mental torture sent his mother—also an Italian immigrant, and with barely a high-school education—to bed. She never got up again.

In the midst of this not-knowing of the details, the country was trying to put itself back together again, life by life. Husband #1 had to grow up, fast. There was the store to tend, and his mother to care for. He did this all, and he did it alone, all while completing his university studies and going to art school.

Once she died, he inherited the house, and some money, and it was time to live for himself. Desperately, as though someone might yank his life right out of his hands and abscond with all the days left to him if he wasn’t careful. Live it all, live a thousand lives, a million, live for the disappeared brother and especially the sister. And hurt others, occasionally, why not, people who lived in countries where uniformed soldiers didn’t bang doors down in the middle of the night and march people off to dark little nightmarish hells deserving of far worse designations than “prison.”

I tried to understand what the proceso militar must have been like, but of course I couldn’t. And my own country hadn’t exactly stepped in and tried to stop it either. I didn’t realize the extent to which Husband #1 was affected by his desaparecidos because he told me in the most matter-of-fact tones imaginable, as though he were talking about someone else. And then he never mentioned them again.

Until right before the end, not long before I put my foot through that painting.

He’d been to Argentina, maybe a few weeks before, or maybe a couple of months, I can’t remember for sure. But one day—I do remember this, and clearly—when we were standing in the kitchen of our East Village apartment, he said, out of the blue, a propos of nothing, or maybe of everything, “I found out what happened to her. When I was there. Mi hermana. My sister. Ya sé lo que le pasó.”

Archives were being opened, people were researching, finding out things. Making them known publicly, lining them up along the cracked sidewalks of collective memory, hoping for the sun to disinfect. A few of the bad guys were even going to prison. And a family friend, I believe, had researched. And found things. And told him. His brother had gone first, the labor union activist, and for the sister it was only a matter of time. She was on a list, the girlfriend was on a list. Their names had been given, or were known anyway, or both. She was warned, the sister; her girlfriend was warned. The girlfriend, or maybe the sister, by that point, because of her connections in academe, was offered the chance, by a woman she knew whose husband was an official in el proceso, to board a plane to Brasil. To disappear that way.

And she refused. Husband #1 was unable to say why, the family friend hadn’t known either. Something about principles, about not accepting help from perros. From dogs. Estúpida, he kept saying, to me, but about her (if he was even talking to me; I’ve never been sure of that), qué estúpida. Stupid. How stupid.

She was one of the ones flown out over the ocean, in a little crop-duster of a plane. Drugged to render her defenseless, knifed in the stomach so she wouldn’t float, and pushed out.

Desaparecida, para siempre. Until the records were outed (the proceso clearly hadn’t envisioned the days when it wouldn’t be the proceso anymore).

This telling, in our kitchen, was a few weeks, maybe a month, before we finished.

And that’s all I know, Bad, Bad Lovers, for this week anyway. I’m sure I’ll talk about this again; for the moment, thank you for reading. This is the first time I’ve told this story in anything approaching a coherent manner, and it’s given me some things to think about.

Husband #1’s still the villain in this tale, make no mistake. But all villains have backstories: remember his, as we go forward.

Catch you next week, friends. Till then, love your life. However shitty these next seven days might turn out to be, you’re not in a dark, dank prison somewhere, at the mercy of the proceso militar.

The post Bad, Bad Love Through A Glass Darkly appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad Bad Love Does Not Make Lemonade

How did it feel to put my booted foot through one of Husband #1’s paintings? A framed one? One of his favorites (though he was no longer painting that way because he was trying to paint something that would sell)?
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

I felt strong and righteous and well within my rights. I felt transgressive and bad and violent, all of which felt good. Really good.

I was putting my foot through that painting in the name of every woman who’d ever fantasized about doing just that (not every woman’s man is a painter, and so I was in something of a privileged position). And there are those who just don’t dare, and then wish they had. Por ejemplo: years later, a friend would tell me a story about her man—also Argentinian; coincidence?—who’d gone back to the homeland for the holidays and returned with a life-sized portrait of his deceased wife, with whom he’d displayed marked symptoms of preoccupation, if not obsession, throughout their short-lived and ill-fated relationship. He then proceeded to hang the portrait above his sofa, claiming that it represented, merely, “Love.” The day I heard that story, I was very glad I’d stuck my foot through that painting. My friend and I drank to it, in fact. A lot.

I was putting my foot through that painting in the name of every single woman who’d ever contemplated throwing her cheating man’s crap out of a third-floor window—I did that, too—ideally, on a busy East Village side-street.

Which ours was. There was a bar—about which you’ll hear more in future episodes, Bad, Bad Love friends; it was to become a favorite of mine—and a video store. Some sort of derelict-looking artists’ collective on one corner (firmly eschewed by Husband #1), a Korean market on the other, and tons of nosy neighbors, a number of whom were holdovers from the old days. Paul and Lizzie, self-righteous adjunct lecturers at the New School in Art History and the Social Science, respectively, whose apartment was inexplicably nice until they told you it was rent-controlled (which made you wonder why yours wasn’t). Fat wives in muumuus with husbands perennially in undershirts, even in the winter, from whose sauna-hot apartments wafted smells of garlic and cabbage. Their English was labored, and limited; they spoke something Slavic with lots of consonant clusters among themselves, and yelled when they fought.

Husband #1 and I had never yelled, which was perhaps one of our relationship’s many problems, and so the neighbors, on that December day—Pearl Harbor Day, to be precise—were surprised. And really, really interested.

They gathered beneath my window, whooping, breaking into a raucous, collective cheer when the ripped canvas, still in its frame, came flying out the window after the last black plastic garbage bag filled with the miscellaneous crap Husband #1 had left lying around the front room. Which, without him in it, was no longer the studio (though there were paint spatters all over the floor, Husband #1 having decided, during the final year we spent together, that he’d become Jackson Pollock redivivus and see if maybe, finally, he could sell some paintings).

The painting I put my foot through was not a Pollock wannabe. Rather, it was among those Husband #1 had shown at the exhibition in the Argentinian Cultural Center in Rome. That eternal city where, as readers who’ve been with me for a while on this here little journey may remember, Husband #1 was determined to woo and to win me. If you’re newer to this party, and are incredulous as to how that could even ever happen (sometimes I am…), just scroll on down a couple months’ worth of Bad, Bad Love entries and be enlightened. Or further confounded.

These were the paintings he’d shown me on that first, fateful flight from Madrid to Rome, after he’d rescued me from the lecherous gaze and folksy, off-key singing of the Italian grandpa in the boarding lounge and bribed the stewardess—or maybe just flashed her a smile, many women found him charming—into moving his seat next to mine. Figurative paintings all, heavily influenced by the Impressionists and those who followed immediately in their footsteps, though with colors leaning toward a Fauvist palette, subject matter with an Argentinian inflection. Café scenes; young, beautiful friends drinking mate in someone’s lush backyard, an asado grill smoking in the background. Evocations of conviviality, ease, relaxed leisure and general bonhomie—idealized, impossible, something Husband #1 chased across the five boroughs for all of the three years I lived with him and claimed never to find.

And images of intimacy. One that particularly haunted me was a nude. A beautiful girl, dark-haired and full-busted (if you’re detecting, across these last few entries, a breast-complex theme, you’re not off the mark: I largely credit Husband #1 with aiding me in the development of said complex: there is absolutely nothing wrong with mine, and there was even less wrong with them twenty years ago). Reclined amid a mound of pillows on a sofa, or maybe a bed, a tree in flower just beyond the open window, she contemplated herself in a hand-mirror. This, I think, pretty much summed up Husband #1’s attitudes toward, and uses for, women (I know, I know…); the girl represented was a real person, about whom we’ll hear in a future post, when I tell you about my trip to Argentina (woo-hoo!), but for now let’s stick with the paintings.

The painting I would really have loved to put my foot through, of course, was the one I’ve just described to you. But, alas, it was not accessible to me, Husband #1 having sold it to one of my girlfriends who lived between the Theater District and Hell’s Kitchen, occupying, at the moment I put my foot through the other painting, pride of place above her sofa (this guy was good, a born salesman).

The image I put my foot through, faute de mieux, was of an old man seated in a chair, in a garden, I think, or maybe on a porch. Wearing a straw hat (again, I think; it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and it’s not like I can pull up a shot on the internet), smoking a pipe. There was a story attached to the old man, which I can’t recall. A neighbor, maybe. Someone dear to Husband #1, whom he’d visited, especially after his parents died. The painting, too, was dear to Husband #1, which gave me extra, righteous pleasure as I rammed my foot through the old man’s face, though I wonder now why he left that one behind when he’d taken absolutely everything else to do with his paintings.

The crap I tossed out onto the street was clothing, for the most part, and self-help books that had become no longer helpful. He’d taken only what he could fit into the small U-Haul he’d gotten his one friend in the city to rent (a musician who never made it; incidentally, the immature and problematic boyfriend of my friend who’d bought the reclining nude). He knew better than to plan to make a second trip. I’d already threatened to call Immigration Services on his ass, though the threat was more than a little hollow, given that he’d waited until exactly one day after receiving his green card in the mail to take my hand, lead me into the studio, and confess to me that he no longer felt deseo. Desire. And that he wanted to leave.

And I actually pleaded with him to stay. Yes, dear friends of this Bad, Bad Love blog, I did.

The foot-through-the-painting thing was at least as much in punishment of myself as it was of Husband #1, and I cried while I did it.

And then I called my friend, who had the reclining nude above her sofa, and who knew where Husband #1 was, and told her to call her boyfriend and tell him to make Husband #1 come and get his crap off the sidewalk.

It took him three days (during which there was rain, and maybe some snow, and some picking through the garbage bags by homeless people and other scavengers; no one took the busted painting), and then he did, sometime during a night I spent in the bed of some guy I’d picked up in a bar. When I came home, the next morning, too early (it wasn’t the kind of thing where you went to breakfast the morning after), everything was gone.

And that was the moment at which I began the revisionist version of the putting-my-foot-through-it story. The empowering one. The woman-don’-take-no-shit one. The one I’d tell at parties and bars the world over, in several languages, for two decades plus. The one I just told you.

Actually, revisionist is a very kind word: I took a lot of shit from Husband #1. Some of which you’ve heard about; you shall hear about more. Because one of the reasons I’m doing this here little blog of Bad, Bad Love, is to try to understand my own bad self.

Okay, I have just done to you what novelists sometimes do, or short story writers, which I can also claim to be: I’ve fast-forwarded you to the end. The very ugly, messy end. The especially observant among you will have noticed that we’re not even in the Bleecker Street apartment anymore, somehow we’ve wound up in the East Village. That’s because, for some reason, this week, I felt like telling the end. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

But now we’ll go back to the middle. It’ll be sad. But also fun, I promise, especially if you, like me, have been party to a Bad, Bad Love. Or maybe just enjoy hearing about it from others less fortunate than yourself.

Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Lovers. Till then, if you see a woman throwing shit out a third-floor window, 99% chance it belongs to her cheatin’ man. Stop, stand, observe. Cheer her on. It’ll help her feel better about her shitty wreck of a life.

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