Bad, Bad Love presents to you pInstallment 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Thanks so much!Have a lovely week:)