It’s all the desperate phone calls, Bad, Bad Lovers (on pay phones, yes, pay phones), and allllllll the witchy chocolate tarts, in this week’s dose of Bad, Bad Love. Administered in the form of Installment VIII of our serialized millefeuille of a yummy little novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). You can either jump right into the intrigue and the chocolate high, or, if you like, go back to the beginning of alllll the trouble, by clicking right here.
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Desperate Measures
Wanda answered on the second ring.
“She’s going to take laudanum, Wanda. Laudanum!”
This was the first time since that Christmas night five years earlier that Livia had pronounced the word aloud. It sounded almost ridiculous.
Wanda listened in silence as Livia talked about Danae’s telegram, Danae’s jerk of a husband, her sister’s fascination with laudanum, her certainty of her sister’s intentions.
“Pero Livia, that sounds so…bueno…so theatrical. She can’t be serious. I don’t even think you can get laudanum anymore.”
“Oh, she’s serious, all right. And, yes, you can get laudanum. She’s already got it. She’s really done her homework. That’s what worries me; it’s not like her. You don’t know Danae; I haven’t really talked about her with you. We don’t have much in common.”
Livia deposited another quarter and pulled out a cigarette. She was exceeding her limit for the day, considerably, but she considered her excesses, in this case, entirely justified. She felt in her pocket for her lighter. How to explain Danae to Wanda?
“Listen, Wanda. The whole thing’s about aging, okay? She’s already had liposuction. Which she did not need. And collagen injections. She had her eyes done last year. I know, because she came here to do it. Her beauty is all she has, and she doesn’t think it has any power anymore, at least not over her husband. He’s fucking a twenty-year-old college student. Her name is Crystalle…” Livia’s voice dropped. This was embarrassing. “Accent on the last syllable…you know,`l-l-e’…”
Wanda’s laugh was loud and strident. Livia held the receiver away from her wounded ear. “Pero Livia, you can’t take this seriously! Crystalle!! ¡Ay, por favor! It sounds like a screw-top wine-cooler!” A snort, followed by a guffaw.
“Wanda… Please. She’s my sister!”
“I’m not laughing at your sister, ¡coño! It’s men…they’re pathetic! Hombre, when they hit mid-life crisis, they don’t even have taste anymore –they don’t care where they stick it, long as it’s too young for `em!” More snorts, more guffaws. “What’s she look like? Wait…don’t tell me. She’s a cheerleader! He’s fucking a cheerleader!”
It was true. Crystalle was a cheerleader who had auditioned the spring of her freshman year for the role of Ophelia; Bretton had been producing Hamlet for the following fall. Her round face with its turned-up nose was all wrong for Ophelia, but just right for Bretton. Crystalle had been Bretton’s personal assistant for two years. But Livia wasn’t of the humor to share the bit about the cheerleader with Wanda. Maybe later.
“Wanda, please, this is serious. She’s cheesy as all hell, está bién, but she’s still fucking my sister’s husband, and my sister wants to take laudanum because of it, well, because of a lot of other things, but she’s not helping. He even brings her to their house to help him in his office…she’s his personal assistant.”
There was a stifled snort of disgust through the receiver. It turned into something like a sigh. “She should leave him…¡que se vaya, coño! What’s she doing with a shit like that anyway? She could find another man.”
It was Livia’s turn to sigh. “You don’t know Danae. I can’t explain it…She doesn’t look for men–she doesn’t know how. They look for her. She’s like my mother. I never talked to you about my mother, either. She died when I was twelve. Actually, it was more like an apotheosis…”
Silence.
“Wanda, Danae isn’t like us. We do things, we make things, we have things to think about when we get up in the morning. Danae… doesn’t. She’s never had to. She just is; it’s like she’s there for men to adore or something.
If she doesn’t have adoration, she withers…I know, I know. I wouldn’t exactly describe her as a feminist, either, and the whole thing’s at least partly her fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’ll do it. I know she will. She’ll probably be sorry afterward because I don’t think she really realizes that you can’t go back, but by then it’ll be too late…and she still loves Bretton if you can believe that. Or she thinks she does…
I don’t want my sister to die, okay? Don’t think I haven’t tried to come up with another solution. I had almost decided to poison him, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life in prison. You have to help me.”
“Bueno.” A definite, prolonged sigh. “When are you leaving?”
“Friday at noon.”
“Okay, Livia, but this isn’t going to be easy. I’ll have to go to the santero. I can’t have you go, this is too complicated, and he’d never give you all the stuff. I’ll need at least a day…But I can’t give it to you tomorrow night; the night is too powerful, and this will be potent stuff, te lo aseguro. Come to my place at ten on Friday morning, maybe on your way to the airport or something…And Livia?”
“What?”
“You know the other stuff you’re doing? No lo jodas. Don’t fuck it up. Be really careful with that right now. You probably shouldn’t even do it between now and then. And you’re going to New Orleans, all sorts of shit can happen there…If you have two spells going at once, if you’re not careful, things can get pretty weird. Cuidado, ¿okay? Nos vemos el viernes.”
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Chocolate Tarts
Livia had carefully considered her choice of a recipe into which to mix Wanda’s liquid. She chose the chocolate tarts for two reasons: first, she had never met a man who did not like chocolate. Second, the tarts could be made in individual portions, wrapped in rice paper, and taken along in her bag (so could cookies, but cookies were not seductive). The tarts were like condoms. One should always have them at the ready.
The first time she prepared the chocolate tarts, Livia made the mistake of tasting one. That was how you cooked, you tasted as you went along, to see if the pastry dough was too salty or too sweet, to see if the chocolate had somehow acquired that dreaded burned taste that meant that you had to throw the whole lot out and start over. Aunt Pearl would never serve something she herself hadn’t tasted, both during the cooking process and once it was finished. Livia religiously followed her example.
When Pearl died, she left her tasting spoons to Livia. The tasting spoons were a perfectly matched collection of small silver spoons, five, of perfectly graded sizes. Livia kept them at the restaurant, in her cabinet, beside the bottle of brandy. She always washed a spoon as soon as she had used it for tasting, both for hygienic purposes and to neutralize its surface again. Silver was porous–it absorbed flavors and smells. What you were tasting at one moment should never be colored, nuanced, by what you had tasted ten minutes before.
Livia had brought the tasting spoons home especially in honor of the occasion–her first batch of chocolate tarts. The tasting spoons were her talisman; they made her think of Pearl. Pearl had never ruined a dish because Pearl had never been perturbed by men. As she rolled out the pastry dough which would eventually cradle six equal portions of the chocolate mixture–in effect, six nights of emotionally safe sex–Livia wondered if Pearl would have given in to her biological urges if she had lived in Manhattan among so many temptations. Livia felt sure that she would have, and she felt sure that Pearl would have thought the idea of the tarts ingenious.
The candles were burning–a red one and a yellow one. Livia had placed them on the small shelf above the stove, in two cheap plates she had bought at a discount store for that purpose. Wanda had said that you should be facing the candles while you cooked. She wasn’t surprised at the bitterness of the drop of chocolate mixture she licked from her tasting spoon. There was no sugar in the mixture; the bitterness was not a burned one (she hadn’t burned the chocolate), but one which lacked sugar. Livia removed the stopper from the tiny green bottle and added six drops of Wanda’s liquid to the dark, moist mixture in the bowl.
The liquid had no smell. She stirred the mixture, portioned it into the six tart shells on the baking tray, placed them into the oven. They would require forty-five minutes of baking time.
After the tarts cooled, Livia ate one. The pastry was light, flaky, buttery, perfect. But when the chocolate mixture, now fully cooked, made contact with her tongue, a bitter taste immediately filled her mouth, a taste so nauseating, so overpowering, so indescribably horrid that she spat the mouthful of tart onto the floor–she hadn’t even made it to the sink. Instinctively, Livia reached for a glass and filled it with water at the tap. She drank the water without rinsing her mouth first. The water carried the bitterness into her stomach.
Seconds later, Livia was hunched over the toilet in her very clean bathroom, her thin body racked by spasms and dry heaves. She vomited her supper, she vomited the water. The water in the toilet bowl before her disgusted (but fascinated) eyes was bright, electric green. Nothing that Livia had eaten for dinner would have turned the water that color, even in the middle of the digestive process. No, it was Wanda’s liquid. Livia flushed the toilet, washed her face, rinsed her mouth.
Her hands were respectful as she wrapped the remaining five tarts in rice paper–midnight blue. She tied the tiny packages with black ribbon, like gifts. She was no longer wary of trying them out: if any man’s soul were similar enough to hers to place her in danger of love’s vulnerability and blindness, she would know it instantly. She smiled to herself as she tied the last ribbon around the last packet and blew out the candles.
~
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.
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