We’re back, we’re back, from a long break…the holidays, and Livia is used to having most of the month of January off (frequent in the hospitality sector, unless you work somewhere warm with a beach). Be that as it may, water under the bridge and all that, today we offer, for your reading delectation, Installment XVII of our serialized novella, entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen).
Wherein it is no longer possible for Livia to deny that weird $**t is happening, or that said, weird $**t is almost certainly related to what she did. With that guy. And to where she slept. Last night. And not even lack of sleep and a hangover are enough to explain away the ghost of the scent of roses that dogs her throughout her apartment as she throws stuff into her suitcase, where she knows, even without looking, that there are no roses to be found…
A NOTE TO REGULARS: Livia’s creator and boss-ess, id est, Moi, is madly trying to finish a novel, to give to her agent. She and Livia have agreed that future chapters will come bi-weekly instead of weekly. We know you understand. There’s a ton of leftovers in the fridge to tide you over between hits, and of course for those who might want to rewind all the way back to Day 1 (a little VCR-era humor for you), this here link will take you right back to the very beginning, from whence you can either dive in or find your favorite bits and reheat ’em.
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The apartment was silent, still. It felt earlier than it was, and she had exactly fifteen minutes to be out the door again. In her bedroom, the bower of the empress, Livia emptied the contents of the black canvas bag onto the bed. She then filled it again with a haphazard combination of jeans, black shirts, white tee shirts (she was vaguely conscious that it would be hot in New Orleans. How hot, she wasn’t sure, but hot). She opened the lingerie drawers of the armoire and extracted a random handful of bras and panties and threw them into the bag. Her lingerie, not the lingerie for sex.
Livia stripped off the suit and the corset and picked the ruined stockings up from the floor where they had fallen. Ruefully (the ensemble had cost her quite a bit of money), she threw all of the garments into the trash can. She hesitated over the black jacket and skirt (after all, the corset had been between her skin and the suit), but decided to follow Wanda’s instructions to the letter. For Danae. There was a soft, swishing sound as the stockings made contact with the plastic liner inside Livia’s trash can. The pulse point at the base of her throat throbbed painfully. Livia chose not to think about it.
She left her bag in front of the bathroom door while she showered; as she finished with each toiletry item, she threw it into the bag. Livia dressed in a white, collarless man’s shirt and black leather pants (the habitual coolness of a New York April had returned; the day was cloudy, it might even rain). The last two items into the bag were Anaïs Nin’s diary (for the plane) and Wanda’s package.
Before heading down the stairs, Livia took a glass from the shelf above the stove, turned on the tap, and filled it with water. She was thirsty; she was still, depsite Wanda’s breakfast, terribly hung over. As she gulped the water, her eyes fell on the shelf. There, half-hidden, forgotten, behind a jumble of miscellaneous kitchen implements–spatulas, wooden spoons, vegetable peelers, was a bottle of Valium there, for emergencies.
The entire weekend which lay before her constituted, as far as Livia was concerned, an emergency; she needed, at the very least, to get a nap in during the flight. The top of the bottle, Livia noted self-righteously, was dusty; the prescription was even out of date. She extracted three capsules. She would allow herself no more than one on each day of the weekend. She would leave the bottle at home, to avoid further temptation. Although she knew that her sister would, if the request were made, supply her with tranquilizers enough to last her the rest of her life. Livia wrapped the three capsules neatly in a tissue and put them in the hip pocket of her pants.
As she reached up to replace the Valium, Livia noticed the first of several strange things she was to notice throughout the day. The shelf was the same shelf where she kept the plates for her candles, the passionate and tempering candles. The red wax (now she remembered; she hadn’t been able to scrape it off the day before) had melted. It had run off the shelf and dripped onto the stove. It had, Livia reminded herself, been unseasonably hot the day before. The melted red had also spread laterally (that was curious…melted wax was generally heavy enough to respond only to the downward pull of gravity). The red wax had covered the spot where the tempering yellow drippings had been. Livia chose not to think about it.
She gathered her bag, her sunglasses, and the deadly, varnished chopsticks, vaguely conscious of a sweet smell, a smell she did not usually associate with her apartment. It was an outdoor smell, like a field in summertime. Composed of several different scents: grasses, evergreen, flowers, even, perhaps, some fruits. She put down the bag; a minute or two wouldn’t make a difference as far as the plane was concerned–she wasn’t planning to check anything.
By Manhattan standards, Livia’s apartment was quite large, but it was small enough for the identification of the source of an unaccustomed smell to be relatively uncomplicated. Livia walked slowly through the kitchen, past her table. She didn’t look up at Ophelia. She had had quite enough of Ophelia for the moment–Ophelia really should not have allowed Livia to fall asleep on the chaise-longue.
The aroma was becoming stronger. Livia’s highly-trained olfactory sense began automatically to dissect it, to identify, incredulously, the individual scents that composed the bouquet. Laurel, yes, definitely, there was laurel; and gardenia…how sweet, how unbearably sweet. There were no gardenia bushes (at least none of which Livia was aware) anywhere in her part of Harlem. There were the botanical gardens… Gardenias, she remembered, had been Marta’s favorite flowers.
The botanical gardens were not even remotely close by. She was tired, and sleep-deprived, and hungover, and she was confusing the smell of gardenias with something else. Livia’s steps echoed as she crossed the dining room. Perhaps the bowl of apples on the table… but her infallible nose had not detected any trace of apple in the wonderful bouquet. There was, indeed, a hint of fruitiness, but Livia would be more inclined to identify that component as lemon. No, the aroma was definitely not proceeding from the bowl of apples. Livia made a mental note to take two of the apples on her way back to the kitchen. She would put them in her bag, for the plane. Airplane food was, most often, unacceptable.
Livia glanced into the salon, just across the darker hall from the dining room. It was bathed in blueish light. The walls were white, but the Hudson was visible through the large windows; it played strange tricks with the white walls sometimes, particularly on warm April days when the sky was gray. Livia liked the blue tones. She found them calming. The salon was unquestionably an attractive, inviting space, but it was devoid of possible points of origin for the aroma. And the aroma, Livia’s nose had decided, was proceeding from her bedroom.
The beautiful, field-like aroma was overpowering in the shrouded half-darkness of the bedroom…overpowering, but fresh, as though it wafted into the room on a delicate spring breeze, through a window open onto a field or a garden. But there was no window in her bedroom, there was no garden, and she was going to be late. The smell was beginning to try her patience. Livia looked around the low shelves that surrounded her bed, with its Pompeii-red comforter and peacock-blue cushions. Nothing was out of place; everything was in order. There were no gardenias. There were no lemons. There were no grasses.
The sandals. The strappy, stiletto-heeled sandals. They were on the bed, terribly black, seductively shiny against the red comforter.
“Mierda!” Livia was irritated by her own inexcusable lack of thoroughness.
There was a suggestion of a throb in the hollow at the base of Livia’s throat. Livia ignored it. As she bent forward, reaching out a hand toward the sandals (they would join the rest of the ensemble in the trash bin), the aroma increased in intensity, to the point of being almost unbearable but, as had been the case with the indescribable taste of roses and chocolate the night before, the intensity was not disagreeable. Far from it. Alarmed, Livia felt the pulsing beginnings of something she definitely should not be feeling, in the vicinity of her heart. A gust of breeze blew an aroma-laden bit of air toward her nose. Despite herself, she inhaled deeply.
Livia’s eyes moved upward along the low shelves (a practical addition to her bedroom, she had congratulated herself when she thought of them), searching for…something, a lemon, a gardenia, something. There had to be something.
Nothing.
Livia’s eyes reached Wanda’s faithful replicas of the paintings which had adorned the bower of that other Livia, the emperor’s wife. She caught her breath. Laurels and evergreens, their greens deep and secretive against a hazy blue sky. Lemon trees and a garden wall. Several lemons rested temptingly on the white surface (probably gesso), inviting Livia’s outraged hand to pick them up, teasing her insulted nose to inhale their scent. And gardenias. Gardenia was now definitely the dominant note of the aroma. There were gardenia bushes on the walls of Livia’s bower, of her bedroom. As she stared, open-mouthed, the leaves of one of the gardenia bushes moved. There was an especially strong waft of the gardenia scent; she felt the breath of a breeze on her face.
An exclamation, inarticulate, enraged (what the hell was going on here, anyway? She had a flight to catch), escaped from the cupids-bow mouth. Livia grabbed the offending sandals, turned, and exited her bedroom. She slammed the door behind her. The scent of lemons, evergreens, laurel, and gardenias (especially gardenias) followed her diligently down the hall to the kitchen.
Livia opened the cabinet beneath the blue shelf and tossed the sandals into the trash bin. She slammed the cabinet door shut and turned to reclaim her bag, the chopsticks, the sunglasses. But. She paused, sniffing, seduced again by the game (what game? well, whatever game it was that was clearly, unmistakably being played in her apartment). The aroma had changed. Yes. Livia breathed a bit more deeply; it was faint, but there all the same…she had it. The gardenia scent had been replaced. Roses. Livia was furious. Fucking roses. Whoever, whatever, was playing with her sleep-deprived senses was going entirely too far.
She began to stalk about the kitchen, sniffing like a terrier, a bloodhound. Under the table? No. The floor under her table was always scrupulously clean. The refrigerator. No, that was stupid. The sink? No, but close…beneath the sink. The trash bin. Livia opened the cabinet. There was the trash bin. Emanating from its interior, Livia was forced to recognize, was the very faint (but nevertheless distinctive) aroma of rosewater.
When Livia closed the cabinet door this time, she didn’t slam it. She shut it very carefully, very gently, with a barely audible click. She reached inside the pocket of her black leather pants, her impatient fingers ripping at the carefully folded tissue. On her way down the stairs, Livia swallowed a Valium. Two. She would get some more from Danae.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, 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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