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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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