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 riptide 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 a while, 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 workstation 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 workstation. 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 anymore.
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 a while 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?
~
