Installment XIV of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), has been serialized for your guilty reading pleasure, and is hereby served. Livia, in a bar, with a witch-doctored chocolate tart, a bottle of bourbon, and a man.
Don’t try this at home, Bad, Bad Lovers, do NOT try this at home. But do click right here, if you’d like catching up on previous bowls of serial. It’s all right there in the fridge, waiting for you.
~
Chocolate Tart Rescued
Entering the potpourri-scented powder room to change, the chocolate tart cradled in her left hand, Livia congratulated herself. The midnight blue rice paper felt crackly and dry against her palm. Good as new. And, most importantly of all, she hadn’t forgotten it. Her composure was fully recovered.
~
Rick
The bar was tiny. And it was really more of a restaurant with a bar, Livia mentally corrected Rick (although she was inclined to excuse his imprecise terminology–such distinctions were much more apparent to people in the business). Livia felt instinctively comfortable in the place; she liked the furnishings, the walls, the mismatched tables, the wood (as opposed to steel) of the bar. Everything looked old, used. Livia loved old things; she much preferred them to new ones.
The bar ran along the back wall of the restaurant, directly opposite the door; all of the stools were occupied save one. The unoccupied stool was beside a slim-but-muscular back clad in faded denim. Despite the ponytail of pale blonde hair that reached several inches below the collar line, the back belonged, she judged, to a man. The sleeves of the denim shirt were rolled up; the hands and forearms were definitely masculine. The empty bar stool would be for her.
Livia approached the bar stealthily. Rick (for Livia was certain of his identity; two years of meeting strangers in bars had given her an infallible sense for these things) conversed lazily with the bartender; they appeared to know one another. She felt entirely unjustified pricks of jealousy as she seated herself on the empty stool. Her stomach fluttered and, with a clarity that left her breathless, Livia realized that she was now seated next to the owner of the voice which had, with its remembered undercurrents and pauses, so implacably prevented her sleep the night before. Several seconds passed before Rick noticed her presence, seconds during which Livia listened to her heart race. She should probably leave.
Just as she was reaching for her bag, the bartender turned in her direction. His eyes lingered on her face, objectively appreciative of female attractiveness–the prerogative of a bartender–as he announced,
“Looks like your friend’s here.”
Rick kept his elbows resting comfortably on the bar and turned his face toward Livia. She froze and allowed her bag to drop back onto the floor. She should leave, but she was definitely going to stay.
Rick’s face fell just short of being perfectly beautiful, a Fra Filippo face with the skin so exquisitely pale it couldn’t possibly resist even under the slightest touch. Fra Filippo’s tour de force was his veils, the way you could see the flesh beneath and between their folds, each one rendered with disturbing, transparent clarity. The almost-perfection of Rick’s face was diaphanous, difficult to grasp or define, almost unreal. The face was framed by a halo of pale blond hair the color of young wheat, fine like spun silk, like a spider’s web, Livia imagined, fragile but surprisingly resilient when you tried to break it.
The forms and volumes of the face were cuttingly perfect, yet there was a tension, a subtle discomfort, in their combination. The face seemed as though it might have received a jarring blow (a bouleversement–Livia tried to remember French words as often as she could. She didn’t want to lose her French), as though something had permanently shaken a once-perfect composition of hills and valleys. Harmonious and symmetrical in its original state, the symmetry was now distorted, but only ever so slightly, disrupted by some cataclysmic spasm (maybe an orgasm, his first, adolescent orgasm) that had left his face’s perfection gently skewed. Like a portrait of a woman by Picasso, Livia thought, with the wide-set eyes slanting upward at slightly different angles and, because of the slightness of the imbalance, fascinating and disconcerting all at once.
Rick’s eyes were pale blue and surrounded by blond, just-visible eyelashes. The brows above those eyes were also pale, barely detectable and therefore more unsettling in the perfection of their arches. Each eyebrow was perfect in its solitude, but their angles were different, vaguely out of time with the slanting of the eyes. Livia’s own eyes were deep, royal, ocean, stained glass blue.
She had an unbidden and inappropriate thought–what color would be obtained by mixing the blue of her eyes with the pale blue of those of the man on the stool beside hers?
“Ophelia…”
Livia started, then contained herself. She was Ophelia. She had forgotten again. The name had been pronounced by a mouth also disconcerting in its nearness to perfection, all the greater because of its just failing to reach that mark (if something is perfect, then it has nowhere else to go, nothing left to which to aspire). The mouth, as it smiled, inclined upward in a manner which did not coincide with the angles of the rest of the face, cheekbones, temples–never before had Livia seen a man with beautiful temples.
The combination of the angles was just off, like a priceless instrument that needed tuning. The effect was discreetly shocking to Livia’s eyes.
They exchanged greetings, commonplaces. Rick introduced Livia, no, Ophelia, to the bartender. His name was Brian. No mention was made of the way in which Ophelia and Rick had made their acquaintance, for which Livia was grateful. Rick offered Ophelia a drink (“Whatever you’re having”). Bourbon.
As Livia rolled the first sip around on her tongue, she noticed a whisper of the taste of roses, which reminded her, in a troubling way, of the rosewater tears. She looked for the bottles of bourbon behind the bar, for a brand with which she was not familiar, but saw only the old standards. Rick was speaking to Ophelia. Livia could think about the bourbon later.
The contained, rough sensuality that ran just beneath the smooth surface of Rick’s phrases reminded Livia of the state in which that voice had left her the previous evening. She endeavored to formulate questions which would entail long answers; she wanted to listen to that voice, to observe that face, for as long as possible.
Rick had, for a long period during his twenties, been a genius painter in Georgia. Or at least Rick had been convinced of his own genius. That was the most important ingredient of any sort of genius, he added. Didn’t Ophelia agree? Livia merely nodded, mute before the terrible spectacle of the almost-perfection of that face. She was smoking a cigarette, already her sixth for the day.
The most important part of any genius, Rick said, of any creativity, was for the creator to be convinced of the vitality and importance of his or her creation. How anyone could be a genius painter in Georgia would have been beyond the ken of most gallery owners and goers in New York, but there Ophelia had it (a crooked smile that resounded in Livia’s lower abdomen like a blow from a well-aimed arrow)–he had been a genius painter in Georgia during his twenties.
Until he’d tired of his own genius. Or perhaps he’d simply lost conviction. Maybe also lost faith in his premature marriage to a graduate student in linguistics who never tired of discussing Barthes, Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Discourse.
Livia caught her breath. She remembered Erik in front of Ophelia’s lovely, drowned face. Erik and Discourse. Both Livia and Rick had been deeply wounded by the French school of deconstructionists. So many things in common–eyes, wounds. Livia wondered if she should be concerned about souls and, in her heart of hearts, she knew that she should be.
“My wife even tried to deconstruct my paintings,” Rick was saying. “Criticize, she called it.”
The voice paused. Livia felt the flutterings. One or two had reached up into her chest, but Livia chose not to think about that. She took a sip of bourbon; there was the taste of roses again. She hadn’t slept at all, and her senses were suffering because of it. She was following the steps, as she had done before on any number of occasions, toward the proffering of a chocolate tart to a man with whom, the test having been passed, she would have sex.
If he detected the bitterness masked by the luscious chocolate and buttery pastry, she would leave. It was simple, just as it had always been. That, she reminded herself, impatient at her fascination with the rose-taste that did not want to abandon her mouth, was why she used the tarts in the first place, for the sake of simplicity.
“But–my poor wife–my paintings were invincible to deconstruction. They were classical. Terribly figurative and classical. It’s kind of hard to deconstruct something with so obvious a group of referents…. but she tried, oh, how she tried.”
Rick’s favorite painting was one of the Three Fates. His wife, for some reason he had never divined, had taken that painting with her when she left. He hadn’t missed it for a week, and then it had been too late. Maybe she was going to try to deconstruct it alone, Livia thought to herself, away from his nearly perfect face. The invincibility of Rick’s figures to her deconstruction had wounded his wife, Rick told Ophelia, in the most intimate flesh of her soul. But she had stayed, or at least her body had, until a mere five years earlier.
“Imagine, Ophelia…” The pale blue eyes found and held the deep, pure blue of Livia’s. Of Ophelia’s. “Imagine, living inside the dead shell of a marriage for ten years, barely even remembering why you got married in the first place. How stupid we are when we’re young. I thought maybe I was dead until she left. Then the studio, the store, everything, became mine again, and I realized I was still alive. Older, but still alive.”
Older. Livia looked again at the face. There were lines, very definite lines, at the corners of the pale blue eyes, but the skin appeared separate from the lines, as though the lines would have no consequences, like the translucent skin of one of Van Eyck’s solemn figures, a donor, or perhaps a saint.
Rick’s slimness and coloring denoted a fragility which Livia was not accustomed to associating with masculinity, an ethereal quality that intrigued her. He would be like a river, frozen in winter, but whose currents continued to flow beneath the deceptively solid surface of the water. Those currents, if they were to crack through the ice, would startle you, take you by surprise, maybe even drown you. Livia would have to be careful.
~
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.
~
Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and Instagram, find her book Birds Of Wonder here and learn more about Cynthia here.
