As promised, Bad, Bad Lovers, and threatened, and teased, herewith the first installment of the novella, by the Yours Truly of some two decades ago, entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as a Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). Just as a reminder, to the young or the forgetful among you, we are back in the ’90s. There were things called pay-phones, and you needed a token to ride the subway…
Laudanum
Less than a week. Less than a week. Danae was turning forty in less than a week. The words came faster and faster, rolling through Livia’s head at a pace that picked up steadily with the metallic clanking of the train, with Livia’s feet pounding down the subway stairs.
Less than a week, less than a less less less less. Going instead of coming, and Livia had missed it, all because of the telegram. She should have booked her flight as soon as she received it, but there hadn’t been time. She would do it tomorrow.
When Livia reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw the line in front of the token booth. She resigned herself to being late for work.
~
Seven years before the telegram, three-quarters of the way through a bottle of orange liqueur on an irrevocable Christmas night, Danae had told Livia that if she wasn’t satisfied with her life by the time she hit forty, she would do it. On the night of her fortieth birthday, the last night of the last day on which she would not yet have begun the forty-first year of her life, Danae would swallow a lethal dose of laudanum.
Earlier, in the pale grey light of a too-warm Christmas morning (it never got really cold in Louisiana), Livia had given her sister a beautifully framed print of Millais’ “Ophelia“. Ophelia was the very image of a romantic death, the kind that Byron or Shelley would have killed for. She floated sweetly there in the still water, so young and lovely, you couldn’t really believe she was dead. Her hair was bright and coppery, and her open eyes were the pale blue of a baby’s blanket. And the flowers hadn’t even begun to wilt. She still held some of them in her left hand.
The painting had always fascinated Livia, but as a gift, and a gift to Danae, it had been a stupid choice. Livia knew that now, but now was not then and, moreover, now was too late. Hindsight is just tardy foresight come back to haunt you, Aunt Cornelia had always said; worse than being blind altogether.
~
Livia’s relationship with Ophelia, and particularly with Ophelia as she had been painted by Millais, had a long history. She had bought a print of that painting during her sophomore year at college, and it had accompanied her ever since. The year she gave the same print to Danae, there had been an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Livia went with Erik. That was back in the days when she had boyfriends. Erik had been one of the last ones, the last one but one, in fact. He was a graduate student in comparative literature. He traveled once a week from New York to New Haven, where he listened in raptured awe to Derrida lecture about différance and the fact that words weren’t really words (they were much more arbitrary than that), that différance was more important than similarity, and that words weren’t really yours after you had said them–they were Discourse. Erik had been enamoured of Derrida.
Livia and Erik went to the exhibition on a gelid day late in November, when the wind blew from all directions at once, when you needed a heavy coat even though it wasn’t Thanksgiving yet. They stared together for what seemed like hours at the painting of Ophelia. Erik had noticed in a soft, awed voice.
“She looks just like you”.
Just before taking the train uptown, Livia and Erik had made excruciating love in the early twilight, and her hand hadn’t left his since their pale cheeks first made post-coital contact with the frigid November air. On their way out of the exhibition, Livia bought the print, just like the one she already had, but much bigger. She needed something big enough to contain Ophelia’s lavish new significance. The print in her apartment wouldn’t bear up under the weight of all that significance, but this one, she’d thought, would do nicely.
Three days later, Erik broke up with Livia. He was in love with a dark-haired girl with full breasts and a foreign mouth. He saw her every Tuesday when he rode the train to New Haven to attend Derrida’s lectures. He and the girl talked about différance.
Livia hid the print in her closet for several days, ashamed of the swelling, tender significance she had lavished on it, mortified by her stupidity, her gullibility, and by the sheer size of the thing. Then she had the idea of giving it to Danae for Christmas. Danae was an incurable romantic; she would adore it. Livia took it to an expensive frame shop the very next day, and now Danae had it in her bedroom, just beside the mirror above her dressing table.
~
“Well, I’ve thought of laudanum. I’m just sick of everything, Liv. Really sick of it. I figure I can stand it, oh, I don’t know, a few more years, I guess…”
Danae’s voice had trailed off into a whisper. Bretton was asleep (Livia could hear snores; she’d been certain they were his). His sister, come down for the holiday from Connecticut with her husband and their two precocious children, had also been asleep. No one could hear, but Danae spoke as though someone might be listening.
“Laudanum?”
Livia remembered laughing at first, not because she’d seen anything funny in what Danae was saying, but as a sort of nervous reaction, a facile replacement for saying something, because she had no idea what to say, and her sister couldn’t possibly be serious anyway. Danae was a maudlin drunk.
But the laughing had stopped as Danae’s level of investment became increasingly evident. At first, Danae hadn’t been sure where she would get laudanum, she told Livia in her hurried, breathy voice, because people didn’t really use laudanum anymore for suicides, but she had found some. Danae, as she informed Livia in absolute, hiccupping confidence, had read about laudanum. Laudanum was clean, bloodless. And it didn’t disfigure, like other, harsher substances that might leave her face frozen forever in an anguish of rigor mortis which would ruin its symmetry and lessen the effect of the terribly perfect jawline. And, best of all, it was difficult to diagnose, and therefore difficult to combat with antidotes. It was, Danae slurred into her sister’s ear, irrevocable.
Irrevocable was one of Danae’s favorite words; just like Marta (Marta was their mother but she had always insisted on her daughters’ calling her Marta), she had her words, bigger and more complex words than were most of the ones she used, words to be taken out and dropped with a portentous thud into a particularly important place in a particularly important sentence, but only from time to time in order to maintain maximum signifying potential. Danae couldn’t get her mouth around the double r’s at the beginning of irrevocable when she was drunk, and to another listener, it might have been unintelligible, but Livia had heard her sister say the word often enough to know what she meant.
~
Livia had her token. She walked onto the platform and kept going, toward the end. There were always more seats at one end or the other of the train, and Livia liked to read on the train. She couldn’t do that standing up; it gave her vertigo.
~
She’d tried to change the subject, but Danae had drawn her relentlessly, drunkenly, back toward the laudanum.
“For awhile, I thought about wrists. You know, razor blades…”
Livia had listened with mounting consternation as her sister enumerated the steps toward the annihilation of her soul in a bathtub. First, she would listen to the waterfall sound of the soothing, lukewarm water as it raged out of the tap, a sound prefigured then by ice cubes and more thick, sweet liquid into her glass. Danae would listen to the water while she sliced the soft skin of her wrists open with one of Bretton’s razor blades before climbing in and watching the water turn a pale, questioning pink and then a final, irrevocable crimson.
There had been a silence then. They both drank, and Livia drank more because she was beginning to realize that her sister meant business. Danae was at least flirting with serious contemplation of suicide. Not for today, not for tomorrow or even next month (Danae had been thirty-three then–forty was forever). No, the laudanum was for some time in a future that probably still seemed so distant to Danae that she couldn’t quite envision it. Livia had been somewhat heartened by the thought; she remembered a short story by someone or other about a man who had determined to commit suicide at sixty. He grew much older and much greyer than sixty while he thought and thought about it, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The story had ended with him still alive, and quite happy to be that way, thank you.
But then there was “Harold and Maude”. Livia had gone to see it during her freshman year of college, at Bard’s Friday night film series. That, she remembered, was the first time she had realized that people, well, women, were capable of living (as opposed to merely existing) after the age of thirty.
It was a wonderful revelation for young Livia; she was light as wisps of winter cloud as she left the darkened gymnasium, deliriously happy at the first contact between her face and the stinging air of a star-studded January midnight.
Maude was seventy and she was still thrilled by daisies and green fields. Until the very end, when she tells the devastated Harold that she’s done it, that she’s taken the pill or swallowed the liquid (Livia couldn’t remember that detail), you really didn’t think she would do it. Especially once she found Harold–imagine finding love (and an adolescent lover) at sixty-nine. But she had done it anyway, on the night of her seventieth birthday, just like she’d promised herself. She had done it quietly, without drama, but she had done it.
Livia had felt suddenly sober in spite of the Drambuie as she looked at her sister. There was a new determination in the set of Danae’s full lips. This might be the one resolution Danae stuck to.
“But it’s too messy…” Danae’s voice slurred the s’s.
“What?”
“The bathtub, Liv! You never listen to me. I was talking about the bathtub, about how it won’t work.”
What if she lost consciousness so quickly that she didn’t manage to turn off the taps, and what if the crimson water, like cherry Kool-Aid, flooded the hand-cut beige tiles of the master bathroom? That wasn’t the sort of scenario Danae wished for the discovery of her lovely corpse.
~
When they were almost through the bottle of orange liqueur, Danae confided to her sister in melodramatic abandon that she had hidden the laudanum behind the mirror on her dressing table. She was going to hang Livia’s gift as close to the laudanum as she could get it, probably just beside the mirror.
~
Ophelia’s beautiful, startled, dead face, would thus–Livia felt a pang of remorse as she glanced impatiently at her watch, calculating–be within her sister’s field of vision for several out of the twenty-four hours of each and every day.
~
Livia had tried to laugh the next day, as they nursed hangovers over cups of black coffee while everyone else returned Christmas presents at the mall. But Danae, her face sallow with the hangover, sober because of it, insisted. She would do it. She would drink the laudanum and just get out and cut her losses if something special, something portentous, didn’t happen by midnight of the night of her fortieth birthday.
Something wonderful and irrevocable that would split the tired earth of her life right down the middle, so that a new plant with riotous green leaves and fantastically colored flowers could spring up and delight her. If that marvelous, portentous something were not forthcoming, she would do it.
~
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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