“You can call me Aphrodite,” she said flatly. “And, to cover your most important question first, Archie owes me a temple.” She led me, expensive heels clicking, to a park bench and swiveled sideways to face me.
“A temple.” I felt stupid. “That’s—that’s a lot to ask from one guy, isn’t it?”
“Just the plans,” Aphrodite said. “I can find people to build it. I had miracles planned for the opening of that temple. I had business to conduct.” Her voice was steel and broken glass.
I put all this together with the bits and pieces Archie had vouchsafed me.
She said, “I don’t suppose, in this ignorant era of video games and cocktails named after television actors, you have any idea what happens to somebody who annoys the goddess of love? The Greek goddess of love?”
I remembered Archie’s Bullfinch. I gulped. “What will you do to him?” There was no doubt in my mind that this woman—this goddess—could lay her hands on Archie any time she wanted.
Aphrodite smiled. “I’ve already done it.”
“Huh?”
“I made him immortal. Until he falls in love, and his love is returned. Then, of course, he has to deal with being in love with someone who’s going to die, in terms of his lifespan, roughly ten minutes from now.”
I blinked. “That’s pretty mean.”
Aphrodite leaned forward. Her perfect breasts swayed against the simple black silk camisole under her suit. “Unless he gives me that temple.”
“Then what does he get?” I said. “Two nights in Pittsburgh? He doesn’t like being immortal,” I said, realizing this fact even as the words left my mouth. Of course. No wonder he seemed so soul tired. Add the specter of the goddess of love gunning for him, and anybody would be wound a little tight.
Skeptically, I said, “How can he possibly give you a temple now? Who even worships love now? All the major religions are decaying into paperwork and procedure and human resource development policies.”
Then I realized I had just insulted a goddess—a Greek goddess—to her face. I waited for an unimaginable blow.
Aphrodite’s eyes glittered. “Oh, honey.” She sat back and lifted her palms, wordlessly inviting me to look around.
Cautiously, I looked around.
A sparrow flew down to the pavement at our feet and snatched up a crumb. Another sparrow flew to meet it, and the first sparrow fed it the crumb, beak to beak.
Two kids in sparkling hip-hop gear lay on their backs under the Bean, making snow-angel gestures and giggling, their hands intertwined above their heads.
A fat, elderly couple with clothes that yelled “tourist” handed a camera to a young Japanese woman with two babies, and the Japanese woman handed the camera to her husband, who put one arm around his wife and took the picture of the tourists standing against the Chicago skyline.
A pigeon puffed itself up to twice its normal size and walked in rings around another pigeon, purbling musically.
A bus rolled by. The video ad on its side was about perfume, or maybe a car, it was hard to tell, but mostly what I could see was the nearly naked body of a beautiful woman with olive skin and black hair and green, green eyes.
Lust serves love, not the other way around, Archie had said. She doesn’t need priests or temples or once-a-week worship services.
I got it. “Everybody worships you,” I said slowly. “Everybody and everything.” I shook my head. “So why are you being so mean to Archie? Is one guy such a big deal? Do you really need that temple?” I felt my eyes fill with tears. “You make so many miracles. Do they have to happen in a pile of stone columns?”
Aphrodite just looked at me. “Think about it. He can’t think. He’s a guy. They all think with their peckers. But you can think.”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that that temple is just dumb. It’s just a way to score against the competition. Archie showed me that book. How all the legends say that you don’t like competition.”
“Competition? That is so like a man. Do you have any idea how hard this job is? I have—” the goddess closed her eyes and her lips moved “—four hundred and fifty-one avatars out there right at this moment. Every one of them is overworked. I’d be more likely to thank him for providing me with another. If he had been on the job all this time instead of slacking, he’d have made lots more. But nooo. The slacker,” Aphrodite said disgustedly. She waved her hand. “He’ll be much more use to me when he has finished falling in love.”
“What do you mean, finished?”
“He has only begun now. By the way, that was classy, refusing all those love charms.” Aphrodite winked at me. “That’s another example for why you should never do magic for anyone but yourself. And when you do, think about why you’re doing it…and then don’t bother.”
“You wanted him to fall in love?” I was impatient of this. “You’re the goddess of love. You could make him fall in love.”
“And what kind of love would that be? Do you think that’s all I have to do all day? Go around shooting arrows at people? Even my son doesn’t have that kind of time. The great thing about this job is that love runs itself, once you get it started.” The goddess grinned. “And all the fun is in the getting started.” A red-winged blackbird swooped down, perched on her handbag, and flew away. “But there’s a whole lot of love going on, and every bit of it needs that first push, eh? The work never ends.”
She patted my knee. “Now. You’ve got Archie started. Grand. But he won’t go forward until he has completed his mission for me.”
I clapped my hands and shouted, “See? You are mean and capricious. You won’t let him alone until he makes that darned temple for you. You’re just as mean and vindictive as every other god I ever heard of.”
Love looked at me and said, “Well, duh. But think a moment, before you go off on me with your prejudices.”
I opened my mouth, remembered who I was slanging, and shut it.
“It is not me who’s keeping Archie from love. If I had my way, he’d have been in love twenty-three-hundred years ago, and this whole entertaining farce would have been mooted. Archie believes in that temple. He’s very invested in the fruits of his genius, whether he admits it or not.”
“I know that,” I said scornfully. “It’s what drives me crazy. He really wants to be Archimedes again. He’s just—”
The goddess interrupted, “He’s just stuck on his own self-image, mad at his father for pushing him, angry like any teenager, yearning for validation and yet getting it only through someone else. Mortals.” She shook her head. “Always wanting someone else to tell them it’s okay to love yourself, or approve of yourself, or to give you the cookie. If you want cookies, fuck it, bake cookies! What, are you crippled? Sheesh.”
Aphrodite rolled her eyes. “Now. You have to get him to make that temple. And when he’s done that, you’ve got to get to his heart, before he comes up with another excuse for why he’s not good enough. I can’t do everything for you.”
“Why not?” I asked. “I’m just curious.”
“Because humans think too much,” she said. “They get distracted from the most basic things like eating, loving, going to the bathroom, for goodness sake. Now, focus, Chloe. Will you get him to do that temple?”
I realized that there were gaps in this goddess’s intelligence network after all. I smiled. “So…you don’t know what I’ve been doing this past week?”
Chapter Eighteen
TALKING TO APHRODITE made me realize how frozen I felt. The post-op feeling persisted when I got home. I wasn’t numb, exactly, but feelings happened far away. I felt like I was a little kid, and my mother was holding my cup of hot chocolate out of my reach so I wouldn’t burn my tongue on it.
Was this what Archie had been to me, just something sugary and bad for me, a temptation that had burned me and left me hurting and unable to remember even the good parts?
I certainly couldn’t remember the good parts now. Something had happened in bed with him, I knew that much.
Kissing him. Something. I wondered, in some alarm, if the spell had excised everything I knew about him. Two years of friendship. Bartender wisdom, crying on his shoulder and getting his caustic, brotherly advice.
Usually that brotherly advice had amounted to, Forget him, he wasn’t worth all your tears, get yourself a good guy like you deserve.
He’d been trying to do just that for me, in fact, for three weeks. And I’d rejected every attempt. I gave away the love charms, or whatever they were, stuck poor Lido with one, got him outed at the AIDS Benefit Ball, and raised Marc’s hopes.
After sunset, I took a walk to the dog park where I’d sprinkled the baby-powder charm Archie gave me. It was dusk, the hour when single residents of Ravenswood Manor come out to walk their dogs and maybe meet someone who could stand to live with their furry little surrogate boyfriends and girlfriends.
I’d always been scornful of that scene. I had no trouble meeting men. Couldn’t hang onto one, but that’s different, right?
I sat on a park bench and watched.
They did seem to be clicking out here.
Girl with pit bull on string meets guy with Shih Tzu on string. They talk. They stand closer together. Their dogs sniff each other’s butts. They all walk away slowly together.
Girl with Rottweiler on string meets guy with standard poodle, no string, but with a cone around its neck, poor mutt. Mutual dog patting. Smiles.
The sight of all those couples hooking up, gazing deep into each other’s eyes while their dogs panted, content, at their feet, reminded me that I had lost something if I could just remember what it was.
At least I could still feel the hole where the spell had dug Archie out of me.
I watched this ballet for an hour.
Darkness fell. I began to think about love, how it really did make the world go around. Under these trees, heavy with summer leaf, people were changing their lives. Doing what animals are born to do: mate and raise families. Sparrows hopped in pairs at my feet, the males puffed up and the females hopping away…but not too fast. Moms were trying to coax their rug rats out of the big plastic castle on the pile of woodchips that passed for a sandbox. A guy pigeon cooed by my shoes, hyper-inflated, bobbing and twirling solemnly on his little pink feet, trying to get a lady pigeon to look.
At least, I assumed it was a lady pigeon.
As if on cue at that thought, I heard a voice beside me. “Come to see the show?” It was Lido. He sat down at the other end of my park bench and turned his liquid brown eyes and his big-bladed nose toward me. “You look solemn.”
“I’m trying to remember how it felt to be in love,” I said.
“Not smart. If you remember, you might fall back in. I take it you’ve forgotten?”
“I had help.” I blushed, remembering where I’d got the help. I hesitated, then said deliberately, “Marc’s mom gave me this spell to recite, if I ever felt—” How had Bubbie put it? “—If I ever felt that I didn’t want to feel invaded by love any more. If I wanted to get Archie out of my system.” I squinted at Lido. “You know that feeling when you can’t stop thinking about someone and they won’t talk to you and it hurts so bad you just want to—to cut them out of your body somehow? Well, that’s what the spell did.”
Enlightenment crossed Lido’s face. “Yes, I know that spell,” he said softly. Then he looked thoughtful. “Ah. So that’s what happened to Archie.”
“What do you mean?” I frowned. “What happened to Archie?”
“He disappeared from the lair four days ago. One minute he’s up with the plants, next minute his clothes are on the floor and he’s gone.”
I frowned harder. “You mean, like, with the chocolate mousse—the time he—I called him—”
“I’m guessing he got called to the Regional Office.”
“What? No!” I fished in my pocket for Bubbie’s card, worn soft and wrinkly from being carried around. “Is that what this says?”
Lido took it and angled it so he could read it by the orangey streetlight of the dog park. He gave a grim laugh. “Yup, that’s it. Where did you say you got this?”
“Marc’s mother. Bubbie.”
“The crazy old one? You mean his grandmother.”
“No, I tried to tell you that night,” I reminded him. “She’s his mom. Oh,” I added, “Bubbie also said that she’s in the same business.”
“Same—what business?”
“She’s a sex demon, too.”
“Too?” A real laugh fell out of Lido. “She sussed me?”
“Yep. What she said was,” I added, pushing my luck, “she and her son are in the same business.” I felt guilty all over again for having connived at Lido’s fall. “Keep the card. You might want it.”
He turned the card in his fingers for a long time. I saw a smile start on his lips. “Wait here.” He got up and put the card carefully on the bench between us. Then he crossed the street to the mom-and-pop corner store.
Archie was in the Regional Office? How could that be? Apparently the spell Bubbie gave me had not only surgically removed him from my heart, but exorcised him all the way back to hell. I wanted to wail, But he’s not a real demon, but I didn’t know how true that really was. After twenty-three hundred years, how human could he still be?
And why hadn’t I thought about that before?
Because I’d been in love.
I had to admit there was something to Archie’s rant against love—not just against the goddess who had cursed him with an eternal love life, but against love itself, love the drug. I’d been addicted to love and now I knew it.
Yet how had this time been any worse than all those times I’d thought I was in love, dated a guy once or twice, or maybe for a whole glorious month, and then got dumped? Only to crawl back to Cheaters and cry on Archie’s bartender shirt.
Now that I’d been there, done that, and could still feel the sutures in my heart where Bubbie’s spell had ripped him out of me, I knew the difference.
The difference was, Archie had loved me back.
Had being the important word here. Past tense.
Another thought occurred to me. Had the recall-to-hell spell cured him of love, the way it had cured me?
What a waste.
We had been so close to—to what? Since Archie wasn’t here to talk cynical sense to me, my “sister” brain started jeering.
What exactly could you have had if he had kept loving you? What if you’d kept doing the magic sex thing with him? Would you have ended up turning into a sex demon too? Was that the rest of Aphrodite’s curse on him, to make his condition contagious if he kept doing the same woman?
Put that way, the idea made me tingle just a little bit.
Lido’s warning sounded in my head. If you remember, you might fall back in.
Lido came back across the street with a paper bag. “Do you have a match? I didn’t think about asking for matches.”
I dug in my purse for the lighter I had brought home from the Venus Dreams launch party. It had Archie’s temple sketch on the side, which was why I’d taken it, since I don’t smoke.
“Thanks,” Lido said, not looking at the sketch. He took a nine-day glass candle full of red wax out of the paper bag and set it on the bench.
I said, “Marc really likes you. He means well by you.”
“I know.” Lido opened his pocketknife and carefully trimmed the candlewick down to one inch long. Then he picked up Bubbie’s spell card and looked at it.
“What do you think they’re doing at the Regional Office? With Archie, I mean?” My tummy didn’t feel so good.
“No clue,” Lido said. “He’ll probably blunder through their offices until he can find somebody to send him home. Archie knows his way around.” Lido flicked the lighter on. In the gloom, the flame glowed yellow, with a blue heart. He flicked it off.
Then he picked up Bubbie’s spell card. “You can’t use this twice, you know.” He looked at me directly, and once again I thought I could see his three hundred years l
ooking out of his big fawn-like eyes.
“What? Ever?”
“If you fall in love with another guy, maybe. But it’s not a solution to the problem. If you should meet Archie again and decide you want to get closer, that’ll void the spell. You can’t just do it over. It won’t work a second time for the same guy.”
“Is it really better to, I dunno, use magic? To get over love?”
“People have been trying to treat love sickness forever. You use what you’ve got. I hear nowadays they’re doing wonders with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”
“What?”
“Modern biochemistry.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Boring.” He smiled. “How are you doing, Chloe? Is the spell really working?”
I took a deep breath and felt my lip tremble a little. Whoa. A feeling. Huh.
“Frankly, it feels kinda weird.” I pointed at the poodle with the cone around its neck, sitting patiently while its master chatted up the woman with the Rottweiler on a string. “See that dog? I know just how it feels. They’ve gone and cut something out of me, and I want to gnaw the place, lick it, scratch it, just to bring it back to life, even if it hurts like hell. At least, then I would remember what’s missing.”
Lido smiled again, turning the card in his tattooed fingers. “I know how you feel. Kind of numb and hollow and medicated.”
Nosiness got the better of me. “Who—who was it? The person you were trying to get out of your system?”
Lido’s smile widened briefly. “Same guy, actually.” Our eyes met. “Archie.” My face must have showed my shock. “But you knew that.”
I had known that. Three weeks ago I’d seen it in Lido’s face. And somehow I’d forgotten.
Yeah, somehow, as in, I had selfishly plunged headlong into my own hormonal craziness over Archie.
“What happened?” I said.
Lido looked at the card. “Archie fell in love with you. He needed help with the love charms, and I realized I was gonna mess ’em up royally if I worked any kind of love magic in that frame of mind. It wasn’t like I had a shot at him.”
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