EQMM, March-April 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "To live a few years fully is better than to live many years badly,” she said, hugging her arms to her breast.

  Once again, the decision was not her father's to make, but the tragedy was that with Jason's assistance she had arranged that circus this morning specifically to convince Periander that his daughter had breathed the vapours of death and that there was nothing for him to live for. Sacrilege in Apollo's shrine had indeed been punished. But at what price, she wondered—

  "Come,” Jason said. “The priests are returning. Let's go back to the sanctum.” He kissed her tear-stained cheeks. “There's a fissure I want to block up."

  Healing, he said. The name Jason means healing, and maybe, just maybe, Cassandra would grow to love him as much as he adored her.

  Right now, though, she doubted it.

  How could she love him, if she hated herself?

  Copyright (c) 2007 by Marilyn Todd

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  A VIENNESE ROMANCE by Stefan Slupetzky

  Stefan Slupetzky was born in 1962 in Vienna and studied at the Vienna Academy of Arts. He worked as both a musician and drawing teacher before turning to writing, and has writ-ten and illustrated more than a dozen books for children. Mr. Slupetzky now writes dramas, short fiction, and novels for adults. His crime-fiction debut, The Case of the Lemming, was awarded the Friedrich Glauser prize for best first crime novel.

  Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

  * * * *

  Lizzy had almost everything. Everything but a place of her own. But because she had almost everything, she had Charlie, and he had a spare. A spare apartment, that is. Charlie would have moved in with Lizzy, but Lizzy said: “You know, living together's best when I'm doin’ it alone. ‘Cause of the vibes, you know? Then I can think about you more than when you're always here. Know what I mean? Yeah, you know..."

  Charlie didn't know, not really, but Lizzy got the penthouse high above the park, with the rooftop terrace and everything. Charlie had more than just “everything"; that was from his days as a great center forward on the soccer field and because he had a star manager and all. But Charlie wasn't the brightest guy, and, well, he could be a little impulsive. Once, for example, when Lizzy didn't answer the phone or open the door for two whole days, Charlie got a little wound up. Luckily, Lizzy's Fiat was still in the underground parking garage, and to make sure it stayed there, Charlie slit all four tires.

  Lizzy was pretty shaken up. “My Chitty Bang,” she sobbed. “You broke my Chitty Bang!” All of a sudden, Charlie couldn't be mad at her anymore; he was overcome by guilt instead. And soon Chitty Bang's parking spot was occupied by a shiny new red Ferrari. To make up. Because basically Charlie was a good guy.

  So Lizzy forgave him. “Oh, Charliesweetie,” she sighed, and blew gently in his ear. Charliesweetie liked that.

  Even so, a week later the television took the brunt of it, on account of a letter on Lizzy's nightstand. A letter that she hid from Charlie fast—but not fast enough.

  "I can't stand it, I just can't stand it!” screamed Lizzy, and locked herself in the bathroom.

  Charlie was seized with a terrible fear that Lizzy would slit her wrists. But she didn't, and the next day, when Charlie apologized with a Super Reality Video Wall, he was happy, because Lizzy blew in his ear again.

  And so, with time, Lizzy's penthouse was no longer a run-of-the-mill penthouse with a view of the park and a rooftop terrace and all. The couch had been replaced with a queen-sized electrical massage lounge; where the bathtub had been there was a Jacuzzi; the extra-bright daylight lamp had become a whole solarium. And Charlie never broke anything twice. Lizzy made sure of that. The business with the sixty-piece dinner service, for example. Lizzy had found it when she was out shopping and had fallen in love with it. And the next time Charlie got all wound up, she ran into the kitchen, threw herself protectively in front of the china cabinet, arms flung wide, and begged him: “No, not Mama's beautiful plates!” And before you knew it, Lizzy had her sixty-piece porcelain service. And a nice new mahogany cabinet to put it in.

  It could have turned out to be a great long-term relationship, with consideration on both sides and genuine understanding and everything. But at some point Lizzy noticed that Charlie hadn't been wound up for two whole weeks, and all of a sudden it was Lizzy who was nervous. She thought: I have this funny kind of feeling that my sweetie's neglecting me. Yeah, just like Lucy and Tommy. It's the beginning of the end, Lucy always says...

  And that's when Lizzy got the idea. The idea with Picasso's beard, that is. There was this report on the television news about an art auction in New York, and Lizzy couldn't change the channel right away to Rich and Famous because her fingernails weren't quite dry. And when she heard what they were asking for the pictures, that was the beginning of Lizzy's interest in art. Eyes wide, she scribbled the name “Picasso” on a scrap of paper. And afterward, she dug out the scrap of paper, learned the name by heart, and went out in search of a bookstore.

  It didn't take Lizzy long at all to draw one of the funny-looking naked women from the Great Book of Picasso. On the third try, she was satisfied. And once she had it in the big golden frame from the furniture store, it looked pretty good to her. Lizzy hung it over the bed between the cat portrait and the sunset.

  Then she called Lucy. “Hi, it's Lizzy ... Hey, Lucy, you gotta do me a favor, okay? But it's gotta be a secret, so don't tell anyone, okay? See, Tommy shaves with an electric shaver, doesn't he? Well, see, the thing is, I could really use some of the hairs from the shaver. No, it's not a joke! What, you guys are splitting up? No, really? Hey, well, all I can say is: Men! You know? But hey, can you do it? The hairs from the shaver, I mean? ... Hey, super, really! I'll come over tomorrow and pick them up. Tomorrow afternoon. Hey, take care of yourself, okay? Bye!"

  * * * *

  Two days later, Charlie turned up to see Lizzy. It took awhile until he went into the bathroom, and in the bathroom it took awhile until he noticed the sink. But when he did, Charlie showed he was the same guy he'd always been.

  "Who is it?” he bellowed. “Who? ... Shaving! There!” And when he tore into the bedroom, Charlie had that crazy look that Lizzy had been waiting for.

  "Anything, sweetie!” she cried out. “Anything but my Picasso!"

  "Picasso? Where is that pig? Where's the damn pig?!” And then Charlie saw the picture on the wall, and that was the last straw. It bothered Lizzy a little when the beautiful picture frame got broken, but she didn't say anything; she was a strong woman.

  * * * *

  And Charlie was a man of his word. He was pale when he got back from New York, but he had it, he really had it with him, the genuine Picasso. And it was a really big one, an oil painting, just the way he'd promised Lizzy. But when she said, “Oh, Charliesweetie” and blew in his ear, it was different from before, because Charlie was still pale, and didn't look happy at all.

  Two weeks later, Charlie took the elevator to the top floor, went into the penthouse, and took care of Lizzy. Then he packed everything that was left of her into the deep freeze. And didn't get wound up at all, the whole time.

  Lizzy's plan wasn't a bad idea, but even so, she'd made a mistake: She'd told Lucy about it. And it was Lucy who told Charlie the whole story when he got back from New York.

  Because Lucy had almost everything. Everything but a place of her own. But because she had almost everything, she had Charlie, and he had a spare.

  Copyright (c) 2004 by Stefan Slupetzky; first published as “Eine Wiener Romanze” in Absurdes Gluck. Translation (c) 2007 by Mary Tannert.

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  (c) 2007 by Joyce Carol Oates

  VALENTINE, JULY HEAT WAVE by Joyce Carol Oates

  A National Book Award winner and a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of many important literary novels, and short-story and poetry collections. She has also become a notable contributor to crime fiction i
n recent years. Her second collection of crime stories, The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Sus-pense, is due from Harcourt in August. She's also got a new novel due in June. See The Gravedigger's Daughter (Ecco).

  By calculated estimate is Eight days should be about right.

  Not that I am a pathologist, or any kind of “naturalist.” My title at the university is professor of humanities. Yet a little research has made me fairly confident Eight days during this heat should be about right.

  Because I have loved you, I will not cease to love you. It is not my way (as I believe you must know) to alter. As you vowed to be my wife, I vowed to be your husband. There can be no alteration of such vows. This, you know.

  You will return to our house, you will return to our bedroom. When I beckon you inside you will step inside. When I beckon you to me you will come to me. You will judge if my estimate has been correct.

  Eight days! My valentine.

  * * * *

  The paradox is: Love is a live thing, and live things must die.

  Sometimes abruptly, and sometimes over time.

  Live things lose life: vitality, animation, the pulse of a beating heart and coursing blood carrying oxygen to the brain, the ability to withstand invasion by predatory organisms that devour them. Live things become, in the most elemental, crudest way of speaking, dead things.

  And yet, the paradox remains: In the very body of death, in the very corpse of love, an astonishing new life breeds.

  This valentine I have prepared for you, out of the very body of love.

  * * * *

  You will arrive at the house alone, for that is your promise. Though you have ceased to love me (as you claim) you have not ceased to be an individual of integrity and so I know that you would not violate that promise. I believe you when you've claimed that there is no other man in your life: no other “love.” And so, you will return to our house alone.

  Your flight from Denver is due to arrive at 3:22 P.M. You've asked me not to meet you at the airport and so I have honored that wish. You've said that you prefer to rent a car at the airport and drive to the house by yourself and after you have emptied your closets, drawers, shelves of those items of yours you care to take away with you, you prefer to drive away alone, and to spend the night at an airport hotel where you've made a reservation. (Eight days ago when I called every airport hotel and motel to see if you'd made the reservation yet, you had not. At least, not under your married name.) When you arrive at the house, you will not turn into the driveway but park on the street. You will stare at the house. You will feel very tired. You will feel like a woman in a trance of—what?

  Guilt, surely. Dread. That sick sense of imminent justice when we realize we must be punished, we will get what we “deserve."

  Or maybe you will simply think: Within the hour it will be ended. At last, I will be free!

  * * * *

  Sometime before 4 P.M. you will arrive at the house, assuming the flight from Denver isn't delayed. You had not known you were flying into a Midwestern heat wave and now you are reluctant to leave the air-conditioned interior of the car. For five weeks you've been away and now, staring at the house set back some distance from the street, amid tall, aging oaks and evergreens, you will wish to think Nothing seems to have changed. As if you have not noticed that, at the windows, downstairs and upstairs, venetian blinds seem to have been drawn tightly shut. As if you have not noticed that the grass in the front lawn is overgrown and gone to seed and in the glaring heat of the summer sun patches of lawn have begun to burn out.

  On the flagstone walk leading to the front door, a scattering of newspapers, fliers. The mailbox is stuffed with mail no one seems to have taken in for several days though you will not have registered Eight days! at this time.

  Perhaps by this time you will concede that, yes, you are feeling uneasy. Guilty, and uneasy.

  Knowing how particular your husband is about such things as the maintenance of the house and grounds: the maintenance of neatness, orderliness. The exterior of the house no less than the interior. Recognizing that appearances are trivial, and yet: Appearances can be signals that a fundamental principle of order has been violated.

  At the margins of order is anarchy. What is anarchy but brute stupidity!

  And so, seeing uneasily that the house seems to be showing signs of neglect, quickly you wish to tell yourself But it can have nothing to do with me! Five weeks you've been away and only twice, each time briefly, you have called me, and spoken with me. Pleading with me Let me go, please let me go as if I, of all people, required pleading-with.

  My valentine! My love.

  * * * *

  You will have seen: my car parked in the driveway, beside the house. And so you know (with a sinking heart? with a thrill of anticipation?) that I am home. (For I might have departed, as sometimes, admittedly, in our marriage I did depart, to work in my office at the university for long, utterly absorbed and delirious hours, with no awareness of time.) Not only is the car in the driveway, but I have promised you that I would be here, at this time; that we might make our final arrangements together, preparatory to divorce.

  The car in the driveway is in fact “our” car. As the house is “our” house. For our property is jointly owned. Though you brought no financial resources to our marriage and it has been entirely my university income that has supported us yet our property is jointly owned, for this was my wish.

  As you are my wife, so I am your husband. Symmetry, sanctity.

  This valentine I've designed for you, in homage to the sanctity of marriage.

  * * * *

  On the drive from the airport, you will have had time to think: to rehearse. You will repeat what you've told me and I will try to appeal to you to change your mind but of course you will not change your mind Can't return, not for more than an hour for that is the point of your returning: to go away again. You are adamant, you have made up your mind. So sorry please forgive if you can you are genuine in your regret and yet adamant.

  The house, our house: 119 Worth Avenue. Five years ago when we were first married you'd thought that this house was “beautiful"—"special.” Like the old residential neighborhood of similarly large houses on wooded lots, built on a hill overlooking the university arboretum. In this neighborhood known as University Heights most of the houses are solidly built brick with here and there a sprawling white colonial, dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Our house is dark-red brick and stucco, two stories and a third part-story between steep shingled roofs. Perhaps it is not a beautiful house but certainly it is an attractive, dignified house with black shutters, leaded-glass windows, a screened veranda, and lifting from the right-hand front corner of the second floor a quaint Victorian structure like a turret. You'd hurried to see this room when the real-estate agent showed us the house but were disappointed when it turned out to be little more than an architectural ornament, impractical even as a child's bedroom.

  On the phone you'd murmured Thank God no children.

  Since you've turned off the car's motor, the air conditioning has ceased and you will begin to feel a prickling of heat. As if a gigantic breath is being exhaled that is warm, stale, humid, and will envelop you.

  * * * *

  So proud of your promotion, Daryll. So young!

  How you embarrassed me in the presence of others. How in your sweetly oblivious way you insulted me. Of course you had no idea. Of course you meant well. As if the fact that I was the youngest “senior” professor in the humanities division of the university at the time of my promotion was a matter of significance to me.

  As my special field is Philosophy of Mind so it's “mind” that is valued, not trivial attributes like age, personality. All of philosophy is an effort of the mental faculties to discriminate between the trivial and the profound, the fleeting and the permanent, the many and the One. Pride is not only to be rejected on an ethical basis but on an epistemological basis, for how to “take pride” in one's s
elf?—in one's physical being, in which the brain is encased? (Brain being the mysterious yet clearly organic repository of “mind.") And how to “take pride” in what is surely no more than an accident of birth?

  You spoke impulsively, you had no idea of the crudeness of your words. Though in naiveté there is a kind of subtle aggression. Your artless blunders made me wince in the presence of my older colleagues (for whom references to youth, as to age, were surely unwelcome) and in the presence of my family (who disapproved of my marrying you, not on the grounds that you were too young, but that you were but a departmental secretary, “no match” intellectually for me which provoked me to a rare, stinging reply But who would be an intellectual match for me? Who, and also female?)

  Yet I never blamed you. I never accused you. Perhaps in my reticence. My silences. My long interludes of utter absorption in my work. Never did I speak of the flaws of your character and if I speak of them now it is belatedly and without condemnation. Almost, with a kind of nostalgia. A kind of melancholy affection. Though you came to believe that I was “judgmental"—"hypercritical"—truly you had no idea how I spared you. Many times.

  * * * *

  Here is the first shock: the heat.

  As you leave the car, headed up the flagstone path to the front door. This wall of heat, waves of heat shimmering and nearly visible rushing at you. “Oh! My God.” Several weeks away in mile-high Denver have lulled you into forgetting what a midsummer heat wave in this sea-level Midwestern city can be.

  Stale humid heat. Like a cloud of heavy, inert gas.

  The heat of my wrath. The heat of my hurt. As you are my wife I spared you, rarely did I speak harshly to you even when you seemed to lose all control and screamed at me Let me go! Let me go! I am sorry I never loved you please let me go!