by Kim Wright
I force myself to swallow the wine and nod my thanks to Valerie. She is my companion, after all.
“Che is an unusual name,” Angelique is saying to me. “Were you named after the stadium?”
“It’s not that kind of Shea,” I say. I know what she’s talking about, because I’ve heard that theory before. Angelique is looking at me with wide, trusting eyes. She must have been pretty, back in the days before she tried to make herself hot. There’s a sweetness to her face that speaks more of homecoming queens than mobsters. God love her, as my Southern grandmother used to say. God bless her stupid little heart. “It’s C-H-E. I’m named after a revolutionary. My parents were hippies.”
“So what do you think of the wine, Che-who-was-named-for-a-revolutionary?” Valerie asks, a small smile playing around her lips. “It’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
Okay, so I really am being challenged. She saw I didn’t want to drink it. Saw that I winced when I tried. Maybe she even googled me under the table while I was googling Angelique. Maybe she’s seen the picture on my website, me toasting someone at a far distance, smiling broadly at an imaginary companion hovering just out of sight.
“Valerie, you must be the most easily pleased person I’ve ever met,” I say. “I think you must like just about everything on earth.” It’s the worst insult I can think to hurl at someone, but Valerie only smiles again.
“Thank you,” she says. “I try very hard to.”
The Tale of Angelique
“That damn cod’s repeating on me,” Angelique says with a burp. “I should have gone to the bathroom back at the inn.”
“We can turn around,” Tess says and I start to protest before I stop myself. Turning back after we’re twenty minutes into the afternoon segment of our walk seems like an admission of failure, like we’ve broken some sort of Canterbury rule before we’ve even begun. And yet on the first day they turned back for me, did they not?
Angelique is already shaking her head. “I’ll just find a bush,” she says. “There’s got to be some kind of bush on this goddamn path.”
We contemplate the view, but the land we’re walking through does not appear to be particularly bushy. It’s another field of hops and a few minutes earlier Tess had paused at one of the piles and crushed a dying leaf in her hand. She had insisted that we all smell it in turn and then said, “When they call a beer ‘hoppy,’ this is what they mean.” The leaf had an earthy, musty aroma I’ve encountered before in bars, or on the happy breath of men, but I had never known that it was precisely hops I was smelling, for I know nothing of beer, no more than Valerie knows about wine.
But now the smell of hops is with me for life. I have a decent palate, but an extraordinary nose—I like to tell people that it was my nose that led me to wine, and not my tongue. Once I have sniffed something I can never forget it, even if I try, and Ned used to tease me about having an olfactory version of a photographic memory. “Could you find me?” he’d asked, playfully lifting his arm and exposing the pit. “Could you pick me out if you were blindfolded and in a whole room full of naked, sweaty men?”
“Maybe . . . assuming that I wanted to,” I’d said and he’d laughed because whenever I was flippant, he was always quick to laugh. It was one of our little brags, that we were both clever and both appreciative of the other’s cleverness, but now I’m starting to see all that banter in a new light. Who did we think we were—characters in some Oscar Wilde play? Why did I never speak the truth—that of course I could have found him, no matter if he were lost among legions of men, and why did he never pull me onto his lap and tell me not to worry, that nothing could make him leave me in the first place? But we were always joking, speaking in shorthand. Even when one of us would say “I love you,” the other one would say “Ditto,” until we got to the point that all we would say was “Ditto.” “Ditto,” he would say at the airport on a Sunday afternoon, when I had pulled into a drop-off lane, him dragging his bag from the backseat and blowing me a kiss as he stepped onto the curb. “Ditto,” I would call back, my gaze already fixed in the rearview mirror, already trying to figure out how to ease back into the flow of traffic.
“There we go,” says Angelique, emerging from behind a stack of hops, buttoning her jeans. “Not the Ritz, but hey, I’ve never been too good to take a crap outdoors.”
“We could have turned back,” Tess repeats faintly, but her professionalism stops her from saying what the rest of us are thinking: So you didn’t just pee, you crapped? Seriously? Right here on the Canterbury Trail behind some farmer’s stack of hops? “But now that you’re feeling better, maybe you’d like to start your story.”
“It isn’t just my story,” Angelique says with confidence. “It’s everyone’s story. I’m going to tell you girls a fairy tale.”
Somehow I wouldn’t have figured the Queen of Jersey for a fairy tale. “Once upon a time in a country far far away . . .” she begins, then stops. “Maybe this is really more of a myth,” she says. “Yeah, a myth. My mother used to tell it to me when I was a little girl. This is the story of Psyche and Eros.”
She pronounces “Psyche” with no accent on the e, so it was the same sound as if you said “I don’t want to psych myself out.” Tess is tolerant, tolerant enough to let some American mobster’s wife take a shit right in the middle of a perfectly lovely British hops field, but even she can’t stand for this. “It’s ‘Psyche’ with an e,” she says. “Psych-ee.”
“Psych-ee,” Angelique repeats obediently, first to herself, and then out loud. “I guess Mama had it wrong.” She doesn’t seem offended at having her pronunciation publicly corrected. It’s probably something that’s happened to her a lot over the last few years, as she has risen from obscurity to Bravo TV fame.
“Anyways,” she continues. “Once upon a time in a country far far away, a king had three daughters. The youngest one was called Psych-ee and she was so sweet and beautiful that all the other women in the kingdom were jealous of her. Her two sisters and even the goddess Aphrodite. In fact, Aphrodite was so jealous that she ordered her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the wrong man. The worst possible man. The one man on earth who would surely break her heart.”
She pauses again, but this time for effect. She’s aware that she has quickly captured everyone’s attention, for who among us does not have an absolute wronger in her past? Who among us has not fallen under this particular curse of Aphrodite, doomed to ignore a dozen nice guys in pursuit of that one singular man who is destined to break our hearts?
“I think Mama told me this story because I was the youngest of three girls,” Angelique says, which is a strange little flicker of insight for a woman so un-self-aware that she can’t even detect the need to crap before it hits her in the middle of a hops field. “And because my sisters were total bitches to me growing up. You know that Aphrodite and Eros are the same people as Venus and Cupid, right? Like the razor blades and valentines?”
“Indeed,” says Tess, “Aphrodite and Eros are the Greek names for the gods the Romans called Venus and Cupid.” She has a way of summing things up neatly, with very little inflection in her voice to reveal her personal opinion. She probably thinks we’re all hopeless. Utterly incapable of telling tales of true love and quite beyond the reach of Canterbury’s salvation. I wonder if we’re the most hopeless group she’s ever led.
“I guess that’s why Mama called them Aphrodite and Eros,” Angelique says. “Because this is a serious story. Eros wasn’t some silly baby with a bow and arrow. He was the most handsome of all the gods.” She pops her hands in quick violent gestures, punctuating the air with her acrylic fingernails as she talks. Maybe it’s an Italian thing, maybe the result of being on TV, the pressure of trying to make every minute of her day camera-worthy. Hard to say. Either way, it’s distracting. I feel like I should be watching her as well as listening, as if she might stop at any moment to act a scene out. “So here’s what ha
ppens. Psyche’s been cursed by the goddess of love, which means that even though she’s perfect, she grows up without any boyfriends. All these years pass and not a single man comes calling, not one. Her parents can’t understand what’s wrong, so they take her to the Oracle of Delphi, which is like a psychic and a priest all rolled up together, and he says that Psyche will have to marry a snake. A snake. A total monster who’s going to devour her. That’s what he says, and nobody fucks with the Oracle of Delphi.”
Her voice drops to a whisper. “So the day of Psyche’s wedding is also the day of her funeral. Her whole family and all the servants take her up to this high mountain where her snake husband says she must wait for him, and everybody is weeping and wailing, except for the sisters. They’re secretly happy because they think the pretty little sweet one is going to finally get what she’s always had coming to her. And her parents just leave her there at the top of the cliff and go home, crying the whole way. But the snake doesn’t show. Psyche waits but nothing comes except the wind. It picks her up and carries her gently gently gently down to a castle at the bottom of the cliff. And once she gets to that castle, everything’s great. She lives in perfect comfort and has whatever she wants. In fact, things appear with a poof the moment she wishes for them.”
“Why do I have the feeling this story is getting ready to go sour?” Silvia asks drily.
“Not yet,” Angelique says. “ ’Cause see, what’s happened is that when Eros came to destroy Psyche, he accidentally pricked himself on one of his own arrows and fell in love with her. That’s how Mama used to say it, ‘He pricked himself,’ and then she would laugh, but of course I was a little girl and I didn’t get why it was funny until later. Prick, get it? You see the joke?”
We nod. We see the joke.
“So it was Eros who sent the wind to rescue her and who set her up in this terrific castle as his wife,” Angelique says. “But she can’t know she’s married to a handsome god; she has to think the prophecy has come true and her husband is a monster. And his mother, Aphrodite, can’t know he’s screwed up and fallen in love with a human. So their marriage must remain secret. Psyche has everything she could want, except for the knowledge of who her husband really is, and that’s heavy, right? Super heavy. Eros only comes to her in bed, when it’s too dark for her to see his face. And night after night they have banging sex—my mother didn’t tell me that part, I figured it out later—but in the morning he’s always gone and she’s always lonely. I mean, what does she have to do all day, living in that castle, with only servants around her and nowhere to go?”
Here she pauses again, and shoots a sympathetic look toward Jean, who, now that I think of it, had come to an almost identical point halfway through her own story. The woman manages to get herself to paradise, and to get herself married to the perfect man. She lives in luxury—in a castle at the bottom of a windy cliff, in some gated community in Guatemala, it hardly matters which, because we’ve all been trained from girlhood to know that this is what we’re supposed to want. But we can’t stand it once we get there. Loneliness sets in . . . boredom, curiosity, impatience, some sort of profound and wordless discontent with the status quo. There is only one female story, I think, and it’s the original one. We are all of us Eves, determined to break out of Eden the minute God and our husband turn their backs. Where’s the snake? we think, as we look around our perfect little worlds, so lonely and so sickeningly bored that we would do anything, anything for some good old-fashioned trouble. This is all very fine and good, but bring on the snake.
“In fact, Psyche feels so lonesome there in the castle,” Angelique says, “that she even asks her awful sisters to come pay her a visit. And that’s how I knew I was Psyche.”
She says this last line with a strange sort of casualness, flipping the dark curtain of hair away from her marked-up face, stopping halfway astride one of the rough, low fences we’ve been crossing all afternoon, teetering a moment, until her boots find solid ground on the other side. They have small pointed heels and small pointed toes, utterly impractical for the trail, but I’ve noticed that tiny women like Angelique are often masters of walking in impractical shoes, willing to go to any degree of discomfort just to be a bit taller.
“I guess you’ve all seen our house,” she says, glancing around for confirmation. “It’s the one on the series and it’s got four whirlpool tubs and a chef’s kitchen and Nico even called it The Castle, that’s what he used to say, but once we moved in, I was just like Psyche. So desperate for company that I broke down and asked my older sisters to come for a week and visit us. They said I did it just to show off, to say, ‘Nah-nah-nah, look at the size of my bathroom,’ but that wasn’t it. I really missed them. And I was, like, trapped. Which sounds stupid, because how can you be trapped in a castle, but that’s what it felt like.”
“Wealth and leisure,” Jean says, “can be surprisingly hard to bear.” She smiles warmly at Angelique. It’s hard to imagine two women with less in common on the surface, but they have found a kinship in their stories. It’s a secret, I suppose, that supremely successful women can share only with each other. God knows, none of the rest of us want to hear it. The secret that having it all isn’t nearly enough. That what we’ve been taught is the end of the story is actually the beginning, that paradise can become just one more box to escape.
“When Nico first moved us into The Castle,” Angelique is saying, “having all those servants flipped me out. Like one day, I was craving these pomegranate martinis. The kind they have at Del Frisco’s, you know? They’re super good, so I went down to the bar in the billiard room and I started messing around, looking for the stuff to make them, and suddenly this guy comes in out of nowhere. He was like the butler and valet and bodyguard and bartender and all that stuff rolled into one and he says, ‘Oh no, ma’am’—he called me ‘ma’am’—and he takes the ice tongs right out of my hands and he makes a big pink pitcher of martinis. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want a pitcher of martinis. I was by myself. I only wanted one. But they were good, so I drank them, and the next day when I come in from my workout it’s sitting there on the bar, another pitcher of pomegranate martinis. And after that he made them every day, just in case I might want one, and it seemed mean not to drink them when he’s made them just for me and the next thing you know there’s a whole episode of me checking into rehab at Promises Malibu, because I’ve got a pomegranate martini monkey on my back.” She stops, exhausted from the chore of walking and talking simultaneously, just as Tess warned that the speaker would be. “They made my life into a fucking joke. Pomegranate martinis. Did you see the bit they did on SNL?”
“You were speaking of Psyche?” Tess prompts. “How she couldn’t bear living forever like that, never seeing her husband’s true face.”
“Oh yeah, Psyche,” Angelique says. “That poor little bitch. She has everything, except, like you say, the knowledge of her husband’s true face, and her sisters are flipped out when they see her castle. More jealous than ever. So they start working on her. Sure, this all seems great on the surface, they tell her. You’ve got the designer clothes and the limo, but your husband, bottom line, he’s still a snake. Which is just fucking word-for-word what my sisters said about Nico. Nice bedspread, they would say. Nice car, and nice coat, but your husband—he’s Mafia, and you’re the only one who’s too stupid to see it. So there I was, living out the story my mother told me, and I know what you’re all thinking. That I really was as dumb as a rock not to understand what was happening right in front of me.”
“No woman sees her own myth,” Tess says.
“But I should’ve,” Angelique says fiercely. “Because my wedding was like a funeral too, you know? When I said I was going to marry Nico, my father said, ‘You’re dead to me,’ and my mother wore black to the wedding, fucking black, and in case there was anybody on earth that missed the point, they showed up at the church in a long limo that looked just like a hearse. Even stand
ing there in the vestry before I went down the aisle, my father was still trying to talk me out of it. He said I was marrying a monster, just like they told the girl in the story, and once my sisters got inside the castle and saw . . . once they saw all the nice shit Nico had given me, they couldn’t stand it. They convinced me to get a private investigator and have him checked out, just like Psyche.”
Angelique smiles bitterly. “Oh, I know. Psyche didn’t really hire a private investigator. But her sisters convinced her that she must kill the snake, that she needed to cut off his head with a knife and even though the sex was great, stupid Psyche believed them, because deep down in her heart she knew it was all too good to be true. And if there’s anything that can make a girl pull a knife on a guy, it’s if she knows he’s acting too good to be true.” We have all stopped here, just over the last and largest of the rough-hewn fences, waiting for the end of her tale, and she looks slowly around the circle, pausing on the face of each woman in turn.
“She knows she can’t kill Eros in the light,” Angelique says. “So she waits for him to come for her in the darkness, like he always does, and they have great sex like usual. Maybe better than ever, who knows? I bet it was better than ever, because sometimes a little danger is hot. And when it’s all over and she knows he’s asleep, she takes up an oil lamp and goes to where he is laying . . . lying?”
“Lying,” say Tess and I in unison.
“She lifts the oil lamp,” says Angelique, still mimicking the characters of her story. Exaggerating each motion, like a mime. “And for the first time she looks upon his face. You think she would have figured it out by now, after that many nights together. You would think she could tell the difference between having a man on top of her or a snake, but anyways, she takes the oil light and she goes to where Eros is sleeping and of course he isn’t a snake at all, he’s the god of love. Beautiful. Just a beautiful man lying there asleep on the bed before her. Her hand starts shaking. It shakes so hard that drops of hot oil spill from the lamp and fall on Eros and he wakes up. He’s furious. He’s given her everything, every luxury, his whole heart, and now she’s gone and disobeyed his only order. She’s seen him for what he really is.”
