by Deb Elkink
In fact, Lou thought, classical literature took liberties in mixing up the roles and tales of all the divinities—gods and goddesses alike—so that the whole body of myth became one jumbled, happy, incestuous mess.
But Lou knew it was certainly the Three Graces who traveled in the retinue of Aphrodite, present at human and divine marriages to enliven the wedding feasts. It was the Three Graces who dressed the gods in the finest of clothing for their sumptuous banquets and brought luxury to the pantheon of deities, making merry their celebrations with song and dance. In art and literature, the Three Graces always appeared as a triad, a composite without individuation, and one Greek philosopher described them as standing for the three-fold aspects of generosity in the giving, receiving, and returning of gifts. Lou preferred the lustier application of the Graces as the three stages of love: beauty, arousing desire, and fulfillment. They personified splendor and festivity, as effective today at explicating metaphysical concepts as when they were first conceived for religious veneration by pre-modern humanity.
For example, a primitive history told of three meteorites that fell from the skies onto a Grecian hillside, dropped by the gods in jest to perplex poor humans about the mystery of the aeons. This initiated the building of a sanctuary for the cult of the heaven-sent stones, taken to be a visitation of the Three Graces themselves.
By the early nineteenth century, the subject had been explored by artists of many media. Lou studied the postcard again. Pradier’s statues depicted the Grace on the left-hand side of his grouping as goddess of the harvest, holding a swath of blossoms, her eyes lowered towards the earth from which sprang her bounty. The middle maiden raised her face towards the skies, with her toe resting atop a jewel box overflowing with glittering gems, signifying radiant beauty. The Grace on the end, with head tilted onto her companion’s shoulder, was the goddess of gaiety, of cheer. Lou theorized that the three beauties gave rise to the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, despite theologians’ blustering about its being the Jewish God through divine revelation who first delivered the virtues world systems subsequently imitated.
It made no difference to Lou. The point was that these tales were useful to remythologize women’s lives away from the tyrannical imperialism of Western monotheism. We incarnate the Graces ourselves by becoming them, she thought, becoming splendid and festive ourselves with the whole of womanhood a trinity of reciprocity, a perception in each other of our own inherent deity. For Aglaia, this was played out through her aesthetics, her needlework becoming the experience of creation itself.
Of course the girl, reading the articles right now a few seats up the airplane aisle, wouldn’t have a clue about the significant contribution Lou’s work made to academia. Aglaia was drawn to Lou’s thesis without understanding it. How enthralling, then, that she could be so tuned in to their gifts of the arts, so artistic herself.
But what Aglaia needed was a new job, closer in proximity to Lou herself. The subject hadn’t come up again since she’d mentioned, at the girl’s apartment a few nights ago, that she’d been campaigning for Aglaia at the university. She’d been doing more than that, of course. Besides the deal she cut with Oliver Upton, Lou had put in motion her political connections to ensure the position of wardrobe consultant would be partly supported by arts funding boards at the county and state levels, outside the jurisdiction of the university itself. This endowment wouldn’t go far—it was more honorarium than actual income—but Lou’s success in obtaining it signaled the validity of her proposal as Aglaia’s benefactor. And maybe it would help catch the attention of the tenure committee as well as Aglaia’s trust.
That’s what Lou needed to concentrate on during their short time in Paris—Aglaia’s intimate trust, which could be acquired in any number of ways. She’d like to somehow milk Aglaia for information about the movie bid that she, as an employee of Incognito Costume Shop, could provide. But more importantly Lou hoped to inveigle Aglaia, to make the girl beholden to her on the social level, by convincing her that they made a good team. But, Lou reassured herself, she had Aglaia’s best interests at heart as well, didn’t she?
Lou unclasped her seatbelt, deciding to check up on Aglaia before they landed and maybe clarify any unfamiliar terms she’d encountered in the literature. But when she was close enough to the girl’s head bent over her reading, she saw that it was not sheets of stapled paper that held Aglaia’s attention but a bound book opened on her lap. So she’d brought that Bible after all! Lou held her breath and watched Aglaia’s finger running along beneath the letters of a sprawling notation scribbled on a page in the book of Joshua: Land of milk and honey—sa peau, ses lèvres. Would the French be too difficult for Aglaia to catch its erogenous inflection—“her skin, her lips”?
Without disturbing Aglaia or awakening the fat man lolling beside her, the professor returned to her seat. Her guess about François’s intentions had been correct, then. He’d been sniffing around Aglaia and she hadn’t recovered from it; hence the lack of boyfriends in her life. Aglaia was not frigid, just unfulfilled. Evidently François had left behind a souvenir for her in the form of a message written into the pages of the sacred script. How ironic; it was the ultimate gloss on the biblical text, a personalized love letter! What a mundane joke—the worldly wise cosmopolitan boy trifling with the starry-eyed farmer’s daughter only to forsake her and leave her pining.
The plane change in New York City was a blur, with crowds at peak density and Aglaia limping as they careened from arrival to departure gate. Only when they were strapped into their seats on the international flight after takeoff, each with a glass of hideous airline wine to celebrate, could Lou lure Aglaia into focused discussion.
“How did you like the articles?” Lou asked, not hiding her cynicism.
“Um, your articles,” Aglaia stalled. “I didn’t quite get to them.”
“Oh?” Lou waited. It would be best if Aglaia admitted of her own accord that she’d been reading other, apparently more riveting, material.
“The titles sounded clever,” Aglaia offered.
“Hmmm.” Seconds passed. “Did you watch the movie?”
“It was a rerun,” Aglaia said. She removed the papers from her purse and sifted past each cover page.
“Did you read the airline magazine then, perhaps order some duty-free items?” Lou enjoyed the prodding and Aglaia couldn’t hold out any longer, turning on Lou eyes full of appeal and fully appealing.
“No, I was reading something else. I ended up bringing that Bible along after all.” Then, like an insincere afterthought, Aglaia added, “I couldn’t very well let Mom down, could I?”
Lou fell silent for effect, relishing the control Aglaia gave her. She opened the cellophane packet and munched on a sesame cracker, arranging her face to appear engaged and evaluative as though waiting for more input. Aglaia licked her lips; she would crack any second now. Slight taciturnity on Lou’s part, she found, always loosened the tightest tongue.
“It’s not that I’m interested in the Bible itself,” Aglaia finally said.
The tension left Lou’s jaw at this, and she realized she’d been on edge after all, worried that Aglaia might be giving in to some sporadic religious inquisitiveness. It was one thing for her to seek out the memory of François, another altogether for her to seek out the presence of God.
“Go on,” she said. It dribbled out then: Aglaia’s decision to look for François preceding her mother’s fortuitous request, the discovery that the boy had journaled in the book’s margins, Aglaia’s compulsion to puzzle through the meaning of his words and the recollections they evoked, and the suspense and delight of reliving, step by step, the summer’s events she’d been blocking for years.
“I’m being hounded to death by the thoughts,” Aglaia said.
The notion of Cerberus came to Lou—the three-headed dog defending the gates of Hades so that no being could escape. Aglaia’s conscience was her Cerberus, a merciless jailer keeping her spirit backed up
and locked away. Lou saw now the futility in any attempt to dam up Aglaia’s onslaught of feelings brought about by reading that Bible. The sooner Aglaia worked through her obsession, the sooner Lou would be able to salvage her own aspirations for this trip.
The younger woman did not have the capacity at present to read her articles, nor was there the slightest chance that Aglaia might listen to a verbal précis of the writing. Already she was tugging at her shoulder bag for the Bible, anxious to re-enter some fantasy world from which Lou was barred. No matter; this only challenged Lou to explain her view of life to Aglaia in more concrete terms, to articulate—perhaps through the instructional tour she planned of Paris’s main attractions—her understanding of reality, relativity, and women’s powerful place in the world, especially as it spoke into their own relationship.
Aglaia leaned on the plane window, the glass cool against her forehead. If she focused on the reflection of the cabin interior she saw Lou, who at last slept beside her after keeping furtive watch on her page turning from the time they left La Guardia. The vigil had unnerved Aglaia; she felt Lou reading along as she sought out François’s notations, one by one, in the Bible’s margins. But Lou couldn’t read her mind, after all, where the real action was taking place.
Aglaia turned her gaze into the night sky, even cupping her eyes against the glow inside so that the exterior gloom consumed her full view. They were flying over a sea of moon-washed mist, too high up to cast a shadow. The wing of the 767 was her point of reference, its metal the only real substance between the earth below and the stars above. She was disembodied, belonging to neither earth nor sky, hurtling through the stratosphere like Pegasus ridden by the goddess of dawn or like an archangel dispatched from heaven’s throne.
Or maybe like a driblet of lukewarm spittle expelled from the mouth of God.
Aglaia closed her eyes, disoriented by the obfuscation of the black night, the throbbing of the plane’s wing strobe, and the labyrinth of her thoughts. She had vertigo of the soul.
Each page of the Bible read during the past hours had taken her to another memory, and her recollections of that summer were now lining up chronologically—François’s notes reminding her, chapter after chapter, of the events that surged towards a climax neither of them knew at the time of his writing. She ignored the formal English terms he’d copied from the minister’s outline, not concerning herself with the theme for more than its ability to guide her understanding of François’s perspective and her own responses. His words punctuated the Word of God in a sort of progressive revelation, layering meaning upon meaning in an allegory that didn’t fit with a literal reading of Scripture.
In the first book of the Bible, Aglaia had found herself again in the genesis of that paradisal summer, when François first walked and talked with her and showed her the enchantment of the Three Graces and breathed into her the consciousness of her own enchanting womanhood. Her exodus from an unquestioning childhood faith into the arid wilderness of confusion was marked by his notations in the margins of the second book—Mount Olympus written beside Mount Sinai, Minotaur beside the golden calf. By the time the youth group had reached the end of the Pentateuch several weeks into François’s stay, like Moses she, too, was standing on a precipice overlooking the River Jordan—or perhaps the River Styx—into a new land but not yet entering it.
When Jericho, city of the moon god, came tumbling down in the pages of the Bible, her own walls of resistance to François’s charm had begun to collapse in that summer of her love.
When Samson perished in the rubble over Delilah’s betrayal, she longed for François’s fingers to unbraid her own hair, as Odysseus might have done to Penelope.
When David slung his fatal pebble towards Goliath’s forehead, the spirit of chastity was dying within Aglaia and, although the shepherd beseeched her from his book—Who is the Rock except our God? The Lord is my Rock, in whom I take refuge, my Rock and my Redeemer—yet David’s poetry was muted by the overriding voice of François, who’d written Atlas on the page and said so long ago with his mouth: “He carries the great rock of the universe on his shoulders.”
The building of the Great Temple out of the cedars of Lebanon, carved with cherubim and palm trees and flowers overlaid with gold, brought to Aglaia’s mind the ringing of hammers as the boys constructed new corrals behind the barn, François’s arms cording up as he reached for another rough-cut slab and pounded it into place.
Then, while Manasseh bowed down to the starry hosts, she was idolizing François but still kept herself from him though the fire burned in her, the convention of decorum holding her to at least some morality.
As Job scraped his itching, running sores with pottery shards, the Lord was speaking to her out of the maelstrom of her own suffering: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation, when the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? She, too, had shouted for joy with her friends—with François—during the overnight retreat down at the lake, as the fervent youth leader urged them on and they sang unto the Lord a new song, sang of the mercies of the Lord, sang with their mouths making known His faithfulness: Praise Him, sun and moon, praise Him, all you shining stars… The heavens declare the glory of God! But her desire at the moment she sang His praises had not been not for the One above, the One within. Her desire was for the one who drew her apart to sit by the lake in the reflection of the midnight skies, and filled her senses with his presence and her imagination with his tales. While the other teens, studious around the campfire, read in Isaiah about the coming king of righteousness—Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace—François was identifying the planets for Aglaia and whispering to her about Chaos, the original dark nothingness from which all else sprang. He spoke of Gaia, the mother earth who gave birth to the starry heavens as an eternal home for the blessed and bestial gods, and then gave birth to Tartarus as the lowest level of the underworld and a wretched pit of blackness reserved for interminable punishment, and then gave birth to Eros as erotic love. Heaven, hell, and sex all born out of one womb.
In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end for her, there in the Prophets where God weighed her on the scales and found her wanting—or where she weighed God and found Him wanting. God had declared, “Let there be light,” but François reawakened in her the mysteries of darkness with his convoluted theories, and she liked the danger hiding in his shadowy innuendo. By that time, her field of vision was limited to the glory of François, and there was no longer refuge in the voice of the Scriptures crying in the desert of her heart, for she was withering like sand-blasted grass and falling like overblown flowers at the end of a drought-ridden summer. There was no longer refuge even in her brother, Joel rejecting any mention of myths and chastising her for having her head turned by stories, chastising her for not reading her Bible anymore.
And now hours into their second leg of the flight, Aglaia dozed with the Bible still open on her lap.
The night sounds seep through the window screen like berry juice through a cheesecloth bag—gentle cricketsong, the humming breeze, the faraway groan of a calf calling maa-maa. Everyone else is in bed, but how can Mary Grace sleep when François is lying a room away? How can she restrain her whirling thoughts and calm the twisting in her gut and alleviate the misery? She sits alone in the unlit kitchen with her elbows on the checkered oilcloth, cheeks cupped in hands.
François finds her like this. The floorboards creak beneath his bare feet, and she’s aware of him before he touches her. She feels his body heat close to her right side without looking up at him. She doesn’t need to look up at him—she has his image burned into her subconscious as surely as Argos, the giant with one hundred eyes, could never shut away his visions even in sleep until he was crushed beneath a great stone and beheaded and his eyes transplanted to the tail of the peacock.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m sad,” she says. She wants him to ask her why, but he doesn’t. If he’d on
ly ask her, she’d be forced to tell him that her fear is he’ll forget her, and he’d be forced to say that would never happen.
“Sad?” is all he asks. “I’ll make you happy.” And he leans down to her so that a curl of his hair tangles in with her lashes as he kisses her with his sweet, moist mouth.
Aglaia woke up with a start, burning with thirst and not a flight attendant in view. The cabin lights were dim. Someone a few rows up coughed but otherwise everything was quiet. She tried to suck up some saliva to moisten her mouth but hesitated to creep across Lou and risk rousing her.
Soft light illumined Lou’s patrician profile and Aglaia took some solace from its flinty angles. Lou was strong and sure-footed, even if she did march over others in her way. Following behind her was safer than pressing on ahead. Yet Lou invited Aglaia to reach out beyond self-imposed boundaries, going as far as to endorse her for the position at PRU. Maybe Lou might understand some of her torment if only Aglaia would open up, explain why she was driven to find François. It wasn’t just about seeing him again, or at least Aglaia hoped that was so. It was about making an end to her fantastical story of love and death and God. Naomi wouldn’t get it, even if Aglaia came clean with her. Maybe she should talk to Lou.
But she was so thirsty! Eventually she sank back into dreams about the burning, unquenchable torment of Tartarus until the captain announced their descent into Paris.
Fourteen
Aglaia’s fingers wrapped around the demitasse from which she had taken two delectable sips. She hated to polish it off with a final gulp but Lou, watching her from across the table, had already finished hers. Aglaia wanted to sit here forever.
The streets of Paris fulfilled her every expectation. This moment of lounging at her first sidewalk café was a condensation of all of her long-held expectations—the pungent coffee and chocolate-drizzled pastry, the wafting perfume of passers-by, the music pulled from a violin by a gypsy-busker in the shade of the boulevard’s trees. Ignoring Lou’s surveillance, she dipped into her bag to hook out her sketchpad and, with a few deft strokes of her graphite, captured the swing of the violinist’s skirt, the strain at the sleeve seam as the girl propelled her bow across willing strings.
