Chimera

by John Barth

  Yes. “I’m a hero!” I indicated with a sweep of my relieved glories, whose first extension she had revealed to me that day. “Virtuoso performance is my line of work!”

  She removed my dexter hand, it being an article of her creed, even with deities, to allow no sheepish, merely dutiful clitorizing. “The more you think of sex as a performance,” she advised me, “the more you’ll suffer stage fright on your opening nights. Just hug up close, now, and fill me in on what I showed you today.”

  Sigh, I did, curled up behind my wise cute tutor as the temple’s great second whorl, to which she’d noonly introduced me, enconched the first. As I’d come to hope and fancy, the Perseid reliefs and my altared view were not coterminous there where I sat regnant with Andromeda; a second series—correspondent to the first in relative proportions, but of grander breadth to fit the scale of their enormous revolution—commenced just after, at the pillar on that farther wall aligned quite with my left-foot bedpost and Calyxa’s navel-point.

  “You saw how it was,” I said: “The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough—but I’d lost my shine with my golden locks: twenty years it was since I’d headed Medusa; I was twenty kilos overweight and bored stiff. With half a life to go, I felt fettered and coffered as ever by Danaë‘s womb, the brassbound chest, Polydectes’s tasks. In fact—please keep your face straight—I became convinced I was petrifying, and asked my doctor if it mightn’t be the late effects of radiation from Medusa. ‘Just aging of the old joints,’ the fool declared, correctly, told me to forget about the Gorgon, give up ouzo, get more exercise. But hare-hunts can’t hold a candle to monstermachy: I stayed up too late, drank too many, traded shameless on my authority to bore each night a captive audience with the story of my life. ‘Change of scene, then,’ the doctor ordered: ‘bit of a sea-trip, do you oodles.’ He even winked: ‘Take the Missus along: second honeymoon, et cetera.’ ”

  “Sometimes,” Calyxa said, “I really wonder about doctors.”

  “Me too. But I proposed it, and Andromeda said sure right off: park the kids in Argos, sail down to Joppa for a visit with her folks; twenty years since she’d seen Cepheus and Cassiopeia. ‘Not quite what I had in mind,’ I told her; ‘We’ll stop off there when the time comes, but let’s go the route: drop in on King Dictys in Seriphos, say hello to Samian Athene, run over to Mount Atlas, where I short-circuited the Graeae—you’ve never seen Mount Atlas—then a quick stop at Chemmis on the Nile, where I landed for a drink before I saved your life.’ By the way, Calyxa,—” I had unwound to follow with my eye those furled episodes along the wall.

  “Please don’t stop,” she pled, and taking her to mean, despite her policy, the idle handiwork that went with my recital, I resumed.

  “So, it was a battle from the outset, even though I’d dropped Styxnymphsville, Hyperborea, and Hesperia from my itinerary to give us an extra week in Joppa and time for a quick look-see at Thessalian Larissa. ‘Joppa period,’ Andromeda said.”

  “I think she was being unreasonable,” said Calyxa.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, now, perhaps it was a bit vain of me to want to retrace my good young days; but it wasn’t just vanity; no more were my nightly narratives: somewhere along the way I’d lost something, took a wrong turn, forgot some knack, I don’t know; it seemed to me that if I kept going over it carefully enough I might see the pattern, find the key.”

  “A little up and to your left,” Calyxa whispered. But I was lost now in my story. “Ever since that run-in with your pal Sabazius,” I said, “things hadn’t been the same between Andromeda and me.” I told her how the bellied beer-god, using his Dionysian alias, had come bingeing from Naxos into Argos with his new wife Ariadne—

  “He told me about her, last time I saw him,” Calyxa confessed. “At first I was mad with jealousy, but he was so happy, and she was sweet…”

  “Everybody was mad,” I said: “the older women especially, drink drink drink, and when I tried to close the bars he talked them into eating their babies till I gave in. Honestly. I’d’ve held out awhile—you’ve got to draw the line somewhere—but Andromeda claimed it was his fame I couldn’t abide…” Truth was, I declared, I did envy the upstart god his enthusiasts, the more as my own glory had not increased since I’d given up heroism for the orderly administration of Argolis; on the other hand, though not a prude, mind, I quite believed in order, measure, self-discipline, and was opposed on principle to indiscriminate housewife orgy, not to mention pedophage. I was no less than Sabazius a son of Zeus, and if no god (owing to Mother’s mere mortality), I had the vita of a gold-haired hard-tasked hero, whereas Sabazius so far as I could see did nothing but booze and ball all day…

  “Better say ‘guzzle and go down,’ ” Calyxa said comfortably. She too, she added, had no taste for orgies unless among especially valued friends—such as, say, (the notion made her stretch), Ammon, Sabazius, and me—her general policy being to offer herself to others, corporeally and otherwise, to the extent of her esteem for them. Nevertheless she’d gone along with group-grope, gang-bang, daisy-chain, and other perversions for her plump pal’s sake, deferring her preferences to his—just as, with Ammon, she smoked hemp and humped hind-to, although left to herself, so to speak, she’d choose light palm-wine and Position One more often than not. In both instances, her pleasure in theirs not only gratified her beyond her own preferences (a mere martyr’s reward, in her view) but made distinctly pleasurable, just in those circumstances, the acts themselves. In short, she was by no means blind to Sabazius’s shortcomings, but they were without effect on her worship of him. “We really used to talk, he and I.”

  It occurred to me to ask why, in view of the foregoing, she had removed my hand in one previous paragraph and limped me with her laughter in another when I’d asked permission to kiss her navel. Her reply was a quiet, short, and serious kiss that messaged clearly even subtless me. I stirred against her nether cheeks very near to Ammonite erection, shrank from the adjective, re-cupped her, resumed my tale:

  “I liked Sabazius okay too,” I admitted, “despite the trouble he’d caused me; once I’d agreed to build him a temple to keep the housewives happy, we drained many a goblet together Before he moved on. But there was no peace after that with Andromeda: now she claimed I’d given in out of weakness, or to curry favor on Olympus: was I pandering to public opinion, yielding to the pedophagic protest groups, or kicking over my traces like a foolish forty-year-old? Fame and kingship had changed me, changed me, she declared, and not for the better, et cetera.”

  “Excuse me for saying so,” Calyxa said, “but I don’t think I care for Mrs. Perseus. Now watch you back up and defend her.”

  Well, I did: none of these unpleasant accusations but had its truth, as I saw when I wasn’t defending myself against them, and its contrary side, as I saw when I was. But one fact was inescapable, however read or rationalized: Perseus the Hero prevailed or perished; Perseus the King had swallowed self-respect and not even compromised with, but yielded to, his adversary.

  “It was all downward after that,” I concluded: “squalls and squabbles; flirtations, accusations; relovings and relapses, let’s not relive it, you know the story, it’s all in that pillar between the last panel yonder,” where Andromeda and I shared our loveseat throne ringed by little princelets, “and the one today,” in which my scold-faced queen sat throned far right and sullen I far left, our grownlings wondering between and a ship making ready in the marble foreground.

  “I went weekending once with Ammon down the Nile to Pharos,” Calyxa remarked. “We swam a lot. It’s the only time I’ve fucked under water.”

  “It’s not so great, actually, didn’t you find?” I asked her in her humor, delving at the same time down to recollection. “The natural lubricants get washed off, and it sort of hurts. I knew this sea-nymph once…”

  “I liked it anyhow,” Calyxa said.r />
  Next night, too, we made less progress with each other than with the templed exposition. “If only Medusa had petrified just that part!” my priestess sighed—but would not let me repeat what she declared went without saying, that what fired my bolt like a green recruit’s before the issue was fairly joined was not inexperience of artful love but inexperience of novel partners. “You’re like some of the holiday tourists we get,” she once declared: “bold as brass back home but all tinsel and tiptoe here.”

  When I had been Perseus proper, I told her then, I’d flown the known world over, Hyperborea to Hesperia, yet never heard of tourists to the country of the gods. Part of every morning, afternoon, and evening Calyxa disappeared into the temple’s outer whorls with strict instructions, as she said from Zeus, that I was not to follow past whichever mural she’d last laid on me. Where did she go? I asked her now. What do? Was she slipping off to Ammon and Sabazius, or tourist-tupping in my heavenly precinct?

  She was not annoyed until I apologized (at once) for my impertinence. “If you’re going to be quarrelsome, be quarrelsome: don’t take one step forward and two back.”

  I apologized for my apology, attributing my too-tameness to long years of Andromeda’s house-training, and that in turn to her father’s domination by Cassiopeia, while at the same time admitting that, as Andromeda herself had charged in the Sabazius affair, a better man would in the first place never—

  “Stop that!” Calyxa cried. I did, began to apologize, stopped that, reflected a moment, and then declared her under no obligation to attend me if she found my manner, mind, or manliness disappointing; but if she chose to stay she must accept me on my terms—which for better or worse included (unlike Sabazius’s or Ammon’s, I daresaid) permitting me to accept her on hers. No drachma but had its other side: Andromeda in my opinion had near henpecked me out of cockhood; but I had learned from her what few men knew, fewer heroes, and no gods: that a woman’s a person in her Independent right, to be respected therefor by the goldenest hero in heaven. If my pet priestess was unused to parity as was I to novelty, then we had each somewhat to teach the other.

  Calyxa sat up and closed me in her lap (these conversations were all postcoitally, anyhow epiclimactically, couched); but all I could get from her was “You, you! You’re leaving something out.”

  “No help for that.”

  “Those letters, Perseus, that she threw overboard …” I groaned. Had voyage in nautic history, I asked rhetorically, ever begun so crossed as ours whose wreckage that day’s mural had fixed forever? We’d set out when spring gave way to summer, neither of us yielding to the other. Andromeda stormed at me it must be Joppa without sidetrips, or she’d go it unburdened of her had-been hero; I stormed back, If she’d wanted a lackey instead of a lord, she should’ve stuck with her Uncle Phineus. Thus we raged and counterbaited as we cleared the port. I perhapped our problem to be mixed marriage: Argives and Ethiopians were oil and vinegar, I declared, palatable when right-proportioned but never truly mixable. Pah, she spat: all marriages were mixed, a man and a woman; but there was my insufferable ego again, proposing three parts Perseus to one Andromeda, when in truth it was her rescue from monstrous Cetus had made the reputation I’d grown so purled upon: she had as it were laid her life on the line to make me famous! I replied, not unfairly I think, that even the bards who sang our story were wont to call her both the cause of my labor and its reward—which was but putting prettily (I went on less fairly) that had I by-passed Joppa altogether I’d’ve spared myself two hard battles (with Cetus and with Phineus’s gatecrashers), plus the sustained one of our recent years together, and found me a more congenial princess somewhere else, whereas she’d’ve been fishfood. That always got to her: she bawled back that what I’d freed her from were but the chains in which my forebears caused her to be put (she meant Uncle Poseidon, who’d given Ammon word to cliff her when the jealous Nereids complained to him of Cassiopeia’s boast et cetera); she owed me nothing, more especially since I’d manumitted her into the bondage of my tyrant vanity, a mere bedpartner and accessory to my fame: it was but a matter, in her view, of exchanging shackles for shekels, or iron manacles for gold. That always got to me: I stormed back, unfairly now, that even read as I read them the poets were wrong: freeing Mother Danaë, not Andromeda, had been my mission; regaining my lost kingdom; resolving, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus, which dated from the womb. To this end Medusa, not fishy Cetus, had been my true adversary and chief ally; I hadn’t even employed her in the Cetus engagement, to dispatch which wanted but my trusty sickle and a bit of shadow-feinting. In short, the whole Joppan adventure, charming as it was, could be regarded as no more than a couple of sub-panels, as it were, in the mural of my life: an interlude in, indeed a diversion from, my hero-work proper.

  “Danaë Danaë!” then had shouted Andromeda. “You should have married your mother!”

  Calyxa clucked her tongue. “You two really went at it, didn’t you?”

  I agreed, my face burning afresh. “That’s when she pounced upon the brassbound sea-chest on the poop,” I said. “We had lots of traveling-bags, but I’d decided to do the trip right—my trip—and had packed my things in the same old trunk that Granddad had shipped me off in, forty years past. For one thing, I thought Seriphean Dictys would be pleased to see it again, so I’d kept in it all my souvenirs: a piece of the net he’d fished us ashore with, the crescent scabbard of Hermes’s sickle, couple of rocks from giant Atlas after I’d stoned him, fern-corals from Joppa (I’d laid Medusa’s head on seaweed while I skewered Cetus), Andromeda’s leg-irons, the Larissan discus, and the letters.”

  “Those letters, Perseus…” I was left-flanked on the couch; naughty Calyxa, propped on her elbows at my hip, amused herself as I spoke by scribing capitals on her forehead with my flopped tool as with an infirm pen. R, S, Something, P: the scramble uncials of my name.

  “Fan letters, mostly,” I said. “Nut mail, con letters, speaking invitations, propositions from women I never heard of—sort of thing every mythic hero gets in each day’s post. I swear I didn’t save them out of vanity, as she claimed; I almost never answered them.”

  “Mm.”

  “It was partly habit, I’m afflicted with orderliness, they were even alphabetized, starting with Anonymous. Partly for amusement, to pick me up when I was feeling down, remind me I’d once got a few things done worth doing. But mainly, I swear, it was for a kind of research, what I mentioned once before: certain letters especially I read and re-read: half a dozen or so from some dotty girl in Chemmis, Egypt. They were billets-doux, I admit it—but along with the hero-worship was a bright intelligence, a lively style, and a great many detailed questions, almost as if she were doing a dissertation. How many had been the Stygian Nymphs? Had Medusa always been a Gorgon? Was it really her reflection in Athene’s shield that saved me from petrifying, or the fact that Medusa had her eyes closed; and if the latter, why’d I need the shield? How was it I’d used the helmet of invisibility only to flee the other Gorgons and not to approach them in the first place? Did everything that saw Medusa turn to stone, or everything Medusa saw? If the former, how explain the sightless seaweed? If the latter, how came it to work when she’d been beheaded? Was my restriction to the adamant sickle and the shadow-trick in the Cetus episode self-imposed or laid on by Athene, and if the former, was my motive to impress Andromeda with skill and valor rather than with magic? And if the latter, why? Considering the crooked sword, the Graeaean subterfuge, the rear-view approaches to Medusa and Cetus, the far-darting Hermean sandals, even the trajectory of the discus that killed Acrisius, would it be fair to generalize that dodge and indirection were my conscious tactics, and, if so, were they characterological or by Athenian directive? Similarly, considering Danaë‘s brass tower, the sea-chest, the strapping tasks of Polydectes, Danaë‘s bondage to him, and Andromeda’s manacles on the one hand, and on the other, my conquests of Atlas, Phineus, Polydectes, and the rest by petrific
ation, could not one say that my goal for myself and gift to others was typically release from immobility, and my punishment—of both my Medusa’d former enemies and my latterly tied-down self—typically its opposite? O Calyxa, this nameless girl, she had no end of insightful questions! Which I pondered and repondered as I’ve done these murals, to find if I could their meaning, where they pointed, what it was I’d lost. One question alone—whether I felt my post-Medusan years an example of or an exception to the archetypal pattern for heroic adventure—set me to years of comparative study, to learn what that pattern might be and where upon it I currently was. Thus this endless repetition of my story: as both protagonist and author, so to speak, I thought to overtake with understanding my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and thus pointed, proceed serene to the future’s sentence. My trustiest aid in this endeavor was those seven letters, at once so worshipful and wise; I’d’ve given much to spend an evening with their author! Hence my fury when Andromeda, herself unhinged by wrath, tore open the chest-lid just off Hydra and threw them to the fish. For the first time in our life, I struck her.”

  My eyes filled at the double memory; Calyxa curled me in her way until my salt tears filled her navel. Post-swatly, I went on, I took from the chest my only correspondence with Andromeda, love-letters written during my youthful trip to Larissa, and posted them with the others in the Gulf of Argolis. Then Andromeda, in a perfect tempest of outrage, fishfed the entire contents of the chest: shore me of my valiant past as a steering drover ballocks a bull.

  “I could listen all night to the way you talk,” Calyxa said.

  “We were so busy storming at each other,” I went on, “and the crew and galley slaves enrapt in our battle royal, none noticed the natural tempest till it struck astern like the fist of a god, as if Father Zeus were counter-punching for smote Andromeda. All quarrels went by the board with mast and tiller; we were stove in a trice, sunk and drowned—all save my wife and me, who, still wrestling with the relatched ruin of my chest, were washed with it the way of its contents. Empty, it floated; our grapple became a grip; the storm passed, the sharks were patient; two days the currents easted us, as in your picture, clutched and quarreling in the Sea of Candia; on the third, as if caught in a repeating dream, we were netted by a fine young fisherman, more the image of my golden youth than my own sons were. He congratulated us on our survival, complimented Andromeda on her brined beauty, introduced himself as Danaus Dictys’s son, and home-ported us with the rest of his catch to Seriphos.”