by John Barth
Calyxa squeezed me. “When I drew that panel for the sculptor from your sister’s sketches, I was afraid you and Andromeda were embracing over the sea-chest.”
Embarrassed, she acknowledged under my amazed interrogation that all the murals in the temple were rendered from her drawings, after careful instructions delivered her from time to time over the years by couriers from Athene. She was not, then, merely maid, minister, and mistress of her deities, their temples, and devotees, but artful chronicler of their careers as well! I refrained from asking whether Sabazius and Ammon were similarly shrined, but praised her artistry to the skies.
“I’m no artist,” she demurred. “Anyhow, I’m not interested in me.”
But I would not let her off so modestly; with real appreciation I kissed her from crown to sole, which flexily she enjoyed, and pressed her tell me how far the murals went—for while I myself could predict, I thought, the next couple of panels, my memory of an odd dark passion in the desert just prior to my demise was still obscure to me, as was the manner of my death itself.
She shook her head. “Tomorrow, or the next night, maybe, I’ll tell you, if you haven’t guessed.” Her tone grew graver. “What do you think the next panel will be?”
I supposed it would portray the famous “sculpture museum” at Seriphos, now the isle’s chief tourist attraction, which we foursomed—Andromeda, Danaus, Dictys, and I—soon after, in what became the cycled dream’s continuation. King Dictys himself was in declining age and health, but overjoyed to review the source and cause of his ascendancy. Andromeda, unsalted and refreshed, seemed to have lost five years and kilos in the sea; she basked in the gallantries of her yet-younger life preserver. The famous statues, of course, were no sculptured likenesses at all, but the stoned originals of Polydectes and his court, fixed forever in their postures of insult and abuse which I had countered with the Gorgon’s head. There in the center sat the false king himself, still gloating at his declaration that my whole laborious adventure had been but his ruse for my riddance; that he had never intended to bed any but my gold-girt mother, whom presently he was starving from her sanctuary with Dictys in Athene’s temple. Those had been his last words: fascinated, I pointed out to my companions that his tongue was still tipped to his teeth to make the theta of Nαῷ ’Aθἠνηϛ, to whose eta he would never come.
“Remarkable,” young Danaus had agreed, and added with a trace of tease in his own teeth-tipped tongue: “If Uncle P. was forty when you froze him, and has been lisping that same theta for twenty years, you and he must be about the same age now.”
Andromeda laughed, her first mirth in months; then the two of them went off at smart Danaus’s suggestion to find something less boring to look at than his petrified progenitors. Dictys and I watched them go, my wife merrily accepting her escort’s elbow, and then went round the remaining figures pensively summoning names and patronymics from that glorious morning for half the afternoon. Returning at last to the now-cool shadow of Polydectes, we sipped from silver beakers of Hippocrene and traded troubles.
“I can’t manage the boy,” Dictys said; “it’s because he never had a mother, and I was too busy running the government to be a proper father.”
I sympathized, reflecting on my own son’s growing rebellion, and asked who was Dictys’s queen; at his hem and haw I dropped the subject, inferring with some satisfaction that young Danaus was illicit. He suggested we ought to interrupt their tête-à-tête; but I asked for more wine instead, and two beakers later was confiding to him my domestic problems and my conviction I was petrifying.’
Dictys shook his head. “Just ossifying, like the rest of us.” Too bad about Andromeda, he said; he was just as pleased never to have wed the only woman he’d ever loved, seeing how seldom the sentiment withstood the years’ attrition. For the rest, there was no help for it, he advised me to resign myself to lovelessness and decline; he’d ship me off to Samos, Joppa, or wherever I wished—but all voyages, he reminded me, come soon or late to the same dark port.
“Better late, then,” said I, and announced to the gathered company at dinner, I was determined to resume the retracement of my ancient route. If Andromeda would not retrace it with me…
Her eyes flashed. “Joppa, period.”
“At least consult Athene,” old Dictys implored me.
“I will,” said I. “Where I did before, in her shrine in Samos.”
“Where he learned about life from art,” Andromeda mocked me; “for represented in her temple murals there were all three Gorgons—snakehaired, swinetoothed, blah blah blah. I know it by heart. I’m staying here.”
Young Danaus fiddled smiling with his flatware. “I’ve heard it said,” he said, “that when you were done with Medusa last time, Athene put her back together again, with a difference: nowadays she turns stone to flesh instead of vice-versa: makes old folks spry again. You and Dad should look her up.”
At this impertinence there was a general pause, and general relief when I merely thanked him, level-voiced, for the report. If she declined to go with me, I told Andromeda next day, she must abide in Seriphos under Dictys’s chaperonage until my return: I would not have her travel unescorted. She replied she was her own woman, would as she would. Very well, I countered, reminding her however that independence had its limits; that, given our particular tempers and past, the more she became her own woman, the less mine.
“Amen,” Andromeda said, a Joppan expression.
“So I went it alone,” I said to Calyxa, “and my guess is that tomorrow’s mural shows us there in the haE of statues: Danaus grinning, Andromeda and I glaring at each other, Dictys shaking his head, and Polydectes still lisping Nαῷ ’Aθἠνηϛ.”
I was mistaken, my artist informed me—not only about next day’s scene (which pillared all I’d just rehearsed) but about the nature of parity between the sexes as well.
“I know,” I sighed, mistaking her. “Andromeda was right.”
“That’s not what I mean!” Calyxa sprang to her nimble knees. “Look at me, for instance: would you call me dependent? I go my own way, lonely or not; that’s why I’ve never married. But don’t you get the point?”
“No.”
She flipped my flunked phallus; “I swear, I’ll have to draw you a picture.”
Instead, she showed me one, next day: myself in conference already with the hooded woman in Athene’s temple, beneath the familiar frieze of Gorgons, winged Pegasus grazing just outside.
“Remarkable!” I scrutinized my companion-in-relief. “The resemblance…”
“With the cowl it’s hard to tell,” Calyxa said; “but if that’s Athene, then Athene’s the one who’s brought me the instructions for all these scenes over the years, and finally brought you here in person from the desert. She’s always been very polite to me, but she never explains the pictures.”
“I’ll be glad to: at first I thought her a fellow-suppliant—”
But Calyxa reminded me of our little rule, explication only after forn. We went to bed early, I did better, fairly entered her, though for less than heroical time and space; I was chided for sighing; she held me between her pretty legs and said: “Aphrodite’s a woman and so am I. Does that make me her equal?” Andromeda’s fallacy, in her view, was an equivocation on the term equality: she Calyxa frankly regarded herself as superior in numerous ways to numerous men and women—
“I think you are too.”
“Do don’t flatter now; I’m serious.” Her dark eyes were, past doubt; I’d have moved off-top, to beside her, better to manifest our parity, but she had extraordinary grip.
“I mean, they’re mortals, and you’re a nymph,” I said limply.
“Never mind that.” The point was, she asserted, it went without saying, in her opinion, that to say men and women were equal was to say nothing. She herself admired excellence wherever she found it; she was far from servile by nature, knew herself to be uncommonly intelligent, witty, healthy, athletical, articulate, brave, and a few oth
er adjectives—
“Pretty,” I suggested. “Sexually adroit…”
She stopped my mouth. “But I happen to know men and women quite superior to me in all these things, and not only wouldn’t I dream of calling myself their equal, I happen to prefer them to myself and my equals. You reminded me once that you’re a mythic hero, but you keep forgetting it yourself. Were you always psychosexually weak, or is that Andromeda’s doing?”
Truly I wished to withdraw, and being at least her muscular match, managed to. She grinned and bussed my forearm.
“No man’s a mythic hero to his wife,” I said. But Calyxa took spirited issue: no woman remained a dream of nymphhood to her husband either, she daresaid, but real excellence in any particular should be excellent even qualified by comparison, long familiarity, and non-excellence in other particulars. That permanent relationship was fatal to passion was perhaps inevitable, and as she preferred to love passionately she would never marry; but having been more than once abused by those she loved, she knew for a fact that her admiration of their excellence was invulnerable. “Ammon’s a real bastard, often as not,” she said; “but I’d die for him tomorrow if he asked me too. I’m good, but he’s great. Who does Andromeda think she is?”
I’d hear no more such criticism. “My question to Athene,” I said, “was Who was I? I made proper sacrifices, prayed she’d appear and counsel me how not to turn to stone. If there was a new Medusa, let a new Perseus be resickled, -shielded, -sandaled, and the rest, to reglorify himself by re-beheading her. It wasn’t Mother Danaë wanted rescuing now, but Danaë‘s son.”
Calyxa snugged against me with a kind of fond exasperation. I went on to recount how, as I’d recounted to Athene my apprehensions, a hooded young woman had appeared beside me at the altar, whom I took to be a fellow-suppliant until from the corner of my eyes I saw a radiance from hers—which, however, like all her features, were cowled from view in the temple dusk. And when she said to me, “Your brother was right: there is a New Medusa,” I recognized the voice as no mortal’s: Athene had come to me, as was her wont, in suppliant’s guise. I reminded her I had no mortal kin, only scores of divine half-siblings like herself, got by Zeus upon his scores of bedmates.
She touched my arm and softly undeceived me. “Dictys and Danaë were closeted a long while in the Seriphos temple before you rescued them. But think again, Perseus, what Polydectes was saying: it wasn’t the theta of Nαῷ ’Aθἠνηϛ, but the sigma of Nαῷ ’Aφροδίτηϛ. He really did lisp, and your mother’s shelter was Love, not Wisdom…”
In short, she said, young Danaus my rescuer and current rival was half my brother! And fortunate it was—she went on at once, to check my flabbergasted ire—King Dictys and my mother had chosen Aphrodite’s shrine instead of Athene’s for their besieged amour, since Athene would have sorely punished them for sacrilege. Such exactly ( I could not get in my outrage edgewise!) had been innocent Medusa’s original sin: was I aware of the circumstances of her Gorgonizing?
I surrendered.
“Me too,” Calyxa said.
She’d been a pretty young girl, went on the cowled apparition: a daughter of the sea-god Phorcys and thus kid-sister to the grim Gray Ladies and cousin to the pretty Nereids. She’d been well brought up by her mother Ceto, was in fact as proper a sea-nymph as ever swam: discreet of her person, pretty as the April moon, a regular churchgoer and comforter of the drowned. Her only failing, if it could be so called, was a maiden’s pride and interest in her budded beauty—in particular her naturally wavy hair, proof against sea-salt and so comely withal that it fired the passions of the admiralty-god himself, her Uncle Poseidon…
“Uncles, I swear,” Calyxa said. “That’s three in this story. And two hair-things. I’m glad I’m a crew-cut orphan.”
“She came one morning to this temple, to sacrifice to Athene,” Athene went on, oddly referring to herself in third-persons, “and catching sight of her reflection in the goddess’s shield, left off her obsequies for a moment to pin up her hair. Next thing she knew, there was a smell of seaweed; wet lips pressed to her neck-nape, and Poseidon put her under. Shocked Athene turned away, Medusa did too, but my, her eyes were fastened on the shield’s reflection: as the blue-eyed scallop resists the greedy star, but at length is pried and gobbled, so she saw herself shucked and forked by the mussled god. When he was done she redid through her tears her hair, to look more becomingly ravished, and called on Athene to avenge her. But that goddess, in her wisdom, punished the victim for the crime. Me—Medusa she banished to chilly Hyperborea with her sisters, whom she’d cursed into snakehaired frights; the very sight of them was enough to turn Medusa’s suitors to stone when they approached her. It was a perfectly dreadful time.”
“Just a minute,” I interrupted.
“I was wondering too,” Calyxa said.
“I know,” said my sister’s surrogate. “But Medusa didn’t, back then. There were no mirrors, you see, in their stony cave, and her swinetoothed sisters could only grunt. After a few years of seeing her would-be boyfriends freeze in their tracks when she made eyes at them, she decided that if she was ever to have a lover she’d have to pretend in the cave what had been no pretense in the temple: not to know he was approaching. One day the seagulls on the statues of her bouldered beaux told her that Perseus himself was winging herward, a golden dream; she lulled her sisters to sleep with a snake-charm song she’d learned and then feigned sleep herself. Softly he crept up behind; her whole body glowed; his hand, strong as Poseidon’s, grasped her hair above the nape. Her eyes still closed, she turned her neck to take his kiss…”
“O wow,” Calyxa said. “Do you know what I think?”
“I know what I felt,” said I. “But how was I to know?”
“I wish I’d known,” I said shamefaced to the hooded one, who replied it was no matter: if she’d known herself to be as Gorgon as her sisters, Medusa would have begged to have her head cut off. In any case, when the Perseid tasks were done and the hero’s gear returned (except the crescent scabbard, given Perseus as a souvenir, and the Graeae’s eye, which unfortunately he’d dropped into Lake Triton on his Libyan overflight), Hermes had kept the adamantine sickle, restored their tooth to the aggrieved Graeae, and forwarded the helmet, sandals, and kibisis to the Stygian Nymphs; Athene retrieved her bright shield and affixed to its boss the Gorgon’s scalp.
“Then there’s no New Medusa? You said there was.”
“There is,” she said. “Athene reckoned she’d punished the girl nearly enough, so she rejoined her head to her body, revived her, and restored her original appearance. What’s more, as a kind of compensation, she allows her some freedom of motion and took away her sculpting glance for the most part, as long as she abides by certain strict conditions…”
“Never mind those,” I said. “Can she unstone me before I’m too far gone?”
The girl hesitated. “Perhaps. Under certain very strict conditions…”
But I would none of reservations and conditions; begged only to be outfitted as before and directed how to head off my recapped adversary. I paced about the temple, impatient to be off; already I felt younger, more Perseus than I’d been in a dozen years. No good her telling me things had changed; I was a new man; only regird me with shield and sickle, it was a decade’s petrifaction in myself I’d cut off first, then Medusa’s head to melt away another, then upstart Danaus’s and confront Andromeda with a better Perseus than had first unscarped her.
“That’s really what you want?” the hooded lady asked then, and simultaneously later Calyxa: “That’s really what you wanted?”
I yessed both; let there be no talk of past past capture, I was growing younger by the moment in both temples, hers with anticipation, mine with recapitulation.
Very well, then, said my coiffed counselor: she’d advise me as before. But the case was truly altered, and so must be both my equipage and my address. From beneath her mantle she produced a golden dagger the length and straightness of
my phallus fairly drawn. I was dismayed, for what might never lose in love would never win in war.
“No adamantine sickle?”
“Just this,” she said, “and your bare hands.”
“I like your bare hands,” Calyxa said. “But I see your point.”
The point was, I was told, I must proceed this time with neither armor nor disguise. Why did I imagine Hades himself no longer used the helmet of his youth, if not that not it nor any other charm could work invisibility once one passed a certain point of fame? As for the polished shield, it itself was changed, aegissed with the former Gorgon’s former power: hence its absence from the temple, lest self-reflection petrify its beholders.
“Magic wallet?” I asked, heartsunk.
“That may be useful,” she said. “Not to put the New Medusa’s head in, since you’re not to cut it off—”
“Not cut it off!” But then I remembered and remarked that her deGorgonization made the kibisis unneeded. “All she has to do is look at me, then, and I’m twenty again? Or is it whoever looks at her? I was asked that question about the old Medusa, in a letter from a girl in Chemmis, Egypt—”
“It’s not that simple, Perseus,” my advisor warned, and my priestess: “You didn’t answer the question.”
