Psyche in a Dress Read online

  Their twins emerged out of glass pools

  to have sex with them on the tabletops

  In the candlelight I wondered

  if Narcissus might find me attractive

  Not that I cared

  Love had already left me

  I had on makeup and a blue satin chinoiserie dress

  my mother’s jewels—

  a double strand of pearls and her sapphire ring

  I imagined her teeth, her eyes

  I asked Narcissus about himself

  I didn’t expect him to say anything interesting

  but when he started talking I fell

  under his spell

  Instead of touching parts of my mother

  I watched Narcissus’s full lips move over his white teeth

  His eyes were pools shattered by sunlight

  and his lashes brushed his cheekbones

  If he was looking at his reflection

  I couldn’t see

  Narcissus

  Narcissus lived with his mother in an apartment on a street lined with other apartments that looked just like it—a cottage cheese stucco-and-glass building with a pool in the center.

  Narcissus swam alone late at night with his reflection. The pool made everything blue, including Narcissus’s skin. The air always smelled of chlorine. When Narcissus swam it got into his hair so he washed carefully with his mother’s expensive shampoo before he went to sleep.

  After school, Narcissus took the bus to the beach where he went surfing or perfected his tan. When he got home his mother was never there. He defrosted his dinner and went into the bathroom paneled with mirrors. He took off his clothes and admired his abdominal muscles, his skin, his cock.

  Narcissus’s father had left before he could remember. His mother was not there. She said she was an actress but Narcissus suspected something else because there were never any roles he knew of but always enough money, heavy makeup, tight dresses, the stink of men. Narcissus never wanted to smell like that.

  When he talked to her she looked right through him if she looked his way at all. But suddenly he had discovered, in those mirrors, someone even more beautiful. Someone completely devoted. Someone who would never look away.

  A lot of people didn’t look away. There were women and men wanting sexual favors. But Narcissus stopped caring about them. It was easier to stand in front of the mirrors, caressing himself.

  Sometimes his twin would materialize. Cold as glass and without a smell but so beautiful that it didn’t matter. They could fuck all night, tireless, insatiable, exactly the same.

  One day on the boardwalk a tall, thin man with pale skin, a hat and dark glasses approached Narcissus. The man seemed out of place and spoke with a thick accent. He handed Narcissus his card and said, “Have you ever acted before?”

  Narcissus smiled because in some ways that was all he had ever done. “Why?” he asked.

  “I am making a film,” the man said. “I need someone to help make my daughter disappear.”

  “Do you know what I like about you, Echo?”

  Narcissus said

  “You know how to listen

  Most of these actresses I know

  just want to go on and on about themselves”

  Perhaps this, too, was a test

  Narcissus did not taste of the spray

  that spurts from the skin of ripe oranges

  When we touched it was for the cameras

  His pupils were blank

  empty

  My reflection was never there

  The lights were bright, revealing the monsters

  He watched himself the whole time

  “Who are you?” Narcissus’s character asked

  “You…you…you”

  Those were my lines

  I went home and looked in the giant tarnished mirror

  with the frame of silver roses

  I had not vanished

  I had not faded

  away to just a voice

  Maybe I wish I had

  It was my voice that had been stolen away

  Eurydice

  Stray dogs followed Orpheus through the streets

  feral cats crawled onto his lap

  wild parrots flew down to light

  upon his shoulders

  rolling their eyes in ecstasy

  eucalyptus trees swooned when he passed them

  jacarandas did a striptease of purple petals

  Orpheus tapped the mike

  and squinted out into the audience

  shifting the weight of his narrow hips

  He cleared his throat

  but it still sounded like he’d just had a cigarette

  He ran his hand through his hair, slicking it back

  sang a cappella

  with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans

  leaning into the microphone as if he were going to go

  down on it

  then played his guitar

  Music can make a man a demigod

  especially to a girl who has seen Love

  up close

  and burned

  and lost him

  especially to a girl without a voice

  I had never understood the expression

  about your heart being in your mouth

  It beat there, choking me with blood

  After the last song he came off the stage

  and someone introduced us

  I could see the dark roots of his bleached hair

  The insomniac circles under his eyes

  He had the irises of a mystic

  Pale, almost fanatical

  His voice was gravelly

  His hands were warm with large blue veins

  I could hear incantations in his blood

  “I’ve seen your films,” he said

  “I’d like to talk with you more some time”

  The next night we ate avocados, oranges and honey

  in Orpheus’s candlelit cavern deep in the canyon

  I wore strapless pale lace and tulle and lilies in my hair

  “Tell me,” he said

  “Tell me a story”

  This in itself was an aphrodisiac

  My throat opened like a flower

  He listened to the myths

  The ones my love once gave me

  Orpheus liked their darkness and the violence

  and the truth

  For me it is the transformation

  I was restless, sweating in my dress

  “Let’s go,” I said “Let’s go, O”

  We ran out into the canyon

  Up the hillsides to the street

  The sky was bright, hallucinatory, pink

  We ran into the neighborhood of rotting mansions

  When the sun set we roamed their damp lawns

  kissed under the purple trees

  There was a pink restaurant with a green awning

  We broke inside and explored the shadowy booths

  the cobwebs draping the bar

  We waltzed on the dance floor with ghosts of dead stars

  When the sun rose we ate waffles with whipped cream

  in an all-night coffee shop

  Sunshine burned through the glass

  searing the night off our skins

  Back in his cavern, Orpheus sang my myths to me

  I imagined that I would stop telling stories

  stop acting in my father’s films

  I would give up my aspirations

  I do not need to be an artist, I told myself

  I do not need to be a goddess

  I will be a woman, a wife, a muse

  But this is what I could not give up:

  I could not give up myself

  And my self had become

  the memory of the god who once visited me each night

  I could not give up the chance to win him back

  How could I win him back if I were happy with another?

  It would never happen.
>
  I would need to prove myself, suffer

  I would need the god

  of hell

  Orpheus

  Orpheus was a musical prodigy. What else, with a name like that? In another place and time his mother might have been a muse of epic poetry, but in this world of separation she was only a woman afraid of poverty and growing old. She took all the money her son made from his first album and bought a small mansion with etched-glass windows, gold columns and a spiked gate. She bought a car and furs and jewels for herself, new breasts. In another place and time, Orpheus’s father might have been the sun god, or at least a king, but instead he was a frightened, bankrupt man who never told Orpheus’s mother to stop what she was doing.

  Orpheus refused to play music for anyone. He locked himself in his room and wrote silent poetry in his journals. He could hear the song of it, his secret. Orpheus’s mother knocked on the door, wanting another album, more money for new skin—on her face, another fur coat. That was when he left the fancy house that he had paid for with music. He never spoke to either of his parents again.

  Orpheus went wandering through the canyons. He found secret underground passageways, crumbling caverns where he hid, got high, smoked packs of cigarettes. One night he ventured out and played his guitar for the birch trees. They danced in the moonlight, their many dark eyes watching, pale silver skin quivering. In the morning the avocado and citrus trees filled his open palms with fruit. Overblown orange poppies with opiate seeds grew out of the parched dirt. Bees let him reach his bare hands into their hives, scooping out gobs of honey, unstung. Rabbits, squirrels and doves gathered to listen to this new Orpheus, the magician, the mystic, realizing his truth, even in a time without muses, kings or sun gods.

  It was hard to live on avocados and oranges, and when the tobacco and pot ran out Orpheus got a job as a bartender in a seedy strip club and sang onstage after hours. The strippers were like birch trees, he found—that silvery and wide-eyed, that susceptible to his charms. He slept with a lot of them. But when he met Eurydice he knew he wanted more. Alone in his cavern, with the insatiable dancing trees awaiting him, he wanted a wife.

  When Eurydice left him the maenad came. She wanted more than a husband.

  After Orpheus began to doubt

  he could not reclaim me

  If you are to love, never look back

  I should have told him

  But what do I know?

  I am just as filled with doubt

  I am only Eurydice

  I am known as Orpheus’s

  I was never a goddess

  My father didn’t argue with me when I said I had to leave

  He smiled to himself

  “Whatever you want, princess

  You’ll be back in time”

  I went away to a new city

  and half waited for Orpheus to come for me

  To lead me back with his poetry

  Dear Orpheus, why did you doubt?

  You are an artist

  When you sing your words

  all the women want your child in their bellies

  All the men want to stand where you stand

  The god of hell should not intimidate you

  Orpheus did not come

  Days and days passed

  I lived in the tall, cold building

  I put on the stray pieces I had brought

  from my mother’s wardrobe

  and walked to school bent under the weight of my books

  I sat in the echoing lecture halls

  and listened for the poetry hidden

  in the professors’ words

  But I couldn’t hear it

  I ate but the food had no taste

  I drank the alcohol

  that was given out every night at the parties

  I watched my belly bloat and my face break out

  Someone offered me acid

  but when I looked out my window

  eight flights to the ground below

  I knew I couldn’t take it

  It would have been too easy to jump

  I wondered if Orpheus was writing about me

  I wondered if I was getting closer to hell

  My sister called me and said

  “Did you hear? Are you okay?”

  “Hear what?” I asked

  but I knew it was bad

  “You know he was dating that crazy singer?

  They were doing heroin.

  Something happened. Orpheus is dead.”

  Love had left again

  I had no doubts about hell now

  I was all the way there

  The Maenad

  The maenad’s father told her she was stupid, a slut. She took off her clothes and danced in the snow, hoping it would make her skin that perfect, white and untouched. But as soon as she stepped into it, the frost became dirty sludge. Her lips were red bitten blood. The roots of her hair were black like the branches that scratched her arms. She wrote poetry and played her guitar so she wouldn’t have to cut herself with something sharper than wood, the fingers of trees. Her guitar spoke and lay in her arms but was not warm. She was only looking for someone to love her.

  The maenad went to the big faraway city and formed a band. She threw herself around the stage, whipping her neck, flashing her breasts, bruising her hipbones, spinning until the world whirled away. Oh, obliterating ecstasy. When she opened her eyes she spit into the audience, thinking the boys with the beefy faces were her father.

  After the shows she was starving, bloodless. She devoured meat, imagining she was ingesting the flesh of the god of pleasure and pain, becoming one with him, divine. She drank wine, imagining it was that same god’s blood, the god of the beautiful and the cruel.

  And Orpheus, he was like a limb of that god. When she heard him sing she felt herself changing. When she touched him she felt herself becoming powerful, beautiful, pure. They ate wild narcotic poppies in his cavern while the bees and lovesick birch trees clamored outside; they wanted him as much as she did.

  “Don’t close your eyes,” she wailed.

  She didn’t want him to leave her, even for a moment. Even in his dreams.

  She asked him, “Do you still love that girl?”

  He said it was over.

  The maenad knew the only way she could be sure was to do something irreversible, terrible, mythic.

  And you came

  hell god

  At a concert downtown

  Somewhere dark, I don’t remember

  The air hissed with sound

  The chandeliers were shattering

  Black smoke swirled around the stage

  I sat on the ground

  in the pool

  of my mother’s old aqua blue taffeta dress

  I wore rhinestones on my breasts and on my ears

  I wore black gloves with the fingers cut out

  black satin pointy-toed stilettos like a wicked bird

  Bees swarmed around me, buzzing in my ears

  I had a forked tongue and horns and a tail

  I saw you and I said, that is the one for me

  My hair caught fire

  You took me home

  It was an old Victorian building

  wooden floor painted black—

  so shiny, a lake—

  no furniture except the low black lacquer bed and table

  You kissed me until I passed over

  The corpse of my body

  was stuffed with black lilies and buzzing bees

  I forgot Orpheus, my song

  I even forgot my first lover, Love

  I stopped wanting anything else in the world

  We ran through the city

  The air smelled of smoke

  Pieces of ash rained down

  Some headless mannequins

  were lined up on the sidewalk by the trash

  You put them in your hearse and took them home

  In Chinatown the cloisonné vases

  were covered with
dust

  The animals hung dead in the windows

  We ate sticky noodles and pork buns with plum sauce

  There was a sign next to a cage of chickens

  THESE BIRDS TO EAT NOT FOR PETS

  No one looked at us as we ran up and down the hills

  The air smelled of burning meat

  We were invisible

  We were demons

  I wanted my mother

  I am not a goddess, I said

  But you are a god

  The god of chaos

  The god of hell

  Hades, my love

  You are a businessman

  You own a tattoo parlor

  and a clothing store that sells leather clothes, masks

  whips and handcuffs

  sex toys and porn

  You are a club promoter

  We went to some kind of old mansion you had found

  at the edge of the park

  I was wearing my mother’s white smoking jacket over her

  tight black cocktail dress

  and black satin shoes with sharp points

  People were standing

  around a pool

  that you had filled with dry ice

  Their drinks were a strange, smoky green

  I wondered how absinthe tasted

  as I ate my poisonous maraschino cherries

  The band was playing in what had once been a ballroom

  You had discovered them

  They looked like birds of prey

  and their music beat past me on dark wings

  You had the room filled with chandeliers, broken

  like crystallized tears

  Thousands and thousands of dried leaves

  blew through the corridors

  Black hounds guarded the doors

  Everyone said you were brilliant

  Everyone said you were some kind of genius