Mantissa (7 page)

“And mine.”

She raises the lyre. “And you can see an identical one to this, or what’s left of it, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Before you start quibbling about that as well.”

“It looks undeniably authentic.”

“It
is
authentic!”

“Of course.”

She gives him a resentful look. “And while you’re about it, for goodness’ sake stop staring at my breasts in that crudely obvious way.”

He stares at her bare, and exquisite, feet. “Sorry again.”

“It’s not my fault that the bra wasn’t even invented then.”

“Absolutely not.”

“That monstrous chain upon true womanhood.”

“Hear hear.”

She contemplates him.

“I don’t mind an occasional casual glance. That’s another of your faults. You never leave anything at all to the imagination.”

“I will try.”

“Not here you won’t. I’ve only done this to show you what you’ve missed. Not that you seem to appreciate it.” She turns away. “If you must know, most decent men fall to their knees when they first see me. As I really am.”

“I am on my knees. In spirit. You look ravishing.”

“By which all you mean is ravishable. You forget I know you through and through. And your miserable little monomaniac mind. All I’ll ever be for you is just another bit of bird.”

“Not true.”

“Of course I don’t expect you to compose hymns and odes and pour libations to me and –” she raises the lyre a fraction and lets it drop against her side – “all that. When the world was still faintly civilized… I’m perfectly well aware it’s too much to expect from anyone in a crassly materialist age like this.” She throws him a half-angry, half-hurt look back over her bare shoulder. “All I ask for is some minimal recognition of my metaphysical status
vis-à-vis
yours.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, you’re too late.” She looks slightly upwards, as if addressing a very distant mountain range. “This last outrage is the final straw. I can overlook much, but not having my essential modesty of demeanor so grossly lampooned. Everyone knows my true nature is shy and retiring. I will not be turned into a brainless female body at your beck and call and every perverted whim. What you forget is that I am
not
something in a book. I am supremely real.” She looks down at the carpet, and speaks in a lower voice. “As well as being a goddess.”

“I’ve never denied it.”

“Oh yes you have. Every time you open your stupid mouth.” She puts the lyre down on the bed, and folds her arms, avoiding his eyes. “I think I’d better warn you that I’m seriously thinking of bringing all this up at our next quarterly meeting. Because basically it’s not just me who’s being insulted, but my whole family. And frankly we’ve had enough. There’s far too much of this about these days. It’s high time someone was made an example of.”

“Truly sorry.”

She eyes him, then looks away again.

“You’ll have to find a more convincing proof of it than that.” Now she raises her left forearm and glances at it, evidently forgetting, in a momentary absentmindedness, that like the rose Ophelia, the wristwatch had not existed in classical times. She looks irritatedly around at the cuckoo clock. “I happen to have a very busy schedule today. I give you ten more sentences to make a full, proper and formal apology. This is your last chance. If I deem it acceptable, I am prepared to delay a decision over having you blacklisted. If not, you must take the consequences. In which case I should in all fairness strongly advise you to keep away from isolated trees and houses without lightning rods for the rest of your life. Especially in stormy weather. Is that clear?”

“Yes, but it’s not fair.”

She gives him a sharp glance. “It is not only fair, but incredibly lenient in the circumstances. And now stop arguing.” She turns and picks up the lyre, then draws herself up slightly. “You can start by getting on your knees. We can skip the kissing the traces of my footsteps bit, as I’m in a hurry. You have ten sentences. No more, no less. Then out.”

Holding his improvised apron firmly in position, he descends rather awkwardly to his knees on the carpet.

“Only ten?”

“You heard.”

She stares into the far corner of the room, waiting. He clears his throat.

“You’ve always been my perfect woman.”

She raises the lyre and plucks a string.

“Nine. And sickeningly trite.”

“Even though I’ve never understood you.”

Another pluck. “You can say that again.”

“Completely.”

“Seven.”

“That’s not a sentence. There wasn’t a verb.”

“Seven.”

He stares at the sternly averted profile.

“Your eyes are like loquat pips, like Amphissa olives, like black truffles, like muscat grapes, like Chian figs… hang on…”

“Six.”

“I hadn’t finished!”

She sniffs. “You shouldn’t have made such a meal of it.”

“There’s never seriously been anyone but you.”

“Bloody liar. Five.”

“I can understand how you drive men mad.”

“Four. And women.”

He leaves a pause, searching her expression.

“Honestly?”

She gives him a quick glance down. “I’m not going to be sidetracked.”

“Of course not. I just wondered.”

She addresses the wall. “If you must know, that poor old bent teaspoon on Lesbos never got over seeing me undress one day for my morning swim.”

“Is that all that happened?”

“Of course it was all that happened.”

“But I thought –”

She throws him another impatient glance. “Look, among the fifty thousand other things you’ve never realized about me is the fact that I wasn’t born yesterday.” She looks away. “Of course she tried all the usual dyke tricks. Wanted to photograph me in my bikini, and so on.”

“Photograph you in your…?”

She shrugs, quivers her head. “Whatever it was then. Sculpt me or something. I can’t remember every tiny detail. Now for heaven’s sake get on with it. You’ve got three sentences left.”

“It was four.”

She breathes out. “Very well then. Four. And they’d better be an improvement on the others.”

“The way you disappear, the way you return.”

She plucks the lyre twice. “That’s two.”

“That’s ridiculous – it was clearly only a comma.”

“Not the way you said it.”

“It was just a pause for rhetorical effect. The concepts are linked. Disappearing, returning. Anyone can see that.” She gives him a warning look down. He says slowly, “You really are the sexiest thing in all creation, you know that?”

She looks away. “That’s definitely two.”

“I can play by the rules as well, you know.”

“One.”

And she stands, with a hint of complacently superior inner knowledge, not very far from that characteristic of a famous type of Cycladic marble head, that is insufferable. He takes a deep breath.

“What I was actually rather wondering was this (colon) whether there aren’t really (comma) in spite of your distinctly exaggerated umbrage at one or two small assumptions I was obliged to make in my fictional representation of you and for which you can in any case very largely blame your own extreme deviousness (parenthesis) if not positive coquettishness (dash) and I speak as one who has more times than he cares to remember been foully stood up by you without even the elementary courtesy of being warned that you were busy having it off with someone else (close parenthesis and comma) areas that merit further investigation by both the written and the writer (comma) or (comma) if you prefer (comma) between the personified as
histoire
and the personifier as
discours
(comma) or in simpler words still (comma) by you and me (semicolon) and as I feel sure that we have at least one thing in common (colon) a mutual incomprehension of how your supremely real presence in the world of letters has failed to receive the attention (parenthesis) though you may regard that as a blessing in disguise (close parenthesis) of the campus faculty-factories (comma) the structuralists and deconstructivists (comma) the semiologists (comma) the Marxists (comma) academic Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all (comma) that it deserves (semicolon) and furthermore as I’m sure a really thorough seminar
à deux
on the subject of ourselves will take time (comma) and I feel slightly at a disadvantage trying to cover my private parts with a rubber sheet (comma) while you (comma) on the other hand (parenthesis) though you do look absolutely delicious and truly divine with your pretty fingers poised like that over your wholly authentic lyre (close parenthesis and comma) do strike me as looking (dash) if it is not just a ghost of that frightful kohl (dash) the teeniest bit tired (comma) as well you might (comma) having very sweetly come all this way (comma, or semicolon if you prefer) then it occurred to me that we could do much worse than relax a little (dash) purely (comma) I hasten to add (comma) for the purposes of discussion (comma) of course (semicolon) and I should add that the bed is exceptionally comfortable if you did feel like resting for a few minutes (dash) but I –”

“This is getting you absolutely nowhere!”

He smiles. “I’m afraid I haven’t quite finished.”

She stares at him, then turns and sits indignantly on the side of the bed, putting the lyre beside her. She folds her arms, and pointedly concentrates her gaze upon the cuckoo clock.

“(Dot dot dot) to resume (dash) but I must insist that it is on the understanding that although I could go on like this forever (comma) until you would have to lie on the bed anyway out of sheer exhaustion (comma) we agree that the formal basis for our discussion must be your recognition of the indisputable fact that if you had only manifested yourself earlier in the text to which you object so much (dash) and especially in that stunning classical get-up (comma) or chiton (dash) the narrative development you most particularly take exception to would almost certainly not have taken place and we should therefore not be respectively standing and kneeling here in this absurd hospital room that I haven’t even had the patience to describe properly by square old standards (comma) let alone
nouveau roman
ones (semicolon) but (comma) and considering this is how I should have begun (comma) because you really are (dash) and I am not (underlined) being a male chauvinist (dash) one of the most godawful cock-teasers in the history of this planet and I sometimes think how much easier the whole damn business would be if we were all gay and if you go on like this we very probably shall be and then where will you be (dash) back mooning around on that godforsaken mountain (comma) wailing those wretched chants in that uncouth Ionian dialect (comma) pinging away on that frightful lyre (dash) and while you’re about it (comma) I wish you’d get the thing in tune (comma) the bass string’s at least a semitone flat (comma) and do not let me forget that you’d be doing us all a great favor if you’d only ask your sister Euterpe or St. Cecilia or actually just any moderately competent bouzouki player to give you a few elementary tips on how to hold a plectrum properly and –”

He has gone too far, at last. She snatches up the lyre and stands shaking it at him.

“If it wasn’t such a performance getting these restrung, this would be framed over your moronic head. And don’t you dare answer back! One single word and it ends
now!
”

It seems for a heart-stopping moment that she will fulfill her threat, despite the consequences. But she lets the lyre fall.

“In my entire four thousand years I’ve never met such arrogance. And the sheer blasphemy! I do
not
inspire pornography. I never have. And as for that other disgusting word… everyone knows that my chief characteristic happens to be a supreme maidenliness – and once and for all will you
stop
looking at my nipples!” He hastily directs his eyes at the carpet again. She stares at him, then at her lyre, then at him again. “I’m most terribly angry.” He nods. “Immortally offended. Apart from anything else you seem to forget who I’m the daughter of.” He looks quickly up and shakes his head. She is not mollified. “
I
can’t help who he happens to be. I fall over myself to behave like one of you. Not to be a snob, not to go running to Daddy like some poor little rich girl.” She looks resentfully down at the carpet at her feet. “And all you do is take advantage of my decency, my trying to keep up with the times.” She shows what is almost a pout. “I’d just like to see you trying to be eternally young and several millennia old, all at the same time.”

Inasmuch as his muteness allows he tries to express the sincerest sympathy. She regards him for a long moment more, then suddenly turns and sits down again on the side of the bed, the lyre on her lap, and begins nervously tracing a decoration on one of its curved arms.

“All right. I may, heaven knows why, out of some misguided sense of responsibility, have inspired you with the mere gist of a notion of some new sort of meeting between us. But all I saw was an interesting little contemporary variation on an ancient theme. Something for learned readers. Not that obscene…” She waves towards the head of the bed. “I thought at least you’d have the sense to consult a few classical texts, for a start.” Her finger traces obsessively up and down the swan’s neck of the golden-armed lyre. “It’s so unfair. I’m not a prig. And humiliating. If my wretched family gets to hear about it.” Her voice grows increasingly hurt. “They think it’s all a huge joke, anyway. Just because I thought I was clever drawing love poetry when we picked lots in the beginning. Then getting stuck with the whole of fiction as well. I have to work ten times as hard as all the rest of them put together.” She broods over her wrongs. “Of course the whole genre is in a mess. Death of the novel, that’s a laugh. I wish to all my famous relations it was. And good riddance.” She pauses again. “It’s what I loathe about this rotten country. And America, that’s even worse. At least the French are doing their best to kill the whole stupid thing off for good.”

He gets to his feet. She sits with her head bowed; then throws the lyre to one side. After a moment she reaches for her floral chaplet, pulls it off, and starts sulkily fiddling with that instead.