Lost in the Funhouse (19 page)

“ ‘Not impossibily.’

“ ‘Is it that her name’s twin syllables fire you with contrary passions? That your heart does battle with your heart till you burn like ashèd Ilion?’

“ ‘Wise son of a wise father! Her smile sows my furrowed memory with Castalian serpent’s teeth; I become a score of warriors, each battling the others; the survivors kneel as one before her; perhaps the salin were better men. If Aeneas Aphrodite’s-son couldn’t stick her, how should I, a mere near mortal?’

“ ‘This is gripping,’ ” I say to myself Telemachus said. “ ‘Weary as we are from traveling all day, I wish nothing further than to sit without moving in this total darkness while you hold me by the hem of my tunic and recount How Your Gorgeous Wife Wouldn’t Have You for Seven Full Postwar Years but Did in the Eighth. If I fail to exclaim with wonder or otherwise respond, it will be that I’m speechless with sympathy.’

“ ‘So be it,’ I said,” I say. “Truth to tell,” I tell me, “when we re-reached Sparta Helen took up her knitting with never a droppèd stitch, as if she’d been away eighteen days instead of ditto years, and visiting her sister instead of bearing bastards to her Trojan lovers. But it was the wine of doubt
I
took to, whether I was the world’s chief fool and cuckold or its luckiest mortal. Especially when old comrades came to town, or their sons, to swap war stoies, I’d booze it till I couldn’t tell Helen from Hellespont. So it was the day Odysseus’ boy and Nestor’s rode into town. I was shipping off our daughter to wed Achilles’ son and Alector’s girl in to wed mine; the place was full of kinfolk, the wine ran free, I was swallowing my troubles; babies they were when I went to Troy, hardly married myself; by the time I get home they’re men and women wanting spouses
of their won; no wonder I felt old and low and thirsty; where’d my kids go? The prime of my life?

“When the boys dropped in I took for granted they were friends of the children’s, come for the party; I saw to it they were washed and oiled, gave them clean clothes and poured them a drink. Better open your palace to every kid in the countryside than not know whose your own are in, Mother and I always thought. No man can say I’m inhospitable. But I won’t deny I felt a twinge when I learned they were strangers; handsome boys they were, from good families, I could tell, and in the bloom of manhood, as I’d been twenty years before, and Paris when he came a-calling, and I gave him a drink and said ‘What’s mine is yours …’…” ….

Why don’t they call her Helen of Sparta?

“I showed them the house, all our African stuff, it knocked their eyes out; then we had dinner and played the guessing game. Nestor’s boy I recognized early on, his father’s image, a good lad, but not hero-material, you know what I mean. The other was a troubler; something not straight about him; wouldn’t look you in the eye; kept smiling at his plate; but a sharp one, and a good-looking, bound to make a stir in the world one day. I kept my eye on him through dinner and decided he was my nephew Orestes, still hiding out from killing his mother and her goat-boy-friend, or else Odysseus’ Telemachus. Either way it was bad news: when Proteus told me how Clytemnestra and Aegisthus had axed my brother the minute he set foot in Mycenae, do you think Helen spared him a tear? ‘No more than he deserved,’ she said, ‘playing around with that bitch Cassandra.’ But when we stopped off there on our way home from Egypt and found her sister and Aegisthus being buried, didn’t she raise a howl for young Orestes’ head! Zeus help him if he’d come to see his Uncle Menelaus! On the other hand, if he was Odysseus’ boy and took after his father, I’d have to keep eye on the wedding silver as well as on the bride.

“To matters worse, as I fretted about this our old minstrel wandered in, looking for a handout, and started up
that wrath-of-Archilles thing, just what I needed to hear; before I could turn him off I was weeping in my wine and wishing I’d died the morning after my wedding night. Hermione barged in too, almost as pretty as her mom, to see who the stranger-chaps were; for a minute it was ‘Paris, meet Helen’ all over again, till I got hold of myself and shooed her out of there. Even so, a dreadful notion struck me: what if Paris had a son we didn’t know about, who’d slipped like slick Aeneas our Trojan clutch, grown up in hiding, and was come now to steal my daughter as his dad my wife! Another horse! Another Hector! Another drink.

“Even as I swallowed, hard and often, the fellow winked at the door I’d sent Hermione through and said, ‘Quite a place, hey, Nestor’s-son?’ Which was to say, among other things, Peisistratus was tagged and out of the game. Nothing for it then but to play the thing out in the usual way. ‘No getting around it, boys,’ I declared: ‘I’m not the poorest Greek in town. But I leave it to Zeus whether what you’ve seen is worth its cost. Eight years I knocked about the world, picking up what I could and wishing I were dead. The things you see come from Cyprus, Phoenicia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Sidonia, Erembi—even Libya, where the lambs are born with horns on.’

“ ‘Born with horns on!’

“I did my thing then, told a story with everyone in it who might be the mystery guest and looked to see which name brought tears. ‘While I was pirating around,’ I said, ‘my wife’s sister murdered my brother on the grounds that she’d committed adultery for ten years straight with my cousin Aegisthus. Her son Orestes killed them both, bless his heart, but when I think of Agamemnon and the rest done in for Helen’s sake, I’d swap two-thirds of what I’ve got to bring them back to life.’

“I looked for the stranger’s tears through mine, but he only declared: ‘Lucky Achilles’ son, to come by such a treasure!’

“ ‘Yet the man I miss most,’ I continued, ‘is shifty Odysseus.’ “ ‘Oh?’

“ ‘Yes indeed,’ I went on,” I go on: “ ‘Now and then I wonder
what became of him and old faithful Penelope and the boy Telemachus.’

“ ‘You know Telemachus?’ asked Telemachus.

“ ‘I knew him once,’ said I. ‘Twenty years ago, when he was one, I laid him in a furrow for his dad to plow under, and thus odysseused Odysseus. What’s more, I’d made up my mind if he got home alive to give him a town here in Argos to lord it over and leave to his son when he died. Odysseus and I, wouldn’t we have run through the grapes and whoppers! Pity he never made it.’

“The boy wet his mantle properly then, and I thought: ‘Hold right, son of Atreus, and keep a sharp lookout.’ While I wondered what he might be after and how to keep him from it, as I had of another two decades past, Herself came in with her maids and needles, worst possible moment as ever.

“ ‘Why is it, Menelaus, you never tell me when a prince comes calling? Good afternoon, Telemachus.’

“Oh, my gods, but she was lovely! Cute Hermione drew princelings to Sparta like piss-ants to a peony-bud, but her mother was the full-blown blossom, the blooming bush! Far side of forty but never a wrinkle, and any two cuts of her great gray eyes told more about love and Troy than our bard in a night’s hexameters. Her figure, too—but curse her figure! She opened her eyes and theirs, I shut mine, there was the usual pause; then Telemachus got his wind back and hollered: ‘Payee-
sis
tratus! What country have we come to, where the mares outrun the fillies?’

“Nestor’s-son’s face was ashen as his spear; ashener than either the old taste in my mouth. If only Telemachus had been so abashed! But he looked her over like young Heracles the house of Thespius and said, ‘Not even many-masked Odysseus could disguise himself from Zeus’s daughter. How is it you know me?’

“ ‘You’re your father’s son,’ Helen said. ‘Odysseus asked me that very question one night in Troy. He’d got himself up as a beggar and slipped into town for the evening …’

“ ‘What for?’ wanted to know Peisistratus.

“ ‘To spy, to spy,’ Telemachus said.

“ ‘What else?’ asked Helen. ‘None knew him but me, who’d have known him anywhere, and I said to my Trojan friends: “Look, a new beggar in town. Wonder who he is?” But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t trick Odysseus into saying: “Odysseus.” ’

“ ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ begged Peisistratus, disbrothered by the war; ‘what I don’t understand is why you tried at all, since he was on a dangerous mission in enemy territory.’

“ ‘Nestor’s-son,’ said I, ‘you’re your father’s son.’ But Telemachus scolded him, asking how he hoped to have his questions answered if he interrupted the tale by asking them. Helen flashed him a look worth epics and said, ‘When I got him alone in my apartment and washed and oiled and dressed him, I promised not to tell anyone he was Odysseus until he went back to his camp. So he told me all the Greek military secrets. Toward morning he killed several Trojans while they slept, and then I showed him the safest way out of town. There was a fuss among the new widows, but who cared? I was bored with Troy by that time and wished I’d never left home. I had a nice palace, a daughter, and Menelaus: what more could a woman ask?’

“After a moment Telemachus cried: ‘Noble heart in a nobler breast! To think that all the while our side cursed you, you were secretly helping us!’

“When I opened my eyes I saw Peisistratus rubbing his, image of Gerenian Nestor. ‘It still isn’t clear to me,’ he said, ‘why the wife of Prince Paris—begging your pardon, sir; I mean as it were, of course—would wash, oil, and dress a vagrant beggar in her apartment in the middle of the night. I don’t grasp either why you couldn’t have slipped back to Lord Menelaus along with Odysseus, if that’s what you wanted.’

“He had other questions too, shrewd lad, but Helen’s eyes turned dark, and before I could swallow my wine Telemachus
had him answered: ‘What good could she have done the Argives then? She’d as well have stayed here in Sparta!’ As for himself, he told Helen, next to hearing that his father was alive no news could’ve more delighted him than that the whole purpose of her elopement with Paris, as he was now convinced, was to spy for the Greeks from the heart of Troy, without which espionage we’d surely have been defeated. Helen counted her stitches and said, ‘You give me too much credit.’ ‘No, by Zeus!’ Telemachus declared. ‘To leave your home and family and live for ten years with another man, purely for the sake of your home and family …’

“ ‘Nine with Paris,’ Helen murmured, ‘one with Deiphobus. Deiphobus was the better man, no doubt about it, but not half as handsome.’

“ ‘So much the nobler!’ cried Telemachus.

“ ‘Nobler than you think,’ I said, and poured myself and Peisistratus another drink. ‘My wife’s too modest to tell the noblest things of all. In the first place, when I fetched her out of Troy at last and set sail for home, she was so ashamed of what she’d had to do to win the war for us that it took me seven years more to convince her she was worthy of me …’

“ ‘I kiss the hem of your robe!’ Telemachus exclaimed to her and did.

“ ‘In the second place,’ I said, ‘she did all these things for our sake without ever going to Troy in the first place.’

“ ‘Really,’ Helen protested.

“ ‘Excuse me, sir …’ said presently Peisistratus.

“ ‘Wine’s at your elbow,’ I declared. ‘Drink deep, boys; I’ll tell you the tale.’

“ ‘That’s not what Prince Telemachus wants,’ Helen said.

“ ‘I know what Prince Telemachus wants.’

“ ‘He wants word of his father,’ said she. ‘If you must tell a story at this late hour, tell the one about Proteus on the beach at Pharos, what he said of Odysseus.’

“ ‘Do,’ Peisistratus said.

“ ‘Hold on,’ I said,” I say: “ ‘It’s all one tale.’

“ ‘Then tell it all,’ said Helen. ‘But excuse yours truly.’

“ ‘Don’t go!’ cried Telemachus.

“ ‘A lady has her modesty,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll fill your cups, gentlemen, bid you good night, and retire. To the second—’

“ ‘Who put out the light?’ asked Peisistratus.

“ ‘Wait!’ cried Telemachus.

“ ‘Got you!’ cried I, clutching hold of his cloak-hem. After an exchange of pleasantries we settled down and drank deep in the dark while I told the tale of Menelaus and his wife at sea:

3

“ ‘Seven years,’ ” I say et cetera, “ ‘the woman kept her legs crossed and the north wind blew without let-up, holding us from home. In the eighth, on the beach at Pharos, with Eidothea’s help I tackled her dad the Old Man of the Sea and followed his tough instructions: heavy-hearted it back to Egypt, made my hecatombs, vowed my vows. At once then, wow, the wind changed, no time at all till we re-raised Pharos! Not a Proteus in sight, no Eidothea, just the boat I’d moored my wife in, per orders. Already she was making sail; her crew were putting in their oars; my first thought was, they’re running off with Helen; we overhauled them; why was everybody grinning? But it was only joy, not to lose another minute; there was Helen herself by the mast-step, holding out her arms to me! Zeus knows how I poop-to-pooped it, maybe I was dreaming on the beach at Pharos, maybe am still; there I was anyhow, clambering aboard: “Way, boys!” I hollered. “Put your arse in it!” Spang! went the mainsail, breeze-bellied for Sparta; those were Helen’s arms around me; it was wedding night! We hustled to the sternsheets, never mind who saw what; when she undid every oar went up; still we tore along the highways of the fish. “Got you!” I cried, couldn’t see for the beauty of her,
feel her yet, what is she anyhow? I decked her; only think, those gold limbs hadn’t wound me in twenty years …’

“ ‘Twenty?’ ‘Counting two before the war. Call it nineteen.’

“ ‘ “Wait,” she bade me. “First tell me what Proteus said, and how you followed his advice.”

“ ‘Our oars went down; we strained the sail with sighs; my tears thinned the wine-dark sea. But there was nothing for it, I did as bid:

4

“ ‘ “Nothing for it but to do as Eidothea’d bid me,” ’ ” I say to myself I told Telemachus I sighed to Helen.

“ ‘ “Eidothea?”

“ ‘ “Old Man of the Sea’s young daughter, so she said,” said I. “With three of my crew I dug in on the beach at sunrise; she wrapped us in seal-calfskins. ‘Hold tight to these,’ she told us. ‘Who can hug a stinking sea-beast?’ I inquired. She said, ‘Father. Try ambrosia; he won’t get here till noon.’ She put it under our noses and dived off as usual; we were high in no time; ‘These seals,’ my men agreed: ‘the longer you’re out here the whiter they get.’ They snuggled in and lost themselves in dreams; I would’ve too, but grateful as I was, when she passed the ambrosia I smelled a trick. Hang around Odysseus long enough, you trust nobody. I’d take a sniff and put the stuff away till the seal stink got to me, then sniff again. Even so I nearly lost my grip. Was I back in the horse? Was I dreaming of Helen on my bachelor throne?”