Lost in the Funhouse (23 page)

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“ ‘Snarled thwarted Helen: “Love!” Then added through our chorus groan: “Loving may waste us into Echoes, but it’s being loved that kills. Endymion! Semele! Io! Adonis! Hyacinthus! Loving steers marine Odysseus; being loved turned poor Callisto into navigation-stars. Do you love me to punish me for loving you?”

“ ‘ “I haven’t heard so deep Greek since Delphi,” I marveled. “But do I ask questions?”

“ ‘ “I’ll put this love of yours truly to the test,” Helen said. Gently she revived me with cold water and pungents from her Nilish store. “I suppose you suppose,” she declared then, “that I’ve been in Troy.”

“ ‘So potent her medicaments, in no time at all I regained my breath and confessed I did.

“ ‘Severely she nodded. “And you suspect I’ve been unfaithful?”

“ ‘ “It would be less than honest of me to say,” I said, “that no fancy of that dirt-foot sort has ever grimed my imagination’s marmor sill.”

“ ‘ “With Paris? And others as well?”

“ ‘ “You wrest truth from me as Odysseus Astyanax Andromache.”

“ ‘ “In a word, you think yourself cuckold.”

“ ‘I blushed. “To rash untowardly to conclusions ill becomes a man made wise by hard experience and time. Nevertheless, I grant that as I shivered in a Trojan ditch one autumn evening in the war’s late years and watched you stroll with Paris on the bastions, a swart-hair infant at each breast and your belly swaggèd with another, the term you mention flit once across the ramparts of my mind like a bat through Ilion-dusk. Not impossibly the clever wound I’d got from Pandarus festered my judgment with my side …”

“ ‘Helen kissed my bilging tears and declared: “Husband, I have never been in Troy.

“ ‘ “What’s more,” she added within the hour, before the boatswain could remobilize the crew, “I’ve never made love with any man but you.”

“ ‘ “Ah.”

“ ‘She turned her pout lips portward. “You doubt me.”

“ ‘ “Too many years of unwomaned nights and combat days,” I explained, “gestate in our tenderer intelligences a skeptic demon, that will drag dead Hector by the baldric till his corpse-track moat the walls, and yet whisper when his bones are ransomed: ‘Hector lives.’ Were one to say of Menelaus at this present hour, ‘That imp nips him,’ one would strike Truth’s shield not very far off-boss.”

“ ‘ “Doubt no more,” said Helen. “Your wife was never in Troy. Out of love for you I left you when you left, but before Paris could up-end me, Hermes whisked me on Father’s orders to Egyptian Proteus and made a Helen out of clouds to take my place.

“ ‘ “All these years I’ve languished in Pharos, chaste and comfy, waiting for you, while Paris, nothing wiser, fetched Cloud-Helen off to Troy, made her his mistress, got on her Bunomus, Aganus, Idaeus, and a little Helen, dearest of the four. It wasn’t I, but cold Cloud-Helen you fetched from Troy, whom Proteus dissolved the noon you beached him. When you then went off to account to Aphrodite, I slipped aboard. Here I am. I love you.”

“ ‘Not a quarter-hour later she asked of suspended me: “Don’t you believe me?”

“ ‘ “What ground have I for doubt?” I whispered. “But that imp aforementioned gives me no peace. ‘How do you know,’ he whispers with me, ‘that the Helen you now hang onto isn’t the cloud-one? Why mayn’t your actual spouse be back in Troy, or fooling in naughty Egypt yet?’ ”

“ ‘ “Or home in Lacedemon,” Helen added, “where she’s been all along, waiting for her husband.”

“ ‘Tresently my battle voice made clear from stem to stern my grown conviction that the entire holocaust at Troy, with its prior and subsequent fiascos, was but a dream of Zeus’s conjure, visited upon me to lead me to Pharos and the recollection of my wife—or her nimbus like. For for all I knew I roared what I now gripped was but a further fiction, maybe Proteus himself, turned for sea-cow-respite to cuckold generals …

“ ‘ “A likely story,” Helen said. “Next thing, you’ll say it was a cloud-Menelaus went fishing on the beach at Pharos! If I carry to my grave no heart-worm grudge at your decade
vagrance, it’s only that it irks me less just now than your present doubt. And that I happen to be not mortal. Yet so far from giving cut for cut, I’m obliged by Love and the one right action of your life to ease your mind entirely.” Here she led me by the hand into her golden-Aphrodite’s-grove, declaring: “If what’s within your grasp is mere cloudy fiction, cast it to the wind; if fact then Helen’s real, and really loves you. Espouse me without more carp! The senseless answer to our riddle woo, mad history’s secret, base-fact and footer to the fiction crazy-house our life: imp-slayer love, terrific as the sun! Love! Love!”

“ ‘Who was I? Am? Mere Menelaus, if that: mote in the cauldron, splinter in the Troy-fire of her love! Does nail hold timber or timber nail? Held fast by his fast-held, consumed by what he feasted on, whatever was of Menelaus was no more. I must’ve done something right.

“ ‘ “ ‘You’ll not die in horsy Argos, son of Atreus …’ ” So quoted Proteus’s last words to me my love-spiked wife. “ ‘The Olympic gods will west you in your latter days to a sweet estate where rain nor passion leaches, there to be your wife’s undying advertisement, her espouser in the gods’ slow time. Not fair-haired battleshouts or people-leadering preserves you, but forasmuch as and only that you are beloved of Helen, they count you immortal as themselves.’ ”

“ ‘Lampreys and flat-fish wept for joy, squids danced on the wave-tops, crab-choirs and minnow-anthems shook with delight the opalescent welkin. As a sea-logged voyager strives across the storm-shocked country of the sole, loses ship and shipmates, poops to ground on alien shingle, gives over struggling, and is whisked in a dream-dark boat, sleep-skippered, to his shoaly home, there to wake next morning with a wotless groan, wondering where he is and what fresh lie must save him, until he recognizes with a heart-surge whither he’s come and hugs the home-coast to sweet oblivion. So Menelaus, my best guess, flayed by love, steeved himself snug in Helen’s hold, was by her hatched and transport, found as it were himself in no time
Lacedemoned, where he clings still stunned. She returned him to bride-bed; had he ever been in Troy? Whence the brine he scents in her ambrosial cave? Is it bedpost he clutches, or spruce horse rib? He continues to hold on, but can no longer take the world seriously. Place and time, doer, done- to have lost their sense. Am I stoppered in the equine bowel, asleep and dreaming? At the Nile-fount, begging Love for mercy? Is it Telemachus I hold, cold-hearth Peisistratus? No, no, I’m on the beach at Pharos, must be forever. I’d thought my cave-work finished, episode; re-entering Helen I understood that all subsequent history is Proteus, making shift to slip me …’

“ ‘Beg pardon.’

“ ‘Telemachus? Come back?’

“To.’

“ ‘Thought I hadn’t noticed, did you, how your fancy strayed while I told of good-voyaging your father and the rest? Don’t I know Helen did the wine-trick? Are you the first in forty years, d’you think, I ever thought I’d yarned till dawn when in fact you’d slipped me?’

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“Fagged Odysseus’-son responded: ‘Your tale has held us fast through a dark night, Menelaus, and will bring joy to suitored Ithaca. Time to go. Wake up, Peisistratus. Our regards to Hermione, thanks to her magic mother.’

“ ‘Mine,’ I replied, ‘to chastest yours, muse and mistress of the embroidrous art, to whom I commission you to retail my round-trip story. Like yourself, let’s say, she’ll find it short nor simple, though one dawn enlightens its dénouement. Her own, I’d guess, has similar abound of woof—yet before your father’s both will pale, what marvels and rich mischances will have fetched him so late home! Beside that night’s fabrication this will stand as Lesser to Great Ajax.’

“So saying I gifted them off to Nestored Pylos and the pig-fraught
headlands dear to Odysseus, myself returning to my unfooled narrate seat. There I found risen Helen, sleep-gowned, replete, mulling twin cups at the new-coaxed coals. I kissed her ear; she murmured ‘Don’t.’ I stooped to embrace her; ‘Look out for the wine.’ I pressed her, on, to home. ‘Let go, love.’ I would not, ever, said so; she sighed and smiled, women, I was taken in, it’s a gift, a gift-horse, I shut my eyes, here we go again, ‘Hold fast to yourself, Menelaus.’ Everything,” I declare, “is now as day.”

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It was himself grasped undeceivèd Menelaus, solely, imperfectly. No man goes to the same Nile twice. When I understood that Proteus somewhere on the beach became Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea, Menelaus ceased. Then I understood further how Proteus thus also was as such no more, being as possibly Menelaus’s attempt to hold him, the tale of that vain attempt, the voice that tells it. Ajax is dead, Agamemnon, all my friends, but I can’t die, worse luck; Menelaus’s carcass is long wormed, yet his voice yarns on through everything, to itself. Not my voice, I am this voice, no more, the rest has changed, re-changed, gone. The voice too, even that changes, becomes hoarser, loses its magnetism, grows scratchy, incoherent, blank.

I’m not dismayed. Menelaus was lost on the beach at Pharos; he is no longer, and may be in no poor case as teller of his gripping history. For when the voice goes he’ll turn tale, story of his life, to which he clings yet, whenever, how-, by whom-recounted. Then when as must at last every tale, all tellers, all told, Menelaus’s story itself in ten or ten thousand years expires, yet I’ll survive it, I, in Proteus’s terrifying last disguise, Beauty’s spouse’s odd Elysium: the absurd, unending possibility of love.

When Dawn rose, pink as peerless Helen’s teat,

which in fact swung wineskinlike between her hind legs and was piebald as her pelt, on which I write,

Ended his life. Commenced his masterpiece. Returned to sleep.

Invoked the muse:

And die. And rot. And feed his silly carcass to the birds.

inspired by the dregs and lees of the muse herself, at whom, Zeus willing, he’ll have a final go before he corks her for good and casts her adrift, vessel of his hopeless hope. The Minstrel’s Last Lay.

I begin in the middle—where too I’ll end, there being alas to my arrested history as yet no dénouement. God knows how long I’d been out of writing material until this morning, not to mention how long altogether I’ve been marooned upon this Zeus-forsaken rock, in the middle of nowhere. There, I’ve begun, in the middle of nowhere, tricked ashore in manhood’s forenoon with nine amphorae of Mycenaean red and abandoned to my own devisings. After half a dozen years of which more later I was down to the last of them, having put her sisters to the triple use aforesung: one by one I broke their seals, drank
the lovelies dry, and, fired by their beneficence, not only made each the temporary mistress of my sole passion but gave back in the form of art what I’d had from them. Me they nourished and inspired; them I fulfilled to the top of my bent, and launched them worldward fraught with our joint conceits. Their names are to me now like the memory of old songs: Euterpe! Polyhymnia! I recall Terpsichore’s lovely neck, Urania’s matchless shoulders; in dreams I hear Melpomene singing yet in the wet west wind, her voice ever deeper as our romance waned; I touch again Erato’s ears, too delicate for mortal clay, surely the work of Aphrodite! I smile at Clio’s gravity, who could hold more wine than any of her sisters without growing tipsy; I shake my head still at the unexpected passion of saucy Thalia, how she clung to me even when broken by love’s hard knocks. Fair creatures. Often I wonder where the tides of life have fetched them, whether they’re undone by age and the world or put on the shelf by some heartless new master. What lovers slake themselves now at those fragile mouths? Do they still bear my charge in them, or is it jettisoned and lost, or brought to light?

With anticipation of Calliope, the last, I consoled me for their casting off. Painful state for a lover, to have always before him the object of his yen—naked, cool, serene—and deny his parchèd sense any slake but the lovely sight of her! No less a regimen I imposed upon myself—imperfectly, imperfectly, I’m not made of stone, and there she stood, brimful of spirit, heavy with what I craved, sweating delicately where the sun caressed her flank, and like her sisters infinitely accessible! A night came, I confess it, when need overmastered me; I broke my vow and her seal; other nights followed (never many in a season, but blessed Zeus, most blest Apollo, how many empty seasons have gone by!) when, despite all new resolve and cursing my weak-willedness even as I tipped her to my will, I eased my burden with small increase of hers. But take her to me altogether I did not, or possess myself of the bounty I thirsted for, and which freely she would yield. Until last night! Until the present morn!
For in that measureless drear interval, now to be exposed, I had nothing to write upon, no material wherewith to fashion the work I’d vowed she must inspire me to, and with which, in the last act of our loveship and my life, I’d freight her.