Psyche in a Dress (2 page)

T
he film my father put me in was called
Narcissus

He saw that I was broken

and he thought it might work well for his next project

I went to the set without any makeup

The ladies frowned at my skin

turned my face this way and that

in the harsh lights

“What are you eating?” they asked me

“Dairy? Sugar?”

“Do you get any sleep?”

“Supplements? Facials?”

“You’ve got to start taking care of yourself”

I shrugged

I said I was okay

I had just inherited my father’s complexion

And now of course

I didn’t have the benefit of sex with a god every night

At least in this film no one gets raped, mutilated

or murdered

Unless you count vanishing as murder

It’s what you assume in this world these days

when someone

disappears

I was supposed to vanish

turn into a voice

Narcissus came to the first reading late

He didn’t apologize

My father didn’t say anything

Anyone else

he’d have fired on the spot

Instead he just scowled

at me

I turned away so he couldn’t see

Narcissus had long, gold ringlets

chiseled features

and a body like a temple

Don’t look too deeply into his eyes, though

You will never find your reflection

I’ll probably be fine if he doesn’t touch me

I told myself

But that was not my father’s plan

Narcissus and I went out for dinner

My father set it up

There was a bar of red-veined marble

with spigots spurting wine like blood

Stargazer lilies stained the white linen tablecloths

with their rusty powder

A woman was covertly nibbling the petals

The food had no scent

Beautiful people sat staring at themselves in the mirrors

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

N
arcissus 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.”

“D
o 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

S
tray 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

O
rpheus 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.

A
fter 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