Lovely War(110)

He disappears, leaving husband and wife alone.

“Not quite what you’d hoped for?” Hephaestus asks Aphrodite.

She gazes into the glimmering coals. “One never gets quite what one hoped for from Death,” she muses.

Hephaestus chuckles. “I mean, from the telling of your story.”

“Oh.” She gazes into the fire. “That remains to be seen.”

Oh?

Hephaestus stretches his crooked legs. Divine though he may be, stiffness and aches are his to know. And he’s been sitting for a long time.

Why did he do this? What did he hope to accomplish? It all feels so embarrassing. So utterly stupid to think that by confronting Aphrodite and exposing her unfaithfulness, he could make anything change. Had he gone mad? What could’ve come over him?

And yet, here she sits, beside him. And all through her long tale, her stance toward Ares seemed to be—what? Not what Hephaestus would expect from a goddess to her lover.

“I think you’re right,” he tells her. “About Olympians being unfit for real love. About death and frailty being essential.”

She leans closer to the fire. “We say a building is made of brick,” she says, “but it’s the mortar, filling in the cracks, that holds it all together. That provides the strength.”

“The scarring,” he says, “that makes a broken bone harder, stronger than it was before.” The one god flung down from Olympus as a child to land in a shattered heap upon the earth knows something about this. His bones are iron.

Aphrodite leans her head against a cushion.

He’s a god. He’s seen her a trillion times. But her beauty melts him still. Always. No less so for being eternally beyond his reach.

He’s been thoroughly beaten down. Shown for the puny, jealous child he is. Humiliated by the web he wove—literally—to humiliate his cheating wife.

And yet, she’s still here.

He decides to try one more time.

“You say perfection limits you,” he says. “But you’re not so perfect as you like to let on.”

Her eyebrows arch. “Is that so?”

“Yes, it is.” He turns his crooked shoulders toward her. “For one thing, you have terrible taste in men.”

The corner of her mouth twitches. “Which one?”

My dumb brother. “All of them,” he says. “You’ve picked a string of winners.” He shrugs. “You did marry me, after all, and I’m no prize specimen.”

She glances at his form and looks at him as if to say, And?

“You’re completely soft where mortals are concerned,” he tells her. “Heart on your sleeve. Vulnerable to everything. I don’t like to say it, but you’re a byword on Olympus for it. Way too invested, they call you. Too far down in the weeds with the mortals. It ruins your cool. Warps your judgment.”

Her hackles rise. “Who says that?”

“Oh, you know.” He shrugs. “Folks.”

“Hermes,” she says darkly. “He’ll be hearing from me.”

If this is his attempt at winning her, it’s working about as well as his last try.

“All I’m saying,” Hephaestus says, with his heart in his throat, “is that, if love demands brokenness, don’t count yourself out.” He gulps. “And you’d have to search far and wide to find a more broken god than me.”

She gazes at him. Her Mona Lisa smile reveals nothing.

“What do you say, Goddess?” he asks her. “How about me?”

She pulls her knees in close and wraps her arms around them. “I say it’s about time.”





DECEMBER 1942


     About Time (Part II)





HEPHAESTUS SCRATCHES HIS shaggy head. “What did you just say?”

“You have no idea.” Her voice rises to a scolding pitch. “Years, I’ve been trying to get you to offer me that. To offer me you.”

He blinks in disbelief.

“How I’ve suffered through those god-awful meet-ups with your stupid, arrogant brother.” She rolls her eyes. “Making sure to strategically pose for Hermes’s camera. Ffaugh.”

Hephaestus thinks the room may have started spinning.

Aphrodite stretches out on the hearth. “He is so boring,” she says. “I thought I would start chewing my fingernails. And I would never.”

“You . . . wanted . . . me?”

“You never wanted me,” Aphrodite tells. “You’re the one god who didn’t. So Zeus sticks me to you like a postage stamp. Fine, you tell yourself, I’ll take a wife if I must. But you never chose me. You! The one god with half a brain and a quarter—oh, let’s say a third—of your typical Olympian ego.”

“Half a brain?” he cries. “One third of a—”

“But you resented me,” cries Aphrodite. “I was an embarrassing reminder that you were—what? The Olympian charity case? You were sure I could never love you. So you shut me out.”

“How can you say such a thing?” he roars. “All I’ve wanted—”

“You were willing to have a wife,” she says, “if Zeus forced you to. But you never got to know me.” She pokes a log in the fire. “Do you know how hard I worked to make sure you knew Ares and I would be here tonight? This little trial was months in the making.”