Lovely War(4)

“You have no idea what I am,” she tells him, “nor what good I do. I know what you think of my ‘silly romances.’”

She turns to Hephaestus. “I might find a mortal to love me,” she continues, “but that’s worship, not love. I’m perfect. Mortals aren’t meant to love perfection. It disillusions and destroys them in the end.”

Hephaestus is baffled. Aphrodite has no one to love her? He, the god of fire and forges, has no shortage of ore and fuel. Ares, the god of war, has been enjoying a blood-soaked century like no other in history. Artemis has no shortage of stags to hunt. Poseidon’s not low on salt water.

And his wife, the gorgeous goddess of romance, is lonely?

“Do you know what it’s like,” she says, “to spend eternity embedded in every single love story—the fleeting and the true, the trivial and the everlasting? I am elbow deep in love, working in passion the way artists work in watercolors. I feel it all.” She wraps her arms tightly across her chest, as though the room is cold. “I envy the mortals. It’s because they’re weak and damaged that they can love.” She shakes her head. “We need nothing. They’re lucky to need each other.”

“Yeah, well, they die,” Ares points out.

“Why have you never said this before?” Hephaestus asks her.

“Why should I?” she says. “Why would you care? You think my work is stupid. You never come out of your forge.”

She’s right. Not stupid, not exactly. But, perhaps, inconsequential. Iron—there’s something that lasts. Steel and stone. But human affection? Hephaestus, as any Greek scholar can tell you, wasn’t born yesterday.

Aphrodite still looks cold. She couldn’t be. But Hephaestus breathes at the fireplace, and the logs laid out there burst into sizzling flame.

Firelight plays across Aphrodite’s features. She tilts her head to one side. “Do you want to see what real love looks like?”

Hephaestus looks up. Her eyes are shining.

“Do you want to hear about my favorites? Some of my finest work?”

“Yes.” Hephaestus’s reply surprises him. “I do.”

A groan rises from the couch, but the goddess ignores War.

“I’ll tell you the story of an ordinary girl and an ordinary boy. A true story. No, I’ll do one better. I’ll tell you two.”

Ares lifts his head. “Do we know these stories?”

“Barely, if at all,” she says. “You never pay attention to girls.”

He snickers. “I beg to differ.”

“I’m not talking about their bodies.” Aphrodite’s eyes roll. “You never pay attention to their lives.”

“Ugh.” His head drops back. “I knew this would be boring.”

Aphrodite’s eyes blaze. “I’ll make it easy on you,” she says. “My two stories involve soldiers. From the Great War. The First World War. You’ll know their names and their rank, at any rate. You may find that you remember bits of their stories.”

Aphrodite’s dark-lidded eyes gaze out into the skyline of a Manhattan autumn evening. The Big Apple’s lights have dimmed, in case of German U-boats in the harbor, or Zeus forbid, Luftwaffe bomber planes from who knows where, but not even a global war can completely snuff out the lights of the City That Never Sleeps.

Ares watches Aphrodite’s lovely face, and Hephaestus’s grotesque one. For the millionth time, the war god wonders what Zeus intended, forcing these two to marry. What a curse, to be yoked to that monstrosity! All the more tragic for someone so perfectly perfect as she.

Why, then, does Ares find the hairs on his arms prickling with jealousy? Even now, though the golden net divides the blacksmith from the goddess, there’s something between them. Something he can neither conquer nor destroy. Impossible though it is, a silver thread binds Hephaestus and Aphrodite together, if only slightly, barring Ares from making Aphrodite completely his own.

But what does he expect? They’re married, after all.

“Goddess.”

Aphrodite meets her husband’s gaze. He points his gavel at her.

“Present your evidence.”

When she tilts her head slightly, he smiles beneath his whiskers. “Tell your story.”

Ares rolls his eyes. “Gods, no,” he moans. “Bring out the hot pincers, the smoking brands! Anything but a love story!”

Aphrodite glares at him.

“She’s always yammering on,” Ares says, “trying to tell me about some dumb love letter, some random kiss or other, and how long it lasted, and, by Medusa’s hair, what they were wearing at the time.”

“Goddess?” says Hephaestus.

“Mmm?”

“Leave nothing out,” says the god of fire. “Make your tale a long one.”





ACT ONE





APHRODITE


     Hazel—November 23, 1917





I FIRST SAW Hazel at a parish dance at her London borough church, St. Matthias, in Poplar. It was November 1917.

It was a benefit, with a drive organized for socks and tins of Bovril broth powder to send to the boys in France. But really, it was a fall dance like the one they held every autumn.