Excerpt: The Will of Venus: the second course
From The Will of Venus:
The dining room was lit only by the pale flames of four candles at the center of the table. Bretton’s face was left in shadow. The light seemed to concentrate strangely around Danae’s olive-skinned face, to highlight its smoothness, its mask-like quality, its absolute lack of expression. Her lips barely separated when she raised her glass to drink.
As she collected their three plates and rose to clear the table, Livia was reluctant to leave the room, to abandon her watchful vigilance over an atmosphere thick with Bretton’s oblivion, with her sister’s resignation, even for the few minutes required to plate the second course. She was fearful that, upon her return with the golden-brown catfish, with their fragrantly spiced crab filling, she would find Danae’s face frozen into a replica of Marta’s death mask, into a mirror of that image held prisoner beneath the glass top of the dressing table upstairs. The candles, the herbs, the scrubbing, all had been in vain. Maybe they had changed nothing, nothing at all. Livia’s stomach was visited by a wave of nausea.
The kitchen was dark. Livia placed the three plates and the three forks into the spotless, blameless, stainless steel sink. As she reached for the light switch above the stove (she couldn’t bear the thought of the entire room brutally illuminated by the overhead fixture), her eyes fell on the candles. Not all of the -white wax had dissolved during her preparation of the four courses. Nothing, she reasoned, could be harmed by lighting them again; the atmosphere in the dining room could hardly be made worse. She would light the candle corresponding to the second course before uncorking the Sancerre she had chosen to accompany it, before removing the three perfectly browned fish with their garnish of spicy roasted tomatoes from the oven. Livia located her lighter in the hip pocket of her black leather pants, and soon the kitchen was bathed in the pale, flickering light of the second candle’s flame.
When she returned to the dining room, she experienced a haunting sense of stopped time, of suspension. Her sister’s arms and torso were in exactly the same configuration as when she had cleared the table some minutes earlier. Danae’s left hand lay in her lap as though it had always lain there, as though carved out of marble. Her right hand still held the wine glass; it made minute, barely discernible movements toward and away from Danae’s closed lips. After approximately a minute of close observation, Livia divined that her sister took a sip of wine every fifteen seconds. Bretton’s presence was an absence. His overlarge body, the fleshy, sensual features of the face, seemed somehow sketchily drawn in the tenuous light. He continued to direct his gaze obliquely toward the shadowy corner farthest from his wife. Bretton’s glass was empty.
As the incongruous party of three began the second course, Livia’s sense of time’s suspension increased. Somewhat alarmed, she realized that the reason for her impression of the dining room’s complete removal from things temporal, from the world outside the space weakly illuminated by the four candles, was the absolute silence that prevailed. Not only was Danae’s birthday dinner devoid of the murmurs and inconsequential interchanges of phrases typical of diners’ conversation but, as Livia observed in astonishment, the sounds of cutlery against china that were normally associated with the progression of a meal were also absent. The cutting of the tender catfish, for which both knife and fork were required, was absolutely soundless. Livia’s hands stopped their automatic motions for several seconds. She sat perfectly still, terrified by that silence, by its evocations of that soundless world from which it seemed increasingly unlikely that she would retrieve her sister.
There was a shrill, cutting sound. The telephone. Danae did not raise her eyes from the mechanical motions of the de-boning of her catfish. (Livia was heartened; her sister had at least begun to eat.) Bretton rose hurriedly from the table without excusing himself. From the hall, Livia could hear his stage voice, unnaturally lowered, but each word rendered audible by the enunciation necessary in order to ensure that a voice would carry. Bretton, Livia realized, was unable to speak in any other way.
“Hi… No, it’s okay, babe, but I won’t be able to make it until later. No, more like eleven-thirty, I’d say. Okay, right you are. See you then. Bye.”
Livia raised shocked eyes to Danae’s face. She watched as her sister’s hands slowly placed her fork and knife onto her plate. The catfish was half-eaten, and a large part of the stuffing was gone, but Livia knew with sick certainty that Danae would not eat another bite. Two more courses represented, to Livia, two more doses of herbs. Livia would somehow convince her to eat dessert; Danae had a weakness for sweets. As Livia watched, however, Danae abandoned the discreet and almost imperceptible sipping procedure she had employed for the past three quarters of an hour to ingest her wine. She raised her glass to her lips with a dramatic sweep of her hand, swallowed the contents in one gulp, refilled it, and drank half of the golden liquid before replacing it on the table. Her sister then turned to her and spoke the first words she had uttered since she had descended the stairs in the black velvet dress over an hour earlier.
“Livia, sweetie, the bottle’s empty. Do you think we can get another?”
