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kashiwrites[NOTE: This section was written for my unfinished NaNo in 2004, and doesn't count in the word total for 2009]
Gods of any description just weren’t a matter for daily concern for Alexandra, until that first dinner at the Dionysus restaurant as summer was just getting underway. And then they became far more of a daily concern than she would ever have dreamed – or wanted.
Of course she had heard the phrases uttered in conversation and in the media a thousand times in her twenty-five years. “She’s a goddess,” someone might say of a beautiful woman who had just entered the room. “He’s completely divine,” some svelte snob in a low cut black satin dress might murmur at a party, cocktail in hand. “We need divine intervention,” another might intone, speaking of a drought and glowering at a sunny, cloudless sky. Or some acolyte, regarding the work of an artist or innovative architect, might be moved to exclaim, “The man is a god! A god, I tell you!”
Merely phrases. Ways of speaking, to express that certain people seemed to have qualities that lifted them above ordinary folk.
Alex hardly expected her dinner with Vijay to have any connection to these utterances about divinity. In fact, deity as such did not haunt her awareness or play much of a role in her thinking, let alone her life. Despite her Greek heritage, she tended not to visit the family’s Orthodox church except for weddings and funerals. And the deities looming further back in time than the relatively more recent Greek Orthodox divinity – the mighty, ancient pantheon of Athens and Corinth and Sparta and Olympia – well, one never thought about them at all, except when telling old myths or naming a building or a restaurant. (After all, here she and Vijay were this evening, dining at the Dionysus. There were frescoes of the enthusiastically tipsy god all over the walls, and painted vines where walls and ceiling met.)
One might have thought that a concern with divinity would come more naturally to Vijay, her co-worker and weekly dinner companion, since the immigrant Indian community seemed so much more outwardly religious, at least from Alexandra’s viewpoint. But Vijay was the third generation of his immigrant family, as she was, and while he did attend a lot of the festivals and occasionally went to the temple, these were more a matter of community socializing than genuine ritual. And even on the ritual level, for many modern Toronto Indians, things were only vaguely “spiritual” and they didn’t regard the individual deities as much more than philosophical concepts.
But that all changed on this evening, sitting at the last inside table beside the patio opening, with the warmth of the day lingering while the daylight faded.
Their weekly dinner, alternating one week on Danforth Avenue (Greektown), and the next week on Gerard Street (Little India), was almost a ritual in itself, as they got together and discussed ideas, books, politics, art, all sorts of things that were a mutual interest. They worked together at a “green” energy company, one that was pushing wind power as the power source of the future. This interest alone had been enough to cement a friendship, before they had discovered other commonalities.
Some co-workers had wondered if they were a couple, which surprised both of them. They hadn’t thought about it, much. They were such good friends that other complications didn’t really seem desirable; there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between them that they didn’t want to risk the friendship by trying to take it further.
Granted, Alex remarked thoughtfully to herself as she delicately slid her chicken souvlaki off the skewer that evening, Vijay was spectacularly good-looking, as many Indian men seemed to be. That jet black hair, those deep-set dark eyes, that full, sensuous mouth… Yes indeedy. He was a work of art, and very kind and progressive and all those good things. Her intellectual type, definitely. But her romantic type? Not really.
Significantly, as it turned out, it was while those private thoughts went through her mind in the middle of their discussion about architecture that the Greek goddess of love happened to walk toward the restaurant.
Alexandra didn’t realize who she was at first. She strolled down the sidewalk in the growing dusk, dressed like any other extremely beautiful, tall, graceful woman in Toronto. (To Alex’s vast envy: she herself was only 5’3”, whereas this woman had to be at least 5’9”. Alex couldn’t help compare her own longish mousey brown hair with this woman’s luxuriant black hair, and find herself wanting.) The woman wore a dark blue business suit, its lines crisp and sharp, but despite the darkness of her hair and the navy suit, from certain angles she almost seemed to glow. Alex had to blink a couple of times, watching her approach. A trick of the light, no doubt, she thought. Maybe time for a new prescription for her glasses. She pushed them up her nose absently, still watching.
The woman turned into the patio area and walked the center path through the tables out there, toward the inside of the restaurant. She moved like a cat, gracefully and smoothly, everything flowing, the sensuous movements all the while contained – barely -- by the stern lines of the suit. And everything stopped as she walked by: conversations halted instantly, forks stopped halfway up, mouths remained open. She herself appeared oblivious to the stares, intent only on reaching whatever goal she had inside the restaurant.
Alex was now as frozen as everyone else as the woman drew near. Vijay finally noticed the silence both across the table from him and on the patio outside, and looked over his shoulder just as the woman came even with them. His fork, too, froze in mid-air.
And the woman, unexpectedly, stopped beside their table. The regard of her sea-blue eyes shocked through Alex like a bullet. And her soft words were equally shocking.
“Alexandra,” said the woman. “You devote far too much time to pursuits of the mind, and far too little to adventures of the heart.”
She knew Alex’s name? What was she talking about? Who was she?? Alex fought past what felt like a great weight in her throat, to squeak, “Do – do I know you?”
The woman’s smile was knowing, and not comforting at all. “Not yet,” she said. She was just turning to go when Vijay forced himself out of his own paralysis, and turned in his chair toward her.
“How – “ his voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “How do you presume to approach a complete stranger and tell her what she should and shouldn’t do with her own mind and heart?”
The woman paused, glancing back at Vijay in appraisal, eyebrows raised. “You are strong and courageous, I see,” she said. “I approve. But you are not in my care, so I can do nothing.”
“In your care!” he said. His breathlessness betrayed how hard it was to force himself to continue speaking. “She doesn’t even know you. How can you be ‘caring’ for her? Who are you?”
Again the knowing, enigmatic smile. “My name,” said the woman, “is Aphrodite.” And she turned, finally, walking that cat-like walk toward the bar in the back.
Her leaving was like the release of pressure, as though the air had somehow become lighter. At least, that was one impression. The other impression was that the air had been so full that there was now a hollow void.
Vijay and Alex watched her departure until they heard a low chuckle from the next table. An older man sat there, his newspaper temporarily lowered while he regarded them ruefully. “You don’t mess with that one,” he said. “I tried to hit on her once, and she she gave me such a cold shoulder it almost froze my bones. But I still felt more alive than I’d ever felt before. Which is why I keep coming here, I guess, just to watch her walk by.”
Vijay licked his lips gingerly. “So she comes here a lot.”
“Oh yeah. She owns the place, in fact. See that young guy behind the bar, the pretty blond fellow?”
“Yes…?”
“Her son.”
“Her son!” Vijay exclaimed. “But he’s at least my age. She can’t possibly be old enough to have a son my age.”
“They’re both older than you think. And she’s got a husband somewhere too, I hear. A mechanic or something, from the sound of it.”
“You know an awful lot about her.”
Once she gets under your skin, you sort of can’t help but want more.”
But why? Who is she?”
The man smiled, almost as enigmatically as the woman had. “I think,” he said, “that she’s exactly who she says she is.” And the newspaper lifted again as he disappeared behind it.
Vijay finally turned back to face Alex. “’Who she says she is’?” he repeated. “I don’t understand. Who did she say she was?”
Alex stabbed a piece of souvlaki with her fork and regarded it sourly. “She said she was Aphrodite. Or at least, said that that’s her name. Her parents named her after the Greek Goddess of love. Is that appropriate, or what?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it love, exactly,” he said. “Maybe exhilaration…”
“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve fallen under her spell already, too, Vijay?” said Alex. “Are you going to start finding out stuff about her like this guy? When her birthday is, where her husband works?”
“She’s awfully striking,” Vijay said, “but I wouldn’t dream of it. I thought she treated you rather rudely. I would expect her to apologize before anything else.”
Alex looked up from her sour contemplation of the chunk of meat. “Seriously?”
“Well, of course. Come to think of it, she was rude to me too.”
“She was, wasn’t she? I wonder what she meant by that crack – ‘I approve’. I don’t know who she is, that she thinks she has the right to approve or disapprove of you.” Alex smiled suddenly. “But I approve, at any rate. That was very nice of you, to speak up like that.”
It was hard to tell if Vijay ever blushed; his skin was just dark enough that it probably wouldn’t show. But he did look sheepish.
“Of course I would speak up. You’re my very good friend.”
“Yes I am,” Alex smiled again. Of course.
They gradually managed to get back to the normal rhythm of their conversation. But the encounters that evening were far from over.
They gradually managed to get back to the normal rhythm of their conversation, though Alex suspected that Vijay was as jumpy as she was, waiting in case the woman – Aphrodite? Puleeze! – came back out past their table. But their meal continued uninterrupted, and they paid their waiter in peace, thinking that was that. Despite the uncomfortable moment with the woman, they rather liked this restaurant, and the food was probably the best Greek cuisine they had tried thus far for their weekly get-togethers. They agreed that they might consider coming here again. So long as they had a table far from the traffic path through the patio and into the main area.
One more thing to do, and then they could go. They each popped in to their respective rest rooms for a bit of hand-washing and freshening up. Alex gave her glasses a bit of a rinse, polishing them with her handkerchief, before heading out to meet Vijay for the long walk that usually followed these dinners.
They met in the hallway between the kitchen and the main restaurant, the place where the coffee machines sat, and the water pitchers and clean water glasses. And unfortunately, Aphrodite happened to be standing in their way. Or was it really an “unfortunate” coincidence? The look in her eyes seemed a bit too purposeful. And that odd, faint glow around her edges seemed to be back. Alex blinked, but it just wasn’t going away. In fact, it was more obvious in the dim light of this short hallway than it had been in the eating area.
“Excuse me,” Alex said, making as though to scoot past. But Aphrodite didn’t move.
“You are too sceptical,” she said. “You analyze things too much. Do you give no weight to the things you feel?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alex said. “Are you going to get out of my way or do I have to call the police because you’re harassing me?”
“You really must let us pass,” Vijay said, his voice conciliatory, as he hoped to avoid a public confrontation.
“I will let you go, of course,” the woman said, speaking to Alex and ignoring him. “But first I must remove your scepticism.”
Her eyes were already flickering over Alex’s shoulder, toward the kitchen, whose door was opening as she spoke. The young man emerged, who had been pointed out as her son. In the bright light from the kitchen, his curly blond hair glowed almost golden. He definitely had the straight nose, wide shoulders, and even the demeanor of those ancient Greek statues; someone very like him had to have been the model the sculptors had used, or the physical ideal they were striving for. He smiled pleasantly.
“Yes, mother? You needed something?” His tenor voice was so melodic it almost made Alex want to sing. She reminded herself sternly that this was an iffy situation, and she couldn’t be distracted by the young man’s beauty. (Though it really was a bit disconcerting, the way Vijay was staring at his golden perfection. If he started drooling, Alex was going to hit him over the head with her purse. Where was her ally now?)
Aphrodite spoke again. “It seems our Alexandra remains sceptical, even though she’s been told who we are. I thought perhaps a demonstration would be convincing.”
“Certainly,” the young man agreed. “Do you have a subject in mind?”
Another figure appeared in the doorway from the kitchen: an older chef, his uniform stained from a sauce that had splattered, his eyes weary as he prepared for the end of his shift. He was very tall, and so thin he was almost gaunt. He obviously never succumbed to the temptation to sample his culinary productions.
As he opened his mouth to ask a question, Aphrodite interrupted. “He’ll do,” she said.
(Chapter 1, part two)
Gods of any description just weren’t a matter for daily concern for Alexandra, until that first dinner at the Dionysus restaurant as summer was just getting underway. And then they became far more of a daily concern than she would ever have dreamed – or wanted.
Of course she had heard the phrases uttered in conversation and in the media a thousand times in her twenty-five years. “She’s a goddess,” someone might say of a beautiful woman who had just entered the room. “He’s completely divine,” some svelte snob in a low cut black satin dress might murmur at a party, cocktail in hand. “We need divine intervention,” another might intone, speaking of a drought and glowering at a sunny, cloudless sky. Or some acolyte, regarding the work of an artist or innovative architect, might be moved to exclaim, “The man is a god! A god, I tell you!”
Merely phrases. Ways of speaking, to express that certain people seemed to have qualities that lifted them above ordinary folk.
Alex hardly expected her dinner with Vijay to have any connection to these utterances about divinity. In fact, deity as such did not haunt her awareness or play much of a role in her thinking, let alone her life. Despite her Greek heritage, she tended not to visit the family’s Orthodox church except for weddings and funerals. And the deities looming further back in time than the relatively more recent Greek Orthodox divinity – the mighty, ancient pantheon of Athens and Corinth and Sparta and Olympia – well, one never thought about them at all, except when telling old myths or naming a building or a restaurant. (After all, here she and Vijay were this evening, dining at the Dionysus. There were frescoes of the enthusiastically tipsy god all over the walls, and painted vines where walls and ceiling met.)
One might have thought that a concern with divinity would come more naturally to Vijay, her co-worker and weekly dinner companion, since the immigrant Indian community seemed so much more outwardly religious, at least from Alexandra’s viewpoint. But Vijay was the third generation of his immigrant family, as she was, and while he did attend a lot of the festivals and occasionally went to the temple, these were more a matter of community socializing than genuine ritual. And even on the ritual level, for many modern Toronto Indians, things were only vaguely “spiritual” and they didn’t regard the individual deities as much more than philosophical concepts.
But that all changed on this evening, sitting at the last inside table beside the patio opening, with the warmth of the day lingering while the daylight faded.
Their weekly dinner, alternating one week on Danforth Avenue (Greektown), and the next week on Gerard Street (Little India), was almost a ritual in itself, as they got together and discussed ideas, books, politics, art, all sorts of things that were a mutual interest. They worked together at a “green” energy company, one that was pushing wind power as the power source of the future. This interest alone had been enough to cement a friendship, before they had discovered other commonalities.
Some co-workers had wondered if they were a couple, which surprised both of them. They hadn’t thought about it, much. They were such good friends that other complications didn’t really seem desirable; there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between them that they didn’t want to risk the friendship by trying to take it further.
Granted, Alex remarked thoughtfully to herself as she delicately slid her chicken souvlaki off the skewer that evening, Vijay was spectacularly good-looking, as many Indian men seemed to be. That jet black hair, those deep-set dark eyes, that full, sensuous mouth… Yes indeedy. He was a work of art, and very kind and progressive and all those good things. Her intellectual type, definitely. But her romantic type? Not really.
Significantly, as it turned out, it was while those private thoughts went through her mind in the middle of their discussion about architecture that the Greek goddess of love happened to walk toward the restaurant.
Alexandra didn’t realize who she was at first. She strolled down the sidewalk in the growing dusk, dressed like any other extremely beautiful, tall, graceful woman in Toronto. (To Alex’s vast envy: she herself was only 5’3”, whereas this woman had to be at least 5’9”. Alex couldn’t help compare her own longish mousey brown hair with this woman’s luxuriant black hair, and find herself wanting.) The woman wore a dark blue business suit, its lines crisp and sharp, but despite the darkness of her hair and the navy suit, from certain angles she almost seemed to glow. Alex had to blink a couple of times, watching her approach. A trick of the light, no doubt, she thought. Maybe time for a new prescription for her glasses. She pushed them up her nose absently, still watching.
The woman turned into the patio area and walked the center path through the tables out there, toward the inside of the restaurant. She moved like a cat, gracefully and smoothly, everything flowing, the sensuous movements all the while contained – barely -- by the stern lines of the suit. And everything stopped as she walked by: conversations halted instantly, forks stopped halfway up, mouths remained open. She herself appeared oblivious to the stares, intent only on reaching whatever goal she had inside the restaurant.
Alex was now as frozen as everyone else as the woman drew near. Vijay finally noticed the silence both across the table from him and on the patio outside, and looked over his shoulder just as the woman came even with them. His fork, too, froze in mid-air.
And the woman, unexpectedly, stopped beside their table. The regard of her sea-blue eyes shocked through Alex like a bullet. And her soft words were equally shocking.
“Alexandra,” said the woman. “You devote far too much time to pursuits of the mind, and far too little to adventures of the heart.”
She knew Alex’s name? What was she talking about? Who was she?? Alex fought past what felt like a great weight in her throat, to squeak, “Do – do I know you?”
The woman’s smile was knowing, and not comforting at all. “Not yet,” she said. She was just turning to go when Vijay forced himself out of his own paralysis, and turned in his chair toward her.
“How – “ his voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “How do you presume to approach a complete stranger and tell her what she should and shouldn’t do with her own mind and heart?”
The woman paused, glancing back at Vijay in appraisal, eyebrows raised. “You are strong and courageous, I see,” she said. “I approve. But you are not in my care, so I can do nothing.”
“In your care!” he said. His breathlessness betrayed how hard it was to force himself to continue speaking. “She doesn’t even know you. How can you be ‘caring’ for her? Who are you?”
Again the knowing, enigmatic smile. “My name,” said the woman, “is Aphrodite.” And she turned, finally, walking that cat-like walk toward the bar in the back.
Her leaving was like the release of pressure, as though the air had somehow become lighter. At least, that was one impression. The other impression was that the air had been so full that there was now a hollow void.
Vijay and Alex watched her departure until they heard a low chuckle from the next table. An older man sat there, his newspaper temporarily lowered while he regarded them ruefully. “You don’t mess with that one,” he said. “I tried to hit on her once, and she she gave me such a cold shoulder it almost froze my bones. But I still felt more alive than I’d ever felt before. Which is why I keep coming here, I guess, just to watch her walk by.”
Vijay licked his lips gingerly. “So she comes here a lot.”
“Oh yeah. She owns the place, in fact. See that young guy behind the bar, the pretty blond fellow?”
“Yes…?”
“Her son.”
“Her son!” Vijay exclaimed. “But he’s at least my age. She can’t possibly be old enough to have a son my age.”
“They’re both older than you think. And she’s got a husband somewhere too, I hear. A mechanic or something, from the sound of it.”
“You know an awful lot about her.”
Once she gets under your skin, you sort of can’t help but want more.”
But why? Who is she?”
The man smiled, almost as enigmatically as the woman had. “I think,” he said, “that she’s exactly who she says she is.” And the newspaper lifted again as he disappeared behind it.
Vijay finally turned back to face Alex. “’Who she says she is’?” he repeated. “I don’t understand. Who did she say she was?”
Alex stabbed a piece of souvlaki with her fork and regarded it sourly. “She said she was Aphrodite. Or at least, said that that’s her name. Her parents named her after the Greek Goddess of love. Is that appropriate, or what?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it love, exactly,” he said. “Maybe exhilaration…”
“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve fallen under her spell already, too, Vijay?” said Alex. “Are you going to start finding out stuff about her like this guy? When her birthday is, where her husband works?”
“She’s awfully striking,” Vijay said, “but I wouldn’t dream of it. I thought she treated you rather rudely. I would expect her to apologize before anything else.”
Alex looked up from her sour contemplation of the chunk of meat. “Seriously?”
“Well, of course. Come to think of it, she was rude to me too.”
“She was, wasn’t she? I wonder what she meant by that crack – ‘I approve’. I don’t know who she is, that she thinks she has the right to approve or disapprove of you.” Alex smiled suddenly. “But I approve, at any rate. That was very nice of you, to speak up like that.”
It was hard to tell if Vijay ever blushed; his skin was just dark enough that it probably wouldn’t show. But he did look sheepish.
“Of course I would speak up. You’re my very good friend.”
“Yes I am,” Alex smiled again. Of course.
They gradually managed to get back to the normal rhythm of their conversation. But the encounters that evening were far from over.
They gradually managed to get back to the normal rhythm of their conversation, though Alex suspected that Vijay was as jumpy as she was, waiting in case the woman – Aphrodite? Puleeze! – came back out past their table. But their meal continued uninterrupted, and they paid their waiter in peace, thinking that was that. Despite the uncomfortable moment with the woman, they rather liked this restaurant, and the food was probably the best Greek cuisine they had tried thus far for their weekly get-togethers. They agreed that they might consider coming here again. So long as they had a table far from the traffic path through the patio and into the main area.
One more thing to do, and then they could go. They each popped in to their respective rest rooms for a bit of hand-washing and freshening up. Alex gave her glasses a bit of a rinse, polishing them with her handkerchief, before heading out to meet Vijay for the long walk that usually followed these dinners.
They met in the hallway between the kitchen and the main restaurant, the place where the coffee machines sat, and the water pitchers and clean water glasses. And unfortunately, Aphrodite happened to be standing in their way. Or was it really an “unfortunate” coincidence? The look in her eyes seemed a bit too purposeful. And that odd, faint glow around her edges seemed to be back. Alex blinked, but it just wasn’t going away. In fact, it was more obvious in the dim light of this short hallway than it had been in the eating area.
“Excuse me,” Alex said, making as though to scoot past. But Aphrodite didn’t move.
“You are too sceptical,” she said. “You analyze things too much. Do you give no weight to the things you feel?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alex said. “Are you going to get out of my way or do I have to call the police because you’re harassing me?”
“You really must let us pass,” Vijay said, his voice conciliatory, as he hoped to avoid a public confrontation.
“I will let you go, of course,” the woman said, speaking to Alex and ignoring him. “But first I must remove your scepticism.”
Her eyes were already flickering over Alex’s shoulder, toward the kitchen, whose door was opening as she spoke. The young man emerged, who had been pointed out as her son. In the bright light from the kitchen, his curly blond hair glowed almost golden. He definitely had the straight nose, wide shoulders, and even the demeanor of those ancient Greek statues; someone very like him had to have been the model the sculptors had used, or the physical ideal they were striving for. He smiled pleasantly.
“Yes, mother? You needed something?” His tenor voice was so melodic it almost made Alex want to sing. She reminded herself sternly that this was an iffy situation, and she couldn’t be distracted by the young man’s beauty. (Though it really was a bit disconcerting, the way Vijay was staring at his golden perfection. If he started drooling, Alex was going to hit him over the head with her purse. Where was her ally now?)
Aphrodite spoke again. “It seems our Alexandra remains sceptical, even though she’s been told who we are. I thought perhaps a demonstration would be convincing.”
“Certainly,” the young man agreed. “Do you have a subject in mind?”
Another figure appeared in the doorway from the kitchen: an older chef, his uniform stained from a sauce that had splattered, his eyes weary as he prepared for the end of his shift. He was very tall, and so thin he was almost gaunt. He obviously never succumbed to the temptation to sample his culinary productions.
As he opened his mouth to ask a question, Aphrodite interrupted. “He’ll do,” she said.
(Chapter 1, part two)