The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [18]
“As you listen to Speusippus?”
“You’re not an effeminate clown. Well, you’re not a clown. They’ll listen to you, too, when the time comes. Meanwhile I’ve got a job for you here.”
No. “Here.”
“You can tutor my son.”
The rain paused in the air, then continued to fall.
“That’s beneath you?”
“Of course it’s beneath me,” I said. “I’ve got work to do.”
“But he likes you already. He told me so himself.”
“Arrhidaeus?”
Antipater raised his head.
Philip looked wondering for a moment. Then his face cleared. “No, you dumb shit,” he said. “Alexander.”
AFTER THE PERFORMANCE, I lie in bed watching my wife remove the long gold pins from her hair and the sharp clasps from her tunic. What a lot of spikes it takes to hold her together. While the men were at the theatre, she spent the evening with Olympias and her women, weaving. She says the queen kept a basket by her foot, and when she saw Pythias looking at it, waved her over to see. Inside was a black snake no bigger than a bracelet. When the meal came Olympias fed it from her own plate, meat sliced fine, like you would give to a baby. The women spoke enthusiastically of the meal, and of different ways of preparing beans and meat. They demonstrated their favourite cuts by slapping themselves on the rump and legs, laughing, until my poor Pythias had to push her own plate away. The only pleasant moment of the evening, as she tells it, came early, when the boy Alexander stopped by to kiss his mother. That must have been before the performance. Introduced to Pythias, he greeted her warmly, with great courtesy and charm, and smelled, she said, most cleanly and pleasantly of spice. I haven’t been able to tell her about the head. Maybe she’ll never have to know.
“We’ll do what we’ll do,” she says again.
“You can’t have no opinion. It can’t be nothing to you. If we stay, it might be for years.”
“You’ve got a choice?”
I say nothing.
“They’re rude,” she says. “All of them. Their bodies stink. The women do slaves’ work. Their wine is bad. The queen”—she glances back over her shoulder at me—“is insane.”
“They will rule the world.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She gets in beside me and lies on her back.
I rest on an elbow to look at her. “I wanted to take you to Athens,” I say. “You’d have been at home there.”
“I was at home in Mytilene.”
Because her tone is petulant I don’t answer, but touch her hip. She spreads her legs. Dry, again. She flinches when I touch her. She says something more about my decision, asks some question. I put my tongue just there, on the pomegranate seed, and the tendons in her groin go taut as bowstrings. Pity and fear, purgation, relief. My tongue, working. A substance like the white of an egg.
THAT NIGHT, I DREAM of Stageira. When I wake, I sit for a long time by the window, wrapped in a blanket, remembering. I was a miserable child, lonely, and frightened when my father was called away at night or travelling, which was often. He was the only doctor for many of the little coastal villages, and as his reputation grew he was called ever farther away, to ever bigger towns. The twins were still allowed to sleep with our mother, but I had no one. I suffered night terrors until my mother taught me the trick of concentrating on whatever was closest to me—the length and texture of the hairs on the fur I slept on, or counting the threads of the pulse in my wrist, or feeling the tide of the breath in my body—and so distracting myself. She said this trick had helped her with the same problem. Soon I was practising it everywhere I went, observing and analyzing and categorizing compulsively, until no one wanted to talk to me because of the questions I asked and the information I spilled. Have you ever noticed? I would ask boys my own age. Can you tell me? I would ask adults. Soon I was spending all my time alone, swimming with my eyes open, trapping insects, reading my father’s books, cutting myself to observe the blood, drawing maps, tracing leaves, charting stars, and all of it helped a little, and none of it helped a lot. On the worst days I stayed in bed, unable