Middlesex (5 page)

   Back in Bithynios, Desdemona was giving those two beginners finishing lessons. While Lefty was still sleeping it off at the Cocoon Inn, she invited Lucille Kafkalis and Victoria Pappas over to the house. The girls were even younger than Desdemona, still living at home with their parents. They looked up to Desdemona as the mistress of her own home. Envious of her beauty, they gazed admiringly at her; flattered by her attentions, they confided in her; and when she began to give them advice on their looks, they listened. She told Lucille to wash more regularly and suggested she use vinegar under her arms as an antiperspirant. She sent Victoria to a Turkish woman who specialized in removing unwanted hair. Over the next week, Desdemona taught the girls everything she’d learned from the only beauty magazine she’d ever seen, a tattered catalogue called
Lingerie Parisienne.
The catalogue had belonged to her father. It contained thirty-two pages of photographs showing models wearing brassieres, corsets, garter belts, and stockings. At night, when everyone was sleeping, her father used to take it out of the bottom drawer of his desk. Now Desdemona studied the catalogue in secret, memorizing the pictures so that she could re-create them later.
   She told Lucille and Victoria to stop by every afternoon. They walked into the house, swaying their hips as instructed, and passed through the grape arbor where Lefty liked to read. They wore a different dress each time. They also changed their hairstyles, walks, jewelry, and mannerisms. Under Desdemona’s direction, the two drab girls multiplied themselves into a small city of women, each with a signature laugh, a personal gemstone, a favorite song she hummed. After two weeks, Desdemona went out to the grape arbor one afternoon and asked her brother, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you down in Bursa? I thought you’d have found a nice Turkish girl to marry by now. Or do they all have mustaches like Victoria’s?”
   “Funny you should mention that,” Lefty said. “Have you noticed? Vicky doesn’t have a mustache anymore. And do you know what else?”—getting up now, smiling—“even Lucille’s starting to smell okay. Every time she comes over, I smell flowers.” (He was lying, of course. Neither girl looked or smelled more appealing to him than before. His enthusiasm was only his way of giving in to the inevitable: an arranged marriage, domesticity, children—the complete disaster.) He came up close to Desdemona. “You were right,” he said. “The most beautiful girls in the world are right here in this village.”
   She looked shyly back up into his eyes. “You think so?”
   “Sometimes you don’t even notice what’s right under your nose.”
   They stood gazing at each other, as Desdemona’s stomach began to feel funny again. And to explain the sensation I have to tell you another story. In his presidential address at the annual convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality in 1968 (held that year in Mazatlán among lots of suggestive piñatas), Dr. Luce introduced the concept of “periphescence.” The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved’s hair. Periphescence denotes the initial drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It lasts, Luce explained, up to two years—tops.) The ancients would have explained what Desdemona was feeling as the workings of Eros. Now expert opinion would put it down to brain chemistry and evolution. Still, I have to insist: to Desdemona periphescence felt like a lake of warmth flooding up from her abdomen and across her chest. It spread like the 180-proof, fiery flood of a mint-green Finnish liqueur. With the pumping of two efficient glands in her neck, it heated her face. And then the warmth got other ideas and started spreading into places a girl like Desdemona didn’t allow it to go, and she broke off the stare and turned away. She walked to the window, leaving the periphescence behind, and the breeze from the valley cooled her down. “I will speak to the girls’ parents,” she said, trying to sound like her mother. “Then you must go pay court.”
   The next night, the moon, like Turkey’s future flag, was a crescent. Down in Bursa the Greek troops scrounged for food, caroused, and shot up another mosque. In Angora, Mustafa Kemal let it be printed in the newspaper that he would be holding a tea at Chankaya while in actuality he’d left for his headquarters in the field. With his men, he drank the last raki he’d take until the battle was over. Under cover of night, Turkish troops moved not north toward Eskisşehir, as everyone expected, but to the heavily fortified city of Afyon in the south. At Eskisşehir, Turkish troops lit campfires to exaggerate their strength. A small diversionary force feinted northward toward Bursa. And, amid these deployments, Lefty Stephanides, carrying two corsages, stepped out the front door of his house and began walking to the house where Victoria Pappas lived.
   It was an event on the level of a birth or a death. Each of the nearly hundred citizens of Bithynios had heard about Lefty’s upcoming visits, and the old widows, the married women, and the young mothers, as well as the old men, were waiting to see which girl he would choose. Because of the small population, the old courting rituals had nearly ceased. This lack of romantic possibility had created a vicious cycle. No one to love: no love. No love: no babies. No babies: no one to love.
   Victoria Pappas stood half in and half out of the light, the shading across her body exactly that of the photograph on page 8 of
Lingerie Parisienne.
Desdemona (costume lady, stage manager, and director all in one) had pinned up Victoria’s hair, letting ringlets fall over her forehead and warning her to keep her biggish nose in shadow. Perfumed, depilated, moist with emollients, wearing kohl around her eyes, Victoria let Lefty look upon her. She felt the heat of his gaze, heard his heavy breathing, heard him try to speak twice—small squeaks from a dry throat—and then she heard his feet coming toward her, and she turned, making the face Desdemona had taught her; but she was so distracted by the effort to pout her lips like the French lingerie model that she didn’t realize the footsteps weren’t approaching but retreating; and she turned to see that Lefty Stephanides, the only eligible bachelor in town, had taken off…
   …Meanwhile, back at home, Desdemona opened her hope chest. She reached in and pulled out her own corset. Her mother had given it to her years ago in expectation of her wedding night, saying, “I hope you fill this out someday.” Now, before the bedroom mirror, Desdemona held the strange, complicated garment against herself. Down went her knee socks, her gray underwear. Off came her high-waisted skirt, her high-collared tunic. She shook off her kerchief and unbraided her hair so that it fell over her bare shoulders. The corset was made of white silk. As she put it on, Desdemona felt as though she were spinning her own cocoon, awaiting metamorphosis.
   But when she looked in the mirror again, she caught herself. It was no use. She would never get married. Lefty would come back tonight having chosen a bride, and then he would bring her home to live with them. Desdemona would stay where she was, clicking her beads and growing even older than she already felt. A dog howled. Someone in the village kicked over a bundle of sticks and cursed. And my grandmother wept silently because she was going to spend the rest of her days counting worries that never went away…
   …While in the meantime Lucille Kafkalis was standing exactly as she’d been told, half in and half out of the light, wearing a white hat sashed with glass cherries, a mantilla over bare shoulders, a bright green, décolleté dress, and high heels, in which she didn’t move for fear of falling. Her fat mother waddled in, grinning and shouting, “Here he comes! Even one minute he couldn’t stay with Victoria!”…
   …Already he could smell the vinegar. Lefty had just entered the low doorway of the Kafkalis house. Lucille’s father welcomed him, then said, “We’ll leave you two alone. To get acquainted.” The parents left. It was dim in the room. Lefty turned … and dropped another corsage.
   What Desdemona hadn’t anticipated: her brother, too, had pored over the pages of
Lingerie Parisienne.
In fact, he’d done it from the time he turned twelve to the time he turned fourteen, when he discovered the real loot: ten postcard-sized photographs, hidden in an old suitcase, showing “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” in which a bored, pear-shaped twenty-five-year-old assumed a variety of positions on the tasseled pillows of a staged seraglio. Finding her in the toiletries pocket was like rubbing a genie’s lamp. Up she swirled in a plume of shining dust: wearing nothing but a pair of Arabian Nights slippers and a sash around her waist (flash); lying languidly on a tiger skin, fondling a scimitar (flash); and bathing, lattice-lit, at a marble hammam. Those ten sepia-toned photographs were what had started Lefty’s fascination with the city. But he had never entirely forgotten his first loves in
Lingerie Parisienne.
He could summon them in his imagination at will. When he had seen Victoria Pappas looking like page 8, what had struck Lefty most acutely was the distance between her and his boyhood ideal. He tried to imagine himself married to Victoria, living with her, but every image that came to mind had a gaping emptiness at the center, the lack of the person he loved more and knew better than any other. And so he had fled from Victoria Pappas to come down the street and find Lucille Kafkalis, just as disappointingly, failing to live up to page 22…
   …And now it happens. Desdemona, weeping, takes off the corset, folds it back up, and returns it to the hope chest. She throws herself on the bed, Lefty’s bed, to continue crying. The pillow smells of his lime pomade and she breathes it in, sobbing…
   …until, drugged by weeping’s opiates, she falls asleep. She dreams the dream she’s been having lately. In the dream everything’s the way it used to be. She and Lefty are children again (except they have adult bodies). They’re lying in the same bed (except now it’s their parents’ bed). They shift their limbs in sleep (and it feels extremely nice, how they shift, and the bed is wet) … at which point Desdemona wakes up, as usual. Her face is hot. Her stomach feels funny, way deep down, and she can almost name the feeling now…
   …As I sit here in my Aeron chair, thinking E. O. Wilson thoughts. Was it love or reproduction? Chance or destiny? Crime or nature at work? Maybe the gene contained an override, ensuring its expression, which would explain Desdemona’s tears and Lefty’s taste in prostitutes; not fondness, not emotional sympathy; only the need for this new thing to enter the world and hence the heart’s rigged game. But I can’t explain it, any more than Desdemona or Lefty could have, any more than each one of us, falling in love, can separate the hormonal from what feels divine, and maybe I cling to the God business out of some altruism hard-wired to preserve the species; I can’t say. I try to go back in my mind to a time before genetics, before everyone was in the habit of saying about everything, “It’s in the genes.” A time before our present freedom, and so much freer! Desdemona had no idea what was happening. She didn’t envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of which might contain a bug. Now we know we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the same wrinkles and age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have that same way of blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and voice boxes, formed from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be extrapolated backward in time, so that when I speak, Desdemona speaks, too. She’s writing these words now. Desdemona, who had no idea of the army inside her, carrying out its million orders, or of the one soldier who disobeyed, going AWOL…
   …Running like Lefty away from Lucille Kafkalis and back to his sister. She heard his feet hurrying as she was refastening her skirt. She wiped her eyes with her kerchief and put a smile on as he came through the door.
   “So, which one did you choose?”
   Lefty said nothing, inspecting his sister. He hadn’t shared a bedroom with her all his life not to be able to tell when she’d been crying. Her hair was loose, covering most of her face, but the eyes that looked up at him were brimming with feeling. “Neither one,” he said.
   At that Desdemona felt tremendous happiness. But she said, “What’s the matter with you? You have to choose.”
   “Those girls look like a couple of whores.”
   “Lefty!”
   “It’s true.”
   “You don’t want to marry them?”
   “No.”
   “You have to.” She held out her fist. “If I win, you marry Lucille.”
   Lefty, who could never resist a bet, made a fist himself. “One, two, three … shoot!
   “Ax breaks rock,” Lefty said. “I win.”
   “Again,” said Desdemona. “This time, if I win, you marry Vicky. One, two, three …”
   “Snake swallows ax. I win again! So long to Vicky.”
   “Then who will you marry?”
   “I don’t know”—taking her hands and looking down at her. “How about you?”
   “Too bad I’m your sister.”
   “You’re not only my sister. You’re my third cousin, too. Third cousins can marry.”
   “You’re crazy, Lefty.”
   “This way will be easier. We won’t have to rearrange the house.”
   Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and strokings of the fingers weren’t the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things constituted a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room. Lefty began waltzing Desdemona around, European-style; he waltzed her outside, across the yard, over to the cocoonery, and back under the grape arbor, and she laughed and covered her mouth with her hand. “You’re a good dancer, cousin,” she said, and her heart jumped again, making her think she might die right then and there in Lefty’s arms, but of course she didn’t; they danced on. And let’s not forget where they were dancing, in Bithynios, that mountain village where cousins sometimes married third cousins and everyone was somehow related; so that as they danced, they started holding each other more tightly, stopped joking, and then just danced together, as a man and a woman, in lonely and pressing circumstances, might sometimes do.