The Canterbury Sisters (10 page)

“What do you think of the wine?” asks Valerie.

The question is directed toward me, even though I’ve been discreet about what I do for a living. People get nervous if you tell them you’re a wine critic. They begin to apologize about whatever they’re drinking, or maybe they suddenly try to speak French. I pick the shot glass up and take a cautious sip. It’s even worse than I would have imagined—like someone plunked a cherry cough drop into a cup of hot water—and I want to tell the women that true zinfandel is garnet-red and robust, not pink and weak and sweet like this crap. They do understand at least that much, don’t they? But they probably don’t understand that much, and most of them probably don’t want to. They’ve lived perfectly good lives while drinking perfectly awful wines and I feel a sudden swoosh, a sense of air going through me, like wind whistling through a hollow tube.
I have a chance here,
I think
. A chance to reinvent myself in the midst of these women with all their martyred and incarcerated husbands, their white zinfandel and baked potatoes.

I force myself to swallow the wine and nod my thanks to Valerie. She is my companion, after all.

“Che is an unusual name,” Angelique is saying to me. “Were you named after the stadium?”

“It’s not that kind of Shea,” I say. I know what she’s talking about, because I’ve heard that theory before. Angelique is looking at me with wide, trusting eyes. She must have been pretty, back in the days before she tried to make herself hot. There’s a sweetness to her face that speaks more of homecoming queens than mobsters. God love her, as my Southern grandmother used to say. God bless her stupid little heart. “It’s C-H-E. I’m named after a revolutionary. My parents were hippies.”

“So what do you think of the wine, Che-who-was-named-for-a-revolutionary?” Valerie asks, a small smile playing around her lips. “It’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

Okay, so I really am being challenged. She saw I didn’t want to drink it. Saw that I winced when I tried. Maybe she even googled me under the table while I was googling Angelique. Maybe she’s seen the picture on my website, me toasting someone at a far distance, smiling broadly at an imaginary companion hovering just out of sight.

“Valerie, you must be the most easily pleased person I’ve ever met,” I say. “I think you must like just about everything on earth.” It’s the worst insult I can think to hurl at someone, but Valerie only smiles again.

“Thank you,” she says. “I try very hard to.”

 The Tale of Angelique 

“That damn cod’s repeating on me,” Angelique says with a burp. “I should have gone to the bathroom back at the inn.”

“We can turn around,” Tess says and I start to protest before I stop myself. Turning back after we’re twenty minutes into the afternoon segment of our walk seems like an admission of failure, like we’ve broken some sort of Canterbury rule before we’ve even begun. And yet on the first day they turned back for me, did they not?

Angelique is already shaking her head. “I’ll just find a bush,” she says. “There’s got to be some kind of bush on this goddamn path.”

We contemplate the view, but the land we’re walking through does not appear to be particularly bushy. It’s another field of hops and a few minutes earlier Tess had paused at one of the piles and crushed a dying leaf in her hand. She had insisted that we all smell it in turn and then said, “When they call a beer ‘hoppy,’ this is what they mean.” The leaf had an earthy, musty aroma I’ve encountered before in bars, or on the happy breath of men, but I had never known that it was precisely hops I was smelling, for I know nothing of beer, no more than Valerie knows about wine.

But now the smell of hops is with me for life. I have a decent palate, but an extraordinary nose—I like to tell people that it was my nose that led me to wine, and not my tongue. Once I have sniffed something I can never forget it, even if I try, and Ned used to tease me about having an olfactory version of a photographic memory. “Could you find me?” he’d asked, playfully lifting his arm and exposing the pit. “Could you pick me out if you were blindfolded and in a whole room full of naked, sweaty men?”

“Maybe . . . assuming that I wanted to,” I’d said and he’d laughed because whenever I was flippant, he was always quick to laugh. It was one of our little brags, that we were both clever and both appreciative of the other’s cleverness, but now I’m starting to see all that banter in a new light. Who did we think we were—characters in some Oscar Wilde play? Why did I never speak the truth—that of course I could have found him, no matter if he were lost among legions of men, and why did he never pull me onto his lap and tell me not to worry, that nothing could make him leave me in the first place? But we were always joking, speaking in shorthand. Even when one of us would say “I love you,” the other one would say “Ditto,” until we got to the point that all we would say was “Ditto.” “Ditto,” he would say at the airport on a Sunday afternoon, when I had pulled into a drop-off lane, him dragging his bag from the backseat and blowing me a kiss as he stepped onto the curb. “Ditto,” I would call back, my gaze already fixed in the rearview mirror, already trying to figure out how to ease back into the flow of traffic.

“There we go,” says Angelique, emerging from behind a stack of hops, buttoning her jeans. “Not the Ritz, but hey, I’ve never been too good to take a crap outdoors.”

“We could have turned back,” Tess repeats faintly, but her professionalism stops her from saying what the rest of us are thinking:
So you didn’t just pee, you crapped? Seriously? Right here on the Canterbury Trail behind some farmer’s stack of hops?
“But now that you’re feeling better, maybe you’d like to start your story.”

“It isn’t just my story,” Angelique says with confidence. “It’s everyone’s story. I’m going to tell you girls a fairy tale.”

Somehow I wouldn’t have figured the Queen of Jersey for a fairy tale. “Once upon a time in a country far far away . . .” she begins, then stops. “Maybe this is really more of a myth,” she says. “Yeah, a myth. My mother used to tell it to me when I was a little girl. This is the story of Psyche and Eros.”

She pronounces “Psyche” with no accent on the
e,
so it was the same sound as if you said “I don’t want to psych myself out.” Tess is tolerant, tolerant enough to let some American mobster’s wife take a shit right in the middle of a perfectly lovely British hops field, but even she can’t stand for this. “It’s ‘Psyche’ with an
e,”
she says. “
Psych-ee.”

“Psych-ee,”
Angelique repeats obediently, first to herself, and then out loud. “I guess Mama had it wrong.” She doesn’t seem offended at having her pronunciation publicly corrected. It’s probably something that’s happened to her a lot over the last few years, as she has risen from obscurity to Bravo TV fame.

“Anyways,” she continues. “Once upon a time in a country far far away, a king had three daughters. The youngest one was called Psych
-ee
and she was so sweet and beautiful that all the other women in the kingdom were jealous of her. Her two sisters and even the goddess Aphrodite. In fact, Aphrodite was so jealous that she ordered her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the wrong man. The worst possible man. The one man on earth who would surely break her heart.”

She pauses again, but this time for effect. She’s aware that she has quickly captured everyone’s attention, for who among us does not have an absolute wronger in her past? Who among us has not fallen under this particular curse of Aphrodite, doomed to ignore a dozen nice guys in pursuit of that one singular man who is destined to break our hearts?

“I think Mama told me this story because I was the youngest of three girls,” Angelique says, which is a strange little flicker of insight for a woman so un-self-aware that she can’t even detect the need to crap before it hits her in the middle of a hops field. “And because my sisters were total bitches to me growing up. You know that Aphrodite and Eros are the same people as Venus and Cupid, right? Like the razor blades and valentines?”

“Indeed,” says Tess, “Aphrodite and Eros are the Greek names for the gods the Romans called Venus and Cupid.” She has a way of summing things up neatly, with very little inflection in her voice to reveal her personal opinion. She probably thinks we’re all hopeless. Utterly incapable of telling tales of true love and quite beyond the reach of Canterbury’s salvation. I wonder if we’re the most hopeless group she’s ever led.

“I guess that’s why Mama called them Aphrodite and Eros,” Angelique says. “Because this is a serious story. Eros wasn’t some silly baby with a bow and arrow. He was the most handsome of all the gods.” She pops her hands in quick violent gestures, punctuating the air with her acrylic fingernails as she talks. Maybe it’s an Italian thing, maybe the result of being on TV, the pressure of trying to make every minute of her day camera-worthy. Hard to say. Either way, it’s distracting. I feel like I should be watching her as well as listening, as if she might stop at any moment to act a scene out. “So here’s what happens. Psyche’s been cursed by the goddess of love, which means that even though she’s perfect, she grows up without any boyfriends. All these years pass and not a single man comes calling, not one. Her parents can’t understand what’s wrong, so they take her to the Oracle of Delphi, which is like a psychic and a priest all rolled up together, and he says that Psyche will have to marry a snake. A snake. A total monster who’s going to devour her. That’s what he says, and nobody fucks with the Oracle of Delphi.”

Her voice drops to a whisper. “So the day of Psyche’s wedding is also the day of her funeral. Her whole family and all the servants take her up to this high mountain where her snake husband says she must wait for him, and everybody is weeping and wailing, except for the sisters. They’re secretly happy because they think the pretty little sweet one is going to finally get what she’s always had coming to her. And her parents just leave her there at the top of the cliff and go home, crying the whole way. But the snake doesn’t show. Psyche waits but nothing comes except the wind. It picks her up and carries her gently gently gently down to a castle at the bottom of the cliff. And once she gets to that castle, everything’s great. She lives in perfect comfort and has whatever she wants. In fact, things appear with a
poof
the moment she wishes for them.”

“Why do I have the feeling this story is getting ready to go sour?” Silvia asks drily.

“Not yet,” Angelique says. “ ’Cause see, what’s happened is that when Eros came to destroy Psyche, he accidentally pricked himself on one of his own arrows and fell in love with her. That’s how Mama used to say it, ‘He pricked himself,’ and then she would laugh, but of course I was a little girl and I didn’t get why it was funny until later. Prick, get it? You see the joke?”

We nod. We see the joke.

“So it was Eros who sent the wind to rescue her and who set her up in this terrific castle as his wife,” Angelique says. “But she can’t know she’s married to a handsome god; she has to think the prophecy has come true and her husband is a monster. And his mother, Aphrodite, can’t know he’s screwed up and fallen in love with a human. So their marriage must remain secret. Psyche has everything she could want, except for the knowledge of who her husband really is, and that’s heavy, right? Super heavy. Eros only comes to her in bed, when it’s too dark for her to see his face. And night after night they have banging sex—my mother didn’t tell me that part, I figured it out later—but in the morning he’s always gone and she’s always lonely. I mean, what does she have to do all day, living in that castle, with only servants around her and nowhere to go?”

Here she pauses again, and shoots a sympathetic look toward Jean, who, now that I think of it, had come to an almost identical point halfway through her own story. The woman manages to get herself to paradise, and to get herself married to the perfect man. She lives in luxury—in a castle at the bottom of a windy cliff, in some gated community in Guatemala, it hardly matters which, because we’ve all been trained from girlhood to know that this is what we’re supposed to want. But we can’t stand it once we get there. Loneliness sets in . . . boredom, curiosity, impatience, some sort of profound and wordless discontent with the status quo.
There is only one female story,
I think,
and it’s the original one.
We are all of us Eves, determined to break out of Eden the minute God and our husband turn their backs.
Where’s the snake?
we think, as we look around our perfect little worlds, so lonely and so sickeningly bored that we would do anything, anything for some good old-fashioned trouble.
This is all very fine and good, but bring on the snake.