"Pause. Long pause. I can't say anything."
You've one last question.
"It'll have to wait. . I'm raining on half the zodiac. . poor Cetus, swim again while you can. ."
If I had one, I'd ask about your and my mortal parts.
"No use: those parts are private, like Andromeda's and Phineus's; not for publication. We didn't die down there at the climax, I can tell you that; simply we commenced our immortality here, where we talk together. Down there our mortal lives are living themselves out, or've long since done — together or apart, comic tragic, beautiful ugly. That's another story, another story; it can't be told to the characters in this."
So be it. Last question?
"Are you happy, Perseus, with the way this story ends?"
Infinite pause. My love, it's an epilogue, always ending, never ended, like (I don't apologize) II-G, which winds through universal space and time. My fate is to be able only to imagine boundless beauty from my experience of boundless love — but I have a fair imagination to work with, and, to work from, one priceless piece of unimagined evidence: what I hold above Beta Persei, Medusa: not serpents, but lovely woman's hair. I'm content. So with this issue, our net estate: to have become, like the noted music of our tongue, these silent, visible signs; to be the tale I tell to those with eyes to see and understanding to interpret; to raise you up forever and know that our story will never be cut off, but nightly rehearsed as long as men and women read the stars. . I'm content. Till tomorrow evening, love.
"Good night."
Good night. Good night.
BELLEROPHONIAD
1
"Good night."
"Good night."
Some stories last longer than others. Now my wife's feelings were hurt, Philonoë's, and no wonder: for the occasion she's made ambrosia with her own hands, dismissed the servants early, donned her best nightie; it should have been one dessert after another. But Bellerophon, King of Lycia, at sundown on the eve of his birthday found floating in the marsh near his palace a Greek novella called Perseid, story of his model hero; by the time he got to its last words he was forty and too tired.
Thus begins, so help me Muse, the tidewater tale of twin Bellerophon, mythic hero, cousin to constellated Perseus: how he flew and reflew Pegasus the winged horse; dealt double death to the three-part freak Chimera; twice loved, twice lost; twice aspired to, reached, and died to immortality — in short, how he rode the heroic cycle and was recycled. Loosed at last from mortal speech, he turned into written words: Bellerophonic letters afloat between two worlds, forever betraying, in combinations and recombinations, the man they forever represent.
"You never criticize," I go on to carp shortly at the bedroom ceiling, dark.
"There's something wrong with a woman who never criticizes."
After a moment, pensive Philonoë beside me said: "Sometimes I criticize."
"No you don't. You're perfect; that's your trouble."
"My feelings are hurt, yes," Philonoë is represented here as having explained. "But there's no point in criticizing a person when he's obviously upset. Though why you're upset, I can't imagine."
"Upset upset. My life's a failure. I'm not a mythic hero. I never will be."
"You are!" Their dialogue conveys the general sense of our conversation, but neither establishes Philonoë's indomitable gentleness of spirit and body and her husband's punishing self-concern, nor achieves in proportion to its length enough simple exposition. Had I understood, when I consented at the end of this novella to be transformed by the seer Polyeidus into a version of Bellerophon's life, that I might be imperfectly, even ineptly narrated, I'd have cleaved to my original program: to fall from heaven into a thornbush, become a blind lame vatic figure, and float upon the marshy tide, reciting my history aloud, in my own voice, to Melanippe the Amazon — my moon, my muse, my final mortal love — as she ebbed and flooded me. And if Polyeidus the Seer had realized that this final and trickiest effort in the literary-metamorphosis way would be freckled and soiled with as it were self-criticism, he'd've let Bellerophon smack into the muck and bubble there forever, like Dante's Wrathful in the marshes of the Styx. Fenny father, old shape-shifter: here you are, then; even here. On with the story.
"It's perfectly obvious," Philonoë went on, her voice as gentle as her gentle body, whose beauty five-and-thirty years had scarcely scarred, "that Athene's still on your side. The Kingdom of Lycia is reasonably prosperous and politically stable despite our vexing military involvement with the Carians and their new alliance with the Solymians and Amazons. Our children are growing up satisfactorily, take it all in all — not like Proetus and Anteia's wayward daughters. Your fame as a Chimeromach seems secure, judging by your fan mail; even the Perseid, I gather from the excerpts you chose to read me, mentions you favorably a couple of times. Finally, our marriage (which, remember, is to me what your career as mythic hero is to you: my cardinal value and vindication, my raison d'être) is, if no longer fiery as Chimera's breath, affectionate, comfortable, and sexually steady, in the main. Certainly we've been spared the resentments that poisoned Perseus and Andromeda's relationship as they reached our age, and while we cannot be called innocent, surely we are rather experienced than guilty.
"Now, it may very well be that your most spectacular work is behind you — I've yet to read the Perseid, but what mythic hero isn't over the hill, as it were, by the time he's forty? However, it strikes me as at least likely that your best work may not be your most spectacular, and that it may lie ahead, if not be actually in progress: I mean the orderly administration of your country, your family, and yourself over the long haul; the patient cultivation of understanding into wisdom; the accumulation of rich experience and its recycling in the form of enlightened policy, foreign, domestic, and personal — all those things, in brief, which make a man not merely celebrated, but great; not merely admired, but loved; et cetera."
I compare to this the rich prose of the Perseid and despair. Sleep with its author, then, if Melanippe's style won't do! No, no, my love, it's not your style; you merely set the words down as they come, or long since came: once-living creatures caught and fossiled in the clay; bones displaced by alien mineral, grown with crystals, hued with the oxides of old corrosion, heaved and worn and rearranged by the eons' ebb; shards; disjecta membra, from which the sleeping dragon is ever harder to infer. You said it. Anyhow I slept, and woke unhappy as before. As always, Philonoë ungrudgingly forgave — Melanippe is no Philonoë. I didn't mean to imply that she is — aroused and made love to me, then permitted me a post-coital nap while she prepared with her own hands a birthday breakfast: spinach pie and feta cheese. With this woman, Polyeidus wonders, the man was unhappy? He shouldn't wonder, Bellerophon believes (echoing for a moment, if lamely, the prancing rhythms and alliterations of the Perseid), as it was he showed Bellerus as a boy the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, fourth quadrant of which calls for the mature hero's sudden and mysterious fall from the favor of gods and men; his departure, voluntary or otherwise, from the city of his own establishment; his mysterious apotheosis on a hilltop, symbolic counterpart of the place of his divine conception; et cetera.