that. They don’t seem to know they’re living in a cage.”
He ignores her. That is all that he can do. She will be twenty-four in a few days and remains under her father’s roof with the implicit proviso that she will be free from any criticism, including much she unquestionably deserves.
“Your boyfriend is Greek, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Cass? I’m just about done with him. His family hates me. What in the hell did you do to them, Dad?”
“Nothing. It was a misunderstanding. Lidia unfortunately married below herself. Mickey is really nothing but a Greek hillbilly. He has more pride than ability. He felt humiliated by my kindness to his family and I only meant well.”
Zeus spoke to Lidia today, the first words in many years. Teri believes Lidia attended the picnic because she is beginning to accept that Cass will marry Dita, as he well may, despite tonight’s hard words from Zeus’s mercurial daughter. Lidia is stout now and gray. Yet the woman he so desperately longed for remains visible to him. For years, especially when he entered the service, he retained the hope that he would return in glory and marry Lidia, whatever her father had to say. When Zeus learned that she had wed herself to a creature as simple as Mickey, it was like a stabbing. Zeus has always recognized that he married Hermione in part because the only woman he ever envisioned as his partner was gone. He wants so many females in other ways. Even now, he can saunter across some broad avenue, stricken by longing for half the women who come into sight. Any manifestation of beauty is enough to stimulate his ardor-good legs, a full bosom, a pleasant face. But he had truly yearned to marry only Lidia, who then chose her father over him. In reprisal, in time, Zeus fucked her. It was the way the gods always served him. He saw that the instant that Terisia asked him to give her best friend a job.
‘She is desperate,’ Teri had said.
So I will fuck her, Zeus thought. Desperation had cost Lidia the power to say no. But even so, she remains one of the few losses in his life. He never sees her, even now, without wondering whether he might have despaired less in himself if she had been his wife, if her strength would have made him less brutal.
Dita has departed without saying good night. Zeus climbs the stairs, pained by his life. Hermione is asleep. He steps into his pajamas and lies beside her. Hermione lets her arm come forward and rest sweetly on his flank. He touches her hand, grateful for its familiarity, and drifts deeply into the grip of his own troubled dreams until he is roused by a clamor down the hall. The rain has cooled the night and Hermione has opened the French door. From there, he hears what is surely glass breaking and soon after, Dita’s scream. There is often noise from Dita’s room, late at night. It is her revenge. But there is no pleasure in these sounds. As he struggles into his robe, he is certain he hears the front door slam.
He tries the knob on Dita’s door and is surprised to find it unlocked. He knocks and enters, asking if she is all right, but his heart clenches when he sees the blood. It is slathered on the French door and looks like a splatter painting on the wall.
“My Lord! What is this?”
Dita is on her bed, her robe parted to expose one long well-shaped leg. She is rubbing the side of her face, and greets her father with a baleful expression.
“What?” he asks again.
“You were right about them being hillbillies.”
“My God. What are you saying?”
“Cass’s mother was here.”
“Lidia?”
“And beat the hell out of me to get me to stop seeing her son.”
“Here. In my house? She beat my daughter?”
“She told me a pretty good story.” Dita at that point seems to recognize the flimsiness of her attire and grabs a quilt at the foot of her bed. “I mean really, Dad. Is there anybody around here you haven’t fucked?”
In him, something gives way, some sluiceway of raw emotion that is always contained for Dita’s sake. There is a clear implication in her words-‘anybody’-and he has always known that if she speaks, she will destroy him. Not because he wouldn’t lie. Zeus has long accepted that lying well is an inevitable attribute of power. But it would mean she has abandoned him forever. The thought of that fills him with both fury and terrible dread.
“Your filthy mouth,” he says. The closest thing to changing the past is to leave it unspoken.
“Oh, that filthy mouth used to suit you fine,” she answers.
He slaps his hand across her lips and slams her head back to stop her. For a time all he knows of himself is rage and strength. But he feels in that brief instant as he drives her skull back several times that she is offering no resistance because she knows this is what she deserves.
When he lets go finally, he takes a step back. His heartbeat is all the way into his shoulders and he is breathing like a horse under a heavy plow. She is winding her head, touching her brow, but finally focuses on him with scorching hatred. The worst has happened, he knows. He has lost her for all time.
“Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you forever.” And then she does what Dita never will-gives way to tears. She wails, his child, as she did when she was young.
He steps forward to comfort her, his arms open.
“Get out,” she screams.
He has taken one step to the door when he sees the smear of blood on the headboard, and worse, a crimson bubble rising from her crown. She realizes he is staring.
“What?”
“You’re cut,” he says. He lifts a hand in warning. “Don’t touch it. Don’t infect it. I’ll get a towel.” He goes to the powder room across the hall. He is trying to explain what has happened in his own mind. But there is only one explanation, which he has always known. He is a bad man.
When he returns to Dita’s bedside, her look has changed. Her beautiful eyes no longer seem to move together. She is slumped to one side and from the desperate way her arm swipes out at the sight of him, he somehow knows she has lost the ability to speak.
He runs down to wake Hermione.
“Something has happened to Dita,” he tells her. Later, he knows, he will think of other things to say, a way to contain this in better words and entomb it in the past. He is Zeus and always finds a path. But not now. By the time they return to Dita, his daughter, his precious child, his treasure, is dead.
34
About 6:30 Saturday morning, Evon was awakened by a flat-handed thumping on her apartment’s front door. She needed sleep, and nearly ignored the racket, but the sound was authoritative and urgent, and she finally jolted awake at the thought of fire. By the time she had her robe on, she realized who it had to be. Cleverly, Heather had stepped to the side, so she was out of sight of the fish-eye in the door. For the sake of her neighbors, Evon had no choice but to open up, albeit with the chain secured.
“Please,” Heather said, as she stepped forward, “please.” She pressed her face to the breach between the jamb and the door. On her breath, Evon could smell the stale reek of alcohol. As so often, Heather had affected her look of reckless dishabille. A slinky sleeveless top of iridescent fabric, which she’d donned for her night in the bars, hung off one shoulder, raising the inevitable question of whether it had been shed in pleasure a few hours earlier. From one finger a pair of glittery six-inch heels rocked, along with a ring of keys, on which Evon could see the garage fob. The doorman was on notice and would have barred Heather, but she’d sneaked in through the building’s subterranean parking garage. The code for the electric door was still programmed into her car, and she’d used the fob to get upstairs from there.
“No,” Evon said. “That’s my line. ‘Please.’ Please, let go. Please. For both our sakes. You’re making both of us totally miserable. You know I have a protection order. Please don’t do this to yourself or to me.” She spoke with a kinder tone than she’d managed in several weeks, but she still closed the door. Heather slammed it once with the flat of her hand, then hammered several times with what sounded from the sharp impact to be the heel of one
