The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2

Aesacus, the Diver (after Ovid)

AESACUS, THE DIVER His birthwas a mystery. Spoiled by the shady groves in the mountain heights, young Aesacus ranged the hills. His conditions of happiness were simple, in theory: life in the open air; contempt of ambition; the love of one woman to people his solitude. Often on his rounds he saw Hesperie, the river god's daughter, but when he caught her alone,off-guard, drying her hair in the sun still wet, still clinging to reverie, he gaped: his gaze intent, his lust feral— (as once, upon arrivingin London in the drought of mid-July, I had no sooner set my bags down on the luggage rack, than I saw a woman across the running pinks and grays of the roofs and walls— handsome, short-cropped chestnut hair— walk to her window H5 and with a sleepwalker's unswerving, even tread, hook her thumbs under the hemline of her nightgown and pull it over her head). She sensed his presence and when she zoomed in on his face in the stark light-dark of the leaves she panicked—crashed through thickets to the barely traveled road where a driver hit his brakes—too late. Aesacus held her mangled body in his arms and keened his lament; how could one outburst of irrevocable lust— which shocked him as much as her— poison their lives forever? (Her reaction puzzled me— I hadn't volunteered to wash the remaining sand off her body to make sure no glass had wedged its way into the calluses on her feet on her earlier crossings of the jetty— she'd volunteered to give me a "tour" of the musty shower room where the four dancers hung theirleotards before they stepped into the stall; but when I put my arms around her waist, loosely, the way her mosaic-patterned sash was tied, 146 she held her body taut, her cheekbones tight. I was so taken with the angles of her face with her hair pulled back like that I didn't care if she wanted to kiss me or kill me. And though my gaze made her uneasy she would have been angry if I had never called^ He ran toward the high cliff, worn thin at the base by rasping waves, and made a runningjump, as if to free her with his own ruin. No one cuts a more ludicrous figure than a failed suicide. But it wasn't his fault: the reclusiveTethys caught sight of the passionate youth flailing the air and— in a fit of misplaced compassion for the wild boy's bad luck— stuck a life-jacket on his back, so as he strove to reach the bottom and stay below, his heartbeat easing to the rate of dolphins and whales, each stroke bringing him closer to the giddiness before asphyxiation, he felt himself drawn upwards, spewed into the ambiguous charity of light. H7 Again and again, he dashed his body into the sea but each time, however deeply he thrust himself downwards, he was restrained, held back by the vest attached to his scapula— like the wings of his own desire . . . It's hard to die when something stronger than death holds you to life. Many who found their way to that sparse rockface mistook the diver for a cormorant; and in time, he came to be known as— The One Who Struggled to Stay Below the Waves. after Ovid 148 ...