He was not stingy with his gifts, but shared his easy, biting wit and knowledge with all who came to him. Thanks to him, a whole generation would grow to be better men than their fathers.
To the adult men on Ogygia, he was just as admired. At first there was envy, but soon he won them over with sheer good cheer and dogged persistence. It helped that he sought no honors and put on no airs, despite claiming the queen’s bed for longer than any before him. How he suppressed his natural kingliness, I do not know—certainly all saw it.
So did the women of my island. Here was a consort for their queen who was worthy of the name. Yet they were never jealous of my possession of him. Perhaps because I did not quicken, they were content to have him by my side.
Not that he was often by my side. Each day seemed to have been planned weeks in advance, filled from dawn to dusk with tasks and errands and trials and ventures. Only at night would he come to me, dutiful and full of smiles.
If I live to be a thousand, I shall never forget the night I first seduced him. Certainly he had shown no overt interest in bedding the queen. Though clearly desperate to prove himself capable of keeping his oath, he brought me no suggestive gifts, nor sent me longing looks, nor lingered on my doorstep. For the first time in my life, I was made the supplicant.
One evening, after he had been among us a few months, I found some absurd pretext to retain him after dining in our open-air hall. “I am astonished one so accomplished has not yet plucked up an instrument to amuse us.”
“I promised to be serviceable, not offensive,” he said with his smile dancing in the torchlight.
“You do not sing?”
“Not songs to entertain deities. Or to please ladies’ ears. You are the one gifted with a voice to move stones. My songs are rough, and blunt.”
“Unlike yourself.”
“Very like myself,” he countered. “Just not the self that lives on Ogygia. Do you notice that often we are defined, not by our natures but by our audience?” He bowed to me. “Expectations are a standard to which we may rise, or fall.”
“It may be so. But I choose to believe we are defined by deeds. Our actions.”
If he laughed, it carried a trace of sourness. “Please, no! I would rather be defined by the curses of my enemies than by the deeds of my hand. At least then I might protest bias. Truth is by far the harsher measure of a man.”
Though intrigued, we were getting further from my purpose. “They say there is truth in music. You claim you have no voice for fine songs. But your fingers seem nimble. Can you not play?”
I saw him open his mouth to protest, then close it again as he recalled himself to his vow. At once he plucked up a lyre and, fiddling a moment to set it to tune, began to strum.
“You play so faintly,” I said after a time. “Come closer.”
Obedient, he drew near, curling onto the earth by my feet. Still he played, picking notes almost at random, yet somehow weaving them into a tapestry that perfectly suited my distraction.
But that was not my aim. “Play me a love song.”
He began again to strum, but I reached down and stilled his hand. “Not on that instrument.”
I do not know if his heart was hammering. If so, it was drowned by the thunder in my ears. I felt like a child, unskilled and uncertain, terrified of rejection, more terrified of success.
I remember him setting aside his lyre and instead beginning to stroke my wrist with the edge of his palm. I remember closing my eyes. I do not remember moving to a bed, only being there, craving his skilled musicality. For it was instantly clear he was no brute upon this instrument, nor no novice. Under his hand, my body was indeed an instrument, one longing to be played, and he was a virtuoso. He could make me shudder and vibrate with the gentlest of touches.
Through the years he mastered my body’s collection of impulses and pleasures, tuning me to every key. I found myself accepting overtures I would have deemed filthy or unwomanly before. In his able hands, it was all pleasure.
But there was no harmony to his music. A true lover accepts receiving as well as giving, and he was ungracious in receipt. Whenever I turned to please him, he would redirect my aims, and if he meant to finish he was perfunctory, making short work once I had achieved all I could stand.
Worse, he was silent. There were no moans, such as other men make. Nor any grunts of effort, any labored breaths. Occasionally, he would crack his neck or stretch his shoulders, as an athlete before a race. He was performing his art—one of the many he had mastered. I was just the vessel for his magnificence. Which left me empty.
Yet from that first night, I could not imagine life without him.
Better I had never seen him.
Unmindful of our compact, my sons often plied him with questions. His answers were as amusing as they were telling.
Once, while Odysseus was teaching them how to trick a whip to make it crack, Nausithous had demanded, “How do you know all this?”
“I have acquired all manner of useless knowledge. My brain is like a sponge in the sea. It cannot help what it absorbs. For whips, I spent some time in Hyperion’s chariot, which took a lot of effort to master, let me tell you. But I suffered a happier fate than poor Phaethon. Zeus did not strike me down, but rather…” His voice had trailed off.
“But rather?” had prompted my younger son, Nausinous.
I could almost hear Odysseus shake himself from his reverie. “But rather he hurled his bolt at some other naughty men, to teach me a lesson.”
“What lesson?”
“That theft is wrong, and carries its own punishment.”
Unhappy with moralizing, Nausithous was dissatisfied with the answer. Directly he had asked, “But where do you come from?”
Odysseus had blinked. “I come from a woman. Alas, she was no goddess, as your mother is. But every mother is a goddess to her son.” He had chuckled. “A goddess, and a demon. She was born of the wind, my mother, and could crack your cheeks with a single bellow.”
“Where is she now?”
Odysseus had drawn a drowning breath. “Dead, I imagine. I dreamed I met with her in the Underworld. She was none too pleased with me, I’ll tell you.”
“Why?”
“Oh, for the fault of all sons—I stayed away too long from her. So let that be a lesson to you, boys, lest your mother haunt your dreams.”
Another time, while they were firing clay figures at a kiln, I heard Nausinous insist, “But who was your father?”
“Sysiphus,” Odysseus had replied carelessly. “At least, he was as hard-working in teaching me, and his pains were just as fruitless.”
“But you know things!”
“I know things, but I had to learn them for myself. You both are much better pupils than I ever was. I always have to learn by doing. But here’s the secret. Become good at something. It doesn’t matter what you learn, so long as you learn to learn deeply. Once you have mastered one thing, you can master anything.”
Once, as Odysseus was cursing the uncooperative earth they were trying to upend, Nausithous asked him, “What kind of soil does your home have?”