“Of course she will. Through her brothers, who are the best sons a man could wish to have. Through the island, that bears the best of her father’s invention, and none of the stains of his sins. And through her mother, who is far kinder than any goddess I have ever worshipped.”
I wanted to say, “If a boy, I shall name him after you. I can offer you immortality of a sort.” But I knew he would have no son by me. His son was born, and named, and raised. By his wife.
“Is she more beautiful than I?” I could not help myself. It was a night for shame, it seemed.
“Hardly. She falls far short of you—your beauty, your stature. Her voice is unmelodious, the opposite of yours. But I long to see my home, pine to give my son what I have imparted to yours. Perhaps, one day, I will send him here, and they can be friends.”
He was such a skilled liar, I could not tell if he spoke the truth of her. Of Penelope. But because he did not praise her, I knew then the love he held for his wife. His Penelope. Like his smiles, his kindness was vicious, and cut me worse than bronze.
I wept then, and he held me, though I refused to cling to him. In tatters, I clung to what little self-respect was left to me.
When the worst of the torrent was past, I tried to smile at him through the veil of my own sorrow. “You must go soon. Your raft needs provisions.”
It was good to witness the trickster tricked a second time. “You knew.” He laughed. “You knew!”
My turn to smile. “How could I not? Your restless nights were not spent by my side. It has been ready for, what, five years? Waiting in the flooded caves below. I trust it will float?”
“I hope, or I’ve lost every trick I ever learned.” Again he smiled with his eyes. “If you wanted to shock me, you’ve done so tonight.”
“Is it such a shock to be free?”
“Yes.” Seeing my expression, he quickly amended his bald statement. “It is not shocking to receive your generosity. You have offered it ever since I arrived. No, it is a shock to think I have fulfilled my oath.”
“You have, and more.” I reached up to caress his cheek. No more salt from tears would stain it. Only the salt of the sea. “I have kept you longer than I should.”
“The will of the goddess. You kept me as long as you felt you must.”
“No. I did not keep you here as a goddess. I kept you as a woman.”
The crook of a smile, a real smile, at the corner of his mouth. “I know.”
I hit him then, with real force. “I know you know, you fiend! A kinder man would allow me to confess in silence.”
He sighed, rubbing where I’d struck as if it hurt. “A kinder man would not have you confess at all.”
Stepping close again, I rested my head against his shoulder. “I do not think I could love a kind man as I have loved you.”
“I’m gratified. What was the other?”
He gazed at me. Then, in a voice quite unlike any I had heard him use, he said, “All my life I wanted to learn something profound. Only here, on this island, in this place, did I have the time to reflect on all my journeys, on all I have seen and all I have done, and prize free the single profound truth I have encountered along the way.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s a thing a poet once said, round a fire one winter night as we waged our endless war. He said that all tragedies come from people loving something they had no business loving. Menelaus loved Helen. Helen loved herself. Agamemnon loved power. Iphigenia loved Achilles. Achilles loved his own legend. Ajax loved war. Hector loved honor.”
“And you? What did Odysseus love, that he should not?”
It would have been kind, to say “Calypso”. But, as he had already noted, he was not a kind man. “My own cleverness. Better to be dull and happy than clever and alone.” He took my hand. “Goddess. I do not deserve your love.”
“Do you believe so? Perhaps. But a man so tortured—by fate, by nature, by his own mind—who devotes himself to kindness? Is he not more deserving of love than a man who is kind by nature?”
Looking down, he shook his head, and was right not to answer. It is not up to the loved to determine their worthiness. It is up to us who love. Who adore.
“There is the man you are,” I told him, “and the man you wish to be. Never cease striving to be the latter. Only make allowances for the lesser. You cannot be all things, and when you try, you cannot even be one.”
Eyes averted, his mouth twitched at the corners. “That is the second piece of profound knowledge I have gained on Ogygia.”
“Am I profound?”
“You are.”
“I am gratified. But you have missed the real profundity of your time here. You could have left long ago, but for your oath.”
“Have I not been faithful?” he said doggedly, his eyes down, his head swinging from side to side. “Have I not kept my word?”
Taking his head in my hands, like a child’s, I raised his eyes to mine. “It is not a matter of breaking promises, my love. The cause of all your tragedies is making promises you must not keep.”
Unable to bear it, he reeled from me. Now it was his turn to weep. Unlike me, he preferred to weep alone.
Yet he did not leave the grove. For once, I was permitted to witness his tears. A night for gifts.
Standing below my statue, I spoke once more, not as woman, but as goddess. “Love cannot compel. Love can only accept. And, perhaps, inspire. If I inspire you, then that is enough.” Then, as woman, I took down my own hair. “My Odd Zeus. God of my heart. Let me breathe for you.”
His head rose, his body followed. Enfolding me, his arms held not art, nor artifice. His need was real, the twin of mine. In the dawn he would board the raft in the caves beneath us. He would sail it out beneath the Azure Gate, past the breakers, and off into the wine-dark sea.
And I? I would have my statue turned. It would no longer face the cave, but rather the open water and sky. And I would watch him go, and sing him on his way, and never let fall my hair again.
That night, in the Grove of Calypso, beneath my offering hands, we made love for the last time. No longer a vow. It was just truth.
And my everlasting tragedy.
The King in Waiting
Russell Whitfield
The Phaeacians have provisioned me well. Well enough so that I might return to my kingdom in the trappings of kingship and not as the beggar who washed up on their shores.
I will return everything that has been given to me with advantages. As I write, I feel the strength of a younger man flowing through my veins. I am as keen as a youngster to see my Penelope again so that I might put this—all of this—behind me and lose myself in the sanctuary of her arms.
-Odysseus
Part I: The Suitor