What a thing it is, to fly! His white wings spread and coursing easily, Pegasus drew up his legs and soared between the streetlamps and the stars. All fell into correct perspective: ships' lanterns, shepherds' watchfires, palace, temples, harbors, hills. Cold wind and dizzy altitude, night-loneliness — they were nothing: for the first time in my life I felt at home; I wanted never to come down. We lit on Athene's pediment after a splendid shakedown circuit of the suburbs.
"Proetus!" I called down to the plaza. Torched guards drew back amazed; the King came out with his sheeted wife. "Anteia's hipped out of her mind!" I cried. "Hallucinating! Don't believe her! Hi yo, half-brother! Away!"
"Poor dear sister!" Philonoë would lament. "Honestly, honey, for all it hurts to imagine you with another woman, I guess I like your other versions of this story better." For in some I had Anteia be a lovely woman, skin fragrant with sun, hair with sea-salt, as if she'd been day-sailing; she steals into the temple, where I lie dreaming lecherously of her cool brown thighs; suddenly her hand caresses my stomach; all my insides contract violently; I fairly explode awake; "Good Zeus!" I croak, and grab her — naked, unbelievable! — when she sits on my pallet-edge; I bury my face in her, so startled am I; pull her down with me, that electrifying skin against mine, and mirabile dictu! at the sheer enormous lust of it do indeed explode, so wholly that I'm certain liver, spleen, guts, lungs, heart, brains, and all have blown from me, and I lie a hollow shell without sense or strength, et cetera, until she restores me and we make repeated love; complaisant Proetus smiles on the ménage; Anteia is pleased when I lie to her that I was thitherto a virgin, but grows subject to fits of jealousy when I tell her later that I've raped an Amazon between our trysts, and breaks off the affair when she finds herself pregnant, but reinstitutes it some years later, I forget why, but breaks it off finally when she and Proetus go vacationing in Italy, et cetera, I forget. In another telling our initial intercourse is a paradigm of assumed inevitability: wittol Proetus leaves the polis on state business and bids me keep Anteia company in his absence; I spend the afternoon playing ball with their daughters in the palace, then stay to drink ale with Anteia during the evening; we talk impersonally and sporadically — mutual silences are neither unusual nor uncomfortable with that woman; on the face of it there is no overt word or deed that unambiguously indicates desire on the part of either of us; the Queen's manner, which I find attractive, is of exhausted strength: throughout the afternoon her movements have been heavy and deliberate, like those of a helot after two straight shifts; in the evening she sits mostly without moving, and frequently upon blinking her eyes keeps them shut for a full half-minute, opening them at last with a wide stare and a heavy expiration of breath; all this I admire, but really rather abstractly, and any sexual desire that I feel is also more or less abstract; at nine-thirty or thereabouts Anteia says, "I'm going to take a shower and go to bed, Bellerophon," and I say, "All right"; to reach the palace baths she has to go through a little corridor off the ale-room where we sit; to reach Athene's temple I must pass through this same corridor, and so it is still not quite necessary to raise eyebrows at our going to the corridor together; there, if she pauses to face me for a moment at the turning to the baths, who's to say confidently that good nights are not on the tips of our tongues? It happens that we embrace instead before we go our separate ways, and further (but I would not say consequently) that our separate ways lead to the same bed, where we spend a wordless, tumultuous night together, full of tumblings and flexings and shudders and such, exciting enough to experience but boring to describe; for the subjects' sakes I leave before sunrise, weatherless, et cetera; remorseful, Anteia soon declares to Proetus that I've seduced her; he obliges her, out of some mad craving for moral clarification, to repeat the adultery; presently she conceives, and fearful that the child will prove a parent-slaying demigod, considers suicide and abortion; I leave town on Pegasus and never see them again, but learn from my spies in Tiryns that the misadventure has produced a normal son and improved the marriage, et cetera. Yet another version —
Which was the truth?
"I quite understand," Philonoë used to say, "that the very concept of objective truth, especially as regards the historical past, is problematical; also that narrative art, particularly of the mythopoeic or at least mythographic variety, has structures and rhythms, values and demands, not the same as those of reportage or historiography. Finally, as between variants among the myths themselves, it's in their contradictions that one may seek their sense. All the same — not to say therefore — I'd be interested to know whether in fact you made love to my sister and wish you hadn't, or didn't and wish you had."
"What a horse!" I invariably replied. "I spent the whole night learning how to fly him and unstarving myself with moussaka at all-night restaurants. By morning I was able to make a perfect four-point landing atop the statue of Abas, Proetus's father, which stood in the breakfast-terrace of the palace. The children were delighted; Proetus blushed; Anteia flushed, hushed the kids, and hmped off with them from the table, giving her husband a last sharp look.
" 'We're at your service, sir,' I said. He bade me park my brother elsewhere, the pigeons were bad enough, then told me frankly that his wife, per program, was holding to her accusations and agitating for my life, motivated no doubt in part by some final urge, such as comes sometimes on ladies at her age and stage, to inspire jealous anger in her husband and prompt him to dramatic if not heroic action in her behalf. For himself, Q.E.D., if he believed her accusation and gave a damn, he'd arrange to have me done in quietly, with minimal fuss. But he was indifferent, except for the sake of public appearances. He therefore requested simply that I disappear. 'At the same time she's hollering for your head,' he said with a sigh, 'she's giving out already that she's eight hours pregnant with a semidemigod.' Doubly impossible, I told him. He raised his hand wearily: if I would not do him the service of assassinating Perseus, at least I might leave the Queen her delusions: fact was, she did show signs of being a couple months gone again, by himself or whomever, and that condition, which given her age et cetera might as possibly be menopause, perhaps accounted for her late irrationality. His p.r. people would do their best to minimize the gossip, but as Anteia was insisting that she'd been divinely raped (half-ravished, anyhow, by a demi-deity), the best thing I could do for him was not deny the child's paternity should she bring it to term, and in the meanwhile go and be a mythic hero — somewhere else.
"I shrugged. 'Set me a task.' 'Kill Perseus!' he whispered. 'Nope.' So he gave me a sealed letter to Iobates — diplomatic business, he declared — and asked me to deliver it to Lycia, air mail special, no peeking, no reply or return necessary, okay? 'Okay.' I took off, came back: 'Which way is Lycia?' He covered his eyes, pointed east-southeast-by-east; here I am; there it is. Philonoë'd say "Thanks for the story; you tell it better all the time." Those were the days. And "When can we visit my sister, Bellerophon? It's a pity the kids have never met their own cousins. Better get off to your lecture now; here's your notes. Kiss goodbye?" I'd tear my hair then, do now, one digression still to go, Zeus Almighty, half a hundred pages in and only launched. How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn't my cup of wine; isn't somebody's; my plot doesn't rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself like a whelk-shell or the snakes on Hermes's caduceus: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies.