Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

      I realize I’m going to give in — not because I enjoy spoiling my children (though I do) or because the story itself will consume less time than further negotiations (though it will) but because I actually want the twins to hear this particular tale. It has a point. I’ve told it before, of course, a dozen times perhaps, but I’m still not sure they get it.

      I snatch up the egg timer and invert it on the nightstand, the tiny grains of sand spilling into the lower chamber like seeds from a farmer’s palm. “Be ready for bed in three minutes,” I warn my children, “or no story.”

      They scurry off, frantically brushing their teeth and slipping on their flaxen nightshirts. Silently I glide about the cottage, dousing the lamps and curtaining the moon, until only one candle lights the twins’ room, like the campfire of an army consisting of mice and scarab beetles.

      “So you want to know what I did in the war,” I intone, singsong, as my children climb into their beds.

      “Oh, yes,” says Damon, pulling up his fleecy coverlet.

      “You bet,” says Daphne, fluffing her goose-feather pillow.

      “Once upon a time,” I begin, “I lived as both princess and prisoner in the great city of Troy.” Even in this feeble light, I’m struck by how handsome Damon is, how beautiful Daphne. “Every evening, I would sit in my boudoir, looking into my polished bronze mirror …”

      Helen of Troy, princess and prisoner, sits in her boudoir, looking into her polished bronze mirror and scanning her world-class face for symptoms of age — for wrinkles, wattles, pouches, crow’s-feet, and the crenellated corpses of hairs. She feels like crying, and not just because these past ten years in Ilium are starting to show. She’s sick of the whole sordid arrangement, sick of being cooped up in this overheated acropolis like a pet cockatoo. Whispers haunt the citadel. The servants are gossiping, even her own handmaids. The whore of Hisarlik, they call her. The slut from Sparta. The Lakedaimon lay.

      Then there’s Paris. Sure, she’s madly in love with him, sure, they have great sex, but can’t they ever talk?

      Sighing, Helen trolls her hairdo with her lean, exquisitely manicured fingers. A silver strand lies amid the folds like a predatory snake. Slowly she winds the offending filament around her index finger, then gives a sudden tug. “Ouch,” she cries, more from despair than pain. There are times when Helen feels like tearing out all her lovely tresses, every last lock, not simply these graying threads. If I have to spend one more pointless day in Hisarlik, she tells herself, I’ll go mad.

      Every morning, she and Paris enact the same depressing ritual. She escorts him to the Skaian Gate, hands him his spear and his lunch bucket, and with a tepid kiss sends him off to work. Paris’s job is killing people. At sundown he arrives home grubby with blood and redolent of funeral pyres, his spear wrapped in bits of drying viscera. There’s a war going on out there; Paris won’t tell her anything more. “Who are we fighting?” she asks each evening as they lie together in bed. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” he replies, slipping on a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box.

      Until this year, Paris had contrived for her to walk the high walls of Troy each morning, waving encouragement to the troops, blowing them kisses as they marched off to battle. “Your face inspires them,” he had insisted. “An airy kiss from you is worth a thousand nights of passion with a nymph.” But in recent months Paris’s priorities have changed. As soon as they say good-bye, Helen is supposed to retire to the citadel, speaking with no other Hisarlikan, not even a brief coffee klatch with one of Paris’s forty-nine sisters-in-law. She’s expected to spend her whole day weaving rugs, carding flax, and being beautiful. It is not a life.

      Can the gods help? Helen is skeptical, but anything is worth a try. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will go to the temple of Apollo and beg him to relieve her boredom, perhaps buttressing her appeal with an offering — a ram, a bull, whatever — though an offering strikes her as rather like a deal, and Helen is sick of deals. Her husband — pseudohusband, nonhusband — made a deal. She keeps thinking of the Apple of Discord, and what Aphrodite might have done with it after bribing Paris. Did she drop it in her fruit bowl … put it on her mantel … impale it on her crown? Why did Aphrodite take the damn thing seriously? Why did any of them take it seriously? Hi, I’m the fairest goddess in the universe — see, it says so right here on my apple.

      Damn — another gray hair, another weed in the garden of her pulchritude. She reaches toward the villain — and stops. Why bother? These hairs are like the Hydra’s heads, endless, cancerous, and besides, it’s high time Paris realized there’s a mind under that coiffure.

      Whereupon Paris comes in, sweating and snorting. His helmet is awry; his spear is gory; his greaves are sticky with other men’s flesh.

      “Hard day, dear?”

      “Don’t ask.” Her nonhusband unfastens his breastplate. “Pour us some wine. Looking in the speculum, were you? Good.”

      Helen sets the mirror down, uncorks the bottle, and fills two bejeweled goblets with Chateau Samothrace.

      “Today I heard about some techniques you might try,” says Paris. “Ways for a woman to retain her beauty.”

      “You mean — you talk on the battlefield?”

      “During the lulls.”

      “I wish you’d talk to me.”

      “Wax,” says Paris, lifting the goblet to his lips. “Wax is the thing.” His heavy jowls undulate as he drinks. Their affair, Helen will admit, still gives her a kick. In the past ten years, her lover has moved beyond the surpassing prettiness of an Adonis into something equally appealing, an authoritative, no-frills masculinity suggestive of an aging matinee idol. “Take some melted wax and work it into the lines in your brow — presto, they’re gone.”

      “I like my lines,” Helen insists with a quick but audible snort.

      “When mixed with ox blood, the dark silt from the River Minyeios is indelible, they say. You can dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula.” Paris sips his wine. “As for these redundant ounces on your thighs, well, dear, we both know there’s no cure like exercise.”

      “Look who’s talking,” Helen snaps. “Your skin is no bowl of cream. Your head is no garden of sargasso. As for your stomach, it’s a safe bet that Paris of Troy can walk through the rain without getting his belt buckle wet.”

      The prince finishes his wine and sighs. “Where’s the girl I married? You used to care about your looks.”

      “The girl you married,” Helen replies pointedly, “is not your wife.”

      “Well, yes, of course not. Technically, you’re still his.”

      “I want a wedding.” Helen takes a gluttonous swallow of Samothrace and sets the goblet on the mirror. “You could go to my husband,” she suggests. “You could present yourself to high-minded Menelaus and try to talk things out.” Reflected in the mirror’s wobbly face, the goblet grows weird, twisted, as if seen through a drunkard’s eyes. “Hey, listen, I’ll bet he’s found another maid by now — he’s something of a catch, after all. So maybe you actually did him a favor. Maybe he isn’t even mad.”

      “He’s mad,” Paris insists. “The man is angry.”

      “How do you know?”

      “I know.”

      Heedless of her royal station, Helen consumes her wine with the crude insouciance of a galley slave. “I want a baby,” she says.

      “What?”

      “You know, a baby. Baby: a highly young person. My goal, dear Paris, is to be pregnant.”

      “Fatherhood is for losers.” Paris chucks his spear onto the bed. Striking the mattress, the oaken shaft disappears into the soft down. “Go easy