20th
Love and Marriage
Another typical evening at the big house. Seems like Jove was going to come home again smelling like lady luck and the sweet smell of rain on wet grass. Juno whips her pet prized peacock Argos into a full length ball gown before supper could even begin to simmer in the kitchen (glazed Titan pork and liver, sunny side up). Drinking her Bellini at the great table spanning one mile each way from each of her imperial elbows, Juno dangles an ankle on the tabletop as Argos’ 1 trillion eyes wink furiously on breasts and stomach and shoulder blades cut razor sharp. And now: The turn of the key in the door.
Jove is trying to be quiet but he can’t muffle those thunderous footsteps – when he kicked the Titans ass back to Tartarus he had been a mere 1400 years old, and with the same sized Nike sneakers. Jove had recently met and bedded Io with her big, fawning eyes and her creamy white shoulders that would make the cattier of her sex call her a cow, and which was somehow translated literally by a few foolhardy but influential historians. Io was such a simple girl — all circles and curves, so unlike Juno in all her stark angularities.
Sure he loved the woman. She was his wife, and they would be together for all eternity and then some because that’s just how it was done back in the old days. But he wished sometimes that she would find some young gladiator, broad shoulders and blood musk intoxicating her senses long enough for Jove to have his way and still be home enough in time to catch his soaps. (His daughter Venus has struck it quite big back in Greece and her re-runs were very much the rage with the Romans.)
Juno though was furiously monogamous, a quality that always stuck him as oddly plebeian. Perhaps his queen had a strain of mortality in that Ichorian blood of hers — he even thought he remembered a rumor about a certain great-great-great Uncle Plubius who gave very dull lectures to the Athenian senators and bounced baby Juno on his arthritic, weathered knee.
Jove felt the chill in the big hall. He fumbled for his house keys, his deep intake of breath causing a few of the familial heirlooms to shake on their priceless hinges. The colossal doors rattled warning to his formidable wife, whose ankle bracelet jingled a shrill welcome to her husband.
The glow of her lovely thigh was the only thing he could see before the first strike of lightening hit– it would heal in a matter of seconds, but still, what a pain in the ass.
In a place where it was somewhere between 1500 BC and 1533 AD — time at Mount Olympus’ high latitude was so vague that it was a wonder how anyone showed up for anything at all — Juno was leaving Jove to become a working woman. Juno had a feeling she would enjoy reigning as the virgin Queen of England, even if it did mean keeping a Parisian chef on the sly.
And thank god for her daddy, who now called himself Henry after some seven Tudors and would one day become a muse to a Madonna —”More reinventions and husbands, darling. No more movies.” Daddy finally encouraged his daughter to reinvent herself too: “Those Hindus got it right, sweet pea. Except that you don’t have to wait for death and the roll of the dice. Choose who you want to be this century and pack an overnight bag.”
Yes, thank god for her daddy. After all, it was he who taught Juno that it was only plebeians who didn’t believe in a good old-fashioned divorce.
