“Fleas?” His glance disapproved of the untidiness around.
“Annoyed. For instance, he hated my trying to keep this apartment in orderhen-fuss, he called itand I hated the way he’d litter stuff around and yell when I so much as dusted the books. I wanted him to take better care of the money; you wouldn’t believe how much went down the drain, and our hopes with it. He wanted me to stop pestering him about such trifles when
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he was struggling to make a picture come out right.” Vanny sighed. “The breakup was yesterday. He’d gone to a party last week that I couldn’t make because of working late. I learned he’d ended in bed with another girl. When I… taxed him, he said why not and I was free to do likewise. I couldn’t see that. The fight got worse and worse till he yelled he’d be damned if he’d anchor himself like a barnacle. He collected his gear and left.”
Hermes arched his brows. “Meseemsseems to me you were pretty unreasonable. What’s it to you if he has an occasional romp? Penelope never jawed Odysseus after he got back.”
Some of her calm deserted her. “The name’s Vanessa, not Penelope. Andand if he doesn’t think any more of me than to not care if I” She squeezed her lids shut.
Hermes waited. His mission was too urgent for haste. The snakes on his caduceus did twitch a bit.
At length she met his gaze and said, “All right. Let’s have your story. Why’re you here? You mentioned food.”
He thought she showed scant respect, especially for one whose whole uriiverse had been upset by the fact of his existence. However, she was not really a worshiper of the Olympians. The sincerity of her appeal to Aphrodite had come in a moment of intoxication. And he had had to admit that all pantheons shared reality. Unless she comprehended that, she probably couldn’t help him. Therefore, this being more or
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less Jesus territory, why should she fall on her knees?
Or was it? Stronger than before, he sensed a new divinity brooding over the land, to which she had some tie. Young, but already immense, altogether enigmatic, the being must be approached with caution. The very mention of it had better be led up to most gradually.
“Well, yes,” Hermes said. “We do lack proper nourishment.”
Vanny considered him. “You don’t look starved.”
“I spoke of nourishment, not fuel,” he snapped. Now that he had been reminded of it, his emptiness made him irritable. “Listen, you could keep going through life on, uh, steak, potatoes, string beans, milk, and orange juice. Right? But suppose you got absolutely nothing else ever. Steak, potatoes, string beans, milk, and orange juice for breakfast, for lunch, for supper, for a bedtime snack and a birthday treat, year after year, decade after decade, steak, potatoes, string beans, milk, and orange juice. Wouldn’t you cross the world on foot and offer your left arm for a chance at a plate of chop suey?”
Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed.
“Oh, indeed,” Hermes snorted. “I can hardly say ‘nectar and ambrosia’ without gagging.”
“Buta whole planet”
“Mortal food has no appeal. Not after celestial.” Hermes curbed his temper. “Let’s continue the analogy. A bowl of unsalted oatmeal wouldn’t really break the monotony of steak, potatoes Never mind.” He paused. “Suppose you finally got access, in addition, to … chop suey, I said
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… okay, we’ll add roast duck, trout, borscht, ice cream, apples, and farofa. That’d be good at first. Given another ten or twenty years, though, wouldn’t you again be so bored that you could barely push down enough food to stay alive?
“Next consider that the gods are immortal. Think in terms of thousands of years.” Hermes shuddered.
Presently he added, quieter: “That’s the basic reason we gave up the burnt offerings you read about in Homer. We passed word on to our priests that these were no longer welcome in a more civilized milieu. That was partly true, of course. We’d cultivated our palates, after we ran into older sets of gods who sneered behind their hands at our barbarous habits. But mainly .. . during a millennium, thighbones wrapped in fat and cast on the flames grew bloody tedious.