Work Text:
You sip your cup of sketos until you reach the bitter coffee beneath the foam. The air smells of old smoke; this shop was once an old man's place, you think. In its heyday, this was a place where paunchy men came to drink coffee and catch up on each other's half-grown children, shutting out the sunset together for a few long hours as they smoked cigars down to their fingers.
It could be your place, now. The men here are your age, and they drink their sweet coffee and sip watered-down ouzo with a kind of fervid animation that you recognize in yourself--that hungering after something true, something blade-sharp and sublime. They touch one another's wrists, cheeks, palms; every one of them is thyrsus-gaunt and hollow-cheeked with anticipation.
It should be your place, but it isn't. They shut the bars in Thebes when the temperance law passed, and you are the voice of law. This is not a place that can be allowed to exist.
Your grandfather would tell you--has told you--that you take such things too seriously. He still drinks a snifter of tsikoudia on cool nights, with a bit of lemon rind curled in the bottom of the glass for flavor. "I've had these bottles in the cellar since I was your age," he would say, and then he'd pour a careful mouthful into your mother's glass for good measure. "See, your mother doesn't mind a sip now and then!"
Your mother comes here when she thinks no one sees, and she returns late at night, smelling of sweat and laden with bottles of ouzo. Once, she brought home a silk stole not her own, and a little fall of pearls scattered over the tiles when she shook it out; your aunts laughed that the stole smelled of men's cologne.
You watch a bright-eyed young man down his little cup of ouzo, his free hand's fingers twining in his neighbor's rope of pearls. She is a tall woman, clean-limbed and narrow-hipped, with sequins on her slim gown and her lips painted the red of drying blood. When she finishes her glass of ouzo, her Adam's apple jogs lightly.
If you nestled your lips against that long neck, if you pressed your nose into the crook of her jaw until you could feel the slight roughness of her skin from chin to ear, would you smell perfume or cologne? When she and her neighbor leave the quiet little bar, when she draws off her pearls and undoes her gown, does she press against his chest and draw his arms around her? Is she a woman, when she stands unclothed, her lips painted and her hair curled just so?--for when her lacquered nails tap against her glass, you understand that she can be no other thing than a woman.
She meets your eyes over the crowded room, raising her glass to you. It isn't a toast, for all there is something like respect in it; it isn't a toast, when duellists salute one another and then begin to pace off the ground between them.
She drinks deep, and her lips leave no print on the lip of the glass. They would leave no mark on your skin, if she put her mouth to your neck; her teeth might tear at your skin, and you would emerge from her ministrations whole and purified. She would drive you through madness and into the perfect clarity beyond it.
You didn't come here to stare at men in gowns.
You can't remember what you came here to do.
At the piano in the corner, a young man picks out the very beginnings of a tune; you know nothing of music, and even less of the jazz that has come filtering over the Atlantic like cigar smoke over a stretched-silk screen, but even you can hear that the man has lost his way. He plucks at a few melancholy chords, a few single notes falling on the still air in sequence, but none of them replete him. "Oh, darling," murmurs the woman, rising with her drink still in her hand. She bends down to kiss her friend, her lover or her votary, and then she glides across the floor as though her skirt scarcely hobbles her.
You have seen women walking in those skirts, all long, white legs encased in whiter stockings rolled down to to the knees, patent-leather shoes with the soles worn down from dancing. When she walks, though, there is a hint of goats' feet on distant hillsides in her gait. There is something inhuman to her that you can't name and don't want to name, but it makes your throat go dry and your eyes water.
She sits upon the piano bench, laying her hand upon the pianist's thigh. "There's music in you," she whispers, although you can hear her as though she's whispering in your ear instead of his. "Let's draw it out, shall we?"
When he touches the keys again, he's a different man. Sweat bleeds down his face, soaks the collar of his shirt and turns it damp and translucent. Each tendon in his neck shows through the cotton, drawn in lengthy shadows when he tilts his head against the lamplight. His song plucks some sympathetic chord within you, until your whole self vibrates with the need to respond to that resonant charge--your feet ache to dance; you feel that ache from arch to sternum, and with each beat of your heart that ache deepens until you think it must split you apart.
The woman's glass has begun to bead with moisture. It catches in the web of her hand and spills over the back, and those glistening droplets slide down her wrist when she tilts her head back to drink.
You don't remember when she refilled her glass--but she must have, because it's full of wine as red as her lips.
The men at the table beside you push their chairs aside. The scrape of wood on tile aches at the back of your head, as though they have dragged their chairs over the inside of your skull. They rise, first one and then two in a laughing pair; their hands clasp tight together, and they swing close, then wide in the widening circle of their friends. One sheds his coat like an old skin; his partner hooks a thumb beneath his suspenders when they pull tight together, and for a moment you can hear the way their breathing quickens.
You want to feel yourself flung from one broad hand to the next, traded between these dancers until you come apart in their arms. You want to take them to pieces with your own hands, and you know that they'd let you when their blood is up; you could draw the pearl necklace from your neck and the stole from about your shoulders, and you could bind them up and make them hear you for once in your goddamn life--
Your hand goes to your throat. To the pearls there.
You lick your lips, and they taste of blood and wine and paint. Where has your cup of sketos gone? Where are those bitter dregs?
"Dance, Pentheus," the woman murmurs, breath hot upon your cheek. Her hand alights between the hem of your gown and your stocking, and you can feel the slick heat of it in your loins.
Dance, Pentheus, she told you, as you stood before your mirror and let her curl your hair and line your eyes. She had pressed her lips against your long neck, biting the flesh as though she meant to tear out your throat.
She is Dionysos; she is Bromios and Evios, and her voice echoes in the hollow parts of you and fills you with a welling madness.
She is Eleutherios, and when she speaks, you must dance yourself apart.