Fro & Donny Redux

Ever since the day she launched a fashion trend in Greece by saying, “I don’t have a thing to wear,” Aphrodite had been big among the gods. Bigness means believers, and her following was huge, until the rising tide of feministic consciousness began to cut into her base. So Fro decided to do what no Olympian had done in a millennium or more--to manifest on Earth in human form.

Much of the pantheon tried to talk her out of it, but no one among them had the numbers it would take to block her, aside from maybe Plutus, god of wealth. Plutus’s stock was surging, but sex sells, so he was all in with the plan. Ares (who now went by Mars and wouldn’t even speak to her in Greek), the one who used to be all dynamite in bed, now passed out tracts denouncing lust, not for moral reasons but because when people were too busy making love, they didn’t get around to making war. He’d sunk all of his belief points into fusion bombs, and since few countries really wanted to incinerate each other’s cities anymore, he wasn’t half the god he used to be. Zeus had been in a depressive funk for decades, ever since Thor started trouncing him in every planetary poll. Buddha didn’t care—he had given up on this whole turning of the wheel a hundred years ago and now just sat in lotus style, his finger by his nostril (some said in it) waiting for enlightenment to come back into style.

But in spite of what the poets say, sex and beauty never really fade, at least in popularity. Desire is always near the top of everybody’s list of what’s desirable. Never has it been more truly said than in the Information Age, “If it looks good, it is good.”

The 20th was Aphrodite’s favorite century, and New York her favorite city-state, all through the glory years when sex was what was sizzling in everybody’s steak. Places founded for the benefit of Puritans who warned each other not to even think about it, now made what some called a “new” religion of it. (Aphrodite thought that was hilarious.) Armies of ad-men were devoted to the search to find the sexy side to everything from laundry soap to breakfast cereal. Yes, Fro was riding high.

She herself was one of the first among the old gods to turn her attention westward. Eurasia liked tradition, and its thousands of ethnic and national identities helped a lot of minor deities hold onto devotees far beyond the time when their past causes were forgotten, but the First World countries (cue the laughtrack once again) had mostly gotten over war as entertainment and now were caught up in a wave of moderation.
Not so America, the land of the extreme and the home of the brazen. Any voice of moderation there was quickly drowned out in the latest buzz, and absolutely nothing was too crazy, too immoral, or too suicidal to become a trend, for a little while at least. Compared to the rest of this sound-bitten paradise, Madison Avenue stood as a bastion of eternal values tried and true, like sex. It seemed the obvious place to start her new crusade to win the hearts of newer generations for the real old time religion.

Trouble was, New York wasn’t Aphrodite’s kind of place. It was cold, and Fro was never one to dress up more than absolutely necessary. Southern California, on the other hand, felt in every way like Greece, maybe even more so than the seashore where she’d made her first appearance, fully grown and fully nude, nearly three millennia ago.

And the sandy beach onto which she took her first shy step in centuries was way more crowded with potential worshipers than that first remote Aegean isle. The trouble was, none of them were falling to their knees, or even gazing with devotion. In fact, it didn’t seem like they had even noticed when she stepped out of her giant clam shell. You’d think they all saw goddesses walk naked from the ocean every day.

But then she looked around and saw the problem. Apparently, they did. Everywhere Fro looked along this sun-drenched strand young women lounged or splashed or walked or played at bouncing globes across a piece of fishing net, and while nobody could—by definition—reach her level of perfection, many of them came so close that mortal eyes could hardly be expected to detect the difference. And most of them were naked, as were many of the men who frolicked there among them.

Bemused, she wandered by the shore, smiling up at Helios while warm waves laved her feet, wondering what it might take to get a man’s attention in a place like this, when suddenly her own eyes were arrested by a vision she had never thought to see again.

She would have known him anywhere, a tall and muscular young man with square jaw, Roman nose, and sun-bleached curls. And though his loins were girded by a narrow strip of silken cloth, the span of his extremities removed all doubt the rest of him was just as exquisite as she remembered.

“Adonis!” she cried out as he approached.

He, as mortals should when meeting goddesses, threw himself on his face in front of her and cast a savory offering at her feet.

And Aphrodite did what goddesses should do when deigning to accept a mortal’s offering. She picked it up and disappeared.

#

Donatello Santori picked himself up, waved and gave a sheepish grin acknowledging the desultory applause of half a dozen witnesses, did his best to brush the sand out of his face, and looked up to see who it was that had called to him. He was prepared to forgive her for the minor sin of causing him to trip. The scenery on Bulldog Beach—scenery like her—in conjunction with his natural klutziness and size-15 feet, made such pratfalls a part of nearly every visit to this little bit of paradise. But when he looked up hopefully, casting about for something witty to say to a lovely lady made yet lovelier by her classic taste in fashion, she was nowhere to be seen.

Donatello was annoyed—pissed would not have been too strong a word—first because in that brief glimpse he’d felt an instant shock of recognition, a sense of deep connection going back for centuries. If asked, he would have called it an infatuation, but in his heart he knew he was in love already with this enigmatic woman.

Of course, if pressed, he would have admitted, that was how he felt toward nearly every naked girl he saw at Bulldog Beach, so he shrugged that passing problem off in favor of the more perplexing mystery of where his lunch had gone. The prices at the ZombieBurger truck were too high to spend twice for eating once, and it was getting late, and Don was hungry and had put his homework off for long enough, so after one last slowly panning gaze across the luscious scenery, and a glance at the Pacific Ocean, he headed back to his apartment.

#

Aphrodite wasn’t sure quite yet just what she thought of California, but it scarcely mattered. Adonis was here, and he had fallen on his face and worshiped her. What’s more, his fragrant offering was of surpassing excellence—a largish portion of chopped bullock prepared with vegetables and rich sauces, between two hunks of soft and tender bread, plus some long, thin, salty, starchy items new to her experience and absolutely wonderful.

To let him know that he had won her favor, Aphrodite went to him that night, dressed in nothing but a golden glow, and did not leave until they’d shared a dream he would not soon forget.

#

Donny yawned and stumbled through his classes. He was on his fourth grande of the day and staring bleary-eyed at his computer screen when there she was, the girl he’d dreamed about all night, the same one he saw on the beach but this time dressed in a loose white toga-looking robe, looking at him from across the room at Starbuck’s. He blushed and tried to focus on the screen in front of him, wondering what to say to her, since “You were in my dreams last night” sounded cheesy even to his own ears. Every time he glanced up, she was staring at him, so he was thinking he might try it anyway, but then Marjo from his history seminar sat down across from him. Marjo, a platinum blonde with well-toned curves, had figured in a dream or two herself, and he’d been trying to get up the nerve to ask her out. Twenty minutes later, when he looked around for the beach girl, she had disappeared, so he let Marjo buy him dinner and then take him home to her place.

#

Fro was shocked. After being bedded by a goddess, how could Donny let a mortal woman turn his head? On the other hand, that mortal looked as good as any goddess Fro had ever known—herself, of course, excepted—and she must know something about pleasing men, because when Fro dropped in on Donny later on that night, she could barely even wake him up, never mind provoke his interest.

#

The next night, Donny studied at the campus library, since he couldn’t let these women keep distracting him. He’d never had this problem back in high school, where his shyness, nerdy ways, and mother-purchased clothing were enough to keep him not just celibate but dateless, but since coming to UCLA he’d shed his glasses and his baby fat and found himself surrounded by attractive women seemingly intent on keeping him from studying.

And yet, when he looked up from his book, there she was, lying on her side on the next table in a diaphanous gown that covered everything while hiding absolutely nothing, gazing at him with a knowing smile that made him really nervous. Even more bizarre, no one else was even glancing her direction; they all walked right by as if they didn’t notice her.

This time it was Allison who saved him, noticing his panicked look and sauntering over to see what was the problem. Donny griped with her about the homework load in their shared class until his stalker—or hallucination—thinned and faded into nothing but a Cheshire pout. Then, though Allison was more than willing to keep him company and even more voluptuous than Marjo, and besides he’d always had a thing for redheads, he promised her a raincheck and went home alone. He had three more pages to translate for Dr. Chambers, and Allison was even worse at Greek than he was.

#

Now Fro was seriously perplexed. As an abstraction, she still had more devotees than any goddess in history, but in person, she couldn’t even hold the attention of one young and randy male. She’d shown him the epitome of female pulchritude. She’d hit him with a love-me look that would have let her lead him off a cliff back in the day. She’d visited his bed and made his dreams come true for half a night. But whenever she appeared in front of him, he looked away. What did these mortals want?

She’d give him one more chance, and if he still played hard-to-get, she’d turn him into a swan and deliver him to Zeus. This time, though, she played it smart. She stayed invisible and watched him as he sat at home and struggled with his books. For a man who read so many, he seemed to be having a lot of difficulty with this one, sounding out the words painstakingly and mispronouncing even simple ones. That seemed true to form—Donny’s best point had not been between his ears before. She had to give him credit, though, as he was obviously trying.

Fro drifted closer, looking at the writing in his book. Not her favorite writer, but one she certainly remembered well. Was this what he’d spent his last hour straining to decipher? Maybe she should help him.

#

Don was seriously stressing over this bit of translation, wondering why he’d signed up for this class at all. One long-dead philosopher writing what may or may not have been the actual words of another dead philosopher in a dead language from the ruins of a dead and buried culture. And the Timaeus in particular was beyond obscure, not just in vocabulary but in the concepts it presented. Was it meant to be understood in some metaphorical way? Was it wit—the Greeks were fond of puns—or homage to some gods or heroes Don would hear about in class?

He slogged through, reading one word at a time aloud, hoping, praying to whatever non-existent gods whose names he could remember that they would help him find some insight in the sound.
Suddenly a nearby voice pronounced the word that he was pointing to, pronounced it with the same inflection as Professor Chambers, and went on to read the rest of the sentence like she spoke Greek every day. He turned to look, and there the sultry stalker sat, beside him on the couch, where he was pretty sure she had not been a moment earlier. She was wearing her loose robe again, a fashion he approved of, though his manners were refined enough to keep his eyes from drifting down when she was looking in his direction.

#

“What did you say?” asked Donny, seemingly indifferent to the nipple Fro was carefully maneuvering into the light.

“Deina kai anagkaia pathēmata,” she answered.

“How would you say that in English?”

“Terrible and necessary affections.”

He looked puzzled.

“You know, the passions that shape the human soul within its immortal receptacle, like pleasure and pain, rashness and fear, the emotions that the gods sculpted the human form around. Have you been reading Plato all this time and still don’t understand his basic premises?”

Now the worship shone in Donny’s eyes at last. “You know Ancient Greek!”

“Don’t you?”

He shook his head. She took the book from him, pointed to the place where she’d left off, and read a few more lines, first in Greek, then in English.

“Hold on,” he said, then tapped at the odd instrument in front of him. She couldn’t hear its music, but Donny seemed to find it pleasing, for he smiled broadly and turned back to her. “Read some more.”

“Will you love me if I do?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Forever and ever.”

“And bring me”—she searched his brain to find the word to name his perfect offering—“cheeseburgers?”

“All you want.”

So she read to him, a sentence at a time, stopping now and then when Donny asked her to explain a term, while he played on his odd silent instrument, through two more pages in his book.

“That was amazing!” he exulted.

“The answer to your prayers?”

“That’s exactly what it was! Chambers is going to flip when he sees this. I thought this assignment would keep me up all night.”

That was what she wanted to hear. “But since it’s finished, now you can make love to me.”

“Okay. Sure. Why not?”

#

Two weeks later, as Diana tracked a mythic stag through moonlit mists that lay across Olympus, she discovered Aphrodite studying her features in a pool of water.

“Fro!” she cried. “What a shock to see you here. I thought you’d gone to manifest in California.”

Aphrodite looked up at her old friend. Her cheeks, though incapable of imperfection, were amber now as any sun-kissed shepherdess and streaked with tears. “I’m losing it, Diana.”

“What are you talking about? Don’t tell me sex is going out of style.”

The goddess of lust just shook her head. “At the moment, I’m not even sure of that.”

Diana looked at Aphrodite, wondering if she was joking. “Hey,” she said, “I heard a rumor you’d hooked up with your old flame Adonis. He still hot as ever?”

Fro nodded, gulped hard, and hung her head, her tears more copious than ever.

“Did that impious male reject you? Shall I pierce his fickle heart with an arrow from my quiver?”

“No, no, he’s still the same, I guess. He pledged to me his undying devotion, as if a mortal had undying anything to offer.”

“Well then, why on earth aren’t you on earth? I know you love your mortals, and no couple ever looked better together than you and Donny.”

Aphrodite wailed aloud and beat her perfect breasts. “He was using me, Diana. He didn’t really love me for the goddess that I am. All he wanted was my mind."