The Venus Complex Read online

  Take this one, for instance: South Africa has the highest death rate from AIDS on the planet. So, what are they doing about it? Well, first their ex-President said that he didn’t think HIV causes AIDS a few years ago, which wasn’t very helpful. Then he said the West should give Africa more money, as if the whole damn continent wasn’t in enough debt as it is. Then—get this—then the government goes out and buys some more attack helicopters and jet planes because, let’s face it, medicines and condoms are not sexy, but jet fighters … wow! Why fork out a load of dough to try and save your people from a hideous disease when you can spend it on arms instead? After all, those sick and dead people need protection from THE ENEMY, whomever THE ENEMY might be.

  I’m not making this up. Why doesn’t this kind of news enrage more people? Don’t they care? Folks all over the world are asking America for cash, saying, “You MUST help us. You are richer and stronger than us. Give us money now to help our starving/ailing/war-stricken people.”

  So, out of “white” guilt, or “colonial” guilt, or “Catholic” guilt, or “filthy rich” guilt, or whatever damn guilt you want to use, we hand over billions of dollars and what happens? More Swiss banks accounts— already stuffed with the ill-gotten gains of a thousand dictators—swell up and more Leaders’ Wives go on shopping trips to Paris. It makes me sick. And we, poor bumbling assholes that we are, fall for it every time. Why? Because, we desperately want to be loved. America wants to be loved and be regarded as special, and, like some dweeby high school kid with braces on her teeth and good grades, doesn’t understand why nobody wants to take her to the prom.

  People who don’t live here couldn’t possibly love or appreciate America like we do, because they are jealous. They envy our lifestyle, our freedom, our opportunities and the undeniable fact that America is the most powerful country in the world. Even the poorest person in America can grow up to be President. Take our ex-Prez Clinton. Look at the shit hole he came from, but, because he was smart, he made good. Well, sort of.

  I only used South Africa as an example, because I’m not racist. I can cheerfully say that I hate everyone. That kind of thing happens all over the world and it doesn’t matter if you are black, white, yellow or puce. The ones in power will fuck you up the ass if they can; it’s in their nature. That’s why I despise humans so much. They are so predictable.

  The sad thing is if I ever held a position of power in the grand scheme of things, I would probably act exactly the same. I am just as predictable as the rest of the sheep.

  ENTRY 8:

  This morning, I decided to start up my computer for the first time in months. I attempted to read the book about 18th Century Art History that I was writing before the Accident. I couldn’t bear to glance at more than a few pages. There doesn’t seem to be any point in continuing. “Fuck Art, Let’s Fuck,” as my students say. I wish.

  Here I am, the proud owner of a vast library of books about the history of art and they have become useless to me. It is as if I have lost all understanding of what any of it means. I suppose the figurative works still say something to me, but there doesn’t seem to be an emotional response anymore, which is odd. When I look at modern art, non-representational art, it is like gazing at the scrawls of a two-year old. There is nothing there for me, nothing. I feel that something vital has vanished from my brain, something that I desperately needed to have inside me to survive in this dreary world. It, whatever “it” was, has gone missing and with it my capacity to enjoy beauty. If a person doesn’t have that anymore, what is the point of life?

  Wanting something to do, I did some surfing on the Internet. I used to think that it was a total waste of time, but now I can see why people get hooked. Battling my baser instincts, I decided not to hit the porno sites. I just checked the news. Some serial killer had been caught in Spokane, Washington, of all places. He had murdered a string of prostitutes. Why? They never seem to discover the motivations of these people. Why do they do it? Is it a power trip? Or does it turn them on to kill women? Does it give them some sexual high? I suppose I should understand, since I was instrumental in my wife’s death, but an erection was the last thing on my mind when I was hurtling towards that maple tree. Anyway, what I did wasn’t murder, was it? When you want to die as well as the other person? That has to be included in that weird kind of Jim Jones - poisoned Kool-Aid -“Hey, let’s all go together!” - kind of thing.

  The news is so depressing, yet I seem to be addicted to it. I watch CNN in the morning, ABC World News at night and cruise the NY Times and the ever-so-venerable BBC on the Internet. The news is either all bad, or pathetic little human interest stories that would warm the cockles of my heart if I had any left.

  ENTRY 9:

  I had a dream about my Mother last night. I guess it was because yesterday was her birthday, May 27th. She would have been seventy-four if she’d been alive today.

  Mother is in her tiny powder-blue bedroom in her apartment in Montreal where she finally ended up after her surreal travels around North America. I am sitting in a chair about two feet away, talking to her. She is wearing a thin, nylon, girlishly pink nightgown, so insubstantial that it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. As always, Mother is complaining that she has been sick and that I have been neglecting her. She does look terrible, like the wrath of God. Then she says, “Do you want to see what my illness has done to me?” To my horror, she gets out of bed and opens up her nightdress, revealing her aged, emaciated body.

  I woke up in a hurry from that one. Not a pleasant dream. Not a pleasant memory, because it was an actual incident from my past. It happened just before she died.

  Mother had been an artist all her life and, to her way of thinking, there wasn’t anything unpleasant or unnatural about showing off the human body. She would never have understood the effect something like that would have on someone, especially her son.

  The vision of my ancient, wrinkled and nude Mother will stay with me for all time …

  ENTRY 10:

  My existence has become almost nauseating. I have become so stultified in my behavior patterns that I am no longer living my life, I am just experiencing events. Sometimes hours go by and all I do is sit on the couch and listen to the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. I am not aware of thinking of anything. I just sit and listen. Listen to the ticking. It is oddly soothing.

  Then I come to—that is the only way to describe it—and I realize that the whole day has passed me by and I didn’t even notice. I wasn’t aware. The sun traveled across the sky, the birds were happily chirping away outside and all I heard was the ticking of the clock. Yet my mind never registered the fact that the ticking was time passing. It was just ticking. There was no emotional or cognitive resonance. Just ticking.

  It is as if I am turning into something. Something dead. I am becoming a mechanical man, a robot. I have this eerie feeling that if I make one wrong move, someone is going to come along, switch off the juice and that will be the end of it all. No more me. I will be still and cold and I won’t be able to think of anything. I will be a big fat zero. In many ways that would be a relief.

  ENTRY 11:

  My emotions are teetering between being completely anesthetized or being in a state of utter irritation with the world.

  Ordinary people’s hypocrisy is mind numbing. I read today that some born-again Christians bombed another abortion clinic. They killed a couple of doctors and nurses in yet another misguided attempt to save the lives of a few unformed tadpoles that haven’t even shed their tails yet. I would have thought that the Sixth Commandment directing the faithful not to kill would also apply to atomizing doctors and nurses, and not just to the elimination of unborn fetuses.

  So here is a knotty conundrum: why is it OK with the brethren to execute men on Death Row (something they all seem to enthusiastically support), but it isn’t OK to scrape an inconvenient sack of cells from a woman’s uterus? I just don’t understand. Actually, who am I kidding? I understand all right. Giving someone on
Death Row a lethal injection isn’t done from any moral perspective. It is done from the age-old standpoint of Vengeance with a capital “V.” It has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with revenge. We Americans are supposed to be living in the most civilized country in the world, but we are still sending criminals into the arena to fight the lions. Except now we strap them to a table or a chair and don’t give them a chance to defend themselves.

  Last week, I was reading a book about ancient Rome. One of the intellectuals of the city was complaining that all Rome’s citizens ever cared about was food and entertainment, entertainment meaning the mayhem and violence of the Coliseum. How little things have changed in the last two thousand years.

  ENTRY 12:

  Today I didn’t do anything except play Solitaire on the computer. I couldn’t believe it when I finally bestirred myself to look at the clock. All those hours wasted that I will never get back again. Not that I have a particularly fulfilling life at the moment, but I didn’t bother to work out and I completely forgot to take a shower.

  I just sat and stared at the computer screen for hours. My eyes were dry and scratchy and my hand ached because I was using the mouse so relentlessly. I was totally engrossed in the game and I began to feel that somehow there was a greater meaning to it all. If I could only win a certain number of times, then everything would come together in my life. Everything would fall into place.

  It scared me. I suddenly realized that it would be very easy for me to spiral further down into the pit and give up caring about anything.

  I don’t want to do that. I have to find something for my mind to work on, but what? I don’t have the energy or the will to learn anything new. I seem to be just hanging around, waiting for SOMETHING to happen.

  My greatest fear is to end up being insignificant, a complete irrelevancy. To not even make a scratch on the surface of life. To have lived and died without doing something of note. That is the great UNKNOWN that we face. Not anything as prosaic as dying. But dying in obscurity, surely that is the worst. Perhaps that’s why people strap bombs around their waists and blow themselves into infinity. Better to die for a cause and be known as a hero than to live a pathetic life just eating, working, fucking and dying.

  Maybe that is why all those little nobodies throughout the world keep on having babies, in the vain hope that one day their inferior genes may come together and produce an anomaly: a truly great and significant human being. Sometimes it happens. Take Beethoven, for example. His family was totally nondescript. His parents were poor alcoholics. Supposedly, the legend goes that many of his siblings were deaf or retarded in some way. Yet against all odds, a genius popped out of his mother’s tired, dried-up womb. You never know.

  I want to be SOMEBODY. I don’t want to be a big NOBODY.

  ENTRY 13:

  I read somewhere that Rasputin, that wily old con artist and buddy of the last Czar of Russia, was of the opinion that he had reached a higher spiritual plane than most other mortals. He had become so holy that he was utterly without sin. Rasputin thought he had come up with a dandy way of generously transferring his sinless state to others. All he had to do was fuck them and then they would also become without sin. This in some way explains this unwashed peasant’s immense popularity with high society ladies. You have to admit that it’s an ingenuous tactic for maneuvering a woman into bed: “Make love to me, baby, and you will be first in line to get into Heaven and shake St. Peter’s hand. Sleep with me, and all your sins will be washed away.”

  It is similar to a benighted idea that is still the rage in South Africa. The neighborhood witch doctors advise AIDS sufferers to rape virgins as a cure for their affliction. This is what is known as magical thinking. Deep down, you realize that this improbable course of action won’t work, but you’re willing to give it a try because … hey, you never know. Maybe the asshole with the beard and the weird staring eyes is right and God is on his side. Perhaps the local quack is more tuned in to health problems than the WHO doctor with the painful injections and all those stupid pills that no one can remember to take. So much easier to fuck and hope for redemption or a cure than to actually take responsibility for your life and your actions. To use your noggin and think. To actually DO something about it.

  I need to DO something about my life, or I’ll be no better than those poor ignorant slobs in Russia or South Africa. I’ll fall into a bottomless pit, or turn into a mechanical man, or become a dribbling idiot in the corner playing Solitaire until the end of Eternity. Either that, or I’ll be walking into my local McDonald’s or post office to work a little magic of my own. And it won’t involve any thinking either.

  ENTRY 14:

  I woke up this morning and looked at all the things in my house and had a powerful urge to redecorate. So much of this place screams “Angie,” that if I had the energy, I would toss out the lot. Maybe that’s why I am depressed all the time. I am surrounded by the miasma of HER. Angie’s presence is everywhere, haunting me. Of course, why hadn’t I spotted it before? The bitch is still bugging me from beyond the grave. Now, that makes sense.

  Everything in this house reeks of someone with “perfect taste.” It is as if they couldn’t be bothered to put some personality into it, they just skimmed through Better Homes and Gardens and did a paint-bynumbers job of decorating the place.

  The only room in the house that I wouldn’t let her touch was my den. No soothing pastels and French Provincial allowed in there. My desk was from Mexico, an enormous monster of dark wood and metal bands, ancient and full of secrets. It cost more to ship it up to Syracuse than it did to buy. Right over the desk was a large, ornately framed print of one of my favorite paintings, Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi (1620).

  Artemisia was greatly influenced in the use of chiaroscuro by Caravaggio, so the effects of light and shade are striking. I love the look of grim determination on her face as a surprisingly muscular Judith robustly hacks off Holofernes’ head. The blood spurts from his neck like a miniature Old Faithful while Judith’s devoted maid stands by her side and gives her a hand by holding the old goat down. I always preferred Artemisia’s version to Caravaggio’s depiction of the same subject. Although it is also gory in the extreme, his Judith’s expression is hilariously prim, as if she was gutting a particularly unpleasant fish rather than actually decapitating someone.

  There are other prints on the walls, reflecting my eccentric taste in the arts. A particular favorite is a photograph of the statue of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by the 17th century Italian master, Gianlorenzo Bernini. My fascination with that particular piece goes back to my childhood, when Mother would encourage me to watch reruns of Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark on the PBS Channel. One night, he was enlightening us about the St. Teresa sculpture and I was struck even at my tender age at how the artist had made the ecstasy of the saint so sexual. She lies there exposed: head back, mouth open, eyes shut, ready and willing. There is an angel armed with an arrow tantalizing her bosom with the point. Any minute, she will be penetrated by the barb and the look on her face is one of rapturous anticipation.

  St. Teresa gave me my first hard-on, bless her. Fortunately, my Mother didn’t notice. She might have put it down to an excess of religious mania and sent me off to the local kiddy shrink.

  Maybe when I am feeling more energetic, I will get rid of all of Angie’s overstuffed sofas and dried flower arrangements, the cunningly distressed pseudo antiques and the bland modern paintings of nothingin-particular and I’ll really go to town. I’ll buy the furniture I want to sit in and be comfortable in. Lots of expensive leather sofas. Leather is so sensual, so smooth, so cool. Just like the breasts of my blue-skinned, fridge-dream girl.

  ENTRY 15:

  I had another dream last night. I don’t like these dreams. They disturb me and they excite me, and I am particularly disturbed by the fact that they excite me.

  I am swimming underwater in a deep, crystal-clear, turquoise pool. The water i
s blood temperature and I can barely feel it against my naked skin. The light is filtering down from the surface and I have the most compelling sense of well-being and peace. I have no trouble breathing underwater, which is bizarre I guess, but it seemed natural at the time.

  I keep on swimming and start to notice that the water is becoming murky. It takes me a while, but I soon realize that there is blood in the water. At the same time, I see an indistinct shape in the distance. I am not alone. Is it a shark? I am concerned, but curiously unafraid.

  I decide to investigate. As I get closer, I can see that the shape is a naked woman frantically swimming away from me. I gain on her. I want to tell her that she has nothing to fear from me.

  She seems to sense that there is no escape and she turns around to confront me. She doesn’t have any problem breathing underwater either, by the way, and when she speaks to me, I don’t have any difficulty understanding her.

  She puts her hand out to stop me and says, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  For a moment, I am puzzled. Why would she think I was going to hurt her? Then, almost subliminally, I notice that I am holding something. I look down and see an enormous carving knife in my hand. The sunlight is glinting off the blade and it looks like an implement of sacrifice.

  I look back at her and she is beautifully terrified. She looks so scared and so sexy.

  She says, “Kill me if you have to, but, please, fuck me first.”

  I am happy to oblige.

  She comes close and puts her arms around me. I kiss her. I have the knife pressed into her back and I can tell that she is turned on. I can remember every sensation: the softness of her skin, the taste of her lips, her dark hair surrounding her face like a cloud.