The Double Woman

Moment by moment a life-size image is being made in a room adjacent to the Tuesday soiree, a room others do not enter, a room others do not notice. Mysteriously, daubs of paint cover the canvas; colors adjust themselves; lines and shadings multiply. An impasto has built up over the hours and the weeks a lone man watches a woman appear twice in adjacent rooms, a double woman, each native to her place, one of flesh and one of paint. I alone know the double woman is one, but I am pledged to silence, and I witness a double reign of beauty reduce my friend to grief. He is so fearful he will be discovered, and humiliation will fill the place of desire. I ask him, "What can be worse than a double woman who cannot be touched as flesh or spirit? Choose one and live a life amplified by pleasure or hope." He ignores me. I tell him only poets are drawn to such a room, only those who live lives guided by poetry would be able to enter it. These secrets are sacred. A sincerely harbored secret, he tells me secretly, can bring an ancient deity to earth and sky. And now I understand his heart. He will love the double woman in the tragic orphean way in which he will be a perfect victim, forever a singer singing of perfect love. Happiness and pleasure count for nothing. Only perfection matters. And that is the riddle posed by the double woman. I am close to solving it. Just a few more songs, just a period of suffering further, and it will be solved. Unless Aphrodite chooses to manifest herself from the foam of the sea or the blaze of an exploding star, and solve this riddle with the graceful ease of an Immortal who nurtures in her single nature both compassion and love.