Another Beatrice

If I could, I would pray, but God has no use for a girl like me.

“Non mi tange.”

During labor, my mother had an auditory hallucination that Dante was speaking to her. Dante the poet. He told her to name me Beatrice. Beatrice was not affected by the flames and misery of hell. Or so she claimed in the second canto of Inferno. Beatrice was not God. She was a woman. More woman, even, than God.

In the food court of a mall, my boyfriend Ethan broke up with me over a soft pretzel. It was kind; I put my face gently into the soft pretzel, and he stroked my hair, and I almost fell asleep. I said, I understand completely. He said, Hey, get your face out of the pretzel.

I sat up and flicked the salt pellets from my cheek. I’m curious, I yawned, before you go.

Right.

Would you say you prefer Sappho or Dante?

Yeah, but why only those two, right?

But what if it was those two? Which one?

Sappho, I guess. I’m not into Christianity.

But Dante was writing about other things. Grief. Power. Love.

And it all comes back to that Christian overview, right?

I made a noise like a game show buzzer, and Ethan’s nostrils flared. Wrong.

Ethan found his own way home. I’m not sure how he did it. We were in a suburb in New Jersey. As for myself, I had a rented Smart Car for the day, for no reason except that I was hoping it would make whimsical fun a greater part of my life. I offered him a ride, but he cast a quizzical eye on the blacktop and said he was hoping to check out the parking lot a little bit more. It had been a while since he’d seen one. He set off, muttering about graduate school.

Jerry, my boss, who was fifty, told me it had been silly to waste my time with anyone under thirty. But then he said, you know what, maybe I’m wrong. We were at the Harvard Club, dining on his account. To be honest, it seemed unlikely that he was wrong. I sipped on a cucumber water and thought about how pleasant it was to eat lunch in what seemed to be a lighting design inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Soft, red, apocalyptic. Lantern lit.

If you were a nocturnal animal, I said, who would you be?

He squeezed my thigh beneath the table. A nerve misfired, and he squeezed his sandwich, too, and all the chicken salad fell out of it and onto his lap. Oh my God, he said.

I told him I would be a lemur.

A lemur. He wiped mayonnaise off his jeans. He motioned to a waiter. A lemur. He chuckled. I was good at helping him recover from life’s little mishaps. He smiled affectionately. His eyes were pointed at the waiter, but that was all part of our many precautions against total ruin. I knew the smile was meant for me.

A lemur. Jerry looked at me, concern crushing his forehead, the bumps of time that pressed upon his brain, and in the crannies of his eyes, I saw a stirring. Jerry looked at me, not as though for the first time. In that look, there had been none of this. In the first look, only the placid lake of shy wanting. Not these things, wood mites of disgust.

I’m kidding, Jerry, I said. Obviously.

Enough of this. Non mi tange. It doesn’t affect me. I’m plummeting through the endless depths of space, not hung up on God. Little ol’ me! In the office, unease wound its way through my cube. My face was hot like fever, but my blood stayed cool. I was cc-ed with abundance. Jerry used to hold me like a little duckling, shooing away the angry black flies of emails, telling everyone that he was the only one who told me what to do. Now, with eyes despairing, he—

Enough about Jerry. What can I tell you? When I introduce myself, people notice me. They think it is possible to fall in love with me after I’ve died. My name is unusual and beautiful. They whisper it, a little question.

? To you devoutly

Dante prayed.

But at the end of the day, I am a woman. The silliest thing of all. 

Calm down, I say.

Not that Beatrice, I say.

Another Beatrice, I say.