Oliver and Eleanor

         

I had known Oliver since high school.  We had both attended the revered Mount Olympus School of Music. I was there on scholarship. He was there because his father could afford it. Oliver was the son of the world famous composer Apollo Greco and his wife Calli, the famous muse and grand dame of the poetry world. Also, Oliver was there because he was just plain talented. His voice poured forth like honey and his fingers vibrated like extensions of the violin strings he bowed. The faces of the teachers, students, the very tree branches that brushed against the auditorium windows, seemed to strain toward the mesmerizing melodies he produced. His music was almost not of this realm.

Outside of school he was a plain all-around good guy. He’d stand us for drinks, drive us out to his parents’ Hampton house, or play a piece on the old piano in the back of the Bacchus Bar and Grill.

Even an ordinary ditty was magic in his hands. As he played “Siren’s Sweet Song” the gal at the bar, sipping her Aphrodite Light Ambrosia, caught his eye and gave him a come hither smile. And boy, did he hurry hither, and then thither, right on back to her place. Eleanor and Oliver shared their first kiss at the beginning of that date, waiting on the downtown F subway platform. Soon he was taking her out to the Hamptons instead of us, and a big diamond appeared hanging off that 4^th finger of her left hand.

 At the wedding that followed, the giants of classical music filled Olympus Hall and provided the wedding guests with interludes to make the very gods pause to listen. The new couple, still in tux and gown, decided to commemorate their first kiss by prancing down the subway steps to the very F train platform where the smooch had occurred.  The post-party group followed in a procession. We “ooed” as their lips locked and “aahed” as they looked deep into each other’s eyes.

Just then we felt the whoosh of the F train as it approached the station from the dark tunnel. No one noticed the homeless man as he barreled down the subway steps toward the couple.

Eleanor felt a huge shove from behind her. As she fell to the tracks, she could hear the fateful thunder of the train. She looked up to the horribly distorted faces of the wedding celebrants. Among them stood one dissolute looking man with a crazed glint in his eye. He had struck and quickly slithered away with a forked tongue flicking from his smirking face.  For Eleanor, all went black as she disappeared beneath the underbelly of the subway car. Her spirit slipped down the long dusky subway tunnel and drainage ditches to the system’s underworld, known among its dead and disenfranchised as Hades South.

Life without Eleanor was impossible for Oliver. Anguish, depression, drugs, liquor all followed. Then one day, he meandered down some subway steps and soulfully played “Eleanor’s Elegy.”   Soon he had haunted all the express and local routes, playing his melancholic homage to his wife. The sad notes filtered down the tracks, through the tunnels, down to Hades South itself, where the king and queen of the underworld were so moved by the melody that they invited Oliver to enter Hades. Through one of the Styx Transit maintenance closets at the end of the PanHellenic /74 Street transfer point, he entered their world. 

Marsha H.

Dec. 9, 2019