The Innocent Read online

  All quotes were taken from public domain Sources.

  Cover photo: Modified photograph of Canova’s “Psyche being awakened by Cupid’s kiss” taken by Eric Pouhier. This picture is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

  Copyright © 2014 Candice R. Lee All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover created by: Candice Raquel Lee ISBN: 0991455703

  ISBN-13: 978-0-99145570-6

  This Book is dedicated to You of a thousand names, who is still you with a thousand faces, through numberless lives with only one heart that loves me.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Call to Adventure

  Dancing with an Incubus

  The First Kiss

  Chandraswami and Shakespeare

  Bears and Wolves

  Not a Knight Anymore

  Quia Amore Langueo

  Nephilim

  Eruption

  Free at Lasts

  The Beast Within

  Virgin Flight

  Avalon

  All Roads Lead to Rome

  Mom and Dad

  Leaving Manhattan

  Listening

  The Devil You Know

  Lance

  Everything Changes

  Playing God

  Forms

  Epilogue

  Discussing The Innocent

  Questioning The Innocent

  Dear Reader,

  Literature of Love Reading List

  About the Author

  Also By the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank her hubby, Dr. Lee, for his undying patience.

  Thanks to my Malu, for coining me a person who is “in love with Love.”

  A heartfelt thank you to my great-grandmother, Viola, for being such a great storyteller I wanted to follow in her footsteps.

  Thanks to my Ima, without whom I would never have grown wings and flown away.

  Finally, I thank my father, George, with all my heart, for without him, I would not have known Love or created Lance.

  “Place me as a symbol on your heart, as a symbol on your arm, for Love is as strong as Death.

  Jealousy is terrible as Hell: Her torments are torments of fire, an all-consuming flame.

  Many waters cannot extinguish Love and rivers cannot drown Her.”

  -Song of Songs 8:6

  Introduction

  So, what is “The Innocent” a myth, an allegory, a philosophical novel, a metaphysical love story? It is all these things. It is based on Jane Eyre, the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast and the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It has elements from these stories, but it is written in the style of a myth. So, what is a myth? Is it a lie? A falsehood? No. That is just a very modern definition the word has taken on. For my purposes, let’s just call myth an ancient story that has been passed on from one generation to the next. In this light, there are many different kinds of myths. Some of them tell stories about creation, about ancestors, behavior, and heroism. Then there are others that try to answer the soul’s cry of, “tell me how to live.” These are the ones that have always captivated me.

  These stories like other myths can be funny and adventurous on the outside, but they contain a profound message or two somewhere inside them. They talk about attaining sacred knowledge and mastering the thing we call life. They posit that life is a series of adventures that does not end even in death. These ancient stores seek to help people understand love, loss and pain and the cyclical nature of life. In the never-ending wheel of existence, each obstacle is interpreted as a way of learning how to meet and defeat obstacles. Each point of suffering and death is a step on an endless path to growing beyond suffering and death.

  I think of myth as the sugar that helps make the medicine of life go down. When you are giving the cold hard facts of life* to the young, the un-fledged, the innocent as we all are in this life) it is always best to couch it, to swaddle it in something palatable like a nice story about love or a great adventure.

  Perhaps it is an act of kindness or a test to see if the receiver will one day take the lump of truth from its pretty wrappings. Perhaps it is an act of faith on the storyteller’s part, the hope that the listener or reader will sometime soon be strong enough to pull back the filmy, gossamer layers, and even though she sees something hard, something scary past the pink cotton of words, she will forge ahead anyway because she is not the same child who first heard this story.

  She will have hard hands and a tough mind. And even when she gets to the last covering and something odd and sharp appears, she will still pull away that last scrap and find the pearl, the gem, the beating human heart, the truth that she was given.

  My story is not new. It is very old and yet still relevant as myth is today. My sources are the myths of Cupid and Psyche, Isis, Inanna and many others. In these tales, a girl must go down to death and men are seen as monsters to a very young heroine on her way to self-knowledge and adulthood. I hope you enjoyed this very old and new journey.

  *One day your body will die. Life is not easy. You will fail. And so on. . .

  Some Themes explored in The Innocent: Love and Lust Morality

  God and Religion Social class Racism

  Suffering

  Good and Evil Atonement and forgiveness Finding home and family

  Prologue

  I was eaten, plain and simple. It felt like being burned alive, like every cell in my body was exploding. Then everything stopped—my breathing, my heart, my pain. I saw my mother’s face. “Hello, Aliyah. Hello, my baby,” she cooed as I clutched her finger. I took my first steps into her arms. As soon as I could talk, I called myself by my English name, Alexa. Then I was out the door and off to school. I discovered books. I read about other lives. I lived behind pages. It seemed like forever while I watched myself sitting in my house, or on a bus, or in a library with a book in my hands.

  Fast-forward. I was a freshman in college and decided for once to go out and party in Manhattan like a normal person, and, of course, that’s what started me on the road to being murdered. At first, I couldn’t figure out why this was happening to me or how I deserved it, but in the end I understood. It’s how it always begins, how Fate starts pushing you, whittling you down, making you over. It always starts small like a pebble or a flash of snow skittering down a slope right before the avalanche. You look up, take a breath, and here it comes, and there is nothing you can do but try and survive it. But the thing is, if you do, you’ll never be the same, and that’s the whole point.

  In the beginning, I was an innocent Jewish girl who wanted love. To that end, I saved a piece of bread from a meal. Sounds crazy, but love makes you do crazy things. Besides, it wasn’t an ordinary piece of bread that would be stupid, it was a piece of Challah bread from the Friday night, Sabbath meal.

  There was a tradition, a Kabalistic myth, a silly story or maybe it was an outright lie, but I had heard that on your eighteenth Hebrew birthday, if you put a piece of Sabbath bread under your pillow, that night you would dream of your B’shert, your soul-mate and true love, the one that God had made for you.

  But with magic there is always a price to pay. One dream would take seven years from my future husband’s life. What if all we were fated to have was seven year? I didn’t want to kill him, but I was curious. I didn’t need to see his face. I just wanted to know if there was a
guy out there for me at all.

  How much would that cost? I wondered.

  According to the story, three girls at my high school had tried it. The first saw a man’s face. The second, who was evidently a snooty witch, would not say what she saw. The third saw nothing.

  I took out the bread, held it in my hand. It was dry and crumbly, white and brown, sacred and mundane. I closed the tin foil around it and tucked it under my pink pillow just as the door to my dorm room flew open and hit the blue wall near my old wood armoire.

  “Alexa,” Reese, one of my many floormates, said, “tell Mikayla what you told me about going to a Jewish high school. She doesn’t believe me.”

  Reese was a petite brunette, a sophomore and nineteen. Mikayla looked like her name, tall and pretty. She swept blonde hair over her shoulder. Her perfect brows came together as she asked, “You’re Jewish?”

  I sighed and nodded.

  “Tell her!” Reese insisted.

  “We weren’t allowed to touch boys at my school,” I said mechanically. My Jewishness had made me a popular freak at the dorm.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mikayla gasped. “That’s so medieval! I would die if I had to live that way.”

  “You wouldn’t die,” I assured her. Going to Yeshiva, Hebrew School, was different than most people’s experiences of high school, but it didn’t kill anyone. Jews had a lot of rules that hadn’t changed in thousands of years, but that was because we were a constant people. Besides, I was used to the rules. I knew them by heart. I knew how to act, how others should act. It was very safe. Now that I was attending a regular college, it was culture shock to say the least. Life’s rules were not so clear cut.

  “So, what did you do?” Mikayla asked. “Live like a nun or something?”

  “No. There were boys around.”

  “Well, how are you going to date them if you can’t touch them?” She asked.

  “You go out. You talk. You eat,” I shrugged.

  “That’s it?”

  “She’s a virgin,” Reese whispered loudly.

  Mikayla looked me up and down like I was an alien with a disease. “Really? You’re joking. No? Really?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to keep calm and not die of embarrassment. Oh, how I wished I had never told Reese my “secret.” But I hadn’t thought it was really that big a deal until she nearly passed out. It was just another thing I was not allowed to do. Jewish guys had Ten Commandments. Jewish girls had eleven. We had the additional “Thou shalt not give it up before marriage” one. It was written on the back of the right tablet under Moses’ thumb. Besides, nobody I knew in high school had had sex, boys or girls. There was no pressure to do it, only pressure not to. How things had changed.

  “It’s really not a big deal,” I told them.

  Reese and Mikayla stared at me.

  “You’re just saying that because you never had any,” Reese told me. “Wait till you get a taste, Alexa. Nothing will stop you then.”

  “I bet she turns into a noisy nympho,” Mikayla screamed. They giggled together.

  “She has two names, and two birthdays too!” Reese went on.

  “What? How?” Mikayla asked, turning to me again as if I had grown horns.

  “I have an English first name and a Hebrew middle name. I am Alexandra Aliyah. Aliyah means to elevate or go higher. My mother wants me to live up to this by becoming a doctor. I like being called Alexa,” I explained simply. “Jews follow the lunar calendar while America follows the sun, so two birthdays.” Not weird. Perfectly normal.

  “Today is her looney birthday,” Reese said, nudging Mikayla “and, you know, we have that extra free ticket…”

  “She has to go out with us,” Mikayla said.

  “That’s what I thought. It’s like Destiny. Right?”

  “You know what would be so cool?” Mikayla screamed, grabbing Reese and shaking her. “If she lost her virginity tonight!”

  Then they turned to me, and after exchanging meaningful looks, Reese came and knelt before me. She looked me right in the eye and said, slowly and seriously, “Tonight, we want you to come out with us, Alexa. No excuses because we are going to find you the juiciest hunk in the world and have him bang you so stupid you won’t be able to walk tomorrow. That is a Valentine’s Day promise.”

  My jaw dropped. I didn’t know what to say. The idea of a preplanned de-virgining was quite unnerving.

  “No. You deserve it. It’s like you’ve been in prison your whole life. You’re like a little baby,” Mikayla said.

  I folded my arms. “I am not a baby. I have a job and a bank account. I have a 4.0 average, and I buy my own food and clothes. Sex doesn’t make you an adult. There are people who never have sex like the Pope, and they aren’t . . .”

  “The Pope? You want to be like the Pope? A nice Jewish girl like you?” Mikayla said, giving me a look as she left. “I’m going to get some clothes for you.”

  “I’ll get some make-up, and shoes,” Reese added, rising and following her.

  “We will make you look so hot you won’t recognize yourself,” they said, leaving.

  “Thanks. But I like recognizing myself,” I shouted after them. This was ridiculous. I was not going out with them. My phone rang. I hurried to pick up.

  “Aliyah, are you studying? How are your grades?” my Jewish Tiger Mother asked when I answered.

  “Great. Great. Great,” I said unenthusiastically.

  “Are you going to the library?” she asked.

  “Of course. I always go to the library,” I sighed, looking across my blue room to the window at the foot of my bed. My view was the blank wall of another building.

  “And happy birthday,” she said. “It’s your Hebrew birthday. You forgot, didn’t you?”

  “No. I definitely didn’t forget,” I told her. Wished I could though.

  “I know it’s hard sacrificing so much, Honey,” she said, “but we’ll celebrate when you come home. It’ll be great. But for now, you don’t need to get distracted. You’d better get going. Love you.”

  “Love you too,” I echoed and closed the phone. I turned around to face my desk. It sat between the head of my bed and the door to my room. It was piled with books: Principles of Biology, lab workbook, Chemistry 101, English Survey and Literature of Love. I had a workload from hell. She was right. I should stay home. I fell back in my chair as the door to my room flew open again. Reese and Mikayla had their arms full with clothes.

  “Try these on,” they said, throwing the pile on my bed.

  I looked at their eager faces. I felt bad about telling them ‘thanks but no thanks’ once again.

  “Then don’t,” a strange new voice inside me said. “Why not go out and have some fun just this once?” It asked. “You’re a smart girl,” It flattered. “You’ll catch up on your work later.”

  Jews would call that the voice of the yetzer hara, the bad side, the thing that tempted you to do things you shouldn’t, the devil on your shoulder. Hearing it wasn’t new; being tempted by it was.

  I bit my lip. I wanted to go out. I had wanted to have fun in Manhattan for a long time. Friends had invited me out again and again, but I had to study. I always had to study. I always did what was right and obeyed the rules. There was always an excuse, and it always won the fight. “It’s your birthday. It’s one night out.” the voice whispered. “Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? What? You think the world will end or something?” it mocked. It was right though. I was turning eighteen, becoming an adult. It was a thing to celebrate with friends. What was the harm in it?

  “Sure,” I said, surprising myself. I felt excited and scared. It felt good.

  I tried on a couple of dresses, somebody’s high-heeled shoes and make-up. It was fun. Mikayla put on a red mini-dress with black stockings and red heels. Reese had a red and black dress with a black satin bow in the back and a sweetheart neckline. I wore a plain black dress, but I felt like a princess getting ready for a ball. They even tri
ed to convince me to take off my glasses, but I wasn’t me without out them. Also, I was almost blind. After they finished with me, they led me to the bathroom mirror. They were right. I barely recognized myself.

  “You look so cute!” they screamed.

  I could see cleavage, a lot of leg, plus my lips were red. I did not look cute. Puppies were cute. My mom would have a conniption fit if she saw me. The Rabbi from my high-school would have a heart attack. I tried to pull the hem down.

  “But what do you think?” the new voice asked me. I stood up straight, looked myself over. I smiled a little at what I saw.

  “We’ve got to go!” Mikayla said, pulling me away from my reflection. “They just texted. They’re here.”

  “Who’s here?” I asked, running to grab my purse and coat.

  “Just hurry!” she screamed at me.

  We took the elevator down the stairs to the dorm lobby. The walls were covered in hearts and Cupids. Even when I went to religious Jewish school, I had loved this holiday. Who couldn’t love a holiday that celebrated Love?

  The lobby was packed with guys and girls on dates. We pushed past them and through the door onto the crowded, noisy streets of Manhattan. It was so weird, but everything seemed different tonight. The street lights sparkled, and I could hear the wind rushing past the buildings like it had a voice. A beautiful black limo pulled up in front of us. This was a dream come true. I was Cinderella, and that was my carriage.

  “There they are!” Mikayla yelled. She pointed to a beat-up red car down the block. Exhaust puffed out of its rear. They ran to it like it was the last bus to heaven. I was following when I saw an old homeless woman wrapped up in a hundred blankets, pushing a cart full of bags. I stopped. February was the coldest month in New York City. I handed her a dollar.

  “What a beautiful girl,” she said, smiling and making the spider web of wrinkles around her dark face dance before she grasped the money and went on her way. When I got to the car, Mikayla refused to move over from the window seat, so I had to run to the other side of the car. I sat down next to Reese and behind the driver.