Katie at the Four Seasons
I arrive in Manhattan yesterday, which always brings back a wave of euphoria - New York! - and anxiety (meetings!
First Boston !). But it is a glorious summer Sunday evening and I meet Katie for drinks so it is all OK.
On our way to dinner we pass Fernando Botero's bronze, “Leda and the Swan" and Katie recalls the mythology where Zeus, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda (married to King Tyndareus ) who hatches, from two eggs, Helen of Troy and Polydeuces. Helen, of course, the most beautiful woman in the land and her abduction by Paris, and eventual marriage to Menelaos, leads to the Trojan War. It is a longer story of course and Katie knows it by heart.
"A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead."
--Leda and the Swan, W.B. Yeats
