tantalize

There was once a king named Tantalus whom the gods favoured above every other mortal. They welcomed him to their own table on Olympus, let him drink the nectar of the immortals and share the food that kept death away. No living man had ever been given so great an honour.

But the honour made Tantalus arrogant, and arrogance bred something monstrous. He wanted to prove the gods were not so all-seeing as they claimed — to trick the deathless ones and laugh at them for it. So he devised a test no sane man would dream of. He took his own young son, Pelops, and killed him with his own hands. He cut the boy apart, boiled the pieces in a great bronze cauldron, and dressed the flesh into a fine dish — then carried it to his table, set it before the gods as a feast, and watched their faces, waiting to see whether they would notice what he was feeding them.

They knew at once. Every god drew back from the dish in horror, sickened to the heart that a father could butcher his own child and serve him up like meat to be eaten. Only Demeter, her mind still clouded with grief for her stolen daughter, ate without seeing — a single mouthful from the boy's shoulder — before the others cried out and struck the plate from her hands. Then the gods gathered up the pieces of Pelops, breathed the life back into him, and made him whole once more, fitting him a shoulder of gleaming ivory where Demeter had taken her bite.

For a crime so vile there could be no forgiveness, and the gods' punishment was fitted to it with cold and clever cruelty. They cast Tantalus down into the underworld and stood him to his chin in a pool of clear, cool water, beneath a tree hung heavy with ripe fruit — pears and figs and pomegranates dangling a hand's breadth above his head. A starving, thirsting man could ask for nothing more.

But when he bent his head to drink, the water drew back and drained away into the earth, leaving dry cracked ground at his feet. And when he reached up for the fruit, a wind rose and lifted the branches just past his fingertips. Always close. Always in plain sight. Never, ever within reach. So he stands to this day — the king who cooked his own son for the gods — parched beside the water and starving beneath the fruit, tormented not by fire or blade but by the endless, aching nearness of everything he can never have.

From his name comes our word tantalize. To tantalize someone is to tease them with something they badly want by holding it out, letting them see it and almost touch it, and then keeping it just beyond their grasp — the way the water and the fruit forever slipped away from Tantalus.