Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

He looked at her. Waited.

  “Okay,” she conceded.

  GACY, 2003

  “‘What would possess the young playwright Lancelot Satterwhite, whose only real talents, thus far, have shown themselves to be a kind of wild reimagining of the Southern experience, to write a play glorifying John Wayne Gacy, the pedophile serial-murdering clown? As if the wooden dialogue, the awful a cappella songs Gacy sings, and the graphic scenes of murder and mayhem weren’t bad enough, the audience leaves after three hours with an overwhelming question: Why? Not only extremely bad, this play is in extremely bad taste. Perhaps this is a nod to Satterwhite’s betters, or some sort of homage to Sweeney Todd, but, sad to say, Lancelot Satterwhite is no Stephen Sondheim and he never will be,’” Mathilde read.

  She tossed the newspaper down.

  “You guessed it. Phoebe fucking Delmar,” she said.

  “All the rest of them loved it,” he said. “Normally, I feel some sort of shame with a bad review. But this chick is so off base I don’t even care.”

  “I think the play is funny,” Mathilde said.

  “It is funny,” Lotto said. “The whole audience was cracking up.”

  “Phoebe Delmar. Five plays, five pans. The woman knows nothing,” Mathilde said.

  They looked at each other, started to smile.

  “Write another,” he said. “I know.”

  GRIMOIRE, 2005

  “You’re a genius,” she said, putting the manuscript down.

  “So do me,” he said.

  “Gladly,” she said.

  HAMLIN IN WINTER, 2006

  Sallie, Rachel, and Rachel’s new husband came up for the opening night. Husband? A man? Where was Elizabeth? Mathilde and Lotto held hands in the taxi going to brunch, communicating, not speaking.

  The husband chitter-chattered like a squirrel. “Affable dimwit” was Mathilde’s assessment later.

  “Illiterate snake” was Lotto’s. “What is she doing? I thought she was a lesbian. I loved Elizabeth. Elizabeth had gorgeous breasts. Where did she pick this meth-head up?”

  “Just because he has a tattoo on his neck doesn’t mean he’s a meth-head,” Mathilde said. She thought for a moment. “I think.”

  They had the story over eggs Benedict. Rachel had had a bad year after college. She had so much energy her hands darted like hummingbirds from plate to utensil to glass to hair to lap, without cease.

  “You don’t get married at twenty-three because you had a bad year,” Lotto said.

  “Why do you get married at twenty-three, Lotto?” Rachel said. “Pray tell.”

  “Touché,” Mathilde murmured. Lotto looked at her. “Actually, we were twenty-two,” she said.

  Anyway, as she had said, Rachel had had a bad year. Elizabeth broke up with her because of something Rachel had done. Whatever it was, it was bad enough that Rachel flushed a brighter red and the husband squeezed her knee under the table. She came home to the beach so Sallie could take care of her. Pete here worked at Marineland.

  “Are you a scientist, Pete?” Mathilde said.

  “No, but I feed the dolphins,” he said.

  Pete was exactly right at exactly the right time, Rachel said. Oh, and she was going to law school, and if Lotto didn’t mind, she’d take over the trust when she was done.

  “Did Muvva cut you off, too?” Lotto said. “Poor lady. Denied the huge, frothy celebration she’d so longed for. She wouldn’t have known who to invite and wouldn’t have attended anyway, but she would have delighted in planning. Muttonchop sleeves for you, Rachel. A cake like Chichén Itzá. Flower girls in hoopskirts. Her whole Yankee family getting sunburnt and internally combusting with envy. I wouldn’t be surprised if she changed the beneficiary of the trust to a schizoid pit-bull rescue or something.”

  There was a pause. Sallie winced and busied herself with her napkin. “She didn’t cut me off,” Rachel said quietly.

  A long silence. Lotto blinked the sting away.

  “But I had to sign a prenup. I only get two mil,” Pete said, making a comically sad face, and they all looked down into their Bloody Marys, and he blushed and said, “I meant if something bad happens. Nothing’s happening, baby,” and Rachel gave a tiny nod.

  He would prove a temporary embarrassment; in six months, Elizabeth, of the great, soft boobs, the cat’s-eye glasses, the pale hair and skin, would be back for good.

  At the theater, Lotto watched his aunt and sister. Ten minutes in, when their mascara started running, he sighed and relaxed and passed a hand over his face.

  After all the curtain calls and congratulations and hugs and the speech he gave to his actors, who loved him, loved him, it was plain from the way they looked at him, Mathilde at last snuck Lotto out the back door to the bar where she’d had the assistant take his family.

  Sallie leapt up, burst into tears, hung on his neck. Rachel hugged him fiercely around the waist. Pete darted in here and there to pat Lotto on his arms. Sallie said in his ear, “I had no idea, my sweet, how much you wanted babies.”

  He looked at her surprised. “That is what you got from this? That I want kids?”

  “Well. Yeah,” Rachel said. “The play is all about family, how you pass things down from one generation to another, how when you’re born, you belong to a certain patch of family land. It was just obvious. Plus, Dorothy is pregnant. And Julie has a baby upstairs. And even Hoover carries his baby around on his chest. That’s not what you meant?”

  “Nope,” Mathilde said, laughing.

  Lotto shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

  ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE, 2006

  A small man came rushing into the black box at the VIP reception. His sparse hair was white. He wore a faded green cloak and looked, flapping up, like a luna moth. “Oh, my dear boy, oh, my dear, dear Lotto, you have done it, you’ve done what I always knew you would do. You have it in your blood, the theater. Tonight, Thalia kisses your cheeks.”

  Lancelot smiled at the little man aping Thalia, kissing his cheeks. He took a glass of champagne from a passing tray. “Thank you so very much. I love Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was a genius, the mother of modern poetry. Now, forgive me, I know that we know each other, but tell me how, exactly?”

  Lotto smiled, never taking his eyes off the little man, who drew his head back quickly and blinked. “Oh. Dear boy. I apologize. I have followed your career, you see, with such delight and knew you so well through your plays that I thought, of course, you knew me in return. The old authorial fallacy. I’m mortified. I’m your old teacher at prep school. Denton Thrasher. Does that ring a”—he took a breath, let it out theatrically—“does that ring a bell?”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Thrasher,” Lancelot said. “I don’t recall. Losing my memory. But thank you ever so much for coming back here and reminding me.”

  He smiled down at the little man.

  “You don’t,” the man said, his voice faltering; then he blushed and seemed to fade where he stood.

  Mathilde, who had been at her husband’s side this whole time, wondered. His memory was as sharp as a diamondcutter. He never forgot a face. He could act out a play verbatim, having seen it only twice. She watched him turn and meet a legendary musical star with a kiss on her hand and saw, past the charm and the easy laughter, a prickly energy. Denton Thrasher walked away. She put a hand on her husband’s arm. When the musical star moved on, Lotto turned to her and silently docked his head on her shoulder for two moments. Recharged, he turned to face the others.

  WALLS, CEILING, FLOOR, 2008

  “Walls, Ceiling, Floor?” the producer said. He was a gentle, sleepy-eyed man who hid a ferocious heart in the flesh of his chest.

  “First part of a trilogy of the dispossessed,” Lotto said. “Same family, different main characters. They lose the family house. It’s where they store everything. History, furniture, ghosts. A tragedy. All three would, we h
ope, play concurrently.”

  “Concurrently. Christ. Ambitious,” the producer said. “Which part of the trilogy is this?”

  “The mental-health part,” Lotto said.

  LAST SIP, 2008

  “Last Sip, let me guess,” the producer said. “Alcoholism.”

  “Foreclosure,” Lotto said. “And the last, Grace, is the story of an Afghanistan veteran who comes home.”

  GRACE, 2008

  “A war story called Grace?” the producer said.

  “I embedded with the Marine Corps in Afghanistan,” Lotto said. “Two weeks, but every moment I thought I was about to die. And every moment I didn’t, I felt blessed. Even if I left religion as a kid. Believe it or not, the title fits.”

  “You’re killing me.” The producer closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Fine. If I read them and love them, we’ll do it. I’m bats for The Springs. And Grimoire. I think you have something interesting in your brain.”

  “Deal,” Mathilde said from the kitchen, arranging fresh-baked speculoos on a plate.

  “But only off-off-Broadway,” he said. “Maybe in New Jersey somewhere.”

  “For the first run,” Mathilde said, setting the tray of cookies and tea on the table. The producer laughed, but nobody else did.

  “You’re serious,” he said.

  “Read it. You’ll see,” Mathilde said.

  —

  ONE WEEK LATER, the producer called. Mathilde answered the phone.

  “I see,” the producer said.

  “I thought you would,” Mathilde said. “Most people eventually do.”

  “Did you?” the producer said. “He’s so clownish on the surface. All joke and dazzle. How in the world could you have seen it?”

  “But I did. The moment I met him,” she said. “A fucking supernova. Every day since.” She thought but did not say almost.

  —

  AFTER SHE HUNG UP with the producer, she came to Lotto over the veranda of their new house in the country [still a disaster of siding and drywall; but she had known there was something beautiful—fieldstone, ancient beams—under the mess]. There was a cherry orchard in the front, a perfect flat space for a pool in the back. She had quit her job months ago, had taken over the business side of his. They kept the one-bedroom as a pied-à-terre in the city; she would make this house perfect for them. Life was rich with possibility. Or life was possibly rich; soon, perhaps, she wouldn’t have to worry about phone bills, juggling this credit card to pay off the next. She felt incandescent with the news.

  Cold sun, jack-in-the-pulpits nosing out of the still-frozen mud. Lotto lay watching the world incrementally wake up. They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.

  She put her cold hand on his stomach, which he was sunning to banish the winter’s white.

  “Vain,” she said.

  “An actor in a playwright’s hide,” he said sadly. “I’ll never not be vain.”

  “Oh, well. It’s you,” she said. “You’re desperate for the love of strangers. To be seen.”

  “You see me,” he said, and he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Now. Please. Talk,” he said.

  She stretched her long arms over her head, and there were little nests of winter hair in the pits. She could hatch baby robins in those things. She looked at him, savoring her own knowing, his unknowing. She put her arms down with a sigh, and said, “Do you want to hear?” And he said, “Oh my goodness, M., you are absolutely killing me.” And she said, “It’s a go. All three.” And he laughed and took her hand, callused from house demolition, and kissed it, bitten fingernail to bitten finger, up the arm, the neck. Hefted her over his shoulder and pinwheeled her until the ground heaved, and then, because the air was bright and the birds were watching, he kissed a long trail down her stomach, and he shucked her right there.

  5

  AFTER THE INCOMPREHENSION and the raw fish came the long flight, then the short. At last, home. He sat, watching through the window as the staircase approached the plane over the sun-shot asphalt. Spring rain had blown through as they taxied in and just as swiftly was gone. He wanted his face in Mathilde’s neck, the soothe of her hair. Two weeks as playwright-in-residence in Osaka and as long as he’d ever been away from his wife. Too much. He’d woken up to the absence of Mathilde in his bed and felt grief in the coolness where her heat should have been.

  The rolling staircase fumbled and missed the door three times before it clicked in. Eager as a virgin. How lovely to stretch this long body of his, to stand and breathe for a few moments at the top of the stairs, savoring the oil and manure and ozone smell of the little Albany airport, sun on his cheeks, wife inside the building waiting to take him to the pretty house in the country, his early dinner. The luxuriant fatigue in his bones chased by cold prosecco then hot shower then smooth Mathilde-skin then sleep.

  His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps.

  He hadn’t accounted for the other passengers’ impatience. It wasn’t until he was already midair that he felt the hand hard in the middle of his back.

  How outrageous, he thought. Pushed.

  Now the pavement was billowing up toward him like a flicked tablecloth, one distant wind sock tonguing eastward, the crenellated roof of the airport building, a shine of the sandpapery steps in the sunlight, the plane’s nose somehow peeling into his vision and the pilot stretching his arms in the window; and Lancelot had twisted entirely around by the time his right shoulder hit the edge of a stair and he was looking at his ostensible pusher looming out of the dark cave mouth at the top, a man with tomato-colored hair and face, lines embossed on his forehead, wearing madras shorts, of all ugly things. Lancelot’s head hit the tread at the moment his rear and legs did, if somewhat lower, and things got a bit swimmy now; and behind the man was the flight attendant who’d snuck Lancelot two minibottles of bourbon after he’d spent a few minutes exercising his old actor’s charm on her—brief fantasy of her with skirt up, legs around his waist in the plastic bathroom, before he banished the image; he was married! and faithful!—and she was in the process of putting her hands slowly up to her mouth as his body made a satisfying thunkata-thunkata rhythm in sliding downward; and he kicked out toward the rail with the instinct to stop his fall, but felt a curious sharp clicking in the shin region and all in that general direction went numb. With delicious slowness, he came to rest in a shallow puddle, his shoulder and ear seeping up the sun-warmed water, his legs still extended up the stairs, though his foot, it appeared, canted outward in a manner unbefitting its owner’s dignity.

  Down, now, the tomato-headed man was coming. A moving stop sign. His footsteps rocked some locus of pain in Lancelot. When the man was close, Lancelot held up the hand that wasn’t numb, but the man stepped over him. Lancelot got a flash up the tube of his shorts; hairy white thigh, dark genital tangle. Then the man was running over the shining asphalt, swallowed up by the slab of a terminal door. Pushed? Fled? Who would do such a thing? Why? Why to him? What had he done?

  [There’d be no answers. The man was gone.]

  The flight attendant’s face came into view, soft cheeks and horse nostrils blowing, and he closed his eyes as she touched his neck and someone somewhere began to shout.

  —

  BACKLIT, the fracture was tectonic, the plates of him overlapping. He was given two casts, a sling, a crown of gauze, pills that made his body feel as if it were encased in three inches of rubber. As if, had he been on the same drugs when he fell, he would have
hit asphalt only to bounce delightedly high, startling pigeons midair and coming to rest on the airport roof.

  He sang falsetto to Earth, Wind & Fire all the way to the city. Mathilde let him eat two doughnuts, and his eyes filled with tears because they were the most amazing doughnuts in the history of glazed doughnuts, food of the gods. He was full of joy.

  They would have to spend the summer in the country. Alas! His Walls, Ceiling, Floor was in rehearsal, and he should be there for it, but really, there was so little he could do. He couldn’t climb the stairs to the rehearsal space, and it would be an abuse of power to make his dramaturge carry him; he couldn’t even climb the stairs to their tiny apartment. He sat on the building’s staircase, looking at the pretty black-and-white tiles. Back and forth Mathilde went, gathering the food, the clothes, everything they needed from the apartment on the second floor down to the car double-parked in the street.

  The building manager’s child stuck her shy brown head out the door and looked at him.

  “What, ho, spratling!” he said to the kid.

  She stuck a finger in her mouth and took it out all wet. “What is that nutty bo-bo doing out there on the stairs?” she said, tiny echo of some adult.

  Lancelot brayed, and the building manager peered out, a bit more ruddy than normal, and took a look at the casts, sling, crown. He nodded at Lancelot, then pulled his kid and head inside and shut the door fast.

  In the car, Lancelot marveled at Mathilde: what a smooth face she had, lickable, like a vanilla ice cream cone. If only the left side of his body hadn’t suddenly become buried in concrete, he would leap over the emergency brake and treat her the way a cow treats a block of salt.

  “Kids are jerks,” he said. “Bless their hearts. We should have some, M. Maybe now that you’re my nurse for the rest of the summer, you can have free license with my body, and in all the lust and frenzy, we’ll beget a sweet wee thing.” They weren’t using birth control, and there was no question that either one of them was defective. It was clearly a matter of luck and time. When he wasn’t high, he was more careful, kept quiet, sensitive to the stoic longing he’d felt in her whenever he brought it up.