Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  “Those drugs of yours spectacular?” she said. “They seem pretty spectacular.”

  “It’s time,” he said. “It’s more than time. We’ve got some cash now, a house, you’re ripe still. Your eggs may be getting a little wrinkly, I don’t know. Forty. We’re risking some springs going sproing in the kid’s head. Though it may not be so bad to have a dumb kid. Smart ones are off as soon as they’re able to escape. Dumbos stick around longer. On the other hand, if we wait too long, we’ll be cutting his pizza for him until we’re ninety-three. No, we got to do this thing ASAP. As soon as we get home, I’m going to impregnate the heck out of you.”

  “Most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said.

  Down the dirt road, up the gravel drive. Graceful dripping limbs of cherry trees, oh, gosh, they lived in The Cherry Orchard. He stood at the back door, watching Mathilde open the French door to the veranda, go down the grass to the new and sparkling pool. There were two tanned and muscled men gleaming in the last sun, unrolling a strip of sod. Mathilde in her white dress, her cropped platinum hair, her slim body, the sunburst sky, the shining muscle men. It was unbearable. Tableau vivant.

  He sat suddenly. A hot dampness overcame his eyes: all this beauty, the stun of his luck. Also, the pain that had just surfaced, a nuclear submarine out of the deep.

  —

  HE WOKE AT HIS USUAL TIME, 5:26, drifting from a dream in which he was in a bathtub barely bigger than his body, and it was full of tapioca pudding. Scrabble as he might, he couldn’t get out of it. The pain made him nauseated and his groaning woke Mathilde. She hovered over him with her terrible breath, her hair tickling his cheek.

  When she came back with a tray of scrambled eggs and a bagel with cream cheese and scallions and black coffee and a rose in a vase with dew all over it, he saw the excitement in her face.

  “You prefer me as an invalid,” he said.

  “For the first time in our lives together,” she said, “you’re neither a black suck of depression nor a swirl of manic energy. It’s nice. Maybe we can even watch an entire movie together now that you’re stuck with me. Maybe,” she said breathlessly, reddening [poor Mathilde!], “we could collaborate on a novel or something.”

  He tried to smile, but overnight the world had turned, and her translucence today seemed anemic, no longer confected of sugar and clarified butter. The eggs were greasy, the coffee overstrong, and even the rose from his wife’s garden emitted an odor that cloyed and put him off.

  “Or not,” she said. “It was just an idea.”

  “Sorry, my love,” he said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”

  She kissed him on the forehead, then rested her cool cheek on it. “You’re hot. I’ll get you one of your magical pills,” she said, and he had to hold his impatience in as she fumbled for the water, the cap of the bottle, the cotton, the tablet that gloriously dissolved on his tongue.

  —

  SHE CAME OUT TO THE HAMMOCK where he was contemplating darkly, though the sun shimmied and played in the bright leaves and the pool suckled at its gutters. Three glasses into a bottle of bourbon; it was past four, who cared? He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered. He had put on Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and it was blasting out of his special speakers in the dining room all the way out to him in the hammock.

  He wanted to call his mother, to let her sweet voice swathe him, but instead he watched a documentary about Krakatoa on his laptop. He was imagining what the world would look like under volcanic ash. As if some mad child had come along and scribbled black and gray over the landscape: the streams gone greasy, the trees powder puffs of ash, greensward a slick of gleaming oil. An image of Hades. Fields of punishment, screams in the night, the Asphodel Meadows. The dead clacketing their bones.

  Luxuriating in the horror, he was. In the unhappiness of being broken. There was not not a kind of wallowing joy in this.

  “Love,” his wife said gently. “I’ve brought you some iced tea.”

  “No iced tea,” he said, and, surprise, his tongue wasn’t working as well as it ought. It was thick. He made as if to look cross-eyed at it, then said, “Whether the weather be cold, whether the weather be hot, we’ll be together whatever the weather whether we like it or not.”

  “Too true,” Mathilde said. And now he saw she was wearing her ancient blue skirt, her hippie gear from a million years ago when they were new to each other and he jumped her bones four times a day. She was alluring, still, his wifey. She crawled on the hammock carefully, but the motion still sent a million fangs deep into his broken bones, and he groaned but bit back his shout and could still barely see when she hiked her skirt to her waist and took off her tank top. A fillip of interest down in his always interested fillip. But the pain ground it down again. She cajoled, but to no avail.

  She gave up. “You must’ve broken your peenbone, too,” she joked.

  It was all he could do to keep himself from flipping her out of the hammock.

  —

  A FASCINATING PBS SPECIAL on black holes: the suck and draw so strong it can gulp down light. Light! He drank deeply, watching; he kept his own council. There were problems at the rehearsal; they needed him, they said; there was a difficult performance of The Springs in Boston and a reportedly great series of Walls, Ceiling, Floor in Saint Louis. He generally went to all that invited him, and yet he couldn’t move from this cottage in the middle of cornfields and cows. Lancelot Satterwhite was needed. And Lancelot Satterwhite was not there. He had never not been there. He might as well already be dead.

  A clip-clop in the library. There was a horse in the house? But no, it was Mathilde in her cycling shoes coming in, in her silly padded trou. She shined with health and sweat. She stank of armpit and garlic.

  “Baby,” Mathilde said, taking his glass away, turning off the show. “It’s been two weeks and you’ve drunk four bottles of Blanton’s. No more documentaries on disaster. You need to do something to fill up your time.”

  He sighed, rubbed his face with his good hand.

  “Write something,” she commanded.

  “Not inspired,” he said.

  “Write an essay,” she said.

  “Essays are for chumps,” he said.

  “Write a play about how you hate the world,” she said.

  “I don’t hate the world. The world hates me,” he said.

  “Boo-hoo,” she laughed.

  She couldn’t know, he thought. Don’t punish her. Plays don’t just get ground out. You need to be filled with a hot kind of urgency to make it right. He gave her a pained smile and took a sip from the bottle.

  “Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?” she said.

  Direct hit. He laughed. “Viper,” he said.

  “Falstaff,” she said. “You’re even getting fat. All that running for nothing. And I thought we’d banished it for good. Come on, kid, buck up, stop drinking, get right in the head.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he said. “You are in robust good health. You exercise two hours a day! I get winded going out to the hammock. So until my benighted bones knit themselves to a semblance of solidity, I shall exercise my right to intoxication and bile and mooning.”

  “How about a Fourth of July party,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a question,” she said.

  And then, as if magic, here he was three days later among shish kebabs and multicolored sparklers going off in those gorgeous, pawlike children’s hands as they ran across the acres that Mathilde had cropped herself on her roaring mower. There was nothing that miracle woman couldn’t do, he thought, then thought about how this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.

  There was a whole keg and corn on the cob and veggie bratwurst and wate
rmelon and Mathilde in a pale low-cut dress, looking beyond beautiful, nestling her head beneath his chin and kissing him on the neck so that all night he carried around a red lipstick mark on his throat like a wound.

  All of his friends swirling around in the dusk, in the night. Chollie with Danica. Susannah like a Roman candle herself in a red dress, and her new girlfriend, Zora, young and black with a tremendously beautiful Afro, kissing under the weeping willow. Samuel with his wife and their triplets wobbling around with watermelon rinds in their hands, and Arnie with his newest bar-back teenager, Xanthippe, almost as stunning as Mathilde had been in her heyday, black bob and a yellow dress so short the toddlers could certainly see her thong and dewy loins. Lotto imagined sprawling on the grass to get his own eyeful, but inversion meant tremendous pain and he remained upright.

  The fireworks blister-popping in the sky, the party sounds. [Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.] Lotto watched himself as if from a distance, playing his own stiffly acted role of jocular clown. He had a terrible headache.

  He went into the bathroom, and the bright lights, the sight of his flushed cheeks and his air splints made him woozy, and he let the smile out of his face, looked at the drooping mask that remained. Midway on life’s journey. He said in a low voice, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.” He was ridiculous. Lugubrious and pretentious at the same time. Lugentious. Pretubrious. He poked at the belly the size of a six-month-old baby glued to his midsection. When Chollie had seen him, he’d said, “You okay there, fella? You’re looking kind of fat.”

  “Hello, Pot,” Lancelot had said. “You’re looking black,” which was true, Chollie’s girth strained the buttons of his four-hundred-dollar shirt. But then again, Chollie had never been a beautiful boy; Lancelot had had much farther to fall. Danica, chic in the one-shoulder designer dress that Chollie’s money had bought her, said, “Leave him be, Choll. The man’s body is broken head to toe. If there’s any time in a man’s life that he gets to get fat, this is it.”

  He couldn’t bear to go back out there, Lancelot decided, to see those people he was pretty sure at times he hated. He went into their room and undressed as well as he could and climbed into bed.

  He was in a murky anteroom of sleep when the door opened, the hall light blasting him awake, then closed, and there was a body in the room that wasn’t his. He waited, panicky. He could barely move! If someone crawled into bed with him to ravish him, he couldn’t flee! But whoever it was was two whoevers and they had no interest in the bed, because there were some low laughs and some whispers and the shush of fabric, and they began to pound out a rhythm against the bathroom door. A kind of syncopated slap-thump with some surprising percussive ughs.

  That door was really rattling away, Lancelot thought. He should tighten the knob tomorrow.

  And then came the thought, a knife of grief in his heart, that once he would have been the one to bring some girl in to do her, and it would have been far, far better than this girl was being done, poor thing, though she seemed to be having a good time. Still, there was something a little fakey about her moaning. Once, even, he would have gotten up and made an orgy out of the event, joining so smoothly it would have been as if he had been invited. Now he lay puddled in his broke-bone carapace, critiquing the performance, soft as a hermit crab. Sure of the dark, he made a hermit crab’s frowning whiskered face, snapping claws with his good hand.

  The girl said, “Aaaaaaah!” and the guy said, “Urrrgh!” and there was more hushed laughing.

  “Oh my god, I needed that,” the guy whispered. “These parties are such shitshows when people bring their kids.”

  “I know,” she said. “Poor Lotto watching those babies with that longing on his face. And Mathilde so skinny these days she’s getting ugly. She keeps letting it go, she’s going to be some kind of witchy old hag. Like, I don’t know, but Botox exists for a reason.”

  “I was always confused why anyone thought she was hot. She’s just tall and blond and skinny, never pretty,” he said. “I’m a connoisseur.” The sound of flesh slapped. Buttocks? Lotto thought. [Thigh.]

  “She’s interesting-looking. Remember how that was a thing in the early nineties? We were all so jealous. Remember when Lotto and Mathilde had the grandest love story ever? And their parties! Christ! I kind of feel bad for them now.”

  The door opened. A pumpkin-colored head, balding. Aha, Arnie. Followed out by a bare shoulder, jagged with bones. Danica. Old affair revisited. Poor Chollie. Lotto felt sick that matrimony could seem so cheap to some people.

  Weary, weary, sick to death, Lancelot stood and dressed again. Those people could rabbit themselves until they died of exhaustion, but he wouldn’t let them mealymouth Mathilde and him. How appalling, to be pitied by such gnats. Adulterer gnats. Worse.

  He came downstairs again and stood in the door with his wife and said cheery good-byes to the friends, the children passed out in the parents’ arms, the drunk adults being driven, the merely tipsy driving themselves. He spackled so much extra charm onto Arnie and Danica that they both blushed and began flirting shyly back, Danica hooking her fingers through his belt loop when she kissed him good night.

  “Alone again,” Mathilde said, watching the last taillights wink away. “For a while, I thought we lost you. And then I would have known we were really in trouble. Lotto Satterwhite intentionally missing a party equals Lotto Satterwhite hacking off a leg.”

  “In truth, I just grinned,” he said, “and bore it.”

  She turned to him, narrow-eyed. She let her dress fall off her shoulders, pool on the floor. She wore nothing underneath. “I just bared it,” she said.

  “Not boring,” he said.

  “Darling, bore me,” she said. “As in drill.”

  “Like a wild boar,” he said. But he was more, to her dismay, like a tired piglet snoozing mid-suckle.

  —

  AND THEN THE SWIFTER DOWNWARD SWOOP. All things had lost their savor. He had his casts taken off, but the left side of his body was limp and tender pink and the texture of an overcooked egg noodle. Mathilde looked at him standing before her naked; she closed one eye. “Demigod,” she said. She closed the other. “Dweeb.” He laughed but was smacked right in the vanity. He was too weak yet to go home to the city. He longed for pollution, noise, light.

  The things he’d discovered online had lost their luster. There were only so many cute baby videos one could take, after all, or cats falling off high places. The sun’s very shine had been besmirched! And his wife’s beauty, which had been so unimpeachable, was irritable, weakened. Such thighs she had, like jamones serranos, salty and overly firm. In morning light, her facial lines had been etched by too strong a hand. Her lips thinning, her eyeteeth surprisingly long, catching on the rims of mugs, on soup spoons, it made him cringe. And always hovering! Blowing on him her breath of impatience! He took to staying in bed past wake-up time, waiting for Mathilde to go off on her run or to her yoga class, off on her bike rides out into the countryside, so that he could go back to sleep.

  It was almost noon. He held his body still, hearing Mathilde creep in the bedroom door. Then the coverlet lifted, and something soft and furry clambered up his body and licked him, chin to schnozz.

  He was laughing when he saw the sweet face, like an earmuff with eyeballs and triangular felted ears.

  “Oh, you,” he said to the puppy. And then he looked at Mathilde, and he couldn’t help it, there were hot tears in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

  “She’s a Shiba Inu,” Mathilde said, and crawled to his side. “What’s her name?”

  Dog, he wanted to say. He’d always wanted to call a dog Dog. It was meta. It was funny.

  Oddly, thrillingly, the word came out as God.

  “God. Nice to meet you, God,” she said. She picked the puppy up and looked in her face. “Most sensible
epistemology I’ve ever heard.”

  —

  THERE IS LITTLE that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time. For a week, he was practically happy again. Such delight he took in the snarfle of God’s hunger, the way she took each piece of kibble out of her bowl to eat off the top of his foot. The pained way she pinched her back legs to her front and flagged her tail, and her little arsehole apertured and bulged, and then she squinted like a philosopher when she eliminated. How she sat quietly with him, chewing on the cuffs of his pants, as he lay on his back and dreamt on a blanket spread in the grass. How he always had something soft under his palm as soon as he called out “God!” which sounded like the first curse he’d ever said in his life, but was not, as it was a proper noun. How he was rewarded with joy, tiny needle teeth in the meat of his thumb. Even her shrill scream when she was tangled in her leash or kept in her crate for the night made him laugh.

  He did not fall out of love with the dog, per se; it was merely that luster dulled under the grind of the daily. God could not bridge the distance between his hermit life as a broken man and the life he longed to live again in the city, all interviews and dinners out and being recognized on the subway. She couldn’t knit his bones together faster. Her small quick tongue could not stanch all wounds. Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.

  Within a week, he felt himself riding the dip again. The thoughts were not serious when he imagined baking a soufflé out of the rat poison Mathilde kept in the garden house or grabbing the wheel out of Mathilde’s hands when she let him come with her to the grocery store, veering over this cliffside, into that stand of maples. They weren’t serious, but they surfaced more and more frequently until he felt carbonated with dark ideas. He was sinking again.