Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  —

  AND THEN IT WAS HIS BIRTHDAY, the big forty, and he would rather have slept through the day, but woke to God shuffling off his chest where she slept and clattering down the stairs to Mathilde, who’d been up before dawn trying not to make a sound in the kitchen. Back door opened, closed. Soon enough, she was in the room, pulling his nicest summer suit out of the closet.

  “Shower,” Mathilde said. “Put this on. Don’t complain. I have a surprise.”

  He did, but it felt bad, waistband so tight it might have been a girdle. She bundled him into the car and they set off through the still-faint dew, illuminated by dawn. She handed him a hot egg muffin with excellent goat cheese, and tomatoes and basil from her garden.

  “Where’s God?” he said.

  She said, beatifically, with a great swoop of her arms, “All around us.”

  “Hardeehar,” he said.

  “Your puppy is with the neighbor’s girl and will return to us bathed and coddled and wearing tiny pink bows above her ears. Relax.”

  He settled in, let the landscape pour all over him. This countryside, bled of humans, was entirely right for his mood. He dozed off and awoke to the car parking, a fine bright morning, a smooth lake, something that seemed like an excessive brown barn in the distance. His wife carried their picnic basket to the edge of the lake under a willow so old it no longer wept, just sort of bore its fate with thickened equanimity. Deviled eggs and champagne, vegetable terrine and Mathilde’s own focaccia, Manchego cheese and bright red cherries from their orchard. Two tiny black-bottom cupcakes, chocolate and cream cheese, his with a candle she lit.

  He blew it out, hoping for something inexpressible. For something finer, more worthy of him.

  Someone came around the building ringing a cowbell and Mathilde packed up slowly. He used his wife as his crutch as they crossed the meadow, all stubble and field mice, to the opera house.

  It was cool inside, and around them there was a sea of whitehairs. “Beware,” Mathilde whispered in his ear. “Geriatrism. Contagious, mortal. Don’t breathe too deeply.”

  He laughed for the first time, it felt like, in weeks.

  The long, tender, non-chords of the strings tuning. He could listen to such anticipatory non-music for hours and leave this place feeling replenished, he thought.

  The sides of the opera house began to slide shut against the day, the murmuring hushed, and the conductor came out and raised her arms. She shot them down to an upwelling of what? Not quite music. Sound. Astringent, strange, wild; and yet it slowly resolved itself out of cacophony into a sort of melody. He leaned forward and closed his eyes and felt the mildew that had grown itself over his being these weeks slowly wiped away by the sound.

  The opera was called Nero. It was a story of Rome burning, but the fire was offstage, and this was not Nero the emperor, but a doppelgänger Nero, Nero the keeper of the wine cellars, who could have been the emperor’s twin brother, who lived in the palace below the king. It was less a story than a great creature surfacing from the deep; it was more sudden audible wave than narrative. It made Lancelot’s head spin. True recognition does this. Dizzies.

  At intermission, he turned to his wife and she smiled as if trying to see him from a very high place. Watchful, waiting. He whispered, “Oh, M., I can barely breathe.”

  —

  OUT IN THE COURTYARD, stunned by sunlight, the soft, cool wind among the poplars. Mathilde fetched them sparkling water. Alone at a café table, a woman recognized him: this was happening more and more. He held a general taxonomy of faces in his mind and could usually place people within a second; not this woman. She laughed, assured him she didn’t know him; she had seen the profile in Esquire. “How nice,” Mathilde said, when the woman went off to the restrooms. “A little bug-zap of fame.” Of course, these were his people, theater people. It was to be expected that some of them might have known something about him, but still the woman’s starstruck blush had fed something hungry in him.

  Contrails in the blue sky. Something beginning to break in him. A good breaking; not, this time, bone.

  In the second act, the story was even more incidental, a tone poem; dancers emerged with rope to become the fire embodied. By the hot-iron gush on his tongue, he understood he’d bit his lip.

  Curtain. Fin.

  Mathilde put her cold hands on his face. “Oh,” she said. “You’re weeping.”

  —

  FOR MOST OF THE WAY HOME he kept his eyes closed, not because he didn’t want to see his wife or the green-blue-gold of the day, but because he couldn’t bear losing the opera.

  When he opened them, Mathilde’s face was drooping. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw her without her smile. The light was such he could see the crazing in her skin by her eyes and nose, fine gray hairs in an electric fizz around her head.

  “Medieval Madonna,” he said. “In gouache. Haloed in gold leaf. Thank you.”

  “Happy birthday, friend of my heart,” she said.

  “It was happy. It is. That opera changed me.”

  “I thought it would,” she said. “I’m glad it did. You were getting to be kind of a drag.”

  Spectacular burst of grapefruit as the sun burned itself out. They watched it on their veranda with another bottle of champagne. He picked God up and kissed her on the crown. He wanted to dance, and so he went in and put on Radiohead and swept Mathilde out of her chair with his strong side and pulled her to him.

  “Let me guess,” Mathilde said, her cheek on his shoulder. “Now you want to write an opera.”

  “Yes,” he said, breathing her in.

  “You’ve never lacked for ambition,” she said, and laughed, and it was a sad sound, echoing against the flagstone and the flit of bats above.

  —

  NOW THE HOURS that he would have spent moping, watching voice-overed destruction or pinkish naked people working up a sweat, were passed in a frenzy of research. He spent an entire night reading what he could find about the composer.

  One Leo Sen. Sen, surname South Asian, derived from the Sanskrit for army, bestowed upon those who did an honorable deed. Lived in Nova Scotia. Fairly new artist, having compositions performed for only about six years, fairly young. Hard to tell, because there were no images of Leo Sen online, only one CV from two years earlier and a smattering of praise for his work. The New York Times listed him as an exciting foreign composer; Opera News had a two-paragraph description of a work titled Paracelsus. There were a few audio clips of a work in progress on someone’s amateurish website, but it was from 2004, so long ago as to have possibly been student work. Inasmuch as a person can be a ghost on the Internet, Leo Sen had made himself into one.

  Genius hermit, Lancelot pictured. Monomaniacal, wild-eyed, made mad by his own brilliance or, no, semiautistic. Burly beard. Loincloth. Socially incompetent. Savage at heart.

  Lancelot e-mailed nearly everyone he knew to find out if anybody knew him. Not a soul did.

  He e-mailed the festival director up at the opera house in the cow fields to see if she would give him contact information.

  Distillation of her response: What’s in it for us?

  Distillation of his: First pass on a possible collaboration?

  Distillation of hers: You have my blessing, here you go.

  —

  SEPTEMBER? ALREADY? Leaves flaked off the trees. God grew a fluffy underlayer of down. Lancelot still had a hitch in his walk from his weakling leg. His narcissism so vast that it seemed the world itself had gone tentative and wobbly to mimic his body.

  They’d gone to the city for the week, come home to the country for the weekend. At night, every night, he wrote a short e-mail to Leo Sen. No response yet.

  Mathilde was wary, watchful. When he finally came to bed, she turned to him in her sleep, clinging, she who never wanted to be touched while she slept. He woke with her hai
r in his mouth, an arm somehow gone missing until he sat upright and felt the blood coming painfully back.

  At last, a day in early October, a new chill in the air, he got Leo Sen on the telephone. The voice was not what he was expecting. It was soft and hesitant, British accent, which surprised him at first; and on second thought, well, India had been colonized; the educated class certainly would have fine-grained BBC inflections. Was this racist? He wasn’t sure.

  “You said Lancelot Satterwhite?” Leo Sen said. “This is a thrill.”

  “A thrill for me,” Lancelot said too loudly in his discomfort. He had imagined this so often it was strange, now, to hear the soft voice, to be told, first, that he was admired. He was expecting Leo Sen to be isolated in his genius, to be irritated by contact. Leo Sen explained: There was no Internet on the island where he lived, and the phone worked only when someone was around to answer it. It was an intentional community. Dedicated to humble daily work and contemplation.

  “Sounds like a monastery,” Lancelot said.

  “Or a nunnery,” Leo said. “Feels like it sometimes, too.”

  Lancelot laughed. Oh! Leo had a sense of humor, what a relief. In his gladness, Lancelot found himself describing his reaction to Leo’s work at the opera house in the summer, how it rocked something in him. He used the word great, he used the phrases sea change and sui generis.

  “I’m so glad,” Leo Sen said.

  “I would do almost anything to collaborate on an opera with you,” Lancelot said.

  The silence was so long he almost hung up, defeated. Well, good effort, Lancelot, it wasn’t in the stars, sometimes things don’t work out, back up on that horse, head down and into the wind, onward, pardner.

  “Sure,” said Leo Sen. “Yes, of course.”

  Before they hung up, they agreed on a three-week residency at an artists’ colony for them both in November. Lancelot was owed a favor and he thought he could get them in. The first day or so, Leo had to finish a commission for a string quartet, but they could start thinking, talking things over. Then they would have endless, relentless work for the next three weeks until they had some ideas, maybe even a stab at the book.

  “What do you think?” said Leo’s voice on the line. “The concept part is actually the most difficult for me.”

  Lancelot looked at the bulletin board in his office, where he’d pinned at least a hundred ideas, a thousand ideas. “I think the concept part won’t be a problem for us,” he said.

  —

  IN THE MORNING, Mathilde went whirring off on an eighty-mile bike ride. Lancelot undressed and looked at himself in the mirror. Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life. Now, though, the wrinkles in the skin of his scrotum, the swirl of gray in the chest hair, the fetal neck wattle. One chink in the armor and death seeps in. He turned this way and that until he found the angle that made him look the way he’d been before his impromptu flight down the stairs in the spring.

  Over his shoulder, he saw God on the bed, watching him, her chin on her paws.

  He blinked. He gave a brilliant grin at the Lancelot he saw in the mirror, winking and nodding and whistling through his teeth as he put his clothes back on, even brushing imaginary dust off the shoulders of his sweater, picking the pills, making a satisfied grunt before hurrying off as if remembering an urgent chore.

  —

  AND THEN IT WAS NOVEMBER and they were spinning past the thwarted graying fields, over the Hudson, into Vermont, New Hampshire. A hush in the air, a gathering of energy.

  In his feverish preparations, Lancelot had lost ten pounds. He’d spent hours on the stationary bicycle, because only movement made him think. Now his knees jerked to some music inaudible to Mathilde, who drove.

  “I’ve narrowed the ideas down to five, M.,” he said. “Listen to this. Retelling of Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace.’ Or ‘The Little Mermaid,’ the opposite of Disney. Andersen, but extended to even more extreme weirdness. Or the trials of Job, but kooky, funny-dark. Or interlocking stories of soldiers in Afghanistan that together tell a kind of longer story, like Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Or The Sound and the Fury in opera form.”

  Mathilde bit her bottom lip with her long incisors and looked only at the road.

  “Kooky?” she said. “Funny-dark? People don’t really think opera and funny. You think fat ladies, solemnity, Rhinemaidens, women killing themselves for the love of a good man.”

  “Opera has a long tradition of humor. Opera buffa. It used to be the primary entertainment for the masses. It’d be nice to democratize it again, make it popular entertainment. Make the mailman sing it on his rounds. He looks as if he’s hiding a beautiful voice under that little blue uniform.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But you’re known for your lyricism. You’re serious, Lotto. Exuberant, sometimes, but not funny.”

  “You don’t think I’m funny?”

  “I think you’re hilarious. I think your work isn’t really funny, though.”

  “Not even Gacy?” he said.

  “Gacy was dark. Wry. Humorous in a bleak way. Not funny, per se.”

  “You think I can’t be funny?” he said.

  “I think you can be dark, wry, and humorous in a bleak way,” she said. “For sure.”

  “Splendid. I will prove you wrong. Now, what do you think of my ideas?”

  She made a face and shrugged.

  “Oh,” he said. “None of those.”

  “Lots of retellings,” she said.

  “I mean, not the Afghanistan one.”

  “No,” Mathilde said. “True. That’s the only great idea. Maybe too on-the-nose, though. Too obvious. Make it more allegorical.”

  “Brank your tongue, witchy-wife,” he said.

  Mathilde laughed. “Maybe this is something that both of you will have to agree on anyway. You and this Leo Sen of yours.”

  “Leo. I feel like a teenager all dressed up in cummerbund and bow tie, heading off to the winter dance,” he said.

  “Well, my love, this is how people sometimes feel when they meet you,” Mathilde said gently, gently.

  His cabin was small, stone, with a fireplace, not so far from the main house where dinner and breakfast would be, and he worried for the first time about ice, about falling with his still-flimsy leg. There was a desk, a chair, and a bed that was normal size, which meant his legs would hang off up to the shins.

  Mathilde sat at the edge of it and bounced. The frame squeaked like a mouse. Lancelot sat next to her and bounced to her offbeat. He put his hand on her leg and moved it, bounce by bounce, up her thigh until his finger was pushing against her groin, and then he hooked it under her elastic and found an anticipatory lushness there. She stood, and he stopped bouncing, and without pulling the curtains, she pushed the crotch of her panties to the side and straddled him. He put his head up her shirt, loving the companionable darkness there.

  “Hello, Private,” she said, teasing the tip of him. “Atten-hut.”

  “Three weeks,” he said, as she escorted him in. She moved her hips like a cowgirl. He said, “Long time without release.”

  “Not for me. I bought a vibrator,” she said breathlessly. “I named him Lancelittle.”

  But this wasn’t the right thing to say, perhaps, because he felt pressured and had to turn her around on her hands and knees to complete things, and the punctuation was a pallid little orgasm that left him discontented.

  She called from the bathroom, where she was soaping herself with sink water, “I’m feeling queasy about leaving you here. Last time I let you go away from me for a little while, you came back broken.” She returned to him, pressed his cheeks in her hands. “My eccentric old man, thinking you could fly.”

  “This time, only my words will fly,” he said solemnly. They bot
h cracked up. Almost twenty years together and if blazing heat had turned to warmth, humor, it was less wild but easier to sustain.

  She said tentatively, “There will be brilliant women here, Lotto. And I know how much you love women. Or did. Once. I mean, before me.”

  He frowned. Never in their lives together had she been jealous. It was undignified of her. Of him. Of their marriage. He withdrew a little. “Oh, please,” he said, and she shook it off and kissed him deeply, and said, “If you need me, I’ll come. I’m four hours away, but I’ll be here in three.” And then she went out the door; she was gone.

  —

  ALONE! The twilit forest watched him through the windows. He did push-ups out of exuberance because it wasn’t yet dinnertime. He unpacked his notebooks, his pens. He went out to the circular drive around his cottage and pulled a fern out by the roots and planted it in a white-speckled navy mug and put it on the mantel, even though it was already curling at the corners with the unexpected indoor heat. When the dinner bell rang, he limped up the dusky dirt road, past the meadow with its statue of a deer. Or no, a real and rather springy deer. Past the hayrick turned to chicken house in the raspberry canes, past the garden replete with pumpkins glowing in the dim, the overgrown stalks of Brussels sprouts, to the old farmhouse from which delicious food smells were emanating.

  The two tables were already filled and he stood in the French doors until someone waved him over, touching an empty seat. He sat and the whole table turned, blinking, as if a sudden bright light had clicked on.

  These people were so beautiful! He didn’t know why he had been nervous. This frizzled and famous poet who was showing everybody the perfect cicada husk on her palm. This German couple who could be twins, with their identical rimless eyeglasses and hair as if it had been cropped with a sling blade in their sleep. This ginger-headed boy barely out of college, with the sudden pink wash of debilitating shyness: poet, clearly. This novelist, blond, athletic, not bad despite the breeder’s gut and purple bags under her eyes. Nowhere near Mathilde, but young enough to be the kind of person who might give Mathilde pause. She did have lovely white forearms, as if cut from polished spruce wood. Once upon a time, when every woman dazzled with particular beauty, her forearms would have been plenty for him, and young Lotto returned for a moment, sexy hound dog, in sucking orgy, the novelist’s round belly with the silvery stretch marks on it. Lovely. He passed her the pitcher of water and shook the image away.