Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  Lancelot felt tears start to his eyes. It was so exactly right. The Germans saw the gleam, and both of them—like budgerigars on their perch—sidled up and hugged Lancelot around the waist.

  —

  ON THE FIFTH DAY of artistic stymie, Lancelot woke to a miserable drizzly dawn and took a bike and coasted down the hill to the town gym’s pool.

  The water made everything better. He was not a good swimmer, but the thrashing helped, and he spent longer and longer with each lap just gliding underwater. It washed over him, calmed him, brought him back to where he had been in the car, coming to the residency. Perhaps it was the oxygen depletion. Perhaps his rangy body had finally gotten the exercise it needed, especially in light of his enforced celibacy. Perhaps, only, he had exhausted himself to the point where his anxieties had fallen away. [False. He should have known a gift when he saw one.] But when he came to the end of the pool, touched the wall, pulled himself up, he knew what the opera would be. It rose before him, gleaming, more real than the water it overlay.

  He sat so long at the end of the pool, having forgotten himself, that his skin was dry when he looked up to see Leo standing beside him, still in his jeans and white button-down and moccasins. “They’d told me you were down here splashing about. I’ve come to fetch you in a little car I’ve borrowed. So sorry to keep you waiting for so very, very long, but you know it means that we’re both keen to begin. If it is convenient for you, I’m ready,” Leo said. He moved, and at last his face, which had been silhouetted by the sun coming directly through the window, was visible.

  “Antigone,” Lancelot said, and smiled up at him.

  “Sorry?” Leo said.

  “Antigone,” Lancelot said. “Spark.”

  “Antigone?” Leo said.

  “Antigone, underground. Our opera. Antigone who hadn’t hanged herself, or she had tried, but before she succeeded, the gods had cursed her with immortality. First they gave it as a gift, for hewing to their laws against those of men. And then, when she railed against the gods, it turned into a taunt. She’s in her cave still, even today. I was thinking of the Cumaean Sybil, who lived for a thousand years, so long that she shrank and was put in an urn. Eliot quoted it as epigraph for ‘The Waste Land,’ from Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, ‘For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar. When the boys asked her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she said, “I want to die.” ’”

  Long silence, pool lapping at the gutters. A woman hummed to herself as she did a slow froglike kick on her back.

  “Oh my god,” Leo said.

  “Yeah,” Lancelot said. “Also, Antigone in the original was on the side of the gods and against men, as in the order of men, as in Creon’s dictates against her brother’s being honored by burial, but I think we can extend this to a sense of—”

  “Misandry.”

  “No, not misandry, but perhaps misanthropy. She scorns the gods for leaving her, humans for their flaws. She has shrunk so small she is beneath humans, literally beneath their feet, and yet she’s above them. Time has purified her. She has become the spirit of humanity. We should change the title. What about Anti-gone? Play with the fact that she’s still here? No?”

  He had led Leo into the locker room and was toweling himself off exuberantly. He took off his trunks. When he looked up, Leo’s eyes were enormous, and he was sitting on his bench, his hands folded in his lap as he watched naked Lancelot. He was pinkish in the face.

  “Antigonist,” Leo said, looking down.

  “Wait. The Antigonad,” Lancelot said, first as a joke because, well, he was just then pulling up his boxer briefs. All right, it was true, he had lingered a little in the buff: there had been an internal hot flash of vanity and gratitude for being looked at. It had been so long since a stranger had seen him naked. Well, there had been that run of Equus in the mid-nineties, but it had played for only twelve nights and the theater had only two hundred seats. But when he said the joke, he found he liked it. “The Antigonad,” he said again. “Maybe it’s a love story. A love story and she’s stuck in a cave. The lovers can’t touch.”

  “For now,” said Leo. “We can always change if we find ourselves to be pro-gonad, I suppose.” Was that suggestive? It was hard to tell with this boy.

  “Leo, Leo,” Lancelot said. “You are as dry as vermouth.”

  —

  AND THEN CAME THE PROLIX PERIOD, when they did not stop talking. For four days, now five, now seven. Without really writing anything yet. They worked in strange twilit limbo. Lancelot always an early riser, Leo up all night, sleeping until two in the afternoon, they compromised by meeting at Lancelot’s when Leo was awake. They worked until Lancelot fell asleep, full-clothed, waking briefly only when the door blasted cold into the cabin as Leo left.

  Lancelot read the original Sophocles play aloud while Leo lay on his hearth before the cheery fire and dreamt, listening. And then, for context, Lancelot read aloud the other two parts of the triumvirate, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. He read aloud the fragments of Euripides. He read the Séamus Heaney adaptation aloud; they read Anne Carson, their heads together. They listened in silence to the Orff opera, the Honegger–Cocteau opera, the Theodorakis opera, the Traetta opera. At supper, they sat engaged, tight and thick, and they spoke of their Antigone, whom they called Go, as if she were a friend.

  Leo hadn’t yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy’s own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo’s jaw in profile, devastating; the way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape. The smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleachy. [The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.]

  —

  THE WEATHER CONSPIRED. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page. The linger of wood smoke on the back of the tongue.

  The collaborators were in so deep that when Natalie tried to sit with them for dinner, Lancelot barely smiled at her before turning back to sketch out what he was saying to Leo on a piece of scrap paper. And Natalie sat back in her chair, tearing up—their friendship mostly in the past, but oh! he still had the power to hurt her with his disregard—until she smiled it away. She watched Lotto. She was listening. There was an electricity here; both men were flushed, shoulders close. If Lotto had been paying attention to Natalie, he would have understand that there would be talk later, the old friend network sparked by what she’d say she’d seen between the two men. At last she nodded and bussed her tray and left; and as this was her last night at the residency, he wouldn’t see her again. [Her death would be soon and sudden. Ski tumble; embolism.]

  The German sculptors had returned to Nuremberg without Lancelot’s noticing it, and a pale young woman had taken their place. She painted one-story-tall oils of the shadows of objects, not the objects themselves. The blond novelist went home to her house full of boys. The colony contracted in winter: now there was only one table of artists at dinner. The frizzled poet wore a face of disappointment when she came in night after night to see the collaborators together. “Lancelot, my dear. Won’t you talk anymore to anyone but that boy?” she said once, leaning close, when Leo went in to fetch the dessert tray for the group.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll come back to you soon, Emmylinn. It’s just the initial stages. The head-over-heels phase.”

  She rested her papery cheek on his upper arm, and said, “I understand. But dovey, it is not healthy to be so immersed for so long. You need to come up for air.”

  —

  AND THEN THERE WAS THE NOTE in the office from his wife, hurtfully terse, and Lancelot felt a dip in him, and he hurried down to the laundry
room to call Mathilde.

  “M.,” he said, when she picked up, “I’m so sorry. I’ve lost track of everything but this project. It’s all-consuming.”

  “No sign of you for a week, my love,” she said. “No call. You’ve forgotten me.”

  “No,” he said. “No. Of course not. I’m just in deep.”

  “In deep,” she repeated slowly. “You are in deep something. The question is: In deep what?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She sighed and said, “Thanksgiving’s tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “We had planned for you to come back for the night so we can host. Our first in the country. I was going to pick you up at eight tomorrow morning. Rachel and Elizabeth and the twins are coming. Sallie’s flying up. Chollie and Danica. Samuel, his triplets, but not Fiona—did you know she’d filed for divorce? Shocker, out of nowhere. You should call him. He misses you. Anyway, I’ve made pies.”

  The silence moved from interrogative to accusatory.

  At last, he said, “I believe just this once that my beloveds can celebrate Thanksgiving without me. I will be giving thanks for you by working. Thereby being able to buy many more decades of Tofurky that you will all insert into your gobbets.”

  “How mean. And sad,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to be mean. And not sad for me,” he said. “After the summer I had, M., I’m bloody delighted to be working.”

  “Bloody,” she said. “I didn’t know they used Anglicisms in New Hampshire.”

  “Leo,” he said.

  “Leo,” she said. “Leo. Leo. Leo. Leo. Listen. I can cancel on them all and drive up there and find a bed-and-breakfast,” she said. “We can gorge on pies. And watch terrible movies. And fuck.”

  And then a long silence and she said, “I guess not.”

  He sighed. “You can’t hate me, Mathilde, when I say no. This is my work.”

  She said nothing, eloquently.

  “This is probably the wrong time to bring it up,” he said.

  “Probably,” she said.

  “But Leo and I were able to extend our residency for two additional weeks. I’ll be back right before Christmas. And that’s a promise.”

  “Nifty,” she said, and hung up, and when he called again and again and again for the third time, she wouldn’t answer.

  —

  IT IS NOT THAT HE FORGOT about the tiff with Mathilde, it was simply that when he went outside the sun had come out and the brightness against the snow and ice made the world seem as if carved of stone, marble, and mica, and the raw minerality of what had been so soft and fresh returned him to Go’s cave, as everything he saw and heard and felt now seemed urgently dovetailed to the world of Go. Two nights earlier, after dinner when it came time to share work, a video artist’s time-lapse hand-drawn movie of a village being built, being razed by fire, being rebuilt, seemed utterly right for their project, and necessary. Just as the puppeteer who was working with a fragment of fabric, who was able to make the piece of flaming silk into something movingly human, had a deep impression upon The Antigonad.

  Lotto couldn’t forget his wife, but she existed on a constant, unchanging plane, her rhythms in his bones. At all moments, he could predict where she was. [Now, whipping eggs for an omelet; now, hiking over the crispy fields to the pond for an illicit smoke as she always did in her angry moments.] And Lancelot existed, right now, on a plane where everything he knew and was had been turned inside out, predictability had exploded.

  He took a nap and woke to Leo sitting beside him on the bed. Last light of day flaring through the window, illuminating the pellucid skin, the fair eyelashes. The boy’s huge hand was warm on his shoulder, and Lancelot blinked sleepily, smiling, and there came the urge from the loyal doggish heart of him to press his cheek against it. So he did.

  Leo flushed, and the hand twitched a little before he withdrew it.

  Lancelot stretched to his full length, arms against the wall, feet dangling, and sat up. There was a smooth blue static in the room.

  “I’m ready,” Leo said. “I want to write Go’s aria first. The love aria. Just the music for now. It’ll dictate the rest of the score. I’m going to disappear for a few days if that’s all right with you.”

  “Don’t disappear,” Lancelot said. He felt a heaviness in him. “Can’t I sit quietly in the corner while you work? I’ll work on the sketch of the book a little more. And do a grammar and dictionary for Go’s language. I won’t bother you for a second. You won’t know I’m there.”

  “Please. As if you could be silent for even an hour,” Leo said. He stood and went to the window, his back turned to Lancelot, who was fully awake now. “It would be good for us to be apart for a span,” Leo said. “For me, at least. To know you are here and not be able to see you. All of that would show up in the music.”

  Lancelot looked at him with some wonder. He was so slight in the window, framed against the steely forest. “But Leo,” he said. “I’ll be lonely without you.”

  Leo turned around and gave Lancelot a quick look and went wordlessly out the door, through the forest, up the path. Lancelot wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and came out to the porch to watch him disappear.

  Later he took himself through the dark trees to the colony house for supper; but only a single light was illuminated in the kitchen, and of the eight artists still in residence, most were in warmer places, being loved and fed and touched on the shoulders, on the cheeks, by family and friends. Being loved. And Lancelot had chosen separateness. He would have acted differently had he known that Leo would turn hermit. It gnawed at him, the old discomfort of being left with only himself.

  Lancelot heated his plate of gravied tofu and potato mash and green beans. Halfway through, he was joined by a smelly, half-deaf composer with a Walt Whitman beard that sopped up his dribbles. He had eyes pink with burst veins and mostly grunted, glaring at Lancelot like a ferocious goat. Lancelot made a game out of having a lopsided conversation with him.

  “Cranberry sauce?” Lancelot said, ladling some out on his own plate, to a grunt.

  “You don’t say? Best you ever had, at the Ritz on Thanksgiving day in 1932?” to a grunt.

  “With whom?” Grunt. “Really? Marvelous. Royalty, did you say?” Grunt. “You did what with Princess Margaret during the war? I had no idea, man, that that was even invented back then.” Grunty-grunty-grunt.

  For dessert there was pumpkin pie. Bumblefuck Pie. An entire one that they split, Lancelot shoving more sweet in to clog up his sadness, the composer matching him bite for bite as if in thrall to a ferocious sense of justice. Lancelot took an intentionally enormous bite to watch the composer mirror him. The man looked like a snake with a rat in its gob. When Lancelot swallowed, he said, “I like you, Walt Whitman.”

  And the composer, who had heard this at least, spat, “Oh, you think you’re so funny,” and stood and left the dishes and the crumby floor to Lancelot to clean.

  “You contain multitudes,” Lancelot said to his beetled back.

  The composer turned, glared. “I’m giving thanks for you,” Lancelot said solemnly.

  Oh, lonely, lonely. Mathilde didn’t answer at the house or at the apartment or on her cell, but of course she wouldn’t; she was hosting company. His family, his friends. They were all certainly talking about him. [Indeed.] He brushed his teeth terribly slowly and went to bed with a doorstop novel. Don’t be paranoid, Lotto, you’re fine, he told himself. And if they were talking about you, surely they’d be saying kind things. Yet he imagined them laughing at him, their faces contorted into grotesque animal forms, Rachel a rat, Elizabeth an elephant with her long, sensitive proboscis, Mathilde an albino hawk. Fraudster, ignoramus, space cadet, they were saying of him. Former male whore. Narcissist!

  Now they were having a grand time without him, deep into their drinks. Throwing t
heir heads back, pointy teeth and wine-stained gums, laughing and laughing. He tossed his book across the room so hard it cracked its spine on landing.

  —

  HE CARRIED HIS MOROSENESS with him through the night into the morning. By noon, he was actively longing for home. For God with her hot nose, for his own pillow, his own sweet Mathilde.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day of Leo’s solitary confinement, Lancelot couldn’t help himself: he went the long way through the woods to have plausible deniability, gathering a dandruffy birch stick on his walk, and ended up outside Leo’s cabin again.

  It took a moment to locate Leo in the dim inside. The boy had made a concessionary fire, too cold outside these days even for him. In the dull glow, his head was pressed against the piano’s forehead, and he could have been sleeping if not for the hand rising from his lap once in a while to strike a note or a chord. The noise after a long period of silence startled, even all the way out to Lancelot behind his tree.

  It was calming, this slow noisemaking. Lancelot went into a very small trance each time he waited for the next note. When it came, it was muted by the walls and windows and pockets of air, and it arrived at Lancelot’s ear unexpectedly. It was like believing yourself alone in a room, beginning to fall into sleep, only to hear a sneeze muffled in the darkest corner.

  He left when his shivering got uncontrollable. There was new bad darkness, a stormy one, fast descending out of the western sky. He skipped dinner for ramen noodles sucked from the styrofoam cup and hot chocolate, and finished off half a bottle of bourbon, dancing naked to a fire that blazed and popped and gave the room a mid-August Florida broil. He opened the window and watched the snow fall slantwise in and hit the floorboards as water, rebounding into mist.