by Lauren Groff
He felt much better and fell asleep atop his bed, sweating and drunk. His body seemed lifted, as if he’d been tied to a kite and set afloat thirty feet above the ground, watching lesser mortals moving in their small and slow ways below.
He woke at his usual time, shivering, and when he went to boil water for coffee, there was no electricity, no heat. Behind the curtains the forest could have been made of glass, the way it dazzled in the last moonlight. In the deep night, the ice had descended, coating the fields and trees as if in epoxy. He had been so drunk he hadn’t awoken, although great tree branches had cracked and fallen all around and lay in the darkness, as stunned as soldiers after an ambush. Lancelot could hardly open the screen door to his cabin. He took one confident step out onto the ice, and for a long moment, he slid gracefully, his weak foot extended back in an arabesque, but though his right toe stubbed up against a rock and stopped the slide of the foot, his body kept going forward and he spun around and cracked his tailbone so hard he had to roll to his side and gnash his teeth. He moaned for a long time in pain. When he went to stand, the skin of his cheek stuck to the ice, and he pulled the top layer off and there was a little blood on his fingertips when he touched it.
Like a mountaineer, he grimped his way hand over hand back onto the porch, into the house, and lay exhausted on the floor, breathing heavily.
Good old Robby Frost, he thought. The ones who said the world would end in ice were right. [Wrong. Fire.]
He would starve here. On the shelf he had one apple kept back from a lunch, a box of skinny-person granola bars that Mathilde had packed, one last ramen cup. He would bleed to death from his cheek. The tailbone fracture would go septic inside him. No electricity and he’d burned up all his firewood in his gluttonous frenzy last night: he would freeze. No coffee either, caffeine withdrawal the real tragedy here. He bundled himself in every article of clothing he could find, making a cloak of the lap blanket. He made a secondary hat out of his laptop case. Big as a rugby prop now, he put his legs up on the bed and ate the entire box of granola bars. When he finished, he knew it was a mistake, because they tasted like tennis balls that had been lost in the bushes for three seasons. Also, they each contained 83 percent of one’s daily fiber, and therefore he’d just ingested 498 percent of his daily fiber and would die from the intestinal roughage before the bleeding or cold would do him in.
Also, he had run his laptop battery down to death the evening before and hadn’t worried about plugging it in because there would always be electricity in the morning; and he had long ago gotten away from writing anything by hand. Why did he not write anything by hand? Why had he gotten away from this most essential art?
He was composing in his head, like Milton, when he heard a motor and opened the curtains and here was blessed Blaine. His pickup truck was in chains. It was pausing at the door, and Blaine was tossing sand out his window, then getting out and crunching up in ice-mountaineering cleats to knock.
“My savior,” Lancelot said, opening the door, forgetting his getup. Blaine took him in head to toe, and his sweet face cracked wide open.
There were camp beds made up in the colony house, and generators, and the stoves were gas and there was plenty of food. The telephones would be back, they said, in a day or so. All was comfortable. The artists had the laughing camaraderie of disaster survivors, and when composer Walt Whitman poured out shots of slivovitz for all and sundry, Lancelot clinked glasses with him and nodded, and the men smiled at each other, letting bygones be bygones. A friendly kindliness settled over them, Lancelot fetching more gingerbread out of the refrigerator for Walt Whitman, the composer lending Lancelot thick cashmere socks.
All afternoon, Lancelot waited and waited, but Leo never came. At last, he cornered Blaine, who had just brought in enough wood to last a month and was getting ready to return home to chip his own house out of the ice.
“Oh,” Blaine said. “Leo said no, thanks, he had enough wood, and he showed me the peanut butter and loaf of bread and jug of water and said he’d prefer to just keep on working. I didn’t think there was harm in it. Oh, dear. Was I wrong?”
No, no, no, Lancelot assured him. But he thought, Yes, horrible, you never leave a man to fend alone with the cold, haven’t you ever read about Shackleton and HMS Endurance? Glaciers and cannibalism. Or fairy tales, the ice goblins coming out of the woods to knock. In the deep night, working, Leo would hear someone moving at the door and go over in his bare feet to investigate, and there would be an eerie soft singing out beyond the circle of trees, and intrigued, Leo would step out briefly into the cold, and the door would close behind him. It would be locked with the ice goblins having stolen inside, and try as he might, there would be no getting back in to the devilishly hot fire, the naked dancing beasties inside, while he did a Little Match Girl huddle against the door and faded off into visions of distant happiness as his breathing slowed to nothing. Frozen. Dead! Poor Leo, stiff corpse blue of hue. Lancelot shivered, even though the colony house was tropical in the good glow of the artists’ relief and the heat from the fireplaces.
Even after the kerosene lamps were blown out and the novelist had put away his guitar and the slivovitz had warmed everyone’s bellies and they had fallen asleep in the communal area, feeling warm and safe, Lancelot worried about the poor boy alone in the forest, deep freeze all around. He tried not to toss and turn on his camp bed for fear of his squeaking springs and blanket rustle keeping the other artists awake, but he gave up on sleep in the wee hours and went down to the frigid telephone booth to see if the wires were up and he could call Mathilde. But the phones were still dead, and the basement was frigid. He came back up to the library and sat in the window overlooking the back fields and watched the night wash itself away.
Sitting there, thinking of Leo’s quick hot flushing, the shock of his hair, Lotto fell into a fitful sleep in the armchair though he dreamt he was awake.
He came to and saw a small figure making its slow and stuttering way out of the forest. In the gleam off the ice and the moonlit dark, it could have been a messenger from a grim story. He watched as the white face under the watch cap came clear, and he felt a slow sun begin to dawn in him when he knew for certain it was Leo.
He met the boy at the kitchen door, silently opening it to him, and though there was an unspoken interdiction against their touching, Lancelot couldn’t help himself; he took Leo’s slight, strong shoulders in his arms and hugged him fiercely, breathing in the persimmon smell of the skin behind the ear, the hair baby fine against his face.
“I was so worried about you,” he said low to keep the others from waking. He let go reluctantly.
Leo held his eyes closed, and when he opened them, it was with some effort. He seemed weary to death. “I’ve finished Go’s aria,” he said. “Of course, I haven’t slept in three nights. I’m ragged with fatigue. I’m going to go home and sleep. But, well. If Blaine can drop you off with a packed supper before he leaves for the night, I will play what I have for you.”
“Yes,” Lancelot said. “Of course. I’ll get up a little picnic and we can talk into the wee hours. But stay now and have some breakfast with me.”
Leo shook his head. “If I don’t get home, I’ll shatter. I just wanted to invite you to my studio. Then, oh, blessed oblivion of sleep for as long as I can remain under.” He smiled. “Or until you come in and wake me.”
He moved to the door, but Lancelot, trying to find a way to keep him, said, “How did you know I’d be awake?”
Lancelot could feel the heat of Leo’s blush from where he was standing. “I know you,” he said. And then, recklessly: “I can’t tell you how many mornings I’ve stood on the road and watched your light go on at five twenty-two before I could go home to sleep.” And then the door opened, closed, and Leo was a scribble disappearing on the dark path and then the blank page of snow.
—
LANCELOT APPLIED DEODORANT TWICE, shaved t
wice. All parts of him had been scrubbed in the hot shower. He watched himself closely in the mirror, unsmiling. It was nothing, his collaborator playing the first music for their project; it was business, routine; he was nauseated, hadn’t eaten a thing all day; his limbs were wrong, as if his bones had melted and been reconstituted at random. The last time he’d felt this way, he had been so young he was a stranger to himself, and there had been a girl with a moon face and self-pierced nose, a night on the beach, a house they were in going up in flames. His first completed act of love. So nervous, he forgot her name for a minute. [Gwennie.] Oh, yes, Gwennie, his memory fraying at the edges, so unlike the old him with the steel-trap brain. Though what her ghost had to say to him could not be pertinent here.
Something was happening inside him. As if inside there were a blast furnace that would sear him if opened. Some secret so unacknowledged not even Mathilde knew.
He hadn’t wanted to put his visit to Leo’s into words that Blaine could hear, so he’d made the soup himself and the sandwiches, packed them in the basket. He set out totteringly over the melting ice without telling anyone where he was going. In the twilight, the ice had retracted enough from the banks to resemble gums with exposed tooth roots. The trees were skinny bodies stripped bare in the wind. It was far more difficult to move than he’d thought it would be: he had to go crabwise, arms extended, basket dangling, and he was breathing heavily by the time he came to Leo’s little Tudor, with firelight reddening the windows.
He went inside for the first time and was startled by the small evidence of habitation. All had been swept clean, and the only markers of Leo were the black shoes, shiny as beetles, in a neat pair under the bed, and the music standing on the piano.
Then the sound of water from a faucet in the bathroom, and there was Leo in the doorway, drying his hands on a towel.
“You came,” he said.
“You doubted?” Lancelot said.
Leo moved toward Lancelot, then stopped in the middle of the floor. He touched his throat, then his legs, then touched his hands together at the palms. He hemmed. “I had planned that we eat first, but I don’t think I can,” Leo said. “I want so much to play for you, and at the same time I’m far too anxious to play for you. This is absurd.”
Lancelot took a screw-top malbec that he’d scavenged from the dining area out of the basket, and said, “So, we drink. Scored a Wine Advocate ninety-three. Complex, fruit-forward, with notes of bravery and wit. Whenever you feel ready, we’ll play.” He’d meant you’ll play, as in piano, and coughed to cover his mistake.
He poured into the same speckled blue mugs that, in his own cabin, he had planted a dead fern in. Leo took a gulp and choked, laughing, and dabbed at his face with a tissue. And then he handed the mug back to Lancelot, grazing his hand. He crossed over to the piano. It felt a violation for Lancelot to sit on the side of Leo’s bed, but still he sat gingerly, aware of the mattress’s coolness, the white sheets, the firmness of it beneath him.
Leo flexed his monstrous hands and, as if for the first time, Lancelot saw their unbelievable beauty. They could span a thirteenth, those hands, they were Rachmaninoff hands. Leo let them float above the keys, and they came down, and Go’s aria had already begun.
After a bar, Lancelot closed his eyes. It was easier this way, to disembody the music. Like this, he heard the sound resolve into a soft song. Soaring and harmonious. So sweet it ached his teeth. Heat began in his stomach and radiated outward, up and down, into the throat, into the thighbones, an emotion so strange Lancelot had a hard time identifying what it was; but within a minute of Leo’s playing, Lancelot had put a name to it. Dread. He was feeling dread, pale and thick. This music was wrong, so utterly and entirely wrong for their project. Lancelot felt as if he were choking. He had wanted the ethereal, the strange. Something a little ugly. Music with humor in it, for gadfly’s sake! A biting sort of music! An undermining and deepening music, one that layered with the original myth of Antigone, which had always been a ferocious and strange story. If only Leo had replicated the music from the opera this summer. This, though. No. This was treacle; this had no humor in it. It was achy; it was trembling. This was so wrong it changed everything.
Everything had been changed.
He had to make sure that his face, turned so attentively toward Leo, his eyes closed, was composed into a mask.
He wanted to escape to the bathroom to weep. He wanted to punch Leo in the nose to get him to stop. He did neither. He sat there, a Mathilde smile on his face, and listened. On his internal dock, a great ship that he had wanted to climb and sail away on gave a low blast. The ropes were tossed. It moved silently out into the bay, and Lancelot was left alone onshore, watching it dip low over the horizon, watching it vanish.
The music ended. Lancelot opened his eyes, smiling. But Leo had seen something in his face and was looking at him now, horror-struck.
When Lancelot opened his mouth but no words came out, Leo stood and opened his door and walked outside in his bare feet, without even a jacket, and vanished into the dark woods.
“Leo?” Lancelot said. He ran to the door and shouted, “Leo? Leo?” But Leo made no sound. He was gone.
They hadn’t been paying attention. On the softest of cat feet, the winter afternoon had passed into twilight.
In the cabin, Lancelot considered. He could run after Leo, with his weak left side—and say what if he found him? Say what if he missed him? He could stay inside here and wait for Leo to come back. But the boy’s pride was badly wounded, and he would very soon be physically hurt by the cold, his feet cut up, frostbite setting in before he consented to return to a cabin where Lancelot was. The only good thing, the only humane thing, was for Lancelot to leave. Allow the boy to creep back inside, lick his wounds in private. Come back tomorrow and straighten things out after they’d both had a moment to cool off.
He scribbled a note. He paid no attention to what he’d said and was too distraught to understand or remember beyond the moment the pencil lifted from the paper. It could have been a poem; it could have been a grocery list. He went out into the lonely cold and tottered painfully up the icy dirt road, feeling every day of his forty years, to the colony house. He was soaked with sweat when he reached it. When he climbed inside, the others had started to eat dinner without him.
—
LONG BEFORE THE SUN ROSE, weak tea, over the clotted fields, Lancelot was pacing in the colony house’s library. The world had gone sideways; all was badly amiss. He hurried out. It was easier to move than it had been the day before, the ice having receded even further so that there was a slushy mud track all the way to Leo’s. Lancelot knocked hard on the door, but it was locked. He moved around to the windows, but the curtains were pulled so tightly no crack was available for his eye. In his mind all night there had been a terrible echo of the time in prep school when he’d discovered the hanged boy. The blue face, the terrible smell. The brush of denim on his face in the dark, his hands reaching up to touch cold dead leg.
He found one window unlatched and wedged his shoulders through, his body snaking after him, and fell so hard on his bad clavicle that the ceiling swam with sparks. “Leo,” he called out in a choked voice, but he knew before he hefted himself to his feet that Leo wasn’t in the cabin. The shoes under the bed were gone, and the closet was empty. It smelled, still, like Leo. He looked vainly for a note, anything, and found only a clean copy of Go’s aria in the piano bench, with Leo’s precise penciled notation. Framable, art even without the music. Only the word acciaccato in black ink.
Lancelot ran as well as he could back to the colony house, catching Blaine driving in, and waved him down.
“Oh,” Blaine said. “Oh, yes. Leo had some terrible news from home and had to fly off in the middle of the night. I’m just coming back from Hartford now. He seemed drawn. He’s a sweet kid, isn’t he? Poor boy.”
Lotto smiled. His eyes filled with tears.
He was absurd.
Blaine looked uncomfortable and laid a hand on Lotto’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he said.
Lancelot nodded. “I need to go home today, too, I’m afraid,” he said. “Please tell them in the office when they come in. I’ll hire a driver. Don’t worry about me.”
“All right, son,” Blaine said quietly. “I won’t.”
—
LANCELOT STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the country house’s kitchen, the limo shushing off through the slush. Home.
God was clicking swiftly down the stairs, Mathilde at the table in a slant of light, her eyes closed, a cup of tea steaming before her. There was a whiff of garbage in the house’s chilly air. Lancelot’s heart gave a somersault: it was his job in the family to take the garbage out. In his absence, Mathilde had been letting it build.
He didn’t know if she would look at him. He had never known her to be so angry that she would not look at him. Her face was so terribly closed. She looked older. Sad. Skinny. Her hair greasy. She was browned, as if she’d been pickled in her own loneliness. Something in him was breaking.
And then God was leaping at his knees, peeing with happiness to see him, and barking in her high-pitched semi-scream. Mathilde opened her eyes. He watched the great pupils narrowing in her irises, watched her see him, and by the look on her face, he understood that she hadn’t known he was there until now. And that she was so very, very glad to see him. Here she was. His only love.
She stood so fast her chair tumbled backward and she came to him with her hands outspread, her face bursting open, and then he pressed his face into her hair to smell it. The earth was stuck, rotating, in his throat. And then her strong and bony body was against his, her scent in his nose, the taste of her earlobe in his mouth. She pulled back a span and looked at him ferociously and kicked the kitchen door shut with her foot. When he tried to speak, she pressed her hand hard over his mouth so he couldn’t and she led him upstairs in absolute silence and had her way with him so roughly that when he woke the next day he had plum-colored bruises on the bones of his hips and fingernail cuts on his sides, which he pressed in the bathroom, hungry for the pain.