Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  “My love,” he said. “Don’t get hysterical.”

  “Hysterical. Lotto, please. Do you know the root of that word? Hystera. Womb. You basically just called me a sissy, crying because of her pink parts.”

  “What is wrong with you? You’re freaking out.”

  She spoke to the dog. “He gave my personality to a murderer and he’s asking why I’m freaking out.”

  “Hey. Look at me. You’re being ridiculous, and not because you have woman parts. Livvie found herself cornered by two bad dudes and she killed one. If some big mean dog bit God in half, you’d kick its brains out. Who knows you better than I know you? You’re a saint, but even saints have their breaking points. Do I think that you’d ever kill someone? I do not. But if we hypothetically had a kid and some man was hypothetically putting his Mr. Winky somewhere near our hypothetical kid with bad intent, you would, without hesitation, rip his throat out with your fingernails. I would too. It doesn’t mean you’re any less than good.”

  “Oh my god. We are discussing the fact you wrote me into a murderer, and out of nowhere, here you are again with the kid nonsense.”

  “Nonsense?”

  “. . .”

  “Mathilde? Why are you breathing like that?”

  “. . .”

  “Mathilde? Where are you going? Okay, fine, lock yourself in the bathroom. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. Can you please talk to me? I’m just going to sit right here. I’m going to wear you down with my devotion. I’m sorry that we got sidetracked. Can we talk about the play? Other than the fact that I gave your personality to a murderer, what did you think? It feels a little wonky in the fourth act. Like a table with one wobbly leg. Needs some rethinking. Maybe you can try your hand? Oh. A bath? In the middle of the day? Okay. Do whatever you need to do. That feels nice, I bet. All warm. Lavender. Wow, you’re going for it. Can we talk through the door? Overall, the piece is really solid, I think. Yes? Mathilde, don’t be like this. This is really important to me. Oh, fine. Be that way. I’m going downstairs to watch a movie, and you are welcome to join me if you like.”

  ESCHATOLOGY, 2014

  Only when they came to a stop in the drive, the bourbon-pickled guests already leaping out, and Lotto saw the skateboard broken on a stump, the clumps of wet kid bathing suits on the grass, God so exhausted she couldn’t pick up her head, did Lotto realize that perhaps he had not thought this through. Oh, dear. Mathilde had been left alone to take care of Rachel’s three children since before breakfast when Lotto went out to fetch milk at the grocery store but then got a call in the aisle that he was wanted immediately in the city for a last-minute hour-long interview on a radio program—the end of his victory lap for Eschatology, which even Phoebe Delmar loved, though as he said to Mathilde, “Eh, praise from a hack is worse than a pan.” It was important, so he drove swiftly into the city, sat in his pajama pants being personable for the airwaves, and then set out to drive home with the morning still bright in his eyes, but he ran into Samuel and Arnie laughing together on the sidewalk, and, jeez, it had been so long! Of course, they had lunch together. Of course, lunch extended into drinks, and Samuel saw a man from his club at the bar, who joined them, some radiologist or oncologist or something, and when they grew hungry at dinnertime, Lotto suggested they come home because, as everyone knew, Mathilde cooked like a goddess and he was drunk, but not so drunk he couldn’t drive.

  He sniffed the milk that had been rolling around on the floor since morning. Maybe it would still do. He came in to find Samuel Pepé Le Pewing kisses up Mathilde’s arms, Arnie searching through the liquor cabinet for the grand old Armagnac he’d given them for Christmas, the doctor doing a spoon airplane to deliver peas into Lotto’s younger niece’s mouth, who was wary of airplane spoons. He kissed Mathilde, rescuing her; she smiled tightly. “Where are the twins?” he said. She said, “Passed out in the only place in the house they agreed to sleep. Your studio.” Her smile maybe had some spite in it. And he said, “Mathilde! Nobody’s allowed to go up there but me. It’s my work space!” And she shot him a look so sharp it went all the way through him, and he nodded, contrite, picked the little girl up, helped her with bedtime necessaries in double time, and came back down.

  The guests were sitting on the terrace, getting blotto. The moon had risen sharp against the velvety blue. Mathilde was pulsing herbs in the Cuisinart, pasta on boil. “Sorry,” he said into her ear, then he took her lobe between his teeth, oh, delicious, maybe they had time, maybe she’d? But she bumped him back, and he went outside, and presently the four men were in their skivvies, in the pool, floating on their backs, laughing, and Mathilde was coming out to the table, a huge white bowl between her hands, trailing steam.

  “This is,” Samuel said through a mouthful of pasta, dripping all over the flagstones, “the most fun I’ve had since I got divorced.” He looked glossy, a little fat at the waist, like an otter. So did Arnie, for that matter, but of course he would now that he was a big-time restaurateur. His sun-ravaged back was spotted darkly; Lotto wanted to warn him about skin cancer, but Arnie had so many girlfriends, surely one of them already had.

  “Poor Alicia. What is this, your third divorce?” Mathilde said. “Third Strike Sam. You’re out.”

  The other men laughed, and Lotto said, “Better nickname than the one he had in his early twenties. Remember? One Ball Sam.”

  Samuel shrugged, imperturbable. That same old self-confidence still spun in him. The doctor looked at him with interest. “One Ball Sam?” he said.

  “Testicular cancer,” Samuel said. “Didn’t matter in the end. One ball made four kids.”

  “I have two beautiful balls,” Lotto said, “that have made zero.”

  Mathilde sat silently while the others gabbed on, then gathered up her plate and went inside. Lotto told a story about the overdose of a very famous actress, all the while smelling some kind of berry cobbler baking; and he waited and waited, but Mathilde didn’t come out. At last he went in to check on his wife.

  She was in the kitchen, back turned toward the veranda door, not doing the dishes, listening. Oh, that tiny cocked ear, the white-blond hair brushing her shoulder. The radio was on, comfortingly low. He listened also and heard with a little pulse in the gut a familiar voice, something with the drawn-out vowels of a storyteller, and the pulse turned into a flap of dismay when he understood that the voice was his. It was the radio show from this morning. Which part? He could barely remember. Oh, yes, a story from his lonely Florida childhood. His own broadcast voice went uncomfortably intimate. There’d been a swamp he’d go down to in the middle of a sinkhole. One day, a leech stuck to his leg. And he’d been a boy so terribly hungry for companionship that he left it there to suck his blood, walked home and ate supper, and the whole time took comfort in his companion against his skin. When he turned over in the night and exploded the thing, there was so much blood that he felt as guilty as if he’d murdered a person.

  The hostess laughed, but it was a half-shocked laugh. Mathilde’s hand went out and clicked the radio off hard.

  “M.?” he said.

  She took a breath, and he watched her rib cage compress as she let it out. “Not your story,” she said. She turned around. She was not smiling.

  “Of course it was,” he said. “I remember it vividly.” He did. He could feel the hot mud on his legs, the horror dissolving to a kind of tenderness when he found the small black leech on his skin.

  “Nope,” she said, and took the ice cream out of the freezer, the cobbler out of the oven, the bowls and spoons outside.

  As he ate, a slow bad feeling spread up from his gut. He called for a car to take the other men back. By the time it drove off, he knew Mathilde was right.

  He came into the bathroom in the middle of Mathilde’s ablutions and sat on the side of the tub. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  She shrugged, spat foam into the sink.

  “To
be fair, it was a leech,” he said. “A story about a leech.”

  She rubbed lotion on her hands, one, the other, looking at him in the mirror, and said, “My loneliness. Not yours. You’ve always had friends. It’s not that you stole my story, it’s that you stole my friend.” And she laughed at herself, but when he came into bed, her light was out, and she was on her side, and though he put his hand on her hip, then between her legs, and kissed her neck, and whispered, “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours,” she was already sleeping or, worse, she was pretending to be asleep.

  THE SIRENS (Unfinished)

  Too much pain. It would kill her.

  Mathilde put the manuscript in the archival box without reading it, and the movers carried it away.

  9

  Scene: A gallery. Cavernous, shadowy, gilded birch trees foresting the walls. Tristan und Isolde on the sound system. Piratical crowd drinking from the bars in all four corners of the room, all bloodlust and hunger. Sculptures on plinths uplit in blue: large, amorphous, molded-steel forms that resolve into terrified faces, titled The End. The gallery, the art, brings to mind Dürer’s woodcuts of the apocalypse. The artist was Natalie. She was posthumously celebrated; a photo of her was blown up, pale, buzz-cut, triumphant over the scene.

  Two bartenders during a lull. One young, one middle-aged, both handsome.

  MIDDLE-AGED: . . . telling you, these days I swear by juice. Kale, carrot, and ginger—

  YOUNG: Who’s that? Tall man, just came in, with the scarf. Oh my stars.

  MIDDLE-AGED [Smiling]: That? Lancelot Satterwhite. You know who he is.

  YOUNG: The playwright? Oh my god. I have to meet him. Maybe he’ll give me a role. Never know. Oh, man. He kind of sucks up all the light in the room, am I right?

  MIDDLE-AGED: You should’ve seen him when he was young. Demigod. At least he thought so.

  YOUNG: You know him? Let me touch your arm.

  MIDDLE-AGED: He was my understudy one summer. Years ago. Shakespeare in the Park. We were Ferdinand. My language! Heavens! I am the best of them that speak this speech, et cetera. Though I always thought of him more as a Falstaff than anything. So gabby. Arrogant as hell. He never made a go of the acting thing, though. There was something just, I don’t know, unconvincing about him. Also, he was far too tall and then he got fat and then skinny again, apparently. It was kind of pitiful. Though, I mean, he did fine in the end. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken a separate path, you know? If I got stuck, my moderate success propelling me moderately, all that. Better to flame out, try something new. I don’t know. You’re not listening.

  YOUNG: Sorry. I’m just. Look at his wife. She’s stunning.

  MIDDLE-AGED: Her? She’s bloodless, all bones. I think she’s hideous. But if you want to meet Lotto, you got to go through her.

  YOUNG: Huh. I think she’s unbelievably beautiful. Is he . . . faithful?

  MIDDLE-AGED: Two camps on that one. Hard to tell. He’ll flirt until you’re a blob of goo and make you fall in love, then look all befuddled when you come on to him. Happened to all of us.

  YOUNG: To you?

  MIDDLE-AGED: Sure.

  [They look at the froglike man who has sidled up, who is now listening, the ice in his glass clicking.]

  CHOLLIE: You, boy. Need you to do a piece of work. Easy hundred bucks. What do you say?

  YOUNG: Depends on what it is, sir.

  CHOLLIE: You need to accidentally spill a glass of red wine on Satterwhite’s wife. All over that white dress, really get it in there. Bonus is, while you’re at it, you’ll get close enough to Satterwhite to slip a note in his pocket. See where it takes you. Maybe he’ll call you for an audition or something. You in?

  YOUNG: Five hundred.

  CHOLLIE: Two. There are seven other bartenders in the room.

  YOUNG: Done. Let me borrow your pen. [He takes Chollie’s fountain pen, scribbles on a napkin, tucks it into his pocket. Looks at the pen, tucks it in, too.] This is so awful. [He laughs, puts wine on a tray, speeds off. ]

  MIDDLE-AGED: What are that kid’s chances of scoring with Lancelot, I wonder.

  CHOLLIE: Less than zero. Lotto’s as straight as a stick and sickeningly monogamous, too. But it’s fun to watch. [Laughs.]

  MIDDLE-AGED: What are you up to, Chollie?

  CHOLLIE: Why are you talking to me? You don’t know me.

  MIDDLE-AGED: I do, actually. I used to go to the Satterwhites’ parties in the nineties. We’ve had some conversations in our time.

  CHOLLIE: Oh. Well, everybody went to those.

  [There is a shattering of glass, and the crowd sound hushes briefly.]

  MIDDLE-AGED: Mathilde took that gracefully. Of course she did. Ice queen. Off to the bathroom with salt and seltzer. And you’re right, everybody went to those parties. And everybody wondered why you were Lancelot’s best friend. Brought nothing to the table, really, did you. So unpleasant.

  CHOLLIE: Well, I’ve known Lotto the longest, you know, all the way from when he was this skinny Florida Cracker with a serious zit problem. Who would have thought? These days he’s famous and I own a helicopter. But I can see that you’ve really come into your own with this mixology pursuit of yours. So, you know. Congratulations.

  MIDDLE-AGED: I—

  CHOLLIE: Anyway, glad we got all caught up, blah blah. I have something to do. [Moves off toward the center of the room, where Young is dabbing at Lancelot’s pants with a paper napkin.]

  LANCELOT: No, buddy, I’m serious, I don’t believe you got any wine on my pants. But thank you. No. Please stop. Please. Stop. Stop.

  YOUNG: Tell your wife how sorry I am, Mr. Satterwhite. Please send me the bill.

  ARIEL: Nonsense, nonsense. I will replace the dress. Back to your station. [Young exits.]

  LANCELOT: Thank you, Ariel. Don’t worry about Mathilde. It’s an old dress, I think. By the way, this is spectacular, all of this. As if you made an exact replica of the inside of my brain. Actually, I saw it was Natalie and dragged Mathilde here, though she wasn’t feeling well. Natalie was a friend from college, we had to come. So tragic, her accident. I’m glad you’re doing her honor. To tell you the truth, I think Mathilde may still feel a little strange about quitting the gallery so suddenly when she got the dating-website job all those years ago.

  ARIEL: I understood that she’d leave me one day. All my best girls do.

  LANCELOT: I think she misses art, though. She makes me go to museums wherever we are in the world. It’ll be good for you two to reconnect.

  ARIEL: One can never have too many old friends. In any event, I’ve heard something about you. Someone told me you’ve come into a shocking inheritance. Is this true?

  LANCELOT [Sucking in his breath sharply.]: My mother died four months ago. No, five. True.

  ARIEL: I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be flip, Lotto. I knew you were estranged and didn’t think through what I was saying. Please forgive me.

  LANCELOT: We were estranged, yes. I hadn’t seen her for decades. Sorry. I’m not sure, really, why I’m getting all misty. It’s been five months. Long enough to have gotten over grieving for a mother who never loved me.

  CHOLLIE [Stepping near.]: If your mother never loved you, it was because your mother was a loveless cunt.

  LANCELOT: Chollie, hello! He is deformed, crooked, old and sere; ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; stigmatical in making, worse in mind. My best friend.

  CHOLLIE: You can shove your Shakespeare up your ass, Lotto. God, I’m sick of it.

  LANCELOT: Charles, I thank thee for thy love to me.

  ARIEL: Wouldn’t be much use up there. Shakespeare in the dark.

  CHOLLIE: Oh, Ariel. Good effort, man. You’ve always been so almost funny.

  ARIEL: Funny thing to say, Charles, when we hardly know each other. You’
ve bought a few paintings from me in the last year, but that’s not enough for you to explain to me how I’ve always been.

  CHOLLIE: You and me? Oh, no, we’re ancient friends. I’ve known you for so long. You don’t remember, but I met you in the city long ago. All the way back when Mathilde and you were an item.

  LANCELOT: [Long pause.] An item? Mathilde and Ariel? What?

  CHOLLIE: Was I not supposed to say that? Sorry. Oh, well, ancient history. You’ve been married a million years, doesn’t matter. Those canapés are breaking my willpower. Excuse me. [Chases off after a waiter with a tray.]

  LANCELOT: An item?

  ARIEL: Well. Yes. I thought you knew Mathilde and I . . . were involved.

  LANCELOT: Involved?

  ARIEL: If it helps, it was purely business. At least for her.

  LANCELOT: Business? You were a, I guess, a patron? Oh, I see! You mean at the gallery. When I was trying to act. Failing mostly. Yes, it’s true. You supported us financially then for years, thank god. Did I ever thank you? [Laughs with relief. ]

  ARIEL: No, well. I’d been her, ah, well, lover. Boyfriend. We’d had an arrangement. I’m sorry. This is awkward. I thought you and Mathilde had no secrets. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said a word.

  LANCELOT: We don’t. Have secrets.

  ARIEL: Of course. Oh, dear. If it helps, nothing has happened since. And she broke my heart. But I’m a million years beyond that. It doesn’t matter.

  LANCELOT: Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

  ARIEL [Pausing for a very long time, getting more and more agitated.]: I should get back to—

  LANCELOT [Booming.]: Stay where you are. You have seen Mathilde naked? You have made love to my wife? Sex? There has been sex?

  ARIEL: It’s so long ago. It doesn’t matter.

  LANCELOT: Answer me.

  ARIEL: Yes. We were involved for four years. Listen, Lotto, I’m sorry this was such a surprise. But it’s between you and Mathilde now. You won, you got her, I lost. I have to get back to my guests. I can’t tell you how little this matters in the long run. You know where to find me if you need to talk. [Exits.]