by Lauren Groff
She took it into the closet in the bedroom and worked feverishly. She edited, condensed, cleaned up the dialogue, and reshaped the scenes. He didn’t remember what he’d written when he woke. She easily passed it off as entirely his.
In a few months, The Springs was finished. Polished. Mathilde read it over and over at night in the closet while Lotto slept, and knew it was good.
But though it was a wonderful play, a play that would later change their lives, nobody wanted to read it. Lotto took it around to producers, theater directors. They took the copies he’d had bound, and nobody returned his call. And Mathilde watched her husband’s reborn twinkle dwindle again. It felt like a slow death of debridement, tiny constant bleeds.
An idea came in the form of one of Antoinette’s notes, a short article ripped out of a magazine on Han van Meegeren, the art forger who had convinced the world his own wan paintings were Vermeers, though every Jesus he painted had the forger’s own face. Antoinette had circled an X-ray of a fake, where, through the ghostly round face of a girl, you could see the uninspired seventeenth-century canvas Meegeren painted on: a farmyard scene, ducks, watering cans. Fake layer atop bad base. Reminds me of someone, Antoinette wrote.
Mathilde went to the library one weekend when Lotto was up in the Adirondacks camping with Samuel and Chollie, a vacation that she had planned, to get him out of the way. She found the plate she wanted in a heavy book. Gorgeous white horse carrying a blue-robed man in the foreground, a confusion of heads on other horses, a stunning building on a hill against the sky. Jan van Eyck, she’d discovered many years ago, in college. When she saw the slide during the class, her heart had gone still.
And to think she had held it in her hands in the tiny room under the stairway in her uncle’s house. She had smelled it: old wood, linseed oil, time.
“Stolen in 1934,” the professor had said. “One panel of a larger altarpiece. It is assumed that it was destroyed many years ago.” He clicked to the next example of disappeared art, but she could see nothing but brilliant fuzz.
At the library, she paid for a color photocopy and typed up a letter. No salutation. Mon oncle, it began.
She sent both letter and photocopy in the mail.
A week later, she was cooking spaghetti, blending up pesto, and Lotto was on the couch, staring at a copy of A Lover’s Discourse, his eyes unfocused, breathing through his mouth.
He answered the telephone when it rang. He listened. “Oh my gracious,” he said, standing. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Of course. I couldn’t be happier. Tomorrow at nine it is. Oh, thank you. Thank you.”
She turned, a spoon steaming in her hand. “What was that?” she said.
He was pale, rubbing his head. “I don’t even,” he said. He sat heavily.
She came over and put herself between his legs, touching his shoulder. “Baby?” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“That was Playwrights Horizons. They’re putting on The Springs. A private financier went crazy for it and is funding the whole thing.”
He put his forehead on her chest and burst into tears. She kissed him on the cowlick at the back of his head to hide her expression, which she knew would be ferocious, grim.
—
WHEN, A FEW YEARS LATER, an attorney contacted her on her phone at the theater where Lotto was helping to cast his new play, she listened intently. Her uncle, the attorney said, had died [carjacking; crowbar]. He’d left his money to a home for indigent mothers. There was, however, a collection of antique Japanese erotica he’d left to her, Aurélie. She said, “But I’m not the person you’re looking for. My name is Mathilde,” and hung up. When the books were delivered to the apartment anyway, she took them to the Strand, and with what she earned, she bought Lotto a watch that would stay watertight to four hundred feet deep.
—
ON THE OPENING NIGHT of The Springs, Mathilde stood with Lotto in the dark.
Broadway! To begin so grandly! He’d been dazzled by the luck; she smiled, knowing that luck was not real.
The workshops had gone brilliantly; they’d attracted a Tony winner for the role of Miriam: undulant, lazy, simmering, the mother. The actors playing Manfred and Hans, the father and son, were barely known now but would be, a decade later, marquee names in feature films.
There was a smattering of strangers, some intrepid avant-gardists. But, confronted by the director in a whispered tête-à-tête with the dismal advance sales the afternoon before, Mathilde had spent all morning and afternoon on the telephone, and had filled the empty seats with their friends. The audience was boisterous, and the mood of the theater giddy and friendly before the houselights dimmed. Only Lotto could draw three hundred loyalists at the last minute out of goodwill alone. He was beloved, uniquely, deeply.
Now, in the dark, she watched the subtle transformation as her husband lost himself. So anxious these past months he’d become again the thin, too-tall boy she’d married. The curtain parted. And she watched with amusement at first and then with a warmth that bordered on awe as he mouthed the lines, made faces for each character as the actors came on and off. It became a sort of one-man show in the shadows.
In the scene where Manfred died, Lotto’s face was slick and shining. Sweat, not tears, at least she believed. Hard to tell. [Tears.]
There were standing ovations, eight of them, the performers coming back again and again and again, not merely because of the audience’s great love for Lotto, but because the play came together, like magic, congealed at the moment of airing. And when Lotto walked out from the wings, the roar from the audience could be heard in the little bar up the block, to which the friends who had been begged to attend and who had arrived to find the show sold-out had decamped to start their own impromptu party.
The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar’s closing, when there were no cabs on the street, and so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. “Chthonic,” he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance for the glory. It was so late there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves.
She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, “Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on earth?”
She, who never drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true; there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous boulder blocking their future had rolled itself away.
“They’ll still be here when we’re gone,” he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he’d be sozzled. “The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches. They will be the kings of the earth.” He was amused by her; he, who was so often drunk. His poor liver. She pictured it inside him, a singed rat, pink and scarred.
“They deserve this place more than we do,” she said. “We’ve been reckless with our gifts.”
He smiled and looked up. There were no stars; there was too much smog for them. “Did you know,” he said, “they found out just a little while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.” He did his best Carl Sagan: “Billions and billions!”
She felt a sting behind her eyes, but couldn’t say why this thought touched her.
He saw clear through and understood. [He knew her; the things he didn’t know about her would sink an ocean liner; he knew her.] “We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.”
—
IN THE HAZY SPACE after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the Internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immen
sely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, after the glorious first night, when everything was good and the light was sweet and possible, she went out for the paper and a whole box of patisserie, pains au chocolat and chaussons aux pommes and croissants, and ate a brilliant almond viennoiserie in four bites as she walked back. Once home in their cozy gold-ceilinged burrow, she poured a glass of water while Lotto rifled through the paper with his hair a bed-head wilderness, and when she turned back around, his great lovely face had blanched. He made a curious grimace, drawing down his lower lip until he showed his bottom teeth, for once, perhaps the first time ever, wordless.
“Uh-oh,” she said, and came swiftly to him and read over his shoulder.
When she was finished, she said, “That critic can eat a bowl of dicks.”
“Language, love,” he said, but it came out automatically.
“No, seriously,” Mathilde said. “Whatsername, Phoebe Delmar. She hates everything. She hated Stoppard’s last play. She called it self-indulgent. She actually said that Suzan-Lori Parks was failing at being Chekhovian, which is insane because of course Suzan-Lori Parks isn’t trying to be Chekhov, duh. It’s hard enough to be Suzan-Lori Parks. That’s like the simplest criterion for being a critic, right, evaluating a work on its own terms. She’s like a bitch-face failed poet who knows nothing and is trying to make a name for herself by tearing people down. She only does pans. Don’t even pay any attention at all.”
“Yeah,” he said, but too softly. He stood and turned around haplessly for a moment like a great tall dog about to sink down into the grass for a nap, then went to the bedroom and crawled under his covers and stayed there, unresponsive, even though Mathilde crept naked into the room on her hands and knees, and dug the sheet out from under the mattress and slithered up the length of his body from the toes up, her head popping out of the duvet at his neck; but his body was lax and his eyes were closed and he wouldn’t respond, and even when she placed both of his hands on her bum, they slid off bonelessly in his misery.
Nuclear option it was, then. She laughed to herself; oh, she loved this hapless man. Mathilde went into the garden, overgrown now that poor Bette had passed away, and made a few phone calls, and at four in the afternoon, Chollie rang the doorbell with Danica on his arm—“Kiss kiss,” Danica shouted in each of Mathilde’s ears, and then, “Fuck you, I hate you, you’re so pretty”—and Rachel and Elizabeth came in, hand in hand, sporting matching tattoos of turnips on their wrists, the meaning of which they gigglingly refused to divulge, and Arnie came and made sloe gin fizzes, and Samuel came in wearing his baby on his chest. When Mathilde succeeded in putting Lotto in a nice blue button-up and khakis, and dragged him out to his friends, and with every hug, every person who came up and told him earnestly how wonderful the play was, she saw an inch of spine returning to him; she saw the color coming back to his face. The man swallowed praise the way runners swallow electrolytes.
By the time the pizza came, Mathilde opened the door, and though she was in leggings and a semitransparent top, the delivery man’s eyes were sucked to Lotto in the middle of the room, turning his arms into monster arms and bugging his eyes, telling a story of when he was mugged in the subway, pistol-whipped on the back of the head. He was emitting his usual light. He mimed a stagger then fell to his knees, and the pizza man leaned in to watch, ignoring the cash Mathilde was trying to hand him.
When she closed the door, Chollie was standing at her side. “Pig to man in a single hour,” he said. “You’re a reverse Circe.”
She laughed silently; he’d pronounced it Chir-chee, as if Circe had been a modern Italian. “Oh, you dirty autodidact,” she said. “It’s pronounced Ser-see.”
He looked wounded, but shrugged and said, “I never thought I’d say it, but you’re good for him. Well, hell!” he said, now in a vicious Florida accent. “Empty-head friendless blond model gold digger actually turning out good. Who’d a thunk? At first, I done figgered you was going to take the money and run. But no. Lotto got hisself lucky.” In his normal voice, Chollie said, “If he turns out to do something big with himself, it’ll be because of you.”
Despite the hot pizzas in her hands, the room felt cold. Mathilde held Chollie’s eye. “He would have been great without me,” she said. The others still on the couch, laughing up at Lotto, though Rachel was looking at Mathilde from the counter in the kitchen, clutching her own elbows.
“Even you couldn’t have magicked that into being, witch,” Chollie said, and he took a pizza box from her, opened it, folded three slices together, and put the box back on the stack to eat the mass in his hands, grinning at her through a mouthful of grease.
—
DURING THE YEARS when Lotto felt as if he were getting to be good enough and secure enough, even when he was working constantly, his plays all being published, productions all over the country steadily increasing so that they alone provided a comfortable living, even then he was gadflied by this Phoebe Delmar.
When Telegony appeared, Lotto was forty-four, and the acclaim was instant and near universal. Mathilde had seeded the idea in his head; it had been seeded in hers by Chollie years earlier with his Circe comment. It was the story of Circe and Odysseus’s son Telegonus, who, after Odysseus had abandoned them, was raised by his mother in a mansion in the deep woods on Aeaea, protected by the enchanted tigers and pigs. When he left home, as all heroes must, Telegonus’s witch mother gave him a poisoned stingray spear; he floated to Ithaca on his little ship, started stealing Odysseus’s cattle and ended up in a terrible battle with the man he didn’t know was his father, finally killing him.
[Telegonus married Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife; Penelope’s own son with Odysseus, Telemachus, ended up marrying Circe; half brothers became stepfathers. As Mathilde always read the myth, it was a roar in support of the sexiness of older women.]
Lotto’s play was also a sly nod to the nineteenth-century idea of the term telegony: that offspring could inherit the genetic traits of their mother’s previous lovers. Telegonus, in Lotto’s version, bore the pig’s snout, the wolf’s ears, and the tiger’s stripes of the lovers Circe had turned into animals. This character was always played in a terrifying mask, the fixity of which made the soft-spoken character all the more powerful. As a joke, Telemachus was also played in a mask in the round, with twenty different eyes and ten different mouths and noses for all of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was off on his little meander over the Mediterranean.
The whole thing was set in Telluride in the modern day. It was an indictment of a democratic society that somehow was able to contain billionaires.
“Didn’t Lancelot Satterwhite come from money? Isn’t this hypocritical of him?” a man could be heard wondering at intermission in the foyer. “Oh, no, he was disinherited for getting married to his wife. It’s such a tragic story, actually,” a woman said, in passing. From mouth to mouth it spread, viral. The story of Mathilde and Lotto, the epic romance; he was unfamilied, cast out, not allowed to go home to Florida again. All for Mathilde. For his love for Mathilde.
Oh, god, thought Mathilde. The piety! It was enough to make her sick. But, for him, she let the story stand.
And then, perhaps a week after the opening, when the advance orders for the tickets were extended out to two months and Lotto was drowning in all of the congratulatory e-mails and calls
, he came to bed in the middle of the night, and she woke instantly, and said, “Are you crying?”
“Crying!” he said. “Never. I’m a manly man. I splashed bourbon in my eyes.”
“Lotto,” she said.
“I mean, I was cutting onions in the kitchen. Who doesn’t love to chop Vidalias in the dark?”
She sat up. “Tell me.”
“Phoebe Delmar,” he said, and handed over the laptop. In its dim gleam, his face was stricken.
Mathilde read and let out a whistle. “That woman better watch her back,” she said darkly.
“She’s entitled to her opinion.”
“Her? Nope. This is the only hatchet job you got for Telegony. She’s insane.”
“Calm down,” he said, but he seemed comforted by her anger. “Maybe she has a point. Maybe I am overrated.”
Poor Lotto. He couldn’t stand a dissenter.
“I know every part of you,” Mathilde said. “I know every full stop and ellipsis in your work, and I was there when you wrote them. I can tell you better than anyone in the world, much more than this bombastic self-petard-hoisting leech of a critic, that you are not overrated. You are not overrated one single whit. She is overrated. They should cut off her fingers to keep her from writing anything more.”
“Thank you for not cursing,” Lotto said.
“And she can fuck herself lingeringly with a white-hot pitchfork. In her dark shit-star of an asshole,” Mathilde said.
“Aha,” he said. “Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce.”
“Try to sleep,” Mathilde said. She kissed him. “Just write another one. Write a better one. Your success is like wormwood to her. It galls.”
“She’s the only one in the world,” he said sadly, “who hates me.”
What was this mania for universal adoration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone. She stifled a sigh. “Write another play, and she’ll come around,” she said, as she always did. And he wrote another one, as he always did.