Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.

Silence. No scoffing. The boys were still. An unknown room in Lotto illuminated. Here, the answer to everything. You could leave yourself behind, transform into someone you weren’t. You could strike the most frightening thing in the world—a roomful of boys—silent. Lotto had gone vague since his father died. In this moment, his sharpness snapped back.

The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!

Lotto was taller than all, shooting off laser beams of joy and warmth, and everyone coming in blinked, dazzled by his grin. They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

They would have this party year after year, he decided. It would be their annual June fête, the friends gathering, building until they had to rent out an airplane hangar to hold everyone, to drink and shout and dance into the night. Paper lanterns, shrimp boil, someone’s kid’s bluegrass band. When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family. This crowded and sweaty lurch was all he wanted of life; this was the summit. Jeez, he was happy.

“What’s it like?” Natalie said quietly. “Marriage, I mean.” Lotto said, “A never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full.” Mathilde said, “Kipling called it a very long conversation.” Lotto looked at his wife, touched her cheek. “Yes,” he said.

Mathilde could save Lotto from his own laziness, Sallie had thought, but here they were, years later, and he was still ordinary. The chorus caught in her throat. A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already sleeping in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver that he’d run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys in puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.

[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.]

It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said this. He, too, had found himself crashed into the desert when, just moments before, all had been open blue sky.

Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to! Like corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they’d swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle. The way the old story goes, woman needs an other to complete her circuits, to flick her to fullest blazing.

Jan van Eyck,

take your husband seriously. I want him to be better than he is.” Her voice was earnest, sweet. “Oh, please. You say that as if he’s sick,” Mathilde said. “He is. Great American Artistitis,” Phoebe Delmar said. “Ever bigger. Ever louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country?

His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right. She should be resentful. But she could not find resentment toward him anywhere inside her. She wanted to press herself against him until his beautiful innocence had stamped itself on her.

She wished she’d been the kind Mathilde, the good one. His idea of her. She would have looked smiling down at him; she would have heard beyond Marry me to the world that spun behind the words. There would have been no pause, no hesitation. She would have laughed, touched his face for the first time. Felt his warmth in the palm of her hand. Yes, she would have said. Sure.