Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

Between his skin and hers, there was the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for

this slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in.

Lotto was loud and full of light; Mathilde, quiet, watchful. Easy to believe that his was the better half, the one that set the tone.

LOTTO LOVED THE STORY. He’d been born, he’d always say, in the calm eye of a hurricane.

But Antoinette had done all the work, after all, and already the heat she’d felt for her husband was half diverted into her son.

EXIGENT.

But as soon as Lotto began to smile and she saw he was her tiny image with her dimples and charm, she forgave him. A relief, to find her own beauty there.

Lotto’s formidable memory revealed itself when he was two years old, and Antoinette was gratified. [Dark gift; it would make him easy in all things, but lazy.]

He came up shouting Kipling’s “If—” to a roaring ovation. The pleasure of these strangers’ applause was punctured by Antoinette’s thin smile, her soft “Go to bed, Lancelot,” in lieu of praise. He stopped trying hard when she praised him, she had noticed. Puritans understand the value of delayed gratification.

Lotto was a tiny adult, articulate, sunny.

Lotto was the one she must save. She lit a match and began to read Revelation in a hushed and tremulous voice.

[Darkness, trumpets, sea creatures, dragons, angels, horsemen, many-eyed monsters; these would fill his dreams for decades.] He watched his mother’s beautiful lips move, her eyes lost in their sockets. He woke in the morning with the conviction that he was being watched, judged at all times. Church all day long. He made innocent faces when he thought bad thoughts. Even when he was alone, he performed.

pumping his legs as fast as he could as if to outpace his sadness, but the sadness was always swifter, easily overtook him again.

Lotto couldn’t come home for the summer. “There are . . . dangers,” she said, and he knew she meant his friends were still hanging around. He imagined Sallie seeing them walking up the highway, her hands of their own accord veering the car to smush them.

When they returned to school for sophomore year, Lotto had tanned so golden it was easy to overlook the zit scars on his cheeks. He was blonder, looser. He smiled, made jokes, learned to expand himself on the stage and off. By never swearing, he showed his cool. Near Christmas, Samuel’s friend had become more popular than even Samuel was, he of the dust-devil confidence, of the shining great brown eyes, but it was too late to mind. Every time Samuel looked at his friend, all those many years of their friendship, he would see how he himself was a miracle worker, how he had brought Lotto back to life again. —

Lotto never brought home the men. They didn’t get put in any book. They remained unseen, these ghosts of hungers in his bed, out of it.

Anywhere else, he hated being left with himself. But tonight, the last glory of his youth, everything he’d lived so far filled him up: his steaming lost Florida, the ache where his father had been, his mother’s fervent belief in him, God who watched, the gorgeous bodies he’d temporarily forgotten himself inside. He let it all wash over him in waves.

It must have taken an immense force of will for

Mathilde to turn her past, so sad and dark, blank behind her.

After being so long a nomad, he was rooted in this place, rooted in this wife, with her fine features and sad, cattish eyes and freckles and gangly tall body with its tang of the forbidden.

But today even the city was laid out like

a tasting menu; it was the newly shining nineties; girls wore glitter on their cheekbones; clothes were shot with silver thread; everything held a promise of sex, of wealth. Lotto would gobble it all up. All was beauty, all abundance. He was Lancelot Satterwhite. He had a sun blazing in him. This splendid everything was what he was screwing now.

mollifyingly,

“Hélène Cixous is sexy. Simone de Beauvoir. Susan Sontag.”

Calm. Mild. End of autumn. Chill in the air like a premonition.

“Did you hear?” Susannah murmured, but was struck silent when Mathilde turned her face toward her. Earlier, Susannah had thought that walking into the apartment with its new coat of bright yellow paint had been like walking into the sun, blinding. But now the color played with the cinnamon freckles on Mathilde’s face. She’d gotten an asymmetrical haircut, her blond lopped at the right jawbone, at the left collar, and it set off her high cheekbones. Susannah felt a pulse of attraction. Odd. All this time, Mathilde had seemed plain, shadowed by her husband’s light, but now the pairing clicked. Mathilde was, in fact, ravishing.

everyone was lounging quietly, eyes closed in the last morsel of chill fall sun, drinking the cold white wine and Belgian beer, waiting for the first person to reach in and take food.

Above the scrum, Mathilde shivered and pulled her cardigan closer. A burgundy leaf fell from the Japanese maple and landed upright in a spinach-artichoke dip. It was chilly in the shadow under the tree. Soon, there would be the long winter, cold and white. An erasure of this night, the garden.

He just wanted the Internet, the other sad souls of the world, but instead, he opened a blank document, shut his eyes, thought of what he’d lost. Home state, mother, that light he’d once lit in strangers, in his wife. His father. Everyone had underestimated Gawain because he was quiet and unlettered, but only he had understood the value of the water under the scrubby family land, had captured and sold it. Lotto thought of the photos of his mother when she was young, once a mermaid, the tail rolled like a stocking over her legs, undulating in the cold springs. He remembered his own small hand immersed in the source, the bones freezing past the point of numbness, how he’d loved that pain.

And her face—what was it? There was something wrong. Eyes puffed and red. What had Lotto done? Surely something awful.

She would leave him. He’d be finished. Fat and alone and a failure, not even worth the air he’d breathe. “Don’t leave me,” he said. “I’ll be better.”

She looked up, then stood and came across the rug to the couch and put the computer down on the coffee table and took his cheeks in her cold hands.

“Oh, Lotto,” Mathilde said, and her coffee breath mingled with his own dead muskrat breath, and he felt the swoop of her eyelashes on his temple. “Baby, you’ve done it,” she said. “What?” he said. “It’s so good. I don’t know why I was so surprised, of course you’re brilliant. It’s just been a struggle for so long.” “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry. What’s happening?” “I don’t know! A play, I think. Called The Springs. You started it at 1:47 last night. I can’t freaking believe you wrote all that in five hours. It needs a third act. Some editing. I’ve already started. You can’t spell, but we knew that.”

It snapped back to him, his writing last night. Some deep-buried acorn of emotion, something about his father. Oh. “All along,” she said, “hiding here in plain sight. Your true talent.”

“My true talent,” he said slowly. “Was hiding.” “Your genius. Your new life,” she said. “You were meant to be a playwright, my love. Thank fucking god we figured that out.” “We figured that out,” he said. As if stepping out of a fog: a little boy, a grown man. Characters who were him but also not, Lotto transformed by the omniscient view. A shock of energy as he looked on them in the morning. There was...

telling him he’s a what? A genius. Lotto had long known it in his bones. Since he was a tiny boy, shouting on a chair, making grown men grow pink and weep. But how nice to get such confirmation, and in such a format, too. Under the golden ceiling, under the golden wife. All right, then. He could be a playwright.

Ghostly out of his body he went, giving an elaborate bow, passing for good through the closed door of the apartment. There should have been nothing left. And yet, some kind of Lotto remained. A separate him, a new one,

“Now you’re Lancelot. No more Lotto. Lotto’s a child’s name, and you’re no child. You’re a genius fucking playwright, Lancelot Satterwhite. We will make this happen.”

If it meant his wife smiling through her blond lashes at him again, his wife posting atop him like a prize equestrienne, he could change. He could become what she wanted. No longer failed actor. Potential playwright. There rose a feeling in him as if he’d discovered a window in a lightless closet locked behind him. And still a sort of pain, a loss. He closed his eyes against it and moved in the dark toward what, just now, only Mathilde could see so clearly.

THE SPRINGS, 1999

Words, tonight, had not failed. Unseen in the corners of the theaters, the forces of judgment had gathered. They watched, considered, found it good.] “Body taking over now,” he said, and she was game for what he had in mind, but when she returned from the bathroom, he was asleep, naked atop the duvet, and she covered him, kissed his eyelids, tasted his glory there. Savored it. Slept.

Erasmus was the man who said, In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. One-eyed king. Roi d’un oeil.

she’d been a French, art history, and classics triple major in college. Dark purple dahlia in the garden-side window, gleam of autumn light beyond.

“I’m just shaking hands with your one-eyed king.” “Oh, love,” he said. “You’re brilliant. That is a better title.” “I know,” she said. “You may have it.” “Generous,” he said.

Of course, you must’ve been a sullen girl. Oh, yes. I can see you were quite a sullen girl. Difficult. Too smart for your own good.

Sore wound, I’m sure it is, darling. Family being the most important thing in the world. The most important. Why, it’s your family that tells you who you are. Without a family, you’re a nobody.

You mean a girl with a rich family? That’s funny because, Mrs. Dutton, I have a family. They’re rich as kings. LADYBIRD: You a liar? Because you are either lying now or you were lying when you said you were an orphan. Either way, I haven’t believed a word out of your mouth since you got here. JOSEPH [Comes out, smiling brightly, whistling.]: Hello, beauties. OLIVIA: I never lie, Mrs. Dutton. I’m a pathological truth-teller.

She looked at him over the table, coffee and bagel, half eaten. “Pathological truth-teller?” He looked at her. Waited. “Okay,” she conceded.

I had to go for a walk to get away from them, but the problem with ideas is that the more you walk, the more you get.

Fine etchings around her eyes, which were still so strangely resentful.