Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

A long, long pause, her breath at the other end. “This is bad, isn’t it,” she said. “This new crisis. I’ve never known you to pass up a little phone sex.” She sounded sad. He missed her, his wife. It felt strange to wake up without needing to bring her milky coffee every morning. He felt the lack of the tiny cares she took for him, the way she laundered his clothes, the way she trimmed his eyebrows. Part of him, here, was lacking.

In the front room, a two-story flutter, love notes from the German Frau’s first marriage barely tethered to a structure so it shifted in the wind, one tiny home movie projected on each. A sculpture of marriage, marriage come alive. Lancelot felt tears start to his eyes. It was so exactly right.

The water made everything better. He was not a good swimmer, but the thrashing helped, and he spent longer and longer with each lap just gliding underwater. It washed over him, calmed him, brought him back to where he had been in the car, coming to the residency. Perhaps it was the oxygen depletion. Perhaps his rangy body had finally gotten the exercise it needed, especially in light of his enforced celibacy. Perhaps, only, he had exhausted himself to the point where his anxieties had fallen away. [False. He should have known a gift when he saw one.] But when he came to the end of the pool, touched the wall, pulled himself up, he knew what the opera would be. It rose before him, gleaming, more real than the water it overlay.

“Misandry.”

misanthropy.

The smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleachy. [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.]

The frizzled poet wore a face of disappointment when she came in night after night to see the collaborators together. “Lancelot, my dear. Won’t you talk anymore to anyone but that boy?” she said once, leaning close, when Leo went in to fetch the dessert tray for the group. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll come back to you soon, Emmylinn. It’s just the initial stages. The head-over-heels phase.” She rested her papery cheek on his upper arm, and said, “I understand. But dovey, it is not healthy to be so immersed for so long. You need to come up for air.”

Lotto couldn’t forget his wife, but she existed on a constant, unchanging plane, her rhythms in his bones.

Don’t be paranoid, Lotto, you’re fine, he told himself. And if they were talking about you, surely they’d be saying kind things. Yet he imagined them laughing at him, their faces contorted into grotesque animal forms, Rachel a rat, Elizabeth an elephant with her long, sensitive proboscis, Mathilde an albino hawk. Fraudster, ignoramus, space cadet, they were saying of him. Former male whore. Narcissist!

And then the door opened, closed, and Leo was a scribble disappearing on the dark path and then the blank page of snow.

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.

It was easier this way, to disembody the music. Like this, he heard the sound resolve into a soft song. Soaring and harmonious.

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.

corrugated

What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear. Another sinkhole. Someone there, suddenly gone. Leo swimming in such cold water. December, rip currents, spray above the wild waves instantly freezing to bullets of ice. He imagined the shock of cold black water on the body, shuddered. Everything about it was wrong.

He had to breathe to keep on two feet. He gripped the table and opened his eyes to see his own face gone white in the mirror. And above his left shoulder, he saw Mathilde at the top of the stairs. She was watching him. She was unsmiling, intent, bladelike in her red dress. The weak December daylight poured through the window above her and touched her around the shoulders.

and still, Lancelot and his wife looked at each other in the mirror. And then Mathilde took one step down and then another, and her old small smile returned to her face. “Merry Christmas!” she called out gaily in her deep, clear voice. He flinched back as if he’d put his hand down on a hot stove, and she fixed him in the mirror as she slowly, slowly, descended.

“Maybe, as in I can read it?” “M.,” he said softly. “I hate my own failure.” “That’s a no?” she said. “That’s a no,” he said. “Okay,” she said. But he had to go to the city the next day to meet with his agent, and she went to his aerie at the top of the house, all scattered papers and coffee cups growing fur, and sat and read what was in the file folder. She stood and went to the window. She thought of the boy who had drowned in the icy black water, of a mermaid, of herself. “Shame,” she said to the dog. “It could have been so great.”

The music begins so quietly it is mistaken for ambient sounds. Drips, rumbles from far off. Hissing, a windlike whistling. Shuffling. Heartbeat. Leathery wings. Fragments of music so filtered it is no longer music. Static of voices, as if through rock. One hopes for the audience talking, the sounds of people settling in deep into the score. The sounds gather a rhythm, a harmony, as they grow louder.]

In imperceptible increments, the lights brighten on the cave, darken on the house. The audience eventually quiets. Go wakes, sits. She begins to sing her first aria, a lament, as she moves around her cave.

Go’s language is her own. Ancient Greek, stripped down, no verb tenses, no cases, no genders. Also warped by millennia of solitude, changed by the fragments of words that have filtered down to her from the world above, German and Fr...

The dancers are behind the tank so that the water magnifies their bodies and makes them wild and strange.

Curse the gods; Go curses them. The humans, Go knows, are growing hot, like a volcano; they will explode, sink to nothing. The end is upon them and they celebrate themselves. Who is worse: the gods or men? Go doesn’t care. Go doesn’t know.

Go is alone, she sings. Deathless Go in a dead world. There is no fate worse than this. Go is alone. Alive, alone. The only one. She holds her last note until her voice breaks, and then beyond. She folds in half on herself until she is in the position we have found her in. The only sounds are wind, water. A slow and ancient heartbeat increases until it overcomes the wind and water noise, and becomes the only thing we can hear. There can be no applause in the intensity of this noise. There is no curtain closing. Go stays folded in her position until the audience files out.

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 l...

He was in the business of narrative; he knew how one loose word could make the whole edifice crumble. [A fine woman! A fair woman! A sweet woman!] For twenty-three years, he’d thought he’d met a girl who was as pure as snow, a sad, lonely girl. He had saved her. Two weeks later, they were married. But, like a squid from the deep, the story had turned itself inside out. His wife had not been pure. She’d been a mistress. Kept for money. By Ariel. It made no sense. Either she’d been a whore or Lancelot was a cuckold; he, who had been faithful from the first. [Tragedy, comedy. It’s all a matter of vision.]

“Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”

chimera

exigency

miasma

She closed her eyes and pulled the long-ago Mathilde, the one from the Parisian schoolyard, tighter to her body.

“I’m not cheap,” she said. “All right.” He leaned back. She wanted to crush the latent joke he never quite delivered, flatten it under her knuckles. “Tell me. What is it that you most want in the world, young queen.” She took a deep breath and pressed her knees together to stop them from shaking. “College tuition,” she said. “For all four years.” He put both hands flat on the table and gave a sharp laugh. “I was thinking a handbag. But you were thinking indentured servitude?” he said. She thought: Oh. [So young! So capable of surprise.] Then she thought: Oh, no, he had laughed at her. Her face was on fire, she felt, striding out. He was behind her at the door; he put his suit coat over her head and gestured for a cab from the awning. Maybe he was made of spun sugar, would melt in the wet. She slid in, and he stood bent in the door, but she wouldn’t move over to let him in. “We can talk about this,” he said. “I’m sorry. You astonished me. That’s all.” “Forget it,” she said. “How can I?” he said. He touched her gently under the chin and she had to fight the urge to close her eyes and rest her head in his palm.

Later, in the window of the train, her face was pale and floating over a green spin of Pennsylvania. She was thinking so hard she noticed neither face nor landscape.

She thought of her grandmother in Paris, her rumpled elegance, the rat-gnawed cheese on the windowsill, the blaze of her crazed dignity. Mathilde had listened from her closet and thought: Never. Never for me. I’d die first.

Never’s a liar. She had nothing better, and time was running out.

Her eyes were dry, yet the world had gone misty. A lump in her throat bigger than the neck could contain.

Outside, the buildings were obscured in the fog and dim, so that when the lights in the buildings opposite came on they were squares floating in space.

Alone, she felt sick, dizzy. She looked at herself reflected in the window, the city slowly moving beyond. She touched her stomach, her chest, her neck. She looked at her hands and saw they were shaking. She was no more rotten than she’d been as the girl on the train, but still she turned away from the Mathilde in the glass.

“You’re leaving?” he said, in French. He took his glasses off and sat back, looking at her. “Where are you going?” “A friend’s,” she said. “Liar,” he said. “Correct,” she said. “I have no friends. Call him a protector.” He smiled. “An efficacious solution to all of your problems,” he said. “If, however, a more carnal one than I’d hoped. But I shouldn’t be surprised. You grew up with my mother, after all.”

And do visit, from time to time. I am curious to see how you change. I predict either something ferocious or something thoroughly bourgeois. You will be a world-eater or a mother of eight.”

“I won’t be a mother of eight,” she said. She wouldn’t visit, either. There was nothing of her uncle’s that she wanted. She took a last look at him, the lovely winglike ears and round cheeks that made a liar of his face, and one side of her mouth curled up, and she bid a silent good-bye to the house as she went through, the secret masterpiece under the stairwell that she yearned to see again and the long dark hallways with locked doors and the huge oak front door. Then she was in the air. She began to run down the packed dirt lane in its blaze of white sun, her legs swinging good-bye, good-bye, to the ruminants in the Mennonite fields, the June breeze, the wild blue phlox on the bank. This sweat she worked up was a glorious one. —

insouciant

eschewed

sere,

The last month before Lotto died returned to her. His sullenness, his monosyllables. The way he looked flinchingly in her direction. She searched for the last time they had seen Chollie together before Lotto died. And suddenly she saw the night in Ariel’s gallery, where he’d dragged her for Natalie’s posthumous opening, huge metallic sculptures with screaming faces in them, the place turned into a fairy-tale forest, all shadowy and dark. Perhaps, she had told herself, it had been so long, perhaps there was no more danger in Ariel. But some pretty little waiter-boy spilled red wine all over her silk dress and she hurried off to blot it away, and when she came back, her husband had been replaced by a robot that looked like him, a man who didn’t smile when he looked at her, who spoke to her glancingly, who, later, seethed. Somewhere between the moment he kissed her gently on the forehead, before the wineglass tipped off the tray and, with terrible slowness, spilled on her skirt, and the moment she returned, Chollie had told him about her arrangement with Ariel. The world flickered before her.

For hours after she’d watched Chollie walk down the gravel drive, Mathilde sat in the kitchen. Night fell and she didn’t turn on the lights. For dinner, she opened a bottle of gift wine from some producer of Lotto’s play years ago, wildly expensive and smoky and lingering on her tongue. When the bottle was finished, she stood and went all the way up to her husband’s studio at the top of the house. His jade plant, so long neglected, had blackened. His books were splayed, wide-winged around the room, his papers were still spread on the desk.

She sat on the leather chair and sank into the divot made by long years under her husband’s weight. She rested her head on the wall behind her, where it was shiny from his head. She looked at the window where he’d dreamt for so many hours, lost in his imaginings, and was filled with a kind of dark tingle. She felt enormous, the size of the house, crowned with the moon, wind in her ears. [Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.] This one would be for Lotto. “This will be fun,” she said aloud to the empty house.

Later, she would think of this gift, so impulsive, the ten-thousand-dollar necklace to a little girl, and feel warmed by it, even during their decade in the underground apartment in Greenwich Village, even when Mathilde didn’t eat lunch so they could pay for phone service. It was cheap to buy a lifetime of friendship.

convection.

A WEEK AFTER GRADUATION, Mathilde was looking up through the casement windows into the courtyard garden where the Japanese maple waggled its leaves in the wind like tiny hands. Already she knew it. This apartment would be her first real harbor in so many years adrift. She was twenty-two. She was so terribly tired. Here, at last, she could rest.