Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“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.”

She had straddled him, was easing his jeans down his hips.

“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 life in these figures. He was suddenly hungry to return to that world, to live in it for a while longer.

But his wife was saying, “Hello there, Sir Lancelot, you doughty fellow. Come out and joust.” And what a beautiful way to fully awaken, his wife astraddle, whispering to his newly knighted peen, warming him with her breath, 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.

He watched as the Lotto he thought he had been stood up in his greasepaint and jerkin, his doublet sweated through, panting, the roar inside him going external as the audience rose in ovation. 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, below his wife, who was sliding her face up his stomach, pushing the string of her thong to one side, enveloping him. His hands were opening her robe to show her breasts like nestlings, her chin tipped up toward their vaguely reflected bodies. She was saying, “Oh god,” her fists coming down hard on his chest, saying, “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

He was still drunk. “Best night of my life,” he said. “A million curtain calls. All my friends. And look at you, gorgeous. Ovations. Off-Broadway. Bar! Walk home, stars in the sky!”

“Words are failing you, my love,” Mathilde said.

[Wrong. 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.

ONE-EYED KING, 2000

“Baby, this play is about Erasmus. You can’t name it The Oneiroi .”

“Why?” Lotto said. “It’s a good name.”

“Nobody’s going to remember it. Nobody knows what it means. I don’t know what it means.”

“The Oneiroi are the sons of Nyx. Night. They’re dreams. Brothers of Hypnos, Thanatos, Geras: Sleep, Death, Old Age. This is a play about Erasmus’s dreams, baby. Prince of the Humanists! The bastard of a Catholic priest, orphaned by the plague in 1483. Desperately in love with another man—”

“I read the play, I know this already—”

“And the word Oneiroi makes me laugh. 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. Oneiroi.”

“Oh,” she said. She’d frowned when he’d spoken French; 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. She came over to him, rested her chin on his shoulder, put her hands down his pants. “Well. It’s a sexy play,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Your hands are very soft, my wife.”

“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.

“Except that I don’t like the way your king there is looking at me. He’s giving me the evil one-eye.”

“Off with his head,” he said, and carried her into the bedroom.

ISLANDS, 2001

“It’s not that I agree with them,” she said. “But it was pretty ballsy of you to write about three Caribbean hotel maids in the middle of a Boston snowstorm.”

He didn’t pick his head up from the crook of his elbow. Newspapers were strewn around the living room of the new second-floor apartment they’d bought. They were still too house-poor to afford a rug. The austere way the oak floors gleamed reminded him of her.

“Phoebe Delmar, I get,” he said. “She hates everything I have done and will ever do. Cultural appropriation, whatever, strident, shrill. But why did the Times reviewer have to bring up my mother’s money? What does that have to do with anything? I sure as stinkers can’t afford the heat now, so why do they care? And why can’t I write about poor people if I was raised with money? Don’t they understand what fiction is?”

“We can afford heat,” she said. “Cable, maybe not. But other than that, it’s a good review.”

“It’s mixed,” he groaned. “I feel like dying.”

[In a week planes would crash a mile away, and Mathilde at work would drop her cup on the floor, shattering it; and Lotto at home would put on his running shoes and run forty-three blocks north to her office and into the revolving door, only to see her leaving in the parallel glass compartment. They would gaze at each other palely through the glass as she was now outside and he in, and he’d feel a confused shame within his panic, though its source — this very moment with the intensity of his tiny despair — would already have been forgotten.]

“You’re such a drama whore,” she said. “Phoebe Delmar would win if you died. Just write a new one.”

“About what?” he said. “I’m dried up. Done at the age of thirty-three.”

“Go back to what you know,” she said.

“I don’t know anything,” he said.

“You know me,” she said.

He looked at her, his face smeary with newsprint, and began to smile. “I do,” he said.

THE HOUSE IN THE GROVE, 2003 ACT II, SCENE I

[ The porch of the plantation house, Olivia in tennis whites, waiting for Joseph to come out. Joseph’s mother is in a rocking chair with a glass of white wine spritzer in her hand. ]

LADYBIRD: Now come on over here and set yourself down. I’m glad we get a minute to chat. Rare Joseph brings a girlfriend home, you know. Most Thanksgivings, it’s just us. Family. But why don’t you tell me about you , darling. Where do you come from? What do your parents do?