Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps.

He hadn’t accounted for the other passengers’ impatience. It wasn’t until he was already midair that he felt the hand hard in the middle of his back.

How outrageous, he thought. Pushed.

Now the pavement was billowing up toward him like a flicked tablecloth, one distant wind sock tonguing eastward, the crenellated roof of the airport building, a shine of the sandpapery steps in the sunlight, the plane’s nose somehow peeling into his vision and the pilot stretching his arms in the window; and Lancelot had twisted entirely around by the time his right shoulder hit the edge of a stair and he was looking at his ostensible pusher looming out of the dark cave mouth at the top, a man with tomato-colored hair and face, lines embossed on his forehead, wearing madras shorts, of all ugly things. Lancelot’s head hit the tread at the moment his rear and legs did, if somewhat lower, and things got a bit swimmy now; and behind the man was the flight attendant who’d snuck Lancelot two minibottles of bourbon after he’d spent a few minutes exercising his old actor’s charm on her — brief fantasy of her with skirt up, legs around his waist in the plastic bathroom, before he banished the image; he was married! and faithful! — and she was in the process of putting her hands slowly up to her mouth as his body made a satisfying thunkata-thunkata rhythm in sliding downward; and he kicked out toward the rail with the instinct to stop his fall, but felt a curious sharp clicking in the shin region and all in that general direction went numb. With delicious slowness, he came to rest in a shallow puddle, his shoulder and ear seeping up the sun-warmed water, his legs still extended up the stairs, though his foot, it appeared, canted outward in a manner unbefitting its owner’s dignity.

Down, now, the tomato-headed man was coming. A moving stop sign. His footsteps rocked some locus of pain in Lancelot. When the man was close, Lancelot held up the hand that wasn’t numb, but the man stepped over him. Lancelot got a flash up the tube of his shorts; hairy white thigh, dark genital tangle. Then the man was running over the shining asphalt, swallowed up by the slab of a terminal door. Pushed? Fled? Who would do such a thing? Why? Why to him ? What had he done?

[There’d be no answers. The man was gone.]

The flight attendant’s face came into view, soft cheeks and horse nostrils blowing, and he closed his eyes as she touched his neck and someone somewhere began to shout.

—

BACKLIT, the fracture was tectonic, the plates of him overlapping. He was given two casts, a sling, a crown of gauze, pills that made his body feel as if it were encased in three inches of rubber. As if, had he been on the same drugs when he fell, he would have hit asphalt only to bounce delightedly high, startling pigeons midair and coming to rest on the airport roof.

He sang falsetto to Earth, Wind & Fire all the way to the city. Mathilde let him eat two doughnuts, and his eyes filled with tears because they were the most amazing doughnuts in the history of glazed doughnuts, food of the gods. He was full of joy.

They would have to spend the summer in the country. Alas! His Walls, Ceiling, Floor was in rehearsal, and he should be there for it, but really, there was so little he could do. He couldn’t climb the stairs to the rehearsal space, and it would be an abuse of power to make his dramaturge carry him; he couldn’t even climb the stairs to their tiny apartment. He sat on the building’s staircase, looking at the pretty black-and-white tiles. Back and forth Mathilde went, gathering the food, the clothes, everything they needed from the apartment on the second floor down to the car double-parked in the street.

The building manager’s child stuck her shy brown head out the door and looked at him.

“What, ho, spratling!” he said to the kid.

She stuck a finger in her mouth and took it out all wet. “What is that nutty bo-bo doing out there on the stairs?” she said, tiny echo of some adult.

Lancelot brayed, and the building manager peered out, a bit more ruddy than normal, and took a look at the casts, sling, crown. He nodded at Lancelot, then pulled his kid and head inside and shut the door fast.

In the car, Lancelot marveled at Mathilde: what a smooth face she had, lickable, like a vanilla ice cream cone. If only the left side of his body hadn’t suddenly become buried in concrete, he would leap over the emergency brake and treat her the way a cow treats a block of salt.

“Kids are jerks,” he said. “Bless their hearts. We should have some, M. Maybe now that you’re my nurse for the rest of the summer, you can have free license with my body, and in all the lust and frenzy, we’ll beget a sweet wee thing.” They weren’t using birth control, and there was no question that either one of them was defective. It was clearly a matter of luck and time. When he wasn’t high, he was more careful, kept quiet, sensitive to the stoic longing he’d felt in her whenever he brought it up.

“Those drugs of yours spectacular?” she said. “They seem pretty spectacular.”

“It’s time,” he said. “It’s more than time. We’ve got some cash now, a house, you’re ripe still. Your eggs may be getting a little wrinkly, I don’t know. Forty. We’re risking some springs going sproing in the kid’s head. Though it may not be so bad to have a dumb kid. Smart ones are off as soon as they’re able to escape. Dumbos stick around longer. On the other hand, if we wait too long, we’ll be cutting his pizza for him until we’re ninety-three. No, we got to do this thing ASAP. As soon as we get home, I’m going to impregnate the heck out of you.”

“Most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said.

Down the dirt road, up the gravel drive. Graceful dripping limbs of cherry trees, oh, gosh, they lived in The Cherry Orchard. He stood at the back door, watching Mathilde open the French door to the veranda, go down the grass to the new and sparkling pool. There were two tanned and muscled men gleaming in the last sun, unrolling a strip of sod. Mathilde in her white dress, her cropped platinum hair, her slim body, the sunburst sky, the shining muscle men. It was unbearable. Tableau vivant.

He sat suddenly. A hot dampness overcame his eyes: all this beauty, the stun of his luck. Also, the pain that had just surfaced, a nuclear submarine out of the deep.

—

HE WOKE AT HIS USUAL TIME, 5:26, drifting from a dream in which he was in a bathtub barely bigger than his body, and it was full of tapioca pudding. Scrabble as he might, he couldn’t get out of it. The pain made him nauseated and his groaning woke Mathilde. She hovered over him with her terrible breath, her hair tickling his cheek.

When she came back with a tray of scrambled eggs and a bagel with cream cheese and scallions and black coffee and a rose in a vase with dew all over it, he saw the excitement in her face.

“You prefer me as an invalid,” he said.

“For the first time in our lives together,” she said, “you’re neither a black suck of depression nor a swirl of manic energy. It’s nice. Maybe we can even watch an entire movie together now that you’re stuck with me. Maybe,” she said breathlessly, reddening [poor Mathilde!], “we could collaborate on a novel or something.”

He tried to smile, but overnight the world had turned, and her translucence today seemed anemic, no longer confected of sugar and clarified butter. The eggs were greasy, the coffee overstrong, and even the rose from his wife’s garden emitted an odor that cloyed and put him off.

“Or not,” she said. “It was just an idea.”

“Sorry, my love,” he said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”