Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

She kissed him on the forehead, then rested her cool cheek on it. “You’re hot. I’ll get you one of your magical pills,” she said, and he had to hold his impatience in as she fumbled for the water, the cap of the bottle, the cotton, the tablet that gloriously dissolved on his tongue.

—

SHE CAME OUT TO THE HAMMOCK where he was contemplating darkly, though the sun shimmied and played in the bright leaves and the pool suckled at its gutters. Three glasses into a bottle of bourbon; it was past four, who cared? He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered. He had put on Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and it was blasting out of his special speakers in the dining room all the way out to him in the hammock.

He wanted to call his mother, to let her sweet voice swathe him, but instead he watched a documentary about Krakatoa on his laptop. He was imagining what the world would look like under volcanic ash. As if some mad child had come along and scribbled black and gray over the landscape: the streams gone greasy, the trees powder puffs of ash, greensward a slick of gleaming oil. An image of Hades. Fields of punishment, screams in the night, the Asphodel Meadows. The dead clacketing their bones.

Luxuriating in the horror, he was. In the unhappiness of being broken. There was not not a kind of wallowing joy in this.

“Love,” his wife said gently. “I’ve brought you some iced tea.”

“No iced tea,” he said, and, surprise, his tongue wasn’t working as well as it ought. It was thick. He made as if to look cross-eyed at it, then said, “Whether the weather be cold, whether the weather be hot, we’ll be together whatever the weather whether we like it or not.”

“Too true,” Mathilde said. And now he saw she was wearing her ancient blue skirt, her hippie gear from a million years ago when they were new to each other and he jumped her bones four times a day. She was alluring, still, his wifey. She crawled on the hammock carefully, but the motion still sent a million fangs deep into his broken bones, and he groaned but bit back his shout and could still barely see when she hiked her skirt to her waist and took off her tank top. A fillip of interest down in his always interested fillip. But the pain ground it down again. She cajoled, but to no avail.

She gave up. “You must’ve broken your peenbone, too,” she joked.

It was all he could do to keep himself from flipping her out of the hammock.

—

A FASCINATING PBS SPECIAL on black holes: the suck and draw so strong it can gulp down light. Light! He drank deeply, watching; he kept his own council. There were problems at the rehearsal; they needed him, they said; there was a difficult performance of The Springs in Boston and a reportedly great series of Walls, Ceiling, Floor in Saint Louis. He generally went to all that invited him, and yet he couldn’t move from this cottage in the middle of cornfields and cows. Lancelot Satterwhite was needed. And Lancelot Satterwhite was not there. He had never not been there. He might as well already be dead.

A clip-clop in the library. There was a horse in the house? But no, it was Mathilde in her cycling shoes coming in, in her silly padded trou. She shined with health and sweat. She stank of armpit and garlic.

“Baby,” Mathilde said, taking his glass away, turning off the show. “It’s been two weeks and you’ve drunk four bottles of Blanton’s. No more documentaries on disaster. You need to do something to fill up your time.”

He sighed, rubbed his face with his good hand.

“Write something,” she commanded.

“Not inspired,” he said.

“Write an essay,” she said.

“Essays are for chumps,” he said.

“Write a play about how you hate the world,” she said.

“I don’t hate the world. The world hates me,” he said.

“Boo-hoo,” she laughed.

She couldn’t know, he thought. Don’t punish her. Plays don’t just get ground out. You need to be filled with a hot kind of urgency to make it right. He gave her a pained smile and took a sip from the bottle.

“Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?” she said.

Direct hit. He laughed. “Viper,” he said.

“Falstaff,” she said. “You’re even getting fat. All that running for nothing. And I thought we’d banished it for good. Come on, kid, buck up, stop drinking, get right in the head.”

“Easy for you to say,” he said. “You are in robust good health. You exercise two hours a day! I get winded going out to the hammock. So until my benighted bones knit themselves to a semblance of solidity, I shall exercise my right to intoxication and bile and mooning.”

“How about a Fourth of July party,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“It wasn’t a question,” she said.

And then, as if magic, here he was three days later among shish kebabs and multicolored sparklers going off in those gorgeous, pawlike children’s hands as they ran across the acres that Mathilde had cropped herself on her roaring mower. There was nothing that miracle woman couldn’t do, he thought, then thought about how this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.

There was a whole keg and corn on the cob and veggie bratwurst and watermelon and Mathilde in a pale low-cut dress, looking beyond beautiful, nestling her head beneath his chin and kissing him on the neck so that all night he carried around a red lipstick mark on his throat like a wound.

All of his friends swirling around in the dusk, in the night. Chollie with Danica. Susannah like a Roman candle herself in a red dress, and her new girlfriend, Zora, young and black with a tremendously beautiful Afro, kissing under the weeping willow. Samuel with his wife and their triplets wobbling around with watermelon rinds in their hands, and Arnie with his newest bar-back teenager, Xanthippe, almost as stunning as Mathilde had been in her heyday, black bob and a yellow dress so short the toddlers could certainly see her thong and dewy loins. Lotto imagined sprawling on the grass to get his own eyeful, but inversion meant tremendous pain and he remained upright.

The fireworks blister-popping in the sky, the party sounds. [Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.] Lotto watched himself as if from a distance, playing his own stiffly acted role of jocular clown. He had a terrible headache.

He went into the bathroom, and the bright lights, the sight of his flushed cheeks and his air splints made him woozy, and he let the smile out of his face, looked at the drooping mask that remained. Midway on life’s journey. He said in a low voice, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.” He was ridiculous. Lugubrious and pretentious at the same time. Lugentious. Pretubrious. He poked at the belly the size of a six-month-old baby glued to his midsection. When Chollie had seen him, he’d said, “You okay there, fella? You’re looking kind of fat.”

“Hello, Pot,” Lancelot had said. “You’re looking black,” which was true, Chollie’s girth strained the buttons of his four-hundred-dollar shirt. But then again, Chollie had never been a beautiful boy; Lancelot had had much farther to fall. Danica, chic in the one-shoulder designer dress that Chollie’s money had bought her, said, “Leave him be, Choll. The man’s body is broken head to toe. If there’s any time in a man’s life that he gets to get fat, this is it.”

He couldn’t bear to go back out there, Lancelot decided, to see those people he was pretty sure at times he hated. He went into their room and undressed as well as he could and climbed into bed.