Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

He was in a murky anteroom of sleep when the door opened, the hall light blasting him awake, then closed, and there was a body in the room that wasn’t his. He waited, panicky. He could barely move! If someone crawled into bed with him to ravish him, he couldn’t flee! But whoever it was was two whoevers and they had no interest in the bed, because there were some low laughs and some whispers and the shush of fabric, and they began to pound out a rhythm against the bathroom door. A kind of syncopated slap-thump with some surprising percussive ughs.

That door was really rattling away, Lancelot thought. He should tighten the knob tomorrow.

And then came the thought, a knife of grief in his heart, that once he would have been the one to bring some girl in to do her, and it would have been far, far better than this girl was being done, poor thing, though she seemed to be having a good time. Still, there was something a little fakey about her moaning. Once, even, he would have gotten up and made an orgy out of the event, joining so smoothly it would have been as if he had been invited. Now he lay puddled in his broke-bone carapace, critiquing the performance, soft as a hermit crab. Sure of the dark, he made a hermit crab’s frowning whiskered face, snapping claws with his good hand.

The girl said, “Aaaaaaah!” and the guy said, “Urrrgh!” and there was more hushed laughing.

“Oh my god, I needed that,” the guy whispered. “These parties are such shitshows when people bring their kids.”

“I know,” she said. “Poor Lotto watching those babies with that longing on his face. And Mathilde so skinny these days she’s getting ugly. She keeps letting it go, she’s going to be some kind of witchy old hag. Like, I don’t know, but Botox exists for a reason.”

“I was always confused why anyone thought she was hot. She’s just tall and blond and skinny, never pretty,” he said. “I’m a connoisseur.” The sound of flesh slapped. Buttocks? Lotto thought. [Thigh.]

“She’s interesting-looking. Remember how that was a thing in the early nineties? We were all so jealous. Remember when Lotto and Mathilde had the grandest love story ever? And their parties! Christ! I kind of feel bad for them now.”

The door opened. A pumpkin-colored head, balding. Aha, Arnie. Followed out by a bare shoulder, jagged with bones. Danica. Old affair revisited. Poor Chollie. Lotto felt sick that matrimony could seem so cheap to some people.

Weary, weary, sick to death, Lancelot stood and dressed again. Those people could rabbit themselves until they died of exhaustion, but he wouldn’t let them mealymouth Mathilde and him. How appalling, to be pitied by such gnats. Adulterer gnats. Worse.

He came downstairs again and stood in the door with his wife and said cheery good-byes to the friends, the children passed out in the parents’ arms, the drunk adults being driven, the merely tipsy driving themselves. He spackled so much extra charm onto Arnie and Danica that they both blushed and began flirting shyly back, Danica hooking her fingers through his belt loop when she kissed him good night.

“Alone again,” Mathilde said, watching the last taillights wink away. “For a while, I thought we lost you. And then I would have known we were really in trouble. Lotto Satterwhite intentionally missing a party equals Lotto Satterwhite hacking off a leg.”

“In truth, I just grinned,” he said, “and bore it.”

She turned to him, narrow-eyed. She let her dress fall off her shoulders, pool on the floor. She wore nothing underneath. “I just bared it,” she said.

“Not boring,” he said.

“Darling, bore me,” she said. “As in drill.”

“Like a wild boar,” he said. But he was more, to her dismay, like a tired piglet snoozing mid-suckle.

—

AND THEN THE SWIFTER DOWNWARD SWOOP. All things had lost their savor. He had his casts taken off, but the left side of his body was limp and tender pink and the texture of an overcooked egg noodle. Mathilde looked at him standing before her naked; she closed one eye. “Demigod,” she said. She closed the other. “Dweeb.” He laughed but was smacked right in the vanity. He was too weak yet to go home to the city. He longed for pollution, noise, light.

The things he’d discovered online had lost their luster. There were only so many cute baby videos one could take, after all, or cats falling off high places. The sun’s very shine had been besmirched! And his wife’s beauty, which had been so unimpeachable, was irritable, weakened. Such thighs she had, like jamones serranos , salty and overly firm. In morning light, her facial lines had been etched by too strong a hand. Her lips thinning, her eyeteeth surprisingly long, catching on the rims of mugs, on soup spoons, it made him cringe. And always hovering! Blowing on him her breath of impatience! He took to staying in bed past wake-up time, waiting for Mathilde to go off on her run or to her yoga class, off on her bike rides out into the countryside, so that he could go back to sleep.

It was almost noon. He held his body still, hearing Mathilde creep in the bedroom door. Then the coverlet lifted, and something soft and furry clambered up his body and licked him, chin to schnozz.

He was laughing when he saw the sweet face, like an earmuff with eyeballs and triangular felted ears.

“Oh, you,” he said to the puppy. And then he looked at Mathilde, and he couldn’t help it, there were hot tears in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

“She’s a Shiba Inu,” Mathilde said, and crawled to his side. “What’s her name?”

Dog, he wanted to say. He’d always wanted to call a dog Dog. It was meta. It was funny.

Oddly, thrillingly, the word came out as God .

“God. Nice to meet you, God,” she said. She picked the puppy up and looked in her face. “Most sensible epistemology I’ve ever heard.”

—

THERE IS LITTLE that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time. For a week, he was practically happy again. Such delight he took in the snarfle of God’s hunger, the way she took each piece of kibble out of her bowl to eat off the top of his foot. The pained way she pinched her back legs to her front and flagged her tail, and her little arsehole apertured and bulged, and then she squinted like a philosopher when she eliminated. How she sat quietly with him, chewing on the cuffs of his pants, as he lay on his back and dreamt on a blanket spread in the grass. How he always had something soft under his palm as soon as he called out “God!” which sounded like the first curse he’d ever said in his life, but was not, as it was a proper noun. How he was rewarded with joy, tiny needle teeth in the meat of his thumb. Even her shrill scream when she was tangled in her leash or kept in her crate for the night made him laugh.

He did not fall out of love with the dog, per se; it was merely that luster dulled under the grind of the daily. God could not bridge the distance between his hermit life as a broken man and the life he longed to live again in the city, all interviews and dinners out and being recognized on the subway. She couldn’t knit his bones together faster. Her small quick tongue could not stanch all wounds. Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.

Within a week, he felt himself riding the dip again. The thoughts were not serious when he imagined baking a soufflé out of the rat poison Mathilde kept in the garden house or grabbing the wheel out of Mathilde’s hands when she let him come with her to the grocery store, veering over this cliffside, into that stand of maples. They weren’t serious, but they surfaced more and more frequently until he felt carbonated with dark ideas. He was sinking again.