Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

She called from the bathroom, where she was soaping herself with sink water, “I’m feeling queasy about leaving you here. Last time I let you go away from me for a little while, you came back broken.” She returned to him, pressed his cheeks in her hands. “My eccentric old man, thinking you could fly.”

“This time, only my words will fly,” he said solemnly. They both cracked up. Almost twenty years together and if blazing heat had turned to warmth, humor, it was less wild but easier to sustain.

She said tentatively, “There will be brilliant women here, Lotto. And I know how much you love women. Or did. Once. I mean, before me.”

He frowned. Never in their lives together had she been jealous. It was undignified of her. Of him. Of their marriage. He withdrew a little. “Oh, please,” he said, and she shook it off and kissed him deeply, and said, “If you need me, I’ll come. I’m four hours away, but I’ll be here in three.” And then she went out the door; she was gone.

—

ALONE! The twilit forest watched him through the windows. He did push-ups out of exuberance because it wasn’t yet dinnertime. He unpacked his notebooks, his pens. He went out to the circular drive around his cottage and pulled a fern out by the roots and planted it in a white-speckled navy mug and put it on the mantel, even though it was already curling at the corners with the unexpected indoor heat. When the dinner bell rang, he limped up the dusky dirt road, past the meadow with its statue of a deer. Or no, a real and rather springy deer. Past the hayrick turned to chicken house in the raspberry canes, past the garden replete with pumpkins glowing in the dim, the overgrown stalks of Brussels sprouts, to the old farmhouse from which delicious food smells were emanating.

The two tables were already filled and he stood in the French doors until someone waved him over, touching an empty seat. He sat and the whole table turned, blinking, as if a sudden bright light had clicked on.

These people were so beautiful! He didn’t know why he had been nervous. This frizzled and famous poet who was showing everybody the perfect cicada husk on her palm. This German couple who could be twins, with their identical rimless eyeglasses and hair as if it had been cropped with a sling blade in their sleep. This ginger-headed boy barely out of college, with the sudden pink wash of debilitating shyness: poet, clearly. This novelist, blond, athletic, not bad despite the breeder’s gut and purple bags under her eyes. Nowhere near Mathilde, but young enough to be the kind of person who might give Mathilde pause. She did have lovely white forearms, as if cut from polished spruce wood. Once upon a time, when every woman dazzled with particular beauty, her forearms would have been plenty for him, and young Lotto returned for a moment, sexy hound dog, in sucking orgy, the novelist’s round belly with the silvery stretch marks on it. Lovely. He passed her the pitcher of water and shook the image away.

A very young African-American filmmaker studied Lancelot, said, “Satterwhite? I just graduated from Vassar. There was a Satterwhite Hall there,” and Lancelot winced a little, sighed. It had been an unpleasant shock when, this past spring, he’d visited his alma mater for a lecture, and the dean had stood and, among other encomiums in his introduction, mentioned that Lancelot’s family had donated the dormitory to the school. Lotto did the math, and remembered finding Sallie, graduation weekend, standing before a vast pit in the ground where bulldozers were moving, her face set and skirt blowing against her skinny legs. She’d hooked her arm through his and led him away. It was true he’d applied to only one school and that the acceptance letter had apparently been mailed home to Florida; he’d never seen it. If there was perfidy, it had the stamp of Antoinette all over it. “Oh,” he said to the filmmaker, who was looking at him strangely. Lancelot’s face must have betrayed him. “No relation.”

Lights came on over the porch outside: a raccoon triggering the sensor. When they went off, the sky was doubled navy velvet. They passed the whole shining salmon in its bed of kale and lemons, the bowl of quinoa salad.

Lancelot found he could not stop talking. He was simply thrilled to be here. Someone had poured him wine after wine. Some artists had disappeared by dessert, but most had pulled their chairs over to his table. He told the story of his failed flight down the plane’s staircase; he told the story of the disastrous audition when he was an actor, when he was asked to strip to the waist and had forgotten that Mathilde had that morning in the shower shaved a smiley face into his chest hair.

“I had heard you were a character,” the poet said, over the crème brûlée, laying her hand on his arm. She had laughed so hard that her eyes were dewy. “I had no idea what a character.”

At the other table, there had been a vaguely Indianish woman in a tunic, and Lancelot felt a flutter in his gut: could Leo be short for Leona? There were women with male voices. She had a white streak in her black hair that seemed appropriately eccentric for the maker of that opera he had seen this summer. She had gorgeous hands, like owlets. But she stood abruptly, carried her plate and utensils to the kitchen, and left; and he swallowed a bitter mouthful. She hadn’t wanted to meet him.

Now they were in the main room, with its pool and Ping-Pong tables, and he was playing. Even with the alcohol, his reactions were swift: he was still a bit of an athlete, he was pleased to see, even after his summer encased in plaster. Someone brought out the whiskey. When he stopped, panting, his noodled left arm a little pangy, a tiny circlet of artists formed around him. Lancelot fell into his automatic charm. “What’s your name? What do you do?” he asked them, one by one.

Artists! Narcissists! Some better than others at concealing, but like children standing at the edge of the playground, fingers in mouths, watching the others wide-eyed as they were one by one induced to play. Each, when invited to talk, was secretly relieved that someone saw them as important as they were. That the most important person in the room had recognized them as equally the most important in the room. If only potentially so. If only in the future.

Because, Lancelot knew, beaming so kindly upon all the others, that he was the only real artist at the place.

When it was his turn, the bright, blushing redheaded boy said his name so softly that Lancelot had to lean forward and ask him to say it again and the boy looked at him with a flash of something — stubbornness, amusement — and said, “Leo.”

Lancelot moved his mouth until words at last came out. “You’re Leo? Leo Sen? Leo Sen the composer?”

“In the flesh,” said Leo. “Glad to meet you.”

And when Lancelot still couldn’t speak, the ginger boy said drily, “Expecting an Indian, weren’t we. I get that often. My father’s half Indian and looks it. His genes were steamrolled by my mother’s. On the other hand, my sister looks like she should be in a Bollywood film and nobody can believe we are related one iota.”

“All this time, and you were just standing there?” Lancelot said. “Letting me make a fool of myself?”

Leo shrugged, and said, “I was amused. I wanted to see what my librettist was like as a person.”

“But excuse me, you can’t be a composer. You’re in kindergarten,” Lancelot said.

“Twenty-six,” Leo said. “Hardly in nappies.” For such a blusher, there was an edge to his words.

“You are nothing like what I expected,” Lancelot said.

Leo blinked hard. His hue had deepened to angry lobster. “And that, I think, is a marvelous thing. Who wants what’s expected?”