Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Long silence, pool lapping at the gutters. A woman hummed to herself as she did a slow froglike kick on her back.

“Oh my god,” Leo said.

“Yeah,” Lancelot said. “Also, Antigone in the original was on the side of the gods and against men, as in the order of men, as in Creon’s dictates against her brother’s being honored by burial, but I think we can extend this to a sense of—”

“Misandry.”

“No, not misandry, but perhaps misanthropy. She scorns the gods for leaving her, humans for their flaws. She has shrunk so small she is beneath humans, literally beneath their feet, and yet she’s above them. Time has purified her. She has become the spirit of humanity. We should change the title. What about Anti-gone ? Play with the fact that she’s still here? No?”

He had led Leo into the locker room and was toweling himself off exuberantly. He took off his trunks. When he looked up, Leo’s eyes were enormous, and he was sitting on his bench, his hands folded in his lap as he watched naked Lancelot. He was pinkish in the face.

“Antigonist,” Leo said, looking down.

“Wait. The Antigonad ,” Lancelot said, first as a joke because, well, he was just then pulling up his boxer briefs. All right, it was true, he had lingered a little in the buff: there had been an internal hot flash of vanity and gratitude for being looked at. It had been so long since a stranger had seen him naked. Well, there had been that run of Equus in the mid-nineties, but it had played for only twelve nights and the theater had only two hundred seats. But when he said the joke, he found he liked it. “The Antigonad,” he said again. “Maybe it’s a love story. A love story and she’s stuck in a cave. The lovers can’t touch.”

“For now,” said Leo. “We can always change if we find ourselves to be pro-gonad, I suppose.” Was that suggestive? It was hard to tell with this boy.

“Leo, Leo,” Lancelot said. “You are as dry as vermouth.”

—

AND THEN CAME THE PROLIX PERIOD, when they did not stop talking. For four days, now five, now seven. Without really writing anything yet. They worked in strange twilit limbo. Lancelot always an early riser, Leo up all night, sleeping until two in the afternoon, they compromised by meeting at Lancelot’s when Leo was awake. They worked until Lancelot fell asleep, full-clothed, waking briefly only when the door blasted cold into the cabin as Leo left.

Lancelot read the original Sophocles play aloud while Leo lay on his hearth before the cheery fire and dreamt, listening. And then, for context, Lancelot read aloud the other two parts of the triumvirate, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus . He read aloud the fragments of Euripides. He read the Séamus Heaney adaptation aloud; they read Anne Carson, their heads together. They listened in silence to the Orff opera, the Honegger — Cocteau opera, the Theodorakis opera, the Traetta opera. At supper, they sat engaged, tight and thick, and they spoke of their Antigone, whom they called Go, as if she were a friend.

Leo hadn’t yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy’s own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo’s jaw in profile, devastating; the way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape. The smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleachy. [The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.]

—

THE WEATHER CONSPIRED. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page. The linger of wood smoke on the back of the tongue.

The collaborators were in so deep that when Natalie tried to sit with them for dinner, Lancelot barely smiled at her before turning back to sketch out what he was saying to Leo on a piece of scrap paper. And Natalie sat back in her chair, tearing up — their friendship mostly in the past, but oh! he still had the power to hurt her with his disregard — until she smiled it away. She watched Lotto. She was listening. There was an electricity here; both men were flushed, shoulders close. If Lotto had been paying attention to Natalie, he would have understand that there would be talk later, the old friend network sparked by what she’d say she’d seen between the two men. At last she nodded and bussed her tray and left; and as this was her last night at the residency, he wouldn’t see her again. [Her death would be soon and sudden. Ski tumble; embolism.]

The German sculptors had returned to Nuremberg without Lancelot’s noticing it, and a pale young woman had taken their place. She painted one-story-tall oils of the shadows of objects, not the objects themselves. The blond novelist went home to her house full of boys. The colony contracted in winter: now there was only one table of artists at dinner. The frizzled poet wore a face of disappointment when she came in night after night to see the collaborators together. “Lancelot, my dear. Won’t you talk anymore to anyone but that boy?” she said once, leaning close, when Leo went in to fetch the dessert tray for the group.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll come back to you soon, Emmylinn. It’s just the initial stages. The head-over-heels phase.”

She rested her papery cheek on his upper arm, and said, “I understand. But dovey, it is not healthy to be so immersed for so long. You need to come up for air.”

—

AND THEN THERE WAS THE NOTE in the office from his wife, hurtfully terse, and Lancelot felt a dip in him, and he hurried down to the laundry room to call Mathilde.

“M.,” he said, when she picked up, “I’m so sorry. I’ve lost track of everything but this project. It’s all-consuming.”

“No sign of you for a week, my love,” she said. “No call. You’ve forgotten me.”

“No,” he said. “No. Of course not. I’m just in deep.”

“In deep,” she repeated slowly. “You are in deep something. The question is: In deep what?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She sighed and said, “Thanksgiving’s tomorrow.”

“Oh,” he said.

“We had planned for you to come back for the night so we can host. Our first in the country. I was going to pick you up at eight tomorrow morning. Rachel and Elizabeth and the twins are coming. Sallie’s flying up. Chollie and Danica. Samuel, his triplets, but not Fiona — did you know she’d filed for divorce? Shocker, out of nowhere. You should call him. He misses you. Anyway, I’ve made pies.”

The silence moved from interrogative to accusatory.

At last, he said, “I believe just this once that my beloveds can celebrate Thanksgiving without me. I will be giving thanks for you by working. Thereby being able to buy many more decades of Tofurky that you will all insert into your gobbets.”

“How mean. And sad,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to be mean. And not sad for me,” he said. “After the summer I had, M., I’m bloody delighted to be working.”

“Bloody,” she said. “I didn’t know they used Anglicisms in New Hampshire.”

“Leo,” he said.

“Leo,” she said. “Leo. Leo. Leo. Leo. Listen. I can cancel on them all and drive up there and find a bed-and-breakfast,” she said. “We can gorge on pies. And watch terrible movies. And fuck.”

And then a long silence and she said, “I guess not.”

He sighed. “You can’t hate me, Mathilde, when I say no. This is my work.”

She said nothing, eloquently.

“This is probably the wrong time to bring it up,” he said.