Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

He found one window unlatched and wedged his shoulders through, his body snaking after him, and fell so hard on his bad clavicle that the ceiling swam with sparks. “Leo,” he called out in a choked voice, but he knew before he hefted himself to his feet that Leo wasn’t in the cabin. The shoes under the bed were gone, and the closet was empty. It smelled, still, like Leo. He looked vainly for a note, anything, and found only a clean copy of Go’s aria in the piano bench, with Leo’s precise penciled notation. Framable, art even without the music. Only the word acciaccato in black ink.

Lancelot ran as well as he could back to the colony house, catching Blaine driving in, and waved him down.

“Oh,” Blaine said. “Oh, yes. Leo had some terrible news from home and had to fly off in the middle of the night. I’m just coming back from Hartford now. He seemed drawn. He’s a sweet kid, isn’t he? Poor boy.”

Lotto smiled. His eyes filled with tears. He was absurd.

Blaine looked uncomfortable and laid a hand on Lotto’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he said.

Lancelot nodded. “I need to go home today, too, I’m afraid,” he said. “Please tell them in the office when they come in. I’ll hire a driver. Don’t worry about me.”

“All right, son,” Blaine said quietly. “I won’t.”

—

LANCELOT STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the country house’s kitchen, the limo shushing off through the slush. Home.

God was clicking swiftly down the stairs, Mathilde at the table in a slant of light, her eyes closed, a cup of tea steaming before her. There was a whiff of garbage in the house’s chilly air. Lancelot’s heart gave a somersault: it was his job in the family to take the garbage out. In his absence, Mathilde had been letting it build.

He didn’t know if she would look at him. He had never known her to be so angry that she would not look at him. Her face was so terribly closed. She looked older. Sad. Skinny. Her hair greasy. She was browned, as if she’d been pickled in her own loneliness. Something in him was breaking.

And then God was leaping at his knees, peeing with happiness to see him, and barking in her high-pitched semi-scream. Mathilde opened her eyes. He watched the great pupils narrowing in her irises, watched her see him, and by the look on her face, he understood that she hadn’t known he was there until now. And that she was so very, very glad to see him. Here she was. His only love.

She stood so fast her chair tumbled backward and she came to him with her hands outspread, her face bursting open, and then he pressed his face into her hair to smell it. The earth was stuck, rotating, in his throat. And then her strong and bony body was against his, her scent in his nose, the taste of her earlobe in his mouth. She pulled back a span and looked at him ferociously and kicked the kitchen door shut with her foot. When he tried to speak, she pressed her hand hard over his mouth so he couldn’t and she led him upstairs in absolute silence and had her way with him so roughly that when he woke the next day he had plum-colored bruises on the bones of his hips and fingernail cuts on his sides, which he pressed in the bathroom, hungry for the pain.

—

AND THEN IT WAS CHRISTMAS. Mistletoe hanging from the hallway chandelier, blue spruce wrapped up the banister, a smell of cinnamon, baking apples. Lancelot stood at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at his cragged face in the mirror, fixing his tie. Looking at him, he thought, you’d never tell that he had been so broken this year. He had suffered, had come through it all stronger. Even, he thought, possibly more attractive. Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age. Poor Mathilde, with her corrugated forehead. In twenty years, she’d be silver-gray, her face full of wrinkles. Oh, but she’d still be beautiful, he thought, loyal to the marrow.

The sound of a motor broke in and he looked out to find the dark green Jaguar turning off the road onto the gravel among the bare cherry trees.

“They’re here,” he called up the stairs to Mathilde.

He was smiling: it had been months since he’d seen his sister and Elizabeth and their adopted twins, and how they would love the rocking turtle and the rocking owl he’d had carved for them by an eccentric hermit woodworker out in the deep upstate wilds. The owl bore a startled scholarly look and the turtle seemed to be chewing a bitter root. Oh, for the kids’ spritelike bodies in his arms. The soothe of his sister beside him. He came up on his toes in excitement.

But he saw, under the bowl of peppermint bark on the cherry hall stand, the corner of a newspaper peeking out. Unusual. Mathilde so neat, usually. Everything in the house in its proper place. He pushed the bowl aside to see. His legs went liquid under him.

A grainy photo of Leo Sen, smiling shyly. A small article beneath his face.

Promising British composer drowned off an island in Nova Scotia. Tragedy. Such potential. Eton and Oxford. Early prodigy on the violin. Known for his aharmonic, deeply emotional compositions. No partner. Will be missed by parents, community. Quotes by famous composers; Leo had been better known than Lancelot had believed.

What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear. Another sinkhole. Someone there, suddenly gone. Leo swimming in such cold water. December, rip currents, spray above the wild waves instantly freezing to bullets of ice. He imagined the shock of cold black water on the body, shuddered. Everything about it was wrong.

He had to breathe to keep on two feet. He gripped the table and opened his eyes to see his own face gone white in the mirror.

And above his left shoulder, he saw Mathilde at the top of the stairs. She was watching him. She was unsmiling, intent, bladelike in her red dress. The weak December daylight poured through the window above her and touched her around the shoulders.

The door opened in the kitchen and the children’s voices were in the back of the house, shouting for Uncle Lotto, and Rachel yelled out, “Hello?” and the dog barked joyfully and Elizabeth honked out a laugh, and Rachel and Elizabeth began to softly bicker, and still, Lancelot and his wife looked at each other in the mirror. And then Mathilde took one step down and then another, and her old small smile returned to her face. “Merry Christmas!” she called out gaily in her deep, clear voice. He flinched back as if he’d put his hand down on a hot stove, and she fixed him in the mirror as she slowly, slowly, descended.

“MAY I AT LEAST READ what you wrote with Leo?” Mathilde asked, one night in bed.

“Maybe,” Lancelot said, and rolled over on top of her and put his hands up her shirt.

Later, after she submarined below the sheets, she came up, flushed with his heat. “Maybe, as in I can read it?”

“M.,” he said softly. “I hate my own failure.”

“That’s a no?” she said.

“That’s a no,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

But he had to go to the city the next day to meet with his agent, and she went to his aerie at the top of the house, all scattered papers and coffee cups growing fur, and sat and read what was in the file folder.

She stood and went to the window. She thought of the boy who had drowned in the icy black water, of a mermaid, of herself. “Shame,” she said to the dog. “It could have been so great.”

THE ANTIGONAD

[ First sketch, with notes for music ]

CAST OF CHARACTERS

GO: countertenor, offstage; onstage, a puppet in water or a hologram that remains the entire opera in a glass tank

ROS: tenor, Go’s lover

CHORUS OF TWELVE: gods and tunnelers and commuters

FOUR DANCERS

ACT I: SOLIP