Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

ARIEL: Nonsense, nonsense. I will replace the dress. Back to your station. [ Young exits. ]

LANCELOT: Thank you, Ariel. Don’t worry about Mathilde. It’s an old dress, I think. By the way, this is spectacular, all of this. As if you made an exact replica of the inside of my brain. Actually, I saw it was Natalie and dragged Mathilde here, though she wasn’t feeling well. Natalie was a friend from college, we had to come. So tragic, her accident. I’m glad you’re doing her honor. To tell you the truth, I think Mathilde may still feel a little strange about quitting the gallery so suddenly when she got the dating-website job all those years ago.

ARIEL: I understood that she’d leave me one day. All my best girls do.

LANCELOT: I think she misses art, though. She makes me go to museums wherever we are in the world. It’ll be good for you two to reconnect.

ARIEL: One can never have too many old friends. In any event, I’ve heard something about you. Someone told me you’ve come into a shocking inheritance. Is this true?

LANCELOT [ Sucking in his breath sharply. ]: My mother died four months ago. No, five. True.

ARIEL: I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be flip, Lotto. I knew you were estranged and didn’t think through what I was saying. Please forgive me.

LANCELOT: We were estranged, yes. I hadn’t seen her for decades. Sorry. I’m not sure, really, why I’m getting all misty. It’s been five months. Long enough to have gotten over grieving for a mother who never loved me.

CHOLLIE [ Stepping near. ]: If your mother never loved you, it was because your mother was a loveless cunt.

LANCELOT: Chollie, hello! He is deformed, crooked, old and sere; ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; stigmatical in making, worse in mind. My best friend.

CHOLLIE: You can shove your Shakespeare up your ass, Lotto. God, I’m sick of it.

LANCELOT: Charles, I thank thee for thy love to me.

ARIEL: Wouldn’t be much use up there. Shakespeare in the dark.

CHOLLIE: Oh, Ariel. Good effort, man. You’ve always been so almost funny.

ARIEL: Funny thing to say, Charles, when we hardly know each other. You’ve bought a few paintings from me in the last year, but that’s not enough for you to explain to me how I’ve always been.

CHOLLIE: You and me? Oh, no, we’re ancient friends. I’ve known you for so long. You don’t remember, but I met you in the city long ago. All the way back when Mathilde and you were an item.

LANCELOT: [ Long pause. ] An item? Mathilde and Ariel? What?

CHOLLIE: Was I not supposed to say that? Sorry. Oh, well, ancient history. You’ve been married a million years, doesn’t matter. Those canapés are breaking my willpower. Excuse me. [ Chases off after a waiter with a tray. ]

LANCELOT: An item?

ARIEL: Well. Yes. I thought you knew Mathilde and I… were involved.

LANCELOT: Involved?

ARIEL: If it helps, it was purely business. At least for her.

LANCELOT: Business? You were a, I guess, a patron? Oh, I see! You mean at the gallery. When I was trying to act. Failing mostly. Yes, it’s true. You supported us financially then for years, thank god. Did I ever thank you? [ Laughs with relief. ]

ARIEL: No, well. I’d been her, ah, well, lover. Boyfriend. We’d had an arrangement. I’m sorry. This is awkward. I thought you and Mathilde had no secrets. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said a word.

LANCELOT: We don’t. Have secrets.

ARIEL: Of course. Oh, dear. If it helps, nothing has happened since. And she broke my heart. But I’m a million years beyond that. It doesn’t matter.

LANCELOT: Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

ARIEL [ Pausing for a very long time, getting more and more agitated. ]: I should get back to—

LANCELOT [ Booming. ]: Stay where you are. You have seen Mathilde naked? You have made love to my wife? Sex? There has been sex?

ARIEL: It’s so long ago. It doesn’t matter.

LANCELOT: Answer me.

ARIEL: Yes. We were involved for four years. Listen, Lotto, I’m sorry this was such a surprise. But it’s between you and Mathilde now. You won, you got her, I lost. I have to get back to my guests. I can’t tell you how little this matters in the long run. You know where to find me if you need to talk. [ Exits. ]

[ Lancelot stands alone in a pocket of his fame, the crowd circling respectfully but nobody nearing. His face is blue in the light. ]

MATHILDE [ Breathless, transparent circle on her dress where the wine had stained her. ]: Here you are. Ready to go yet? I can’t believe you somehow maneuvered me into stepping into this gallery again. Christ, talk about a sign we should never have come. Lucky this is silk, and the wine just sort of beaded off— Lotto? Lotto Satterwhite. Lotto! Are you okay? Hello? My love? [ Touches his face. ]

[ He looks at her as if from a very great height. ]

MATHILDE [ Voice trailing off. ]: Love?

SUNSET. House on the dunes like a sea-tossed conch. Pelicans thumbtacked in the wind. Gopher tortoise under the palmetto.

Lotto stood in the window.

He was in Florida. Florida? In his mother’s house. He had no idea how he had found himself here.

“Muvva?” he called out. But his mother had been dead for six months.

The place smelled of her, talcum and roses. Dust a soft gray skin over the chintz and Lladró. Also mildew, the sea’s armpit stink.

Think, Lotto. Last thing remembered. Home, moonlight planing the surface of the desk, bone fingers of winter trees plucking stars from the sky. Papers strewn. Dog wheezing on his feet. One floor below, his wife sleeping, hair in a white-blond plume on the pillow. He’d touched her shoulder and climbed to his study, the residue of her warmth in his palm.

A slow dark bubble rising and it returned to him, the badness between them, their great love gone sour. How furious he’d been. How his anger had shrouded all he saw.

For the past month he had been standing on a thin wire between staying with her and leaving her. It had been exhausting to clench his feet, to wonder where he’d fall.

He was in the business of narrative; he knew how one loose word could make the whole edifice crumble. [A fine woman! A fair woman! A sweet woman!] For twenty-three years, he’d thought he’d met a girl who was as pure as snow, a sad, lonely girl. He had saved her. Two weeks later, they were married. But, like a squid from the deep, the story had turned itself inside out. His wife had not been pure. She’d been a mistress. Kept for money. By Ariel. It made no sense. Either she’d been a whore or Lancelot was a cuckold; he, who had been faithful from the first.

[Tragedy, comedy. It’s all a matter of vision.]

—

HE FELT THE COLD OF DECEMBER through the window. How long would this sunset take? Time was not behaving the way he had come to expect. The beach was absent of souls. Where were the marching old folks, the dog walkers, the boozy strollers, where were the sunset lovers, the lotus eaters? Gone. The sand was inexplicably smooth as skin. He felt his fear building. He reached inside the house and flicked the light switch.

The lights were as dead as, well. As dead as his mother.

No electricity; no phone. He looked down. He was wearing a pajama top. He was, however, not wearing pants. This lit the fuse. He heard the sizzle. The panic in him went off.

He saw himself running through the little house as if from above. He peered in the cupboards. He went into Sallie’s room, vacated after Antoinette died.

All the while, outside, the sun was setting, shadows creeping out of the sea on swift amphibian feet and moving toward the Gulf, over the Intracoastal Waterway, the St. Johns River, the cold springs and gatored swamps, the fountains dyed turquoise in the sad, cheap developments, half foreclosed upon. Over the mangroves, over the manatees, over the clams in their beds, one by one closing their hard little lips like a choir at the end of a song. There the shadows dove deeper into the Gulf, rolled in their underwater doubled darkness toward Texas.