Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“My mother was many things, but not clever.”

“Bite your tongue,” Gawain said. “You got no idea the things she done for you.”

“She did nothing. Loved nobody but herself. I haven’t seen her since the eighties.”

“Son, you see things awry. She loved you too much.”

There was a rippling in the pool; Lotto looked in. The water was green-brown with murk, oak leaves coated the surface. A whiteness like an egg emerging, his mother’s forehead. She smiled up. She was young, beautiful. Her red hair licked the surface, golden leaves knitted in. She spat dark water from her mouth.

“Muvva,” he said. When he looked up, his father was gone. The old ache at his center, again.

“Darling,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“You tell me,” he said. “I just want to go home.”

“To that wife of yours,” she said. “Mathilde. I never liked her. I was wrong. You never understand these things until you’re dead.”

“No. You were right,” he said. “She’s a liar.”

“Who cares. She loved you. A good wife. Made your life beautiful, calm. Did the bills. You never worried about a thing.”

“We were married for twenty-three years, and she never told me she’d been a whore. Or an adulteress. Or both. Hard to tell. Pretty huge lie of omission.”

“Huge thing’s your ego. Awful that you weren’t the only man for her. Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren’t around.”

“But she lied,” he said.

“Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”

A rumble; thunder over Hamlin. Sun went dull, sky gray felt. His mother sank so her chin was obscured by the murk.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“It’s time,” she said.

“How do I come home?”

She touched his face. “Poor darling,” she said, and sank down.

—

HE TRIED TO RETURN to his wife by imagining her deeply. By now, Mathilde would be alone in the house with God. Her hair would be darkened with grease, face drawn. She would have begun to smell. Bourbon for dinner. She’d have fallen asleep in her favorite chair by the fireplace with its cold ashes, veranda doors open to the night so that Lotto could wander back. In sleep her eyelids were so translucent that he always thought if he looked hard, he could see her dreams pulsing like jellyfish across her brain.

He would have liked to go deeper into her, to seat himself on the seat of her lacrimal bone and ride there, tiny homunculus like a rodeo cowboy, understand what it was she thought. Oh, but it would be redundant. Quiet daily intimacy had taught him. Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely. He could sense the phrasing of the jokes she was about to tell, feel the goose bumps on her upper arms when she felt chilled.

She’d wake soon with a startle. His wife, who never cried, would cry. Masked with her own fingers, she’d wait in the dark for Lotto to return.

—

MOON A NAVEL, light on the water a trail of fine hair leading straight to Lotto.

Coming toward him on it, all the girls he’d had before Mathilde. So many. Naked. Shining. Chollie’s sister, Gwennie, his first at fifteen, hair wild. Glossy private-school girls, dean’s daughter, townies, college girls: breasts of bread boules and fists and squash balls in athletic socks and bull’s-eyes and buckeyes and teacups and mouse snouts and tick bites, bellies and rumps, glorious, all beautiful to Lotto. A few slender boys, his theater teacher. [Look away.] So many bodies! Hundreds! He would bury himself in them. Twenty-three years faithful to Mathilde. Without compunction, he could roll his body on the sea of theirs like a dog rolls on fresh new grass.

It would serve his wife right. It would make them equal. He could return to her afterward, avenged.

But he couldn’t. He shut his eyes and put his fingers in his ears. The sand pressed against his tailbone. He felt them passing by, fingers flicking like feathers over his skin. He counted a slow thousand after the last and looked to see the trail from the moon extruded out of the stopped water, the sand torn up in one long line.

—

THE WATER WAS THE ONLY WAY, he decided, to return to Mathilde. He would swim back into time.

He took off his boxer briefs and walked into the ocean. His feet, touching the water, set off bolts of electricity like lightning. He watched, thrilled, as the light branched into the deep and slowly faded. Saltatory conduction. Each time it was gone, he made it shoot outward again. He took a breath and plunged into the water and began to swim, loving the phosphorescence as his arms struck the surface. The moon drew him along. It was not difficult, swimming in stilled water, though he had to climb the crests of the waves as if they were bumps on the land. Lobes of warmth, of cold, always the dazzle. He thrashed away, feeling a good tiredness come over him. He swam until his arms burned and his lungs were salted, and he swam some more.

He imagined passing schools of unmoving fish. He thought of galleons below, foundered in mud spangled with bullion. Stone trenches as deep as the Grand Canyon, which he flew over as if he were an eagle in a sky of water. At the bottom of these canyons were rivers of mud, creatures all goop and sudden gleam of teeth. He imagined a vast sea creature below, unfurling its arms to grasp him, but he was slippery and strong and escaped.

He’d been swimming for hours, if not days. If not weeks.

He couldn’t anymore. He stopped. He turned onto his back and went down. He saw the soft cotton of dawn wipe over the face of the night. He opened his mouth as if to eat the day. He was drowning, and in his drowning there came a glorious, vivid vision.

He was tiny, polyp of his mother, still attached by milk and warmth. Beach vacation. A window was open, waves sizzling beyond. [Antoinette, forever connected to the ocean, grasping what it reached, pulling it in, spitting up shells and bones.] She hummed. The slatted shades were down, casting streaks of light onto her. Hair glorious to her hips. She’d been a mermaid only recently, still a mermaid in her soft, pale, damp skin. She took one strap down slowly. Over a shoulder, the arm. The other. Now over her breasts, pop, out they came, soft pink like chicken cutlets, over her pale stomach with its breading of sand. Over her pubis with its luxuriant curls, down the white columns of her legs. She’d been so thin. Beautiful. From his nest of towels, Lotto, tiny, watched his gold-banded mother and had an inkling. She was over there; he was here. They were not, in fact, connected. They were two, which meant that they were not one. Before this moment, there had been a long warm sleep, first in darkness and then in gradual light. Now he had awoken. It came out of him in a squawk, this awful separateness. She startled out of her daydream. Hush, my little, she said, coming over, putting him against her chilly skin.

She, at some point, had stopped loving him. [He couldn’t know.] It was a sorrow of his life. But perhaps, right then she did.

He floated down until he shipwrecked on the bottom of the ocean. Poofs of sand. He opened his eyes. His nose was barely below the surface, where the last of the moon rode the tip of a stilled wave. He put his feet down and pushed, and his body rose out of the water to his thighs.

Like a dog that had followed him, the shore was ten feet behind.

—

THE DAY DAWNED FIRST ON THE CLOUDS. Golden cattle of sun. At least he’d have this comfort. The beach stretched perfect, the dunes black with foliage. Untouched by man. History, during the night, had been peeled to the beginning.