Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Despite the hot pizzas in her hands, the room felt cold. Mathilde held Chollie’s eye. “He would have been great without me,” she said. The others still on the couch, laughing up at Lotto, though Rachel was looking at Mathilde from the counter in the kitchen, clutching her own elbows.

“Even you couldn’t have magicked that into being, witch,” Chollie said, and he took a pizza box from her, opened it, folded three slices together, and put the box back on the stack to eat the mass in his hands, grinning at her through a mouthful of grease.

—

DURING THE YEARS when Lotto felt as if he were getting to be good enough and secure enough, even when he was working constantly, his plays all being published, productions all over the country steadily increasing so that they alone provided a comfortable living, even then he was gadflied by this Phoebe Delmar.

When Telegony appeared, Lotto was forty-four, and the acclaim was instant and near universal. Mathilde had seeded the idea in his head; it had been seeded in hers by Chollie years earlier with his Circe comment. It was the story of Circe and Odysseus’s son Telegonus, who, after Odysseus had abandoned them, was raised by his mother in a mansion in the deep woods on Aeaea, protected by the enchanted tigers and pigs. When he left home, as all heroes must, Telegonus’s witch mother gave him a poisoned stingray spear; he floated to Ithaca on his little ship, started stealing Odysseus’s cattle and ended up in a terrible battle with the man he didn’t know was his father, finally killing him.

[Telegonus married Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife; Penelope’s own son with Odysseus, Telemachus, ended up marrying Circe; half brothers became stepfathers. As Mathilde always read the myth, it was a roar in support of the sexiness of older women.]

Lotto’s play was also a sly nod to the nineteenth-century idea of the term telegony : that offspring could inherit the genetic traits of their mother’s previous lovers. Telegonus, in Lotto’s version, bore the pig’s snout, the wolf’s ears, and the tiger’s stripes of the lovers Circe had turned into animals. This character was always played in a terrifying mask, the fixity of which made the soft-spoken character all the more powerful. As a joke, Telemachus was also played in a mask in the round, with twenty different eyes and ten different mouths and noses for all of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was off on his little meander over the Mediterranean.

The whole thing was set in Telluride in the modern day. It was an indictment of a democratic society that somehow was able to contain billionaires.

“Didn’t Lancelot Satterwhite come from money? Isn’t this hypocritical of him?” a man could be heard wondering at intermission in the foyer. “Oh, no, he was disinherited for getting married to his wife. It’s such a tragic story, actually,” a woman said, in passing. From mouth to mouth it spread, viral. The story of Mathilde and Lotto, the epic romance; he was unfamilied, cast out, not allowed to go home to Florida again. All for Mathilde. For his love for Mathilde.

Oh, god, thought Mathilde. The piety! It was enough to make her sick. But, for him, she let the story stand.

And then, perhaps a week after the opening, when the advance orders for the tickets were extended out to two months and Lotto was drowning in all of the congratulatory e-mails and calls, he came to bed in the middle of the night, and she woke instantly, and said, “Are you crying?”

“Crying!” he said. “Never. I’m a manly man. I splashed bourbon in my eyes.”

“Lotto,” she said.

“I mean, I was cutting onions in the kitchen. Who doesn’t love to chop Vidalias in the dark?”

She sat up. “Tell me.”

“Phoebe Delmar,” he said, and handed over the laptop. In its dim gleam, his face was stricken.

Mathilde read and let out a whistle. “That woman better watch her back,” she said darkly.

“She’s entitled to her opinion.”

“Her? Nope. This is the only hatchet job you got for Telegony. She’s insane.”

“Calm down,” he said, but he seemed comforted by her anger. “Maybe she has a point. Maybe I am overrated.”

Poor Lotto. He couldn’t stand a dissenter.

“I know every part of you,” Mathilde said. “I know every full stop and ellipsis in your work, and I was there when you wrote them. I can tell you better than anyone in the world, much more than this bombastic self-petard-hoisting leech of a critic, that you are not overrated. You are not overrated one single whit. She is overrated. They should cut off her fingers to keep her from writing anything more.”

“Thank you for not cursing,” Lotto said.

“ And she can fuck herself lingeringly with a white-hot pitchfork. In her dark shit-star of an asshole,” Mathilde said.

“Aha,” he said. “Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce.”

“Try to sleep,” Mathilde said. She kissed him. “Just write another one. Write a better one. Your success is like wormwood to her. It galls.”

“She’s the only one in the world,” he said sadly, “who hates me.”

What was this mania for universal adoration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone. She stifled a sigh. “Write another play, and she’ll come around,” she said, as she always did. And he wrote another one, as he always did.

MATHILDE BEGAN GOING for much longer runs in the hills. Two hours, three hours.

Sometimes, when Lotto was alive and he was in full steam up in his study in the attic and she could hear even in the garden outside as he cracked himself up, doing his characters’ lines in their own voices, she had to put on her running shoes and set off down the road to prevent herself from going up the stairs and warming herself against his happiness; she had to run and run as a reminder that having her own strong body was a privilege in itself.

But after Lotto left, her grief had begun to radiate into her body, and there was a run after she had been several months a widow when Mathilde had to stop a dozen miles from the house and sit on a bank for a very long time because, it appeared, her body had stopped working the way it should. When she stood, she could only hobble like an old woman. It began to rain and her clothes were soaked, her hair stuck to her forehead and ears. She came slowly home.

But the private investigator was in Mathilde’s kitchen, the light on over the sink. The dim brown dusk of October was falling outside.

“I let myself in,” the investigator said. “About a minute ago.” She was wearing a tight black dress, makeup. Like so, she looked German, elegant without being pretty. She wore figure eights in her ears, infinity swinging every time she moved her head.

“Huh,” said Mathilde. She took off her running shoes, her socks, her wet shirt, and dried her hair with God’s towel. “I wasn’t aware that you knew where I lived,” Mathilde said.

The investigator waved that away, said, “I’m good at what I do. Hope you don’t mind that I’ve poured us a glass of wine. You’re going to want it when you see what I found about your old friend Chollie Watson.” She laughed at her own pleasure.

Mathilde took the manila envelope she held out, and they went out to the stone veranda where the watery sun was going down over the cold blue hills. They stood watching it in silence until Mathilde began to shiver.

“You’re upset with me,” the investigator said.

Mathilde said, very gently, “This is my space. I don’t let anyone in. Finding you here felt like an assault.”

“I’m sorry,” the investigator said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought we had chemistry. I sometimes come on too strong.”