Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Then it was the last week of the summer. Samuel’s parents getting misty, untangling the new Labrador puppy from the table. “Our boys,” the mother said at the lobster restaurant. “They’re growing up.” Boys, considering themselves grown-up lo! these four years, were kind to her and kept straight faces.

From the airless campus of the boys’ prep school to the wonderland of college. Coed bathrooms: soapy breasts. Dining hall: girls tonguing soft-serve ice creams. Within two months, Lotto was called Master of the Hogs. Hoagmeister. It’s not true that he had no standards, it’s simply that he saw the stun in every woman. Earlobes like drupes. Soft golden down edging the temples. Such things outshone the less savory rest. Lotto imagined his life as an antipriest, devoting his soul to sex. He’d die an ancient satyr, a houseful of sleek nymphs gamboling him to the grave. What if his greatest gifts were the ones he employed in bed? [Delusion! Tall men have such miles of limbs that it strains the heart to pump blood to the nether bits. He charmed others into believing him better than he was.]

His roommates couldn’t believe the parade of girls. Fleabitten women’s studies major with nip rings; townie with a roll cresting out of her acid-washed jeans; neuroscience major, prim part, thick glasses, who specialized in the reverse cowgirl. The roommates would watch the trek through the common room, and when Lotto and the girl disappeared into his room, they would fetch the book they kept with taxonomies.

Australianopithecus: floppy-haired Aussie, later a famous jazz violinist.

Virago stridentica: ambiguously gendered punkette Lotto had picked up downtown.

Sirena ungulatica: valedictorian, velvety face atop a three-hundred-pound body.

The girls would never know. The roommates didn’t think they were cruel. But when, two months in, they showed the book to Lotto, he was furious. He bellowed, called them misogynists. They shrugged. Women who screwed deserved the scorn they got. Lotto was doing what men do. They didn’t make up the rules.

Lotto never brought home the men. They didn’t get put in any book. They remained unseen, these ghosts of hungers in his bed, out of it.

—

IT WAS THE LAST NIGHT of Lotto’s college play. Hamlet . The theatergoers who came in after the circuit of the cowbell were soaked; clouds that had oppressed the valley all day had split. Ophelia was played naked, her tremendous boobs blue-veined like Stilton cheeses. Hamlet was Lotto and vice versa. Every performance, he’d gotten a standing ovation.

In the dark wings, he cracked his neck and took a breath into his stomach. Someone was sobbing, someone lit a cigarette. Shuffling of a barn at dusk. Whispers. Yeah, I got a job in banking … She stood upon the balcony, inimically mimicking him hiccupping while amicably welcoming him in… Break a leg. Break both!

Reverberating hush. Curtain opened. Watchmen clomped out. “Who’s there?” Inside Lotto the switch flipped on, and his life receded. Relief.

Husk of Lotto watched in the wings as he, Hamlet, sauntered on.

He came to himself again when his doublet was sweat-soaked and he was bowing, and the noise of the audience rose until his final standing ovation. Professor Murgatroyd in the front row, supported between his lover and his lover’s lover, shouting in his Victorian bluestocking’s voice, “Bravo, bravo.” Armful of flowers. Girls he’d slept with, one after the other, hugging him, oily slicks of lip gloss on his tongue. Who’s this? Bridget with the spaniel’s face, oh dear, clutching him. They’d hooked up, what, two times? [Eight.] He’d heard she was calling herself his girlfriend, poor thing. “See you at the party, Bridge,” he said gently, extricating himself. The audience faded into the rain. Ophelia squeezed his arm. See him later? He’d enjoyed the two times they’d met up in the handicapped bathroom during rehearsals. Indeed, he would be seeing her, he murmured, and she carried her mad-girl’s body away.

He closed himself into a bathroom stall. The building emptied out, front doors locked. When he emerged, the dressing rooms were swept. All was dark. He took his greasepaint off slowly, watching himself in the low wattage. He reapplied foundation, smoothing the pits in his face, and left the eyeliner on, liking how vivid it made his blue. It was good to be the last person in this sacred place. Anywhere else, he hated being left with himself. But tonight, the last glory of his youth, everything he’d lived so far filled him up: his steaming lost Florida, the ache where his father had been, his mother’s fervent belief in him, God who watched, the gorgeous bodies he’d temporarily forgotten himself inside. He let it all wash over him in waves. He took the blaze of feeling through the dark rain toward the cast party, which he could hear from a half mile away, and walked in to applause, someone putting a beer in his hand. Minutes or aeons later, he stood on a window ledge while the world behind him flashed with lightning.

Trees turned to sparked neurons in silhouette. The campus quick ember, slow ash.

At his feet the party roiled with cutting-edge early nineties fashions, midriffs and piercings and ball caps to hide receding hairlines, teeth empurpled by the black light, brown lipstick with brown liner and cartilage cuffs and biker boots and exposed boxers and bump and grind and Salt-N-Pepa and green-glowing dandruff and deodorant streaks and cheekbones highlighted to shine.

Somehow he’d acquired an empty jug of water that someone had Ace-bandaged to his head. There was shouting: “All Hail the Water Princeling.” Oy: this was bad. His friends had found out where his money came from. He had hidden it, drove a beat-up Volvo for goodness sakes. He was shirtless, he found, better to show off his muscles. He was aware of how he appeared at every angle in the room, and what the jug stole in dignity, it returned in militaristic jauntiness. He puffed his chest. Now he had a bottle of gin in his hand and his friends were shouting, “Lotto! Lotto! Lotto!” as he tilted it to his lips and took in a long draught, which would turn to soldering flux in his brain by morning and make his thoughts impenetrable, impossible to part.

“The world is ending,” he bellowed. “Why not hump?”

A cheer from the dancers at his feet.

He raised his arms. [The fatal look up.]

In the doorway, suddenly, her.

Tall, in silhouette, wet hair casting the hall light into a halo, stream of bodies on the stairs behind her. She was looking at him, though he couldn’t see her face.

She moved her head and there was half of it, strong and bright. High cheekbones, plush lips. Tiny ears. She was dripping from walking through the rain. He loved her first for the stun of her across this thump and dance.

He had seen her before, he knew who she was. Mathilde, whatsername. Beauty like hers cast glimmers on the walls even across campus, phosphorescence on the things she touched. She’d been so far above Lotto — so far above every person at the school — she had become mythological. Friendless. Icy. She went weekends to the city; she was a model, hence the fancy clothes. She never partied. Olympian, elegant on her mount. Yes — Mathilde Yoder. But his victory had made him ready for her tonight. Here she was for him.

Behind him in the crashing storm, or maybe within him, a sizzle. He leapt into the grind of bodies, kneeing Samuel in the eye, crushing some poor small girl to the ground.

Lotto swam up out of the crowd and crossed the floor to Mathilde. She was six feet tall in bobby socks. In heels, her eyes were at his lip line. She looked up at him coolly. Already he loved the laugh she held in her, which nobody else would see.