Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

She stopped still. Stand straight, she told herself. She gave poor Land her largest smile. “Don’t lose heart. Onward!” she said.

She saw his face again and again as she drove back fast through the night to get home to her house, her dog. How ugly a handsome man can sometimes be. Perhaps Land was a far better actor than she’d ever believed him to be; better, for sure, than Lotto had been. Well, she knew what that was like.

—

EMPTY THEATERS ARE MORE SILENT than other empty places. When theaters sleep, they dream of noise and light and motion. She found only one door unlocked to the street and stepped out of the freezing wind. Even now, bird-bone Danica and pretty Susannah were exhausting their small talk, waving off the waiter, almost ready to start badmouthing Mathilde for standing them up. So be it. All day at work she’d felt a ratcheting of anxiety, and when Lancelot wouldn’t answer her texts, when he didn’t come home, she went to find him. Gacy on the marquee. Play about evil, corroding him internally. She followed the faint traces of his voice through the backstage, hands out, shuffling, to feel her way in the dark; she wouldn’t turn on a light and warn him she was there. At last she was in the wings, and there he was onstage, of course, in dim light, saying:

Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart,

Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood,

When man’s worst sin is, he does too much good!

Who, then, dares to be half so kind again?

For bounty, that makes gods, does still mar men.

It took her to the end of the scene to identify it: Timon of Athens . Her least favorite Shakespeare. He started the next scene. Oh. He was doing the whole play. Alone. To nobody.

She was safe in the darkness, and there allowed herself to smile at him — ludicrous, sweet man — and the smile expanded alarmingly in her diaphragm so that she had to breathe deep, stern breaths to keep from laughing. Because look at him, too tall, stalking the stage. Keeping the old dream moribund with these infusions of acting; the old self she thought dead still secretly alive. But stagy, too loud. Not the actor he thought he was.

She stood in the black folds of the curtain, and he finished and bowed and bowed; then he caught his breath and came back down into his body again. He flicked off the lights. He had a light on his cell, and he guided himself out with it, but she was careful to stay away from its dim circle. He passed close by her and she caught a whiff of him: sweat and coffee and his own human smell, and maybe bourbon to loosen him. She waited until the door echoed closed, and then she came more swiftly through the dark by feel, outside into the icy street, and jumped into a cab and raced him home. When he came in, it was only minutes after her, but she’d smelled the winter in his hair when he leaned his head against her neck. She held his head gently, feeling his secret happiness moving in him.

—

LATER, UNDER HER NOM DE PLUME, she wrote a play called Volumnia. It played in a fifty-seat theater. She gave it her all.

[She shouldn’t have been surprised when nobody came.]

SO LONG AGO, and she had been so little then. There was a long darkness between what she remembered and the results. There was something ajar here. A four-year-old is still an infant. It seemed too harsh to hate a baby for being a baby, for making a baby’s mistake.

Perhaps it was always there; perhaps it was made in explanation, but all along she had held within her a second story underneath the first, waging a terrible and silent battle with her certainty. She had to believe of herself that the better story was the true one, even if the worse was insistent.

She was four years old, and she heard her brother playing upstairs in her grandmother’s house when the rest of the family was eating pheasants her father had shot that morning. In the window, the family was gathered under the tree, baguettes and cassoulet on the table, wine. Her mother’s rosy face was tipped back, sun full on her skin. Her father was feeding Bibiche a morsel. Her grandmother’s mouth was more dash than n , signaling happiness. The wind was rising, the leaves shushing. There was a smell of good manure on the air and a delicious far Breton waiting clammy on the countertop for dessert. She was on the potty, trying to go, but her brother was more interesting with his songs and thumps above. He was supposed to be sleeping. Bad boy, he would not.

The girl went up the stairs, gathering dust with her fingertip.

She opened the door to the room. Her baby brother saw her and crowed with happiness. Come on, she said. He tottered out. She followed him to the stairs, golden old oak shining from the slippers that buffed it up and down, day after day.

Her brother stood at the top of the steps, wobbly, his hands reaching for hers, sure she would help him. He pressed up against her. But instead of taking his hand in hers, she moved her leg where it was touching him. She didn’t mean to, not really, well, maybe some of her meant it, perhaps she did. He tottered. And then she watched the baby tumble slowly down the stairs, his head like a coconut, thump-a-bump all the way down.

The still knot of him at the bottom. Thrown laundry.

When she looked up, she saw the ten-year-old cousin where she hadn’t seen her before, standing in the door of the upstairs bathroom, gaping.

This was the bad version. This version was what later events told her had happened. It was as real as the other. They played simultaneously in a loop.

Yet Mathilde could never quite believe it. That twitch of a leg a later insertion, surely. She could not believe and yet something in her did believe, and this contradiction that she held within her became the source of everything.

All that remained were the facts. Before it all happened, she had been so beloved. Afterward, love had been withdrawn. And she had pushed or she hadn’t; the result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she’d been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this, how could she not have been forgiven?

IT WAS MATHEMATICAL, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.

This one man nervous in a suit a size too small for his long, lean self. This woman in a green lace dress cut to the upper thigh with a white rose behind her ear. Christ, so young.

The woman before them was a Unitarian minister and on her buzzed scalp the gray hairs shone in the swab of sun through the lace in the window. Outside, Poughkeepsie was waking. Behind them, a man in a custodian’s uniform cried softly beside a man in pajamas with a dachshund: their witnesses. A shine in everyone’s eye. One could taste the love on the air. Or maybe that was sex. Or maybe it was all the same then.

“I do,” she said. “I do,” he said. They did; they would.

Our children will be so fucking beautiful, he thought, looking at her.

Home, she thought, looking at him.

“You may kiss,” said the officiant. They did; would.

Now they thanked everyone and laughed, and papers were signed, and congratulations offered, and all stood for a moment unwilling to leave this genteel living room where there was such softness. The newlyweds thanked everyone again shyly and went out the door into the cool morning. They laughed, rosy. In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.

—

HER LIFE. In the window the parakeet. Scrap of blue midday in the London dusk. Ages away from what had been most deeply lived. Day on a rocky beach, creatures in the tide pool. All those ordinary afternoons, listening to footsteps in the beams of the house and knowing the feeling behind them.