Fates and Furies (15 page)

The girl said,
“Aaaaaaah!”
and the guy said,
“Urrrgh!”
and there was more hushed laughing.

“Oh my god, I needed that,” the guy whispered. “These parties are such shitshows when people bring their kids.”

“I know,” she said. “Poor Lotto watching those babies with that longing on his face. And Mathilde so skinny these days she’s getting ugly. She keeps letting it go, she’s going to be some kind of witchy old hag. Like, I don’t know, but Botox exists for a reason.”

“I was always confused why anyone thought she was hot. She’s just tall and blond and skinny, never pretty,” he said. “I’m a connoisseur.” The sound of flesh slapped. Buttocks? Lotto thought. [Thigh.]

“She’s interesting
-
looking. Remember how that was a thing in the early nineties? We were all so jealous. Remember when Lotto and Mathilde had the grandest love story ever? And their parties! Christ! I kind of feel bad for them now.”

The door opened. A pumpkin-colored head, balding. Aha, Arnie. Followed out by a bare shoulder, jagged with bones. Danica. Old affair revisited. Poor Chollie. Lotto felt sick that matrimony could seem so cheap to some people.

Weary, weary, sick to death, Lancelot stood and dressed again. Those people could rabbit themselves until they died of exhaustion, but he wouldn’t let them mealymouth Mathilde and him. How appalling, to be pitied by such gnats. Adulterer gnats. Worse.

He came downstairs again and stood in the door with his wife and said cheery good-byes to the friends, the children passed out in the parents’ arms, the drunk adults being driven, the merely tipsy driving themselves. He spackled so much extra charm onto Arnie and Danica that they both blushed and began flirting shyly back, Danica hooking her fingers through his belt loop when she kissed him good night.

“Alone again,” Mathilde said, watching the last taillights wink away. “For a while, I thought we lost you. And then I would have known we were really in trouble. Lotto Satterwhite intentionally missing a party equals Lotto Satterwhite hacking off a leg.”

“In truth, I just grinned,” he said, “and bore it.”

She turned to him, narrow-eyed. She let her dress fall off her shoulders, pool on the floor. She wore nothing underneath. “I just bared it,” she said.

“Not boring,” he said.

“Darling, bore me,” she said. “As in drill.”

“Like a wild boar,” he said. But he was more, to her dismay, like a tired piglet snoozing mid-suckle.

—

A
ND
THEN
THE
SWIFTER
DOWNWARD
SWOOP
. All things had lost their savor. He had his casts taken off, but the left side of his body was limp and tender pink and the texture of an overcooked egg noodle. Mathilde looked at him standing before her naked; she closed one eye. “Demigod,” she said. She closed the other. “Dweeb.” He laughed but was smacked right in the vanity. He was too weak yet to go home to the city. He longed for pollution, noise, light.

The things he’d discovered online had lost their luster. There were only so many cute baby videos one could take, after all, or cats falling off high places. The sun’s very shine had been besmirched! And his wife’s beauty, which had been so unimpeachable, was irritable, weakened. Such thighs she had, like
jamones serranos
, salty and overly firm. In morning light, her facial lines had been etched by too strong a hand. Her lips thinning, her eyeteeth surprisingly long, catching on the rims of mugs, on soup spoons, it made him cringe. And always hovering! Blowing on him her breath of impatience! He took to staying in bed past wake-up time, waiting for Mathilde to go off on her run or to her yoga class, off on her bike rides out into the countryside, so that he could go back to sleep.

It was almost noon. He held his body still, hearing Mathilde creep in the bedroom door. Then the coverlet lifted, and something soft and furry clambered up his body and licked him, chin to schnozz.

He was laughing when he saw the sweet face, like an earmuff with eyeballs and triangular felted ears.

“Oh, you,” he said to the puppy. And then he looked at Mathilde, and he couldn’t help it, there were hot tears in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

“She’s a Shiba Inu,” Mathilde said, and crawled to his side. “What’s her name?”

Dog, he wanted to say. He’d always wanted to call a dog Dog. It was meta. It was funny.

Oddly, thrillingly, the word came out as
God
.

“God. Nice to meet you, God,” she said. She picked the puppy up and looked in her face. “Most sensible epistemology I’ve ever heard.”

—

T
HERE
IS
LITTLE
that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time. For a week, he was practically happy again. Such delight he took in the snarfle of God’s hunger, the way she took each piece of kibble out of her bowl to eat off the top of his foot. The pained way she pinched her back legs to her front and flagged her tail, and her little arsehole apertured and bulged, and then she squinted like a philosopher when she eliminated. How she sat quietly with him, chewing on the cuffs of his pants, as he lay on his back and dreamt on a blanket spread in the grass. How he always had something soft under his palm as soon as he called out “God!” which sounded like the first curse he’d ever said in his life, but was not, as it was a proper noun. How he was rewarded with joy, tiny needle teeth in the meat of his thumb. Even her shrill scream when she was tangled in her leash or kept in her crate for the night made him laugh.

He did not fall out of love with the dog, per se; it was merely that luster dulled under the grind of the daily. God could not bridge the distance between his hermit life as a broken man and the life he longed to live again in the city, all interviews and dinners out and being recognized on the subway. She couldn’t knit his bones together faster. Her small quick tongue could not stanch all wounds. Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.

Within a week, he felt himself riding the dip again. The thoughts were not serious when he imagined baking a soufflé out of the rat
poison Mathilde kept in the garden house or grabbing the wheel out of Mathilde’s hands when she let him come with her to the grocery store, veering over this cliffside, into that stand of maples. They weren’t serious, but they surfaced more and more frequently until he felt carbonated with dark ideas. He was sinking again.

—

A
ND
THEN
IT
WAS
HIS
BIRTHDAY
, the big forty, and he would rather have slept through the day, but woke to God shuffling off his chest where she slept and clattering down the stairs to Mathilde, who’d been up before dawn trying not to make a sound in the kitchen. Back door opened, closed. Soon enough, she was in the room, pulling his nicest summer suit out of the closet.

“Shower,” Mathilde said. “Put this on. Don’t complain. I have a surprise.”

He did, but it felt bad, waistband so tight it might have been a girdle. She bundled him into the car and they set off through the still-faint dew, illuminated by dawn. She handed him a hot egg muffin with excellent goat cheese, and tomatoes and basil from her garden.

“Where’s God?” he said.

She said, beatifically, with a great swoop of her arms, “All around us.”

“Hardeehar,” he said.

“Your puppy is with the neighbor’s girl and will return to us bathed and coddled and wearing tiny pink bows above her ears. Relax.”

He settled in, let the landscape pour all over him. This countryside, bled of humans, was entirely right for his mood. He dozed off and awoke to the car parking, a fine bright morning, a smooth lake, something that seemed like an excessive brown barn in the distance. His wife carried their picnic basket to the edge of the lake under a
willow so old it no longer wept, just sort of bore its fate with thickened equanimity. Deviled eggs and champagne, vegetable terrine and Mathilde’s own focaccia, Manchego cheese and bright red cherries from their orchard. Two tiny black-bottom cupcakes, chocolate and cream cheese, his with a candle she lit.

He blew it out, hoping for something inexpressible. For something finer, more worthy of him.

Someone came around the building ringing a cowbell and Mathilde packed up slowly. He used his wife as his crutch as they crossed the meadow, all stubble and field mice, to the opera house.

It was cool inside, and around them there was a sea of whitehairs. “Beware,” Mathilde whispered in his ear. “Geriatrism. Contagious, mortal. Don’t breathe too deeply.”

He laughed for the first time, it felt like, in weeks.

The long, tender, non-chords of the strings tuning. He could listen to such anticipatory non-music for hours and leave this place feeling replenished, he thought.

The sides of the opera house began to slide shut against the day, the murmuring hushed, and the conductor came out and raised her arms. She shot them down to an upwelling of what? Not quite music. Sound. Astringent, strange, wild; and yet it slowly resolved itself out of cacophony into a sort of melody. He leaned forward and closed his eyes and felt the mildew that had grown itself over his being these weeks slowly wiped away by the sound.

The opera was called
Nero.
It was a story of Rome burning, but the fire was offstage, and this was not Nero the emperor, but a doppelgänger Nero, Nero the keeper of the wine cellars, who could have been the emperor’s twin brother, who lived in the palace below the king. It was less a story than a great creature surfacing from the deep; it was more sudden audible wave than narrative. It made Lancelot’s head spin. True recognition does this. Dizzies.

At intermission, he turned to his wife and she smiled as if trying to see him from a very high place. Watchful, waiting. He whispered, “Oh, M., I can barely breathe.”

—

O
UT
IN
THE
COURTYARD
, stunned by sunlight, the soft, cool wind among the poplars. Mathilde fetched them sparkling water. Alone at a café table, a woman recognized him: this was happening more and more. He held a general taxonomy of faces in his mind and could usually place people within a second; not this woman. She laughed, assured him she didn’t know him; she had seen the profile in
Esquire.
“How nice,” Mathilde said, when the woman went off to the restrooms. “A little bug-zap of fame.” Of course, these were his people, theater people. It was to be expected that some of them might have known something about him, but still the woman’s starstruck blush had fed something hungry in him.

Contrails in the blue sky. Something beginning to break in him. A good breaking; not, this time, bone.

In the second act, the story was even more incidental, a tone poem; dancers emerged with rope to become the fire embodied. By the hot-iron gush on his tongue, he understood he’d bit his lip.

Curtain.
Fin.

Mathilde put her cold hands on his face. “Oh,” she said. “You’re weeping.”

—

F
OR
MOST
OF
THE
WAY
HOME
he kept his eyes closed, not because he didn’t want to see his wife or the green-blue-gold of the day, but because he couldn’t bear losing the opera.

When he opened them, Mathilde’s face was drooping. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw her without her smile. The light was
such he could see the crazing in her skin by her eyes and nose, fine gray hairs in an electric fizz around her head.

“Medieval Madonna,” he said. “In gouache. Haloed in gold leaf. Thank you.”

“Happy birthday, friend of my heart,” she said.

“It was happy. It is. That opera changed me.”

“I thought it would,” she said. “I’m glad it did. You were getting to be kind of a drag.”

Spectacular burst of grapefruit as the sun burned itself out. They watched it on their veranda with another bottle of champagne. He picked God up and kissed her on the crown. He wanted to dance, and so he went in and put on Radiohead and swept Mathilde out of her chair with his strong side and pulled her to him.

“Let me guess,” Mathilde said, her cheek on his shoulder. “Now you want to write an opera.”

“Yes,” he said, breathing her in.

“You’ve never lacked for ambition,” she said, and laughed, and it was a sad sound, echoing against the flagstone and the flit of bats above.

—

N
OW
THE
HOURS
that he would have spent moping, watching voice-overed destruction or pinkish naked people working up a sweat, were passed in a frenzy of research. He spent an entire night reading what he could find about the composer.

One Leo Sen. Sen, surname South Asian, derived from the Sanskrit for
army
, bestowed upon those who did an honorable deed. Lived in Nova Scotia. Fairly new artist, having compositions performed for only about six years, fairly young. Hard to tell, because there were no images of Leo Sen online, only one CV from two years earlier and a smattering of praise for his work.
The New York Times
listed him as an exciting foreign composer;
Opera News
had a two-paragraph
description of a work titled
Paracelsus.
There were a few audio clips of a work in progress on someone’s amateurish website, but it was from 2004, so long ago as to have possibly been student work. Inasmuch as a person can be a ghost on the Internet, Leo Sen had made himself into one.

Genius hermit, Lancelot pictured. Monomaniacal, wild-eyed, made mad by his own brilliance or, no, semiautistic. Burly beard. Loincloth. Socially incompetent. Savage at heart.

Lancelot e-mailed nearly everyone he knew to find out if anybody knew him. Not a soul did.

He e-mailed the festival director up at the opera house in the cow fields to see if she would give him contact information.