Fates and Furies (5 page)

Denton Thrasher gathered Lotto in his arms and wiped his face with the hem of his pajama top, revealing a furry white belly, and Lotto was rocked on the edge of the stage, smelling witch hazel and Listerine and pajamas worn too many times between washes.

—

T
HIS
L
ANCELOT
CHILD
in Denton’s lap. So young, crying past the point of immediate sorrow into something deeper. It frightened Denton. Four o’clock. Sweet Lancelot, so talented, but this was a little much, even if Denton saw in him the rare spark. His looks were both promising and as if some essential promise had fled and left wreckage in its wake, which was odd, the boy being fifteen at most. Well, beauty could come back, perhaps. In ten years he might be ravishing, grow into his great goofy body, into his charm: already, there was the bigness of a real actor on the stage. Alas, Denton knew, the world was full of real actors. Christ, the bells of four-thirty, he was about to go out of his skull. Denton could not hold this sorrow. He was too weak. [Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.] He thought, I’ll be stuck here with this boy forever. He knew only one thing that could shut off this flow of tears, and in a panic, he pushed the child upright and scrabbled in his lap and took the surprised pale worm out
of his jeans, and it grew impressively in his mouth, thank god, and this alone was enough to stop the sobs. Baton of youth! Youthfully swift, too. O, that this too too solid flesh was now melting, thawing, resolving itself into a spunky dew. Denton Thrasher wiped his mouth and sat up. What had he done? The boy’s eyes vanished in shadow: “Going to bed,” he whispered, and he ran down the aisles, through the doors, out. A shame, Denton thought. Dramatic, to be forced to flee in the night. He would miss this place. He would regret not watching Lancelot grow. He stood and took a bow. “Be blessed,” he said to the great empty theater and went off to the costume room to pack.

—

S
AMUEL
H
ARRIS
, up early for crew, was watching out the window when he saw poor Bumblefuck Pie run across the dark quad, weeping. Ever since the other boy had arrived halfway through the fall semester, he’d been so blue he was almost iridescent with sadness. Samuel was the cox of Bumblefuck’s boat, practically nestled every day in his lap, and despite the fact that the other kid was kind of a pariah, Samuel worried about him, six-foot-three and only a hundred fifty pounds, frozen-looking, cheeks like slabs of beaten tenderloin. It seemed clear he was going to hurt himself. When Samuel heard Lotto rushing up the stairs, he opened his door and manhandled him into the room, fed him oatmeal cookies that his mother sent from home, and this way got the whole story. Oh god, Jelly Roll! Lotto said that after the police came, he’d sat in the theater for hours to calm down. He seemed to want to say something more, considered it, packed it away. Samuel wondered. He thought of what his father the senator would do, and drew a man’s stern face over his own. He reached out a hand to Lotto’s shoulder and patted him until he calmed. It felt as if they’d crossed a bridge a second before it collapsed.

For a month, Samuel watched Lotto drag himself around the campus. And when school let out, Samuel took the other boy with him to
his summerhouse in Maine. There, with the senator father and Samuel’s whippet mother, star debutante of Atlanta’s highest black society, Lotto experienced sailboats and clambakes and friends in Lilly Pulitzer and Brooks Brothers knitwear, champagne, pies cooling on the windowsill, Labrador retrievers. Samuel’s mother bought him facial soap and good clothes, made him eat and stand tall. He grew into himself. He found success with a forty-year-old cousin of Samuel’s who cornered him in the boathouse; brown skin tasted the same as pinkish, Lotto learned to his delight. When they returned to school for sophomore year, Lotto had tanned so golden it was easy to overlook the zit scars on his cheeks. He was blonder, looser. He smiled, made jokes, learned to expand himself on the stage and off. By never swearing, he showed his cool. Near Christmas, Samuel’s friend had become more popular than even Samuel was, he of the dust-devil confidence, of the shining great brown eyes, but it was too late to mind. Every time Samuel looked at his friend, all those many years of their friendship, he would see how he himself was a miracle worker, how he had brought Lotto back to life again.

—

T
HEN
, just before Thanksgiving of sophomore year, Lotto, coming back to his room after math study one day, found Chollie, waxy and smelly, slumped in the hallway outside his door. “Gwennie,” Chollie said, and groaned, folded himself in half. Lotto dragged him into the room. He got a garbled story; Gwennie had overdosed. She couldn’t have died, dangerous Gwennie, vibrating with life. But she had. Chollie had found her. He’d run away. He had nowhere to go but to Lotto. The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto’s shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago, he’d been a kid, thinking about his Nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and sines. Now he was heavy, adult. Later, when the boys had calmed and they went for pizza in the little town,
Lotto said to Chollie what he’d wanted to say to Gwennie since the night of the fire: “I’ll take care of you.” He felt brave. Lotto let Chollie sleep in his bed for the rest of the term; he didn’t mind the floor. [Through the rest of Lotto’s high school, through college, Chollie would take the money Lotto would give him gladly, go out into the world, eventually return. He sat in on every class he could; he had no degrees, but he learned more than enough. If people didn’t report Lotto, it was because they loved Lotto, not because they cared a whit about Chollie, who was a person only Lotto could stand.]

The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!

Thus began the era of women. Trips to the city, sweating through polo shirts at the nightclubs, lines of coke on midcentury-modern coffee tables, parents out of town.
It’s okay, man, don’t freak, the housekeeper doesn’t care.
Threeway with two girls in someone’s bathroom. “Maybe you could come home this summer,” Antoinette said. “Oh,
now
you want me,” Lotto said sarcastically, refusing. Headmaster’s daughter on the lacrosse field. Hickeys. Maine again, forty-one-year-old cousin at a seedy motel, neighbor girl in a hammock, tourist girl swimming out to the sailboat at night. Samuel rolling his eyes with envy. Volvo station wagon bought with Lotto’s fat allowance. Three inches by September, six-foot-six. Othello in eponymous same, and a Desdemona from town, seventeen, shaved down there like a prepube, Lotto discovered. Spring; summer in Maine; autumn, Head of the Charles, the varsity eight placed. Thanksgiving at Samuel’s New York house. Christmas, Sallie took him and Rachel to Montreal. “No Muvva?” he said, trying not to show his hurt. Sallie blushed. “She’s ashamed of the way she looks,” she said gently. “She’s fat now, hushpuppy. She never leaves the house.” Early admission to Vassar, the only school he applied to, overconfident; an excellent party there, a party to end all parties, no reason for his choice but that. Celebration with
Samuel’s fifteen-year-old sister up for the weekend, in a handicapped bathroom. Never, never tell Samuel. Searing glare. What am I, an idiot? Surprise! Samuel was going to Vassar, too, had gotten in everywhere but would have died before he missed Lotto’s fun. Only skinny Sallie and four-year-old Rachel, who wouldn’t let him put her down, came up for his graduation. No Muvva. To offset the sadness, Lotto imagined his mother as the mermaid she’d once been, not the obese woman who’d swallowed her. In Maine, Samuel’s forty-three-year-old cousin in Switzerland, alas. Samuel’s sister in an orange bikini, with a mop-haired boyfriend mooning behind her, thank god. Only one girl that whole summer, adder-tongued ballerina: what she could do with her legs! Games of croquet. Fireworks. Keg on the beach. Sailing regatta.

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.

—

I
T
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.