Fates and Furies (16 page)

Distillation of her response: What’s in it for us?

Distillation of his: First pass on a possible collaboration?

Distillation of hers: You have my blessing, here you go.

—

S
EPTEMBER
? A
LREADY
? Leaves flaked off the trees. God grew a fluffy underlayer of down. Lancelot still had a hitch in his walk from his weakling leg. His narcissism so vast that it seemed the world itself had gone tentative and wobbly to mimic his body.

They’d gone to the city for the week, come home to the country for the weekend. At night, every night, he wrote a short e-mail to Leo Sen. No response yet.

Mathilde was wary, watchful. When he finally came to bed, she turned to him in her sleep, clinging, she who never wanted to be touched while she slept. He woke with her hair in his mouth, an arm somehow gone missing until he sat upright and felt the blood coming painfully back.

At last, a day in early October, a new chill in the air, he got Leo Sen on the telephone. The voice was not what he was expecting. It was soft and hesitant, British accent, which surprised him at first; and on second thought, well, India had been colonized; the educated class
certainly would have fine-grained BBC inflections. Was this racist? He wasn’t sure.

“You said Lancelot Satterwhite?” Leo Sen said. “This is a thrill.”

“A thrill for me,” Lancelot said too loudly in his discomfort. He had imagined this so often it was strange, now, to hear the soft voice, to be told, first, that he was admired. He was expecting Leo Sen to be isolated in his genius, to be irritated by contact. Leo Sen explained: There was no Internet on the island where he lived, and the phone worked only when someone was around to answer it. It was an intentional community. Dedicated to humble daily work and contemplation.

“Sounds like a monastery,” Lancelot said.

“Or a nunnery,” Leo said. “Feels like it sometimes, too.”

Lancelot laughed. Oh! Leo had a sense of humor, what a relief. In his gladness, Lancelot found himself describing his reaction to Leo’s work at the opera house in the summer, how it rocked something in him. He used the word
great
, he used the phrases
sea change
and
sui generis
.

“I’m so glad,” Leo Sen said.

“I would do almost anything to collaborate on an opera with you,” Lancelot said.

The silence was so long he almost hung up, defeated. Well, good effort, Lancelot, it wasn’t in the stars, sometimes things don’t work out, back up on that horse, head down and into the wind, onward, pardner.

“Sure,” said Leo Sen. “Yes, of course.”

Before they hung up, they agreed on a three-week residency at an artists’ colony for them both in November. Lancelot was owed a favor and he thought he could get them in. The first day or so, Leo had to finish a commission for a string quartet, but they could start thinking, talking things over. Then they would have endless, relentless work for the next three weeks until they had some ideas, maybe even a stab at the book.

“What do you think?” said Leo’s voice on the line. “The concept part is actually the most difficult for me.”

Lancelot looked at the bulletin board in his office, where he’d pinned at least a hundred ideas, a thousand ideas. “I think the concept part won’t be a problem for us,” he said.

—

I
N
THE
MORNING
, Mathilde went whirring off on an eighty-mile bike ride. Lancelot undressed and looked at himself in the mirror. Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life. Now, though, the wrinkles in the skin of his scrotum, the swirl of gray in the chest hair, the fetal neck wattle. One chink in the armor and death seeps in. He turned this way and that until he found the angle that made him look the way he’d been before his impromptu flight down the stairs in the spring.

Over his shoulder, he saw God on the bed, watching him, her chin on her paws.

He blinked. He gave a brilliant grin at the Lancelot he saw in the mirror, winking and nodding and whistling through his teeth as he put his clothes back on, even brushing imaginary dust off the shoulders of his sweater, picking the pills, making a satisfied grunt before hurrying off as if remembering an urgent chore.

—

A
ND
THEN
IT
WAS
N
OVEMBER
and they were spinning past the thwarted graying fields, over the Hudson, into Vermont, New Hampshire. A hush in the air, a gathering of energy.

In his feverish preparations, Lancelot had lost ten pounds. He’d spent hours on the stationary bicycle, because only movement made him think. Now his knees jerked to some music inaudible to Mathilde, who drove.

“I’ve narrowed the ideas down to five, M.,” he said. “Listen to this. Retelling of Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace.’ Or ‘The Little Mermaid,’ the opposite of Disney. Andersen, but extended to even more extreme weirdness. Or the trials of Job, but kooky, funny-dark. Or interlocking stories of soldiers in Afghanistan that together tell a kind of longer story, like
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
. Or
The Sound and the Fury
in opera form.”

Mathilde bit her bottom lip with her long incisors and looked only at the road.

“Kooky?” she said. “Funny-dark? People don’t really think opera and funny. You think fat ladies, solemnity, Rhinemaidens, women killing themselves for the love of a good man.”

“Opera has a long tradition of humor. Opera buffa. It used to be the primary entertainment for the masses. It’d be nice to democratize it again, make it popular entertainment. Make the mailman sing it on his rounds. He looks as if he’s hiding a beautiful voice under that little blue uniform.”

“Yes,” she said. “But you’re known for your lyricism. You’re serious, Lotto. Exuberant, sometimes, but not funny.”

“You don’t think I’m funny?”

“
I
think you’re hilarious. I think your work isn’t really funny, though.”

“Not even
Gacy
?” he said.

“
Gacy
was dark. Wry. Humorous in a bleak way. Not funny, per se.”

“You think I can’t be funny?” he said.

“I think you can be dark, wry, and humorous in a bleak way,” she said. “For sure.”

“Splendid. I will prove you wrong. Now, what do you think of my ideas?”

She made a face and shrugged.

“Oh,” he said. “None of those.”

“Lots of retellings,” she said.

“I mean, not the Afghanistan one.”

“No,” Mathilde said. “True. That’s the only great idea. Maybe too on-the-nose, though. Too obvious. Make it more allegorical.”

“Brank your tongue, witchy-wife,” he said.

Mathilde laughed. “Maybe this is something that both of you will have to agree on anyway. You and this Leo Sen of yours.”

“Leo. I feel like a teenager all dressed up in cummerbund and bow tie, heading off to the winter dance,” he said.

“Well, my love, this is how people sometimes feel when they meet you,” Mathilde said gently, gently.

His cabin was small, stone, with a fireplace, not so far from the main house where dinner and breakfast would be, and he worried for the first time about ice, about falling with his still-flimsy leg. There was a desk, a chair, and a bed that was normal size, which meant his legs would hang off up to the shins.

Mathilde sat at the edge of it and bounced. The frame squeaked like a mouse. Lancelot sat next to her and bounced to her offbeat. He put his hand on her leg and moved it, bounce by bounce, up her thigh until his finger was pushing against her groin, and then he hooked it under her elastic and found an anticipatory lushness there. She stood, and he stopped bouncing, and without pulling the curtains, she pushed the crotch of her panties to the side and straddled him. He put his head up her shirt, loving the companionable darkness there.

“Hello, Private,” she said, teasing the tip of him. “Atten-hut.”

“Three weeks,” he said, as she escorted him in. She moved her hips like a cowgirl. He said, “Long time without release.”

“Not for me. I bought a vibrator,” she said breathlessly. “I named him Lancelittle.”

But this wasn’t the right thing to say, perhaps, because he felt pressured and had to turn her around on her hands and knees to complete things, and the punctuation was a pallid little orgasm that left him discontented.

She called from the bathroom, where she was soaping herself with sink water, “I’m feeling queasy about leaving you here. Last time I let you go away from me for a little while, you came back broken.” She returned to him, pressed his cheeks in her hands. “My eccentric old man, thinking you could fly.”

“This time, only my words will fly,” he said solemnly. They both cracked up. Almost twenty years together and if blazing heat had turned to warmth, humor, it was less wild but easier to sustain.

She said tentatively, “There will be brilliant women here, Lotto. And I know how much you love women. Or did. Once. I mean, before me.”

He frowned. Never in their lives together had she been jealous. It was undignified of her. Of him. Of their marriage. He withdrew a little. “Oh, please,” he said, and she shook it off and kissed him deeply, and said, “If you need me, I’ll come. I’m four hours away, but I’ll be here in three.” And then she went out the door; she was gone.

—

A
LONE
! The twilit forest watched him through the windows. He did push-ups out of exuberance because it wasn’t yet dinnertime. He unpacked his notebooks, his pens. He went out to the circular drive around his cottage and pulled a fern out by the roots and planted it in a white-speckled navy mug and put it on the mantel, even though it was already curling at the corners with the unexpected indoor heat. When the dinner bell rang, he limped up the dusky dirt road, past the meadow with its statue of a deer. Or no, a real and rather springy deer. Past the hayrick turned to chicken house in the raspberry canes, past the garden replete with pumpkins glowing in the dim, the overgrown stalks of Brussels sprouts, to the old farmhouse from which delicious food smells were emanating.

The two tables were already filled and he stood in the French
doors until someone waved him over, touching an empty seat. He sat and the whole table turned, blinking, as if a sudden bright light had clicked on.

These people were so beautiful! He didn’t know why he had been nervous. This frizzled and famous poet who was showing everybody the perfect cicada husk on her palm. This German couple who could be twins, with their identical rimless eyeglasses and hair as if it had been cropped with a sling blade in their sleep. This ginger-headed boy barely out of college, with the sudden pink wash of debilitating shyness: poet, clearly. This novelist, blond, athletic, not bad despite the breeder’s gut and purple bags under her eyes. Nowhere near Mathilde, but young enough to be the kind of person who might give Mathilde pause. She did have lovely white forearms, as if cut from polished spruce wood. Once upon a time, when every woman dazzled with particular beauty, her forearms would have been plenty for him, and young Lotto returned for a moment, sexy hound dog, in sucking orgy, the novelist’s round belly with the silvery stretch marks on it. Lovely. He passed her the pitcher of water and shook the image away.

A very young African-American filmmaker studied Lancelot, said, “Satterwhite? I just graduated from Vassar. There was a Satterwhite Hall there,” and Lancelot winced a little, sighed. It had been an unpleasant shock when, this past spring, he’d visited his alma mater for a lecture, and the dean had stood and, among other encomiums in his introduction, mentioned that Lancelot’s family had donated the dormitory to the school. Lotto did the math, and remembered finding Sallie, graduation weekend, standing before a vast pit in the ground where bulldozers were moving, her face set and skirt blowing against her skinny legs. She’d hooked her arm through his and led him away. It was true he’d applied to only one school and that the acceptance letter had apparently been mailed home to Florida; he’d never seen it.
If there was perfidy, it had the stamp of Antoinette all over it. “Oh,” he said to the filmmaker, who was looking at him strangely. Lancelot’s face must have betrayed him. “No relation.”

Lights came on over the porch outside: a raccoon triggering the sensor. When they went off, the sky was doubled navy velvet. They passed the whole shining salmon in its bed of kale and lemons, the bowl of quinoa salad.

Lancelot found he could not stop talking. He was simply thrilled to be here. Someone had poured him wine after wine. Some artists had disappeared by dessert, but most had pulled their chairs over to his table. He told the story of his failed flight down the plane’s staircase; he told the story of the disastrous audition when he was an actor, when he was asked to strip to the waist and had forgotten that Mathilde had that morning in the shower shaved a smiley face into his chest hair.

“I had heard you were a character,” the poet said, over the crème brûlée, laying her hand on his arm. She had laughed so hard that her eyes were dewy. “I had no idea
what
a character.”

At the other table, there had been a vaguely Indianish woman in a tunic, and Lancelot felt a flutter in his gut: could Leo be short for Leona? There were women with male voices. She had a white streak in her black hair that seemed appropriately eccentric for the maker of that opera he had seen this summer. She had gorgeous hands, like owlets. But she stood abruptly, carried her plate and utensils to the kitchen, and left; and he swallowed a bitter mouthful. She hadn’t wanted to meet him.

Now they were in the main room, with its pool and Ping-Pong tables, and he was playing. Even with the alcohol, his reactions were swift: he was still a bit of an athlete, he was pleased to see, even after his summer encased in plaster. Someone brought out the whiskey. When he stopped, panting, his noodled left arm a little pangy, a tiny circlet of
artists formed around him. Lancelot fell into his automatic charm. “What’s your name? What do you do?” he asked them, one by one.