Fates and Furies (19 page)

“Don’t disappear,” Lancelot said. He felt a heaviness in him. “Can’t I sit quietly in the corner while you work? I’ll work on the sketch of the book a little more. And do a grammar and dictionary for Go’s language. I won’t bother you for a second. You won’t know I’m there.”

“Please. As if you could be silent for even an hour,” Leo said. He stood and went to the window, his back turned to Lancelot, who was fully awake now. “It would be good for us to be apart for a span,” Leo said. “For me, at least. To know you are here and not be able to see you. All of that would show up in the music.”

Lancelot looked at him with some wonder. He was so slight in the window, framed against the steely forest. “But Leo,” he said. “I’ll be lonely without you.”

Leo turned around and gave Lancelot a quick look and went wordlessly out the door, through the forest, up the path. Lancelot wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and came out to the porch to watch him disappear.

Later he took himself through the dark trees to the colony house for supper; but only a single light was illuminated in the kitchen, and of the eight artists still in residence, most were in warmer places, being loved and fed and touched on the shoulders, on the cheeks, by family and friends. Being loved. And Lancelot had chosen separateness. He would have acted differently had he known that Leo would turn hermit. It gnawed at him, the old discomfort of being left with only himself.

Lancelot heated his plate of gravied tofu and potato mash and green beans. Halfway through, he was joined by a smelly, half-deaf composer with a Walt Whitman beard that sopped up his dribbles. He had eyes pink with burst veins and mostly grunted, glaring at
Lancelot like a ferocious goat. Lancelot made a game out of having a lopsided conversation with him.

“Cranberry sauce?” Lancelot said, ladling some out on his own plate, to a grunt.

“You don’t say? Best you ever had, at the Ritz on Thanksgiving day in 1932?” to a grunt.

“With whom?” Grunt. “Really? Marvelous. Royalty, did you say?” Grunt. “You did
what
with Princess Margaret during the war? I had no idea, man, that that was even invented back then.” Grunty-grunty-grunt.

For dessert there was pumpkin pie. Bumblefuck Pie. An entire one that they split, Lancelot shoving more sweet in to clog up his sadness, the composer matching him bite for bite as if in thrall to a ferocious sense of justice. Lancelot took an intentionally enormous bite to watch the composer mirror him. The man looked like a snake with a rat in its gob. When Lancelot swallowed, he said, “I like you, Walt Whitman.”

And the composer, who had heard this at least, spat, “Oh, you think you’re so funny,” and stood and left the dishes and the crumby floor to Lancelot to clean.

“You contain multitudes,” Lancelot said to his beetled back.

The composer turned, glared. “I’m giving thanks for you,” Lancelot said solemnly.

Oh, lonely, lonely. Mathilde didn’t answer at the house or at the apartment or on her cell, but of course she wouldn’t; she was hosting company. His family, his friends. They were all certainly talking about him. [Indeed.] He brushed his teeth terribly slowly and went to bed with a doorstop novel. Don’t be paranoid, Lotto, you’re fine, he told himself. And if they were talking about you, surely they’d be saying kind things. Yet he imagined them laughing at him, their faces contorted into grotesque animal forms, Rachel a rat, Elizabeth an
elephant with her long, sensitive proboscis, Mathilde an albino hawk. Fraudster, ignoramus, space cadet, they were saying of him. Former male whore. Narcissist!

Now they were having a grand time without him, deep into their drinks. Throwing their heads back, pointy teeth and wine-stained gums, laughing and laughing. He tossed his book across the room so hard it cracked its spine on landing.

—

H
E
CARRIED
HIS
MOROSENESS
with him through the night into the morning. By noon, he was actively longing for home. For God with her hot nose, for his own pillow, his own sweet Mathilde.

On the afternoon of the fourth day of Leo’s solitary confinement, Lancelot couldn’t help himself: he went the long way through the woods to have plausible deniability, gathering a dandruffy birch stick on his walk, and ended up outside Leo’s cabin again.

It took a moment to locate Leo in the dim inside. The boy had made a concessionary fire, too cold outside these days even for him. In the dull glow, his head was pressed against the piano’s forehead, and he could have been sleeping if not for the hand rising from his lap once in a while to strike a note or a chord. The noise after a long period of silence startled, even all the way out to Lancelot behind his tree.

It was calming, this slow noisemaking. Lancelot went into a very small trance each time he waited for the next note. When it came, it was muted by the walls and windows and pockets of air, and it arrived at Lancelot’s ear unexpectedly. It was like believing yourself alone in a room, beginning to fall into sleep, only to hear a sneeze muffled in the darkest corner.

He left when his shivering got uncontrollable. There was new bad darkness, a stormy one, fast descending out of the western sky. He skipped dinner for ramen noodles sucked from the styrofoam cup
and hot chocolate, and finished off half a bottle of bourbon, dancing naked to a fire that blazed and popped and gave the room a mid-August Florida broil. He opened the window and watched the snow fall slantwise in and hit the floorboards as water, rebounding into mist.

He felt much better and fell asleep atop his bed, sweating and drunk. His body seemed lifted, as if he’d been tied to a kite and set afloat thirty feet above the ground, watching lesser mortals moving in their small and slow ways below.

He woke at his usual time, shivering, and when he went to boil water for coffee, there was no electricity, no heat. Behind the curtains the forest could have been made of glass, the way it dazzled in the last moonlight. In the deep night, the ice had descended, coating the fields and trees as if in epoxy. He had been so drunk he hadn’t awoken, although great tree branches had cracked and fallen all around and lay in the darkness, as stunned as soldiers after an ambush. Lancelot could hardly open the screen door to his cabin. He took one confident step out onto the ice, and for a long moment, he slid gracefully, his weak foot extended back in an arabesque, but though his right toe stubbed up against a rock and stopped the slide of the foot, his body kept going forward and he spun around and cracked his tailbone so hard he had to roll to his side and gnash his teeth. He moaned for a long time in pain. When he went to stand, the skin of his cheek stuck to the ice, and he pulled the top layer off and there was a little blood on his fingertips when he touched it.

Like a mountaineer, he grimped his way hand over hand back onto the porch, into the house, and lay exhausted on the floor, breathing heavily.

Good old Robby Frost, he thought. The ones who said the world would end in ice were right. [Wrong. Fire.]

He would starve here. On the shelf he had one apple kept back from a lunch, a box of skinny-person granola bars that Mathilde had
packed, one last ramen cup. He would bleed to death from his cheek. The tailbone fracture would go septic inside him. No electricity and he’d burned up all his firewood in his gluttonous frenzy last night: he would freeze. No coffee either, caffeine withdrawal the real tragedy here. He bundled himself in every article of clothing he could find, making a cloak of the lap blanket. He made a secondary hat out of his laptop case. Big as a rugby prop now, he put his legs up on the bed and ate the entire box of granola bars. When he finished, he knew it was a mistake, because they tasted like tennis balls that had been lost in the bushes for three seasons. Also, they each contained 83 percent of one’s daily fiber, and therefore he’d just ingested 498 percent of his daily fiber and would die from the intestinal roughage before the bleeding or cold would do him in.

Also, he had run his laptop battery down to death the evening before and hadn’t worried about plugging it in because there would always be electricity in the morning; and he had long ago gotten away from writing anything by hand. Why did he not write anything by hand? Why had he gotten away from this most essential art?

He was composing in his head, like Milton, when he heard a motor and opened the curtains and here was blessed Blaine. His pickup truck was in chains. It was pausing at the door, and Blaine was tossing sand out his window, then getting out and crunching up in ice-mountaineering cleats to knock.

“My savior,” Lancelot said, opening the door, forgetting his getup. Blaine took him in head to toe, and his sweet face cracked wide open.

There were camp beds made up in the colony house, and generators, and the stoves were gas and there was plenty of food. The telephones would be back, they said, in a day or so. All was comfortable. The artists had the laughing camaraderie of disaster survivors, and when composer Walt Whitman poured out shots of slivovitz for all
and sundry, Lancelot clinked glasses with him and nodded, and the men smiled at each other, letting bygones be bygones. A friendly kindliness settled over them, Lancelot fetching more gingerbread out of the refrigerator for Walt Whitman, the composer lending Lancelot thick cashmere socks.

All afternoon, Lancelot waited and waited, but Leo never came. At last, he cornered Blaine, who had just brought in enough wood to last a month and was getting ready to return home to chip his own house out of the ice.

“Oh,” Blaine said. “Leo said no, thanks, he had enough wood, and he showed me the peanut butter and loaf of bread and jug of water and said he’d prefer to just keep on working. I didn’t think there was harm in it. Oh, dear. Was I wrong?”

No, no, no, Lancelot assured him. But he thought, Yes, horrible, you never leave a man to fend alone with the cold, haven’t you ever read about Shackleton and HMS
Endurance
? Glaciers and cannibalism. Or fairy tales, the ice goblins coming out of the woods to knock. In the deep night, working, Leo would hear someone moving at the door and go over in his bare feet to investigate, and there would be an eerie soft singing out beyond the circle of trees, and intrigued, Leo would step out briefly into the cold, and the door would close behind him. It would be locked with the ice goblins having stolen inside, and try as he might, there would be no getting back in to the devilishly hot fire, the naked dancing beasties inside, while he did a Little Match Girl huddle against the door and faded off into visions of distant happiness as his breathing slowed to nothing. Frozen. Dead! Poor Leo, stiff corpse blue of hue. Lancelot shivered, even though the colony house was tropical in the good glow of the artists’ relief and the heat from the fireplaces.

Even after the kerosene lamps were blown out and the novelist had put away his guitar and the slivovitz had warmed everyone’s
bellies and they had fallen asleep in the communal area, feeling warm and safe, Lancelot worried about the poor boy alone in the forest, deep freeze all around. He tried not to toss and turn on his camp bed for fear of his squeaking springs and blanket rustle keeping the other artists awake, but he gave up on sleep in the wee hours and went down to the frigid telephone booth to see if the wires were up and he could call Mathilde. But the phones were still dead, and the basement was frigid. He came back up to the library and sat in the window overlooking the back fields and watched the night wash itself away.

Sitting there, thinking of Leo’s quick hot flushing, the shock of his hair, Lotto fell into a fitful sleep in the armchair though he dreamt he was awake.

He came to and saw a small figure making its slow and stuttering way out of the forest. In the gleam off the ice and the moonlit dark, it could have been a messenger from a grim story. He watched as the white face under the watch cap came clear, and he felt a slow sun begin to dawn in him when he knew for certain it was Leo.

He met the boy at the kitchen door, silently opening it to him, and though there was an unspoken interdiction against their touching, Lancelot couldn’t help himself; he took Leo’s slight, strong shoulders in his arms and hugged him fiercely, breathing in the persimmon smell of the skin behind the ear, the hair baby fine against his face.

“I was so worried about you,” he said low to keep the others from waking. He let go reluctantly.

Leo held his eyes closed, and when he opened them, it was with some effort. He seemed weary to death. “I’ve finished Go’s aria,” he said. “Of course, I haven’t slept in three nights. I’m ragged with fatigue. I’m going to go home and sleep. But, well. If Blaine can drop you off with a packed supper before he leaves for the night, I will play what I have for you.”

“Yes,” Lancelot said. “Of course. I’ll get up a little picnic and we can talk into the wee hours. But stay now and have some breakfast with me.”

Leo shook his head. “If I don’t get home, I’ll shatter. I just wanted to invite you to my studio. Then, oh, blessed oblivion of sleep for as long as I can remain under.” He smiled. “Or until you come in and wake me.”

He moved to the door, but Lancelot, trying to find a way to keep him, said, “How did you know I’d be awake?”

Lancelot could feel the heat of Leo’s blush from where he was standing. “I know you,” he said. And then, recklessly: “I can’t tell you how many mornings I’ve stood on the road and watched your light go on at five twenty-two before I could go home to sleep.” And then the door opened, closed, and Leo was a scribble disappearing on the dark path and then the blank page of snow.

—

L
ANCELOT
APPLIED
DEODORANT
TWICE
, shaved twice. All parts of him had been scrubbed in the hot shower. He watched himself closely in the mirror, unsmiling. It was nothing, his collaborator playing the first music for their project; it was business, routine; he was nauseated, hadn’t eaten a thing all day; his limbs were wrong, as if his bones had melted and been reconstituted at random. The last time he’d felt this way, he had been so young he was a stranger to himself, and there had been a girl with a moon face and self-pierced nose, a night on the beach, a house they were in going up in flames. His first completed act of love. So nervous, he forgot her name for a minute. [Gwennie.] Oh, yes, Gwennie, his memory fraying at the edges, so unlike the old him with the steel-trap brain. Though what her ghost had to say to him could not be pertinent here.