Fates and Furies (22 page)

Lancelot soared along on the applause and the lengthy introductions, replete with short scenes from each playwright’s work acted out by theater majors. He was having difficulty following along. He must have had more bourbon than he thought. His own play he could understand; the Miriam from
The Springs
was perfect, sex in a dress, all chesty growl and hips and shining copper hair. She would have a life on film, he knew it. [Yes, small roles, hers a small spark.]

Now the discussion. Future of theater! First thoughts? The codger
began his grouse in a pseudo-British accent. Well, radio didn’t kill the theater, then films didn’t kill the theater, then television didn’t kill the theater, and so it was a bit daft to believe that the Internet, as seductive as it was, would kill the theater, wasn’t it? The warrior went next: marginalized voices, voices of color, voices traditionally repressed will be heard as loudly as anyone’s, drowning out the voices of the boring old white men of the patriarchy. Well, Lancelot responded mildly, even boring old white men of the patriarchy had stories to tell, and the future of theater was like the past of theater: creating innovation in storytelling, inverting narrative expectations. He smiled; so far, only he had had applause. They all looked at the girl, who shrugged, bit her fingernails. “Don’t know. Not a fortune-teller,” she said.

Impact of technological age? We are in Silicon Valley, after all. Audience laughed. Warrior leapt in, kicking his dead horse: with YouTube and MOOCs, and all the other innovations, knowledge has been democratized. Looked at the girl, seeking alliance
.
With feminism equalizing home work, women are given the freedom from childbearing and drudgery. A farmer’s wife in Kansas, who once had to be only a housekeeper, who had to put up the fruit and wipe the bottoms and churn the butter, et cetera, could have half her workload shared and could go from wifey to creator. She could listen to the newest innovations on her computer; she could watch new plays from the comfort of her home; she could learn how to compose music all by herself; she could be the creator of a new Broadway show without ever having to live in the soulless third circle of hell that is New York City.

Irritation bristled in Lancelot. Who was this one-note show-off, and what gave him the right to spit at the way other people chose to live their lives? Lancelot loved his circle of hell!

“Let’s not patronize the wives of the world, shall we?” he said. Laughter. “Sometimes people who create are so narcissistic we assume that our way of living is the jewel in the crown of humanity. But
most playwrights I know are asinine codpieces”—assenting roar from the codger—“and the wives are far better human beings. They are kinder, more generous, more worthy all around. There’s a nobility in making life smooth and clean and comfortable. It’s a choice at least equal to the choice of navel-gazing for a living. The wife is the dramaturge of the marriage, the one whose work is essential to what is produced, even if her contributions are never directly recognized. There is glory in this role. My wife, Mathilde, for instance, gave up her job years ago to make mine run more smoothly. She loves to cook and clean and edit my work, it makes her happy to do these things. And what piece of jerk chicken would condescend to say that she was lesser for not being the creator in the family?”

He was pleased with how smoothly the words seemed to exit his mouth. He thanked the powers that be for his glibness. [Nothing to do with it.]

Tartly, from the girl playwright: “I have a wife and I am a wife. I’m not comfortable with the gender essentialism I’m hearing here.”

“I mean, of course, wife in the genderless sense of helpmeet,” Lancelot said. “There are male wives. When I was an actor, I was so underemployed that I basically did all the housework myself while Mathilde earned the dough. [He did the dishes; that part was true.] Anyway, there
is
an essential difference in genders that isn’t politically correct to mention these days. Women
are
the ones to bear the children, after all, they are the ones to nurse, they are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.”

He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd. Someone was talking in a loud voice at the back of the auditorium. What had he done? He looked down in panic at Mathilde, who was staring at her shoes.

The girl playwright scowled at Lancelot and said, enunciating very crisply, “Did you just say that women aren’t creative geniuses because they have babies?”

“No,” he said. “Goodness, no. Not
because
. I wouldn’t say that. I love women. And not all women have babies. My wife, for one. At least not yet. But listen, we’re all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we’re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman chooses to spend hers on creating actual life and not imaginary life, that’s a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she’s creating so much more than just a made-up world on the page! She’s creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it’s so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today. And nobody could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human life. I mean, the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it’s because they’re making their creations internal, spending the energies on
life
itself. It’s a kind of bodily genius. You can’t tell me that that isn’t at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men—better, in many ways—but the reason for the disparity in creation is because women have turned their creative energies inward, not outward.” The murmurs had turned angrier. He listened, astonished, and heard only a very small smattering of applause. “What?” he said.

The codger jumped in to agree, giving such a long, convoluted, self-regarding story that name-dropped Liam Neeson and Paul Newman and the Isle of Wight that Lancelot’s cold sweat dried and the pulse in his gut calmed down. He looked again for Mathilde, hoping to catch her eye and comfort himself in her, but where she had been sitting was an empty seat.

There was an enormous crack in the world. Lancelot was teetering. Mathilde had left. Mathilde had stood and walked out of the auditorium publicly. Mathilde was so angry she’d had enough. Enough what? Forever enough? Maybe, when she emerged into the astringent light of Palo Alto, she felt the sun on her face and realized
the truth: that she was far better off without him, that she, a saint, was only being dragged down for the dog
crotte
of a husband he was. His hands itched to call her. For the rest of the discussion, the younger two panelists and the moderator declined to look at Lancelot, which was for the best anyway, because it took all his concentration to stay in his chair. He sat in his discomfort until the end, and when there was the meet-and-greet afterward, he said to the moderator, “I may skip the cheese and crackers just now. Don’t want to get my head handed to me,” and the moderator winced and said, “Might be a good call.” Lancelot sped to the green room to look for Mathilde, but she wasn’t there. And there was such a tsunami of people pouring out now into the hallway that he darted into a private handicapped bathroom to call her, but though her phone rang and rang, she didn’t answer. He listened to the crowd noise outside intensify, then gradually diminish.

He spent a long time looking at himself in the mirror: the forehead so huge he was wearing his own billboard, the strange nose that seemed to be growing as he aged, the fine hairs on the lobes of his ears an inch long when uncurled. All this time and he’d been carrying around his ugliness as confidently as if it were beauty. How strange. He played a game of solitaire on his phone. Then about fifteen more games of solitaire, calling Mathilde between each. The phone made an ignominious bleep and died. His gut spoke to him, and he remembered he hadn’t eaten since breakfast in the hotel in San Francisco and that there was supposed to have been a lunch, and he thought of the usual bitter iced tea and chocolate torte for dessert, but his heart quailed, and as it was somewhere near three o’clock already, the lunch was long over. He poked his head out into the corridor, where there had been crowds milling when he went into the bathroom, but it was empty. He slid along the wall and poked his head around the corner to look, but the way to the front door was clear as well.

He walked out and stood looking at the piazza where students with giant backpacks beetled on their way to world dominance. The wind felt lovely on his face.

“For shame,” said a voice to his right, and he slid his eyes toward a woman: desiccated head covered thinly with dyed black hair. “To think I’ve always loved your work, too. I wouldn’t have paid for a single ticket if I knew you were such a misogynist.”

“I’m not a misogynist! I love women,” Lotto said, and she snorted and said, “That’s what all misogynists say. You just love to pork women.”

It was no use. He did love to pork women, even if he’d porked only one since matrimony. He sped away along the stucco wall, darting under the shadows and through the copses of eucalyptus, berries crunching underfoot, stepping out confusedly on a street called El Camino Real. He was feeling the opposite of royal. He took the road in the vague direction of San Francisco. He sweated through his shirt, the sun far hotter than he’d thought. The street was endless and he was light-headed. He wandered through a neighborhood with odd little split-levels behind palatial gates, pink oleander, cactus gardens. He came to another great road and crossed the street to a cafeteria-style Mexican restaurant, where, surely, he could buy some sustenance and get his druthers back, and he ate half of his chile relleno burrito while waiting in the line to pay. He was still chewing when he dug in his pocket for his wallet. With a leap of fear, he remembered he’d left it in the hotel room. He never had to pay for a thing on these jaunts, and if he did, Mathilde was there with her purse, and frankly, he hated the way wallets made his buttocks look as if they were sporting a huge canker. He preferred the sleek profile of the walletless rear.

He shrugged at the cashier, whose eyes narrowed, who said something menacing in Spanish. He put the plate down, and said, “I’m sorry,
lo siento
,” until he backed all the way to the door.

At last, he found himself in a horseshoe-shaped strip mall, where, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that made a flutter of astonishment in his chest: a telephone booth, the first he’d seen in, what, decades? He found himself dialing collect the only number he still knew by heart in this age of cell phones. Such a relief, the weight of the receiver in the hand, the reek of others’ breath and grease. His mother’s voice rose on the other end. Collect? Oh dear, oh dear, yes, she’d take it, and then she said, “Lancelot? Darling? What’s wrong? Is it that wife of yours? Gracious, has she left you?”

He swallowed. He felt a strange echo of having lived this moment before. When? College, just after the Saturday marriage ceremony, when he ran up to his dorm, how small it had suddenly seemed, skim-coated with childhood. After he’d stuffed his clothes into a duffel for the stolen honeymoon on the Maine coast, he picked up the phone with suppressed glee and called his mother to tell her he was married. “No, you’re not,” she’d said. “I am. It’s done,” he’d said. “Undo it. Quickie divorce,” she’d said, and he’d said, “No.” She’d said, “What kind of girl would marry you, Lancelot? Think. An immigrant? A gold digger?” “Neither,” he’d said. “A Mathilde Yoder. The best person on the planet. You’ll love her.” “Won’t,” she’d said. “I’ll never meet her. You get it annulled or you’re disinherited. No more allowance. And how are you going to survive in the big bad city without money? How are you going to survive as an
actor
,” she’d said, and he’d smarted at the sneer. He’d thought of a life empty of Mathilde. He’d said, “I’d rather die,” and she’d said, “My darling, you will eat your words.” And he’d sighed and said, “I hope you and your tiny heart have a great life together, Muvva,” and hung up. The wedge had been driven all the way in.

He felt sharp now in the California sunlight. Nauseated. “What did you say?” he said.

“I’m truly sorry,” his mother was saying. “I am. All those years I’ve bitten my tongue, darling. All the pain between us, all the distance,
all of it unnecessary. That horrible creature. I knew she’d end up hurting you. Just come on home. Rachel and Elizabeth and the kids are here for a visit. Sallie would leap the moon to baby you again. Come on home and your women will take care of you.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you. But no.”

“Sorry?” she said.

“I called because I lost my cell,” he said. “I wanted to let Sallie know in case Mathilde was frantically calling around for me. Tell her I’ll be home soon with the champagne and cheese for the party,” he said.

“Listen, darling—” Antoinette began, but Lancelot said, “Bye,” and she said, “I love you,” into the dead phone.

Antoinette put down the receiver. No, she thought. He hadn’t chosen that wife over his mother again. Not when Antoinette had given him everything. Without her, he would never have become what he was; he never would have written her into immortality the way she’d groomed him to do. Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they’ll always share the warm, dark swim.

The ocean out the window cast its net of waves onto the white sand, withdrew it, catching nothing. Antoinette knew the little pink house on the dunes was listening, her sister-in-law rolling peanut butter cookies in the kitchen, her daughter and grandchildren just coming in from the beach, the outdoor shower spitting on below where she sat. Lord give her strength, but she was sick of these dark, small, fearful people. Surely it was natural she’d love them less than she loved her son, who was big and golden like her. Mice are nice but lions roar.

In the kitchen, Sallie rolled dough in greasy palms, fretting. The phone had rung and Antoinette’s voice had risen in her bedroom sharply. “Is it that wife of yours?” she’d said. Sallie considered her sister-in-law; though she appeared confected of sugar and air, there was a bitter black walnut at her core. Sallie worried for Lancelot, poor child, whose sweetness went all the way through. She considered
calling Mathilde to see what was going on but refrained. Nothing is gained in the immediate; her work was slow and at a distance.