Fates and Furies (14 page)

The flight attendant’s face came into view, soft cheeks and horse nostrils blowing, and he closed his eyes as she touched his neck and someone somewhere began to shout.

—

B
ACKLIT
, the fracture was tectonic, the plates of him overlapping. He was given two casts, a sling, a crown of gauze, pills that made his body feel as if it were encased in three inches of rubber. As if, had he been on the same drugs when he fell, he would have hit asphalt only to bounce delightedly high, startling pigeons midair and coming to rest on the airport roof.

He sang falsetto to Earth, Wind & Fire all the way to the city. Mathilde let him eat two doughnuts, and his eyes filled with tears because they were the most amazing doughnuts in the history of glazed doughnuts, food of the gods. He was full of joy.

They would have to spend the summer in the country. Alas! His
Walls, Ceiling, Floor
was in rehearsal, and he should be there for it, but really, there was so little he could do. He couldn’t climb the stairs to the rehearsal space, and it would be an abuse of power to make his dramaturge carry him; he couldn’t even climb the stairs to their tiny apartment. He sat on the building’s staircase, looking at the pretty black-and-white tiles. Back and forth Mathilde went, gathering the food, the clothes, everything they needed from the apartment on the second floor down to the car double-parked in the street.

The building manager’s child stuck her shy brown head out the door and looked at him.

“What, ho, spratling!” he said to the kid.

She stuck a finger in her mouth and took it out all wet. “What is that nutty bo-bo doing out there on the stairs?” she said, tiny echo of some adult.

Lancelot brayed, and the building manager peered out, a bit more ruddy than normal, and took a look at the casts, sling, crown. He nodded at Lancelot, then pulled his kid and head inside and shut the door fast.

In the car, Lancelot marveled at Mathilde: what a smooth face she had, lickable, like a vanilla ice cream cone. If only the left side of his body hadn’t suddenly become buried in concrete, he would leap over the emergency brake and treat her the way a cow treats a block of salt.

“Kids are jerks,” he said. “Bless their hearts. We should have some, M. Maybe now that you’re my nurse for the rest of the summer, you can have free license with my body, and in all the lust and frenzy, we’ll beget a sweet wee thing.” They weren’t using birth control, and there was no question that either one of them was defective. It was clearly a matter of luck and time. When he wasn’t high, he was more careful, kept quiet, sensitive to the stoic longing he’d felt in her whenever he brought it up.

“Those drugs of yours spectacular?” she said. “They seem pretty spectacular.”

“It’s time,” he said. “It’s more than time. We’ve got some cash now, a house, you’re ripe still. Your eggs may be getting a little wrinkly, I don’t know. Forty. We’re risking some springs going sproing in the kid’s head. Though it may not be so bad to have a dumb kid. Smart ones are off as soon as they’re able to escape. Dumbos stick around longer. On the other hand, if we wait too long, we’ll be cutting his pizza for him until we’re ninety-three. No, we got to do this thing ASAP. As soon as we get home, I’m going to impregnate the heck out of you.”

“Most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said.

Down the dirt road, up the gravel drive. Graceful dripping limbs of cherry trees, oh, gosh, they lived in
The Cherry Orchard.
He stood at the back door, watching Mathilde open the French door to the veranda, go down the grass to the new and sparkling pool. There
were two tanned and muscled men gleaming in the last sun, unrolling a strip of sod. Mathilde in her white dress, her cropped platinum hair, her slim body, the sunburst sky, the shining muscle men. It was unbearable.
Tableau vivant.

He sat suddenly. A hot dampness overcame his eyes: all this beauty, the stun of his luck. Also, the pain that had just surfaced, a nuclear submarine out of the deep.

—

H
E
WOKE
AT
HIS
USUAL
TIME
, 5:26, drifting from a dream in which he was in a bathtub barely bigger than his body, and it was full of tapioca pudding. Scrabble as he might, he couldn’t get out of it. The pain made him nauseated and his groaning woke Mathilde. She hovered over him with her terrible breath, her hair tickling his cheek.

When she came back with a tray of scrambled eggs and a bagel with cream cheese and scallions and black coffee and a rose in a vase with dew all over it, he saw the excitement in her face.

“You prefer me as an invalid,” he said.

“For the first time in our lives together,” she said, “you’re neither a black suck of depression nor a swirl of manic energy. It’s nice. Maybe we can even watch an entire movie together now that you’re stuck with me. Maybe,” she said breathlessly, reddening [poor Mathilde!], “we could collaborate on a novel or something.”

He tried to smile, but overnight the world had turned, and her translucence today seemed anemic, no longer confected of sugar and clarified butter. The eggs were greasy, the coffee overstrong, and even the rose from his wife’s garden emitted an odor that cloyed and put him off.

“Or not,” she said. “It was just an idea.”

“Sorry, my love,” he said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”

She kissed him on the forehead, then rested her cool cheek on it. “You’re hot. I’ll get you one of your magical pills,” she said, and he had
to hold his impatience in as she fumbled for the water, the cap of the bottle, the cotton, the tablet that gloriously dissolved on his tongue.

—

S
HE
CAME
OUT
TO
THE
HAMMOCK
where he was contemplating darkly, though the sun shimmied and played in the bright leaves and the pool suckled at its gutters. Three glasses into a bottle of bourbon; it was past four, who cared? He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered. He had put on Pergolesi’s
Stabat Mater
and it was blasting out of his special speakers in the dining room all the way out to him in the hammock.

He wanted to call his mother, to let her sweet voice swathe him, but instead he watched a documentary about Krakatoa on his laptop. He was imagining what the world would look like under volcanic ash. As if some mad child had come along and scribbled black and gray over the landscape: the streams gone greasy, the trees powder puffs of ash, greensward a slick of gleaming oil. An image of Hades. Fields of punishment, screams in the night, the Asphodel Meadows. The dead clacketing their bones.

Luxuriating in the horror, he was. In the unhappiness of being broken. There was not
not
a kind of wallowing joy in this.

“Love,” his wife said gently. “I’ve brought you some iced tea.”

“No iced tea,” he said, and, surprise, his tongue wasn’t working as well as it ought. It was thick. He made as if to look cross-eyed at it, then said, “Whether the weather be cold, whether the weather be hot, we’ll be together whatever the weather whether we like it or not.”

“Too true,” Mathilde said. And now he saw she was wearing her ancient blue skirt, her hippie gear from a million years ago when they were new to each other and he jumped her bones four times a day. She was alluring, still, his wifey. She crawled on the hammock carefully, but the motion still sent a million fangs deep into his broken bones,
and he groaned but bit back his shout and could still barely see when she hiked her skirt to her waist and took off her tank top. A fillip of interest down in his always interested fillip. But the pain ground it down again. She cajoled, but to no avail.

She gave up. “You must’ve broken your peenbone, too,” she joked.

It was all he could do to keep himself from flipping her out of the hammock.

—

A
FASCINATING
PBS
SPECIAL
on black holes: the suck and draw so strong it can gulp down light. Light! He drank deeply, watching; he kept his own council. There were problems at the rehearsal; they
needed
him, they said; there was a difficult performance of
The Springs
in Boston and a reportedly great series of
Walls, Ceiling, Floor
in Saint Louis. He generally went to all that invited him, and yet he couldn’t move from this cottage in the middle of cornfields and cows. Lancelot Satterwhite was
needed.
And Lancelot Satterwhite was not there. He had
never
not been there. He might as well already be dead.

A
clip-clop
in the library. There was a horse in the house? But no, it was Mathilde in her cycling shoes coming in, in her silly padded trou. She shined with health and sweat. She stank of armpit and garlic.

“Baby,” Mathilde said, taking his glass away, turning off the show. “It’s been two weeks and you’ve drunk four bottles of Blanton’s. No more documentaries on disaster. You need to do something to fill up your time.”

He sighed, rubbed his face with his good hand.

“Write something,” she commanded.

“Not inspired,” he said.

“Write an essay,” she said.

“Essays are for chumps,” he said.

“Write a play about how you hate the world,” she said.

“I don’t hate the world. The world hates me,” he said.

“Boo-hoo,” she laughed.

She couldn’t know, he thought. Don’t punish her. Plays don’t just get ground out. You need to be filled with a hot kind of urgency to make it right. He gave her a pained smile and took a sip from the bottle.

“Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?” she said.

Direct hit. He laughed. “Viper,” he said.

“Falstaff,” she said. “You’re even getting fat. All that running for nothing. And I thought we’d banished it for good. Come on, kid, buck up, stop drinking, get right in the head.”

“Easy for you to say,” he said. “You are in robust good health. You exercise two hours a day! I get winded going out to the hammock. So until my benighted bones knit themselves to a semblance of solidity, I shall exercise my right to intoxication and bile and mooning.”

“How about a Fourth of July party,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“It wasn’t a question,” she said.

And then, as if magic, here he was three days later among shish kebabs and multicolored sparklers going off in those gorgeous, pawlike children’s hands as they ran across the acres that Mathilde had cropped herself on her roaring mower. There was nothing that miracle woman couldn’t do, he thought, then thought about how this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.

There was a whole keg and corn on the cob and veggie bratwurst and watermelon and Mathilde in a pale low-cut dress, looking beyond beautiful, nestling her head beneath his chin and kissing him on the neck so that all night he carried around a red lipstick mark on his throat like a wound.

All of his friends swirling around in the dusk, in the night.
Chollie with Danica. Susannah like a Roman candle herself in a red dress, and her new girlfriend, Zora, young and black with a tremendously beautiful Afro, kissing under the weeping willow. Samuel with his wife and their triplets wobbling around with watermelon rinds in their hands, and Arnie with his newest bar-back teenager, Xanthippe, almost as stunning as Mathilde had been in her heyday, black bob and a yellow dress so short the toddlers could certainly see her thong and dewy loins. Lotto imagined sprawling on the grass to get his own eyeful, but inversion meant tremendous pain and he remained upright.

The fireworks blister-popping in the sky, the party sounds. [Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.] Lotto watched himself as if from a distance, playing his own stiffly acted role of jocular clown. He had a terrible headache.

He went into the bathroom, and the bright lights, the sight of his flushed cheeks and his air splints made him woozy, and he let the smile out of his face, looked at the drooping mask that remained. Midway on life’s journey. He said in a low voice,
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.”
He was ridiculous. Lugubrious and pretentious at the same time. Lugentious. Pretubrious. He poked at the belly the size of a six-month-old baby glued to his midsection. When Chollie had seen him, he’d said, “You okay there, fella? You’re looking kind of fat.”

“Hello, Pot,” Lancelot had said. “You’re looking black,” which was true, Chollie’s girth strained the buttons of his four-hundred-dollar shirt. But then again, Chollie had never been a beautiful boy; Lancelot had had much farther to fall. Danica, chic in the one-shoulder designer dress that Chollie’s money had bought her, said, “Leave him be, Choll. The man’s body is broken head to toe. If there’s any time in a man’s life that he gets to get fat, this is it.”

He couldn’t bear to go back out there, Lancelot decided, to see those people he was pretty sure at times he hated. He went into their room and undressed as well as he could and climbed into bed.

He was in a murky anteroom of sleep when the door opened, the hall light blasting him awake, then closed, and there was a body in the room that wasn’t his. He waited, panicky. He could barely move! If someone crawled into bed with him to ravish him, he couldn’t flee! But whoever it was was two whoevers and they had no interest in the bed, because there were some low laughs and some whispers and the shush of fabric, and they began to pound out a rhythm against the bathroom door. A kind of syncopated slap-thump with some surprising percussive ughs.

That door was really rattling away, Lancelot thought. He should tighten the knob tomorrow.

And then came the thought, a knife of grief in his heart, that once he would have been the one to bring some girl in to do her, and it would have been far, far better than this girl was being done, poor thing, though she seemed to be having a good time. Still, there was something a little fakey about her moaning. Once, even, he would have gotten up and made an orgy out of the event, joining so smoothly it would have been as if he had been invited. Now he lay puddled in his broke-bone carapace, critiquing the performance, soft as a hermit crab. Sure of the dark, he made a hermit crab’s frowning whiskered face, snapping claws with his good hand.