Fates and Furies (20 page)

Something was happening inside him. As if inside there were
a blast furnace that would sear him if opened. Some secret so unacknowledged not even Mathilde knew.

He hadn’t wanted to put his visit to Leo’s into words that Blaine could hear, so he’d made the soup himself and the sandwiches, packed them in the basket. He set out totteringly over the melting ice without telling anyone where he was going. In the twilight, the ice had retracted enough from the banks to resemble gums with exposed tooth roots. The trees were skinny bodies stripped bare in the wind. It was far more difficult to move than he’d thought it would be: he had to go crabwise, arms extended, basket dangling, and he was breathing heavily by the time he came to Leo’s little Tudor, with firelight reddening the windows.

He went inside for the first time and was startled by the small evidence of habitation. All had been swept clean, and the only markers of Leo were the black shoes, shiny as beetles, in a neat pair under the bed, and the music standing on the piano.

Then the sound of water from a faucet in the bathroom, and there was Leo in the doorway, drying his hands on a towel.

“You came,” he said.

“You doubted?” Lancelot said.

Leo moved toward Lancelot, then stopped in the middle of the floor. He touched his throat, then his legs, then touched his hands together at the palms. He hemmed. “I had planned that we eat first, but I don’t think I can,” Leo said. “I want so much to play for you, and at the same time I’m far too anxious to play for you. This is absurd.”

Lancelot took a screw-top malbec that he’d scavenged from the dining area out of the basket, and said, “So, we drink. Scored a
Wine Advocate
ninety-three. Complex, fruit-forward, with notes of bravery and wit. Whenever you feel ready, we’ll play.” He’d meant
you’ll
play, as in piano, and coughed to cover his mistake.

He poured into the same speckled blue mugs that, in his own cabin, he had planted a dead fern in. Leo took a gulp and choked, laughing, and dabbed at his face with a tissue. And then he handed the mug back to Lancelot, grazing his hand. He crossed over to the piano. It felt a violation for Lancelot to sit on the side of Leo’s bed, but still he sat gingerly, aware of the mattress’s coolness, the white sheets, the firmness of it beneath him.

Leo flexed his monstrous hands and, as if for the first time, Lancelot saw their unbelievable beauty. They could span a thirteenth, those hands, they were Rachmaninoff hands. Leo let them float above the keys, and they came down, and Go’s aria had already begun.

After a bar, Lancelot closed his eyes. It was easier this way, to disembody the music. Like this, he heard the sound resolve into a soft song. Soaring and harmonious. So sweet it ached his teeth. Heat began in his stomach and radiated outward, up and down, into the throat, into the thighbones, an emotion so strange Lancelot had a hard time identifying what it was; but within a minute of Leo’s playing, Lancelot had put a name to it. Dread. He was feeling dread, pale and thick. This music was wrong, so utterly and entirely wrong for their project. Lancelot felt as if he were choking. He had wanted the ethereal, the strange. Something a little ugly. Music with humor in it, for gadfly’s sake! A biting sort of music! An undermining and deepening music, one that layered with the original myth of Antigone, which had always been a ferocious and strange story. If only Leo had replicated the music from the opera this summer. This, though. No. This was treacle; this had no humor in it. It was achy; it was trembling. This was so wrong it changed everything.

Everything had been changed.

He had to make sure that his face, turned so attentively toward Leo, his eyes closed, was composed into a mask.

He wanted to escape to the bathroom to weep. He wanted to
punch Leo in the nose to get him to stop. He did neither. He sat there, a Mathilde smile on his face, and listened. On his internal dock, a great ship that he had wanted to climb and sail away on gave a low blast. The ropes were tossed. It moved silently out into the bay, and Lancelot was left alone onshore, watching it dip low over the horizon, watching it vanish.

The music ended. Lancelot opened his eyes, smiling. But Leo had seen something in his face and was looking at him now, horror-struck.

When Lancelot opened his mouth but no words came out, Leo stood and opened his door and walked outside in his bare feet, without even a jacket, and vanished into the dark woods.

“Leo?” Lancelot said. He ran to the door and shouted, “Leo? Leo?” But Leo made no sound. He was gone.

They hadn’t been paying attention. On the softest of cat feet, the winter afternoon had passed into twilight.

In the cabin, Lancelot considered. He could run after Leo, with his weak left side—and say what if he found him? Say what if he missed him? He could stay inside here and wait for Leo to come back. But the boy’s pride was badly wounded, and he would very soon be physically hurt by the cold, his feet cut up, frostbite setting in before he consented to return to a cabin where Lancelot was. The only good thing, the only humane thing, was for Lancelot to leave. Allow the boy to creep back inside, lick his wounds in private. Come back tomorrow and straighten things out after they’d both had a moment to cool off.

He scribbled a note. He paid no attention to what he’d said and was too distraught to understand or remember beyond the moment the pencil lifted from the paper. It could have been a poem; it could have been a grocery list. He went out into the lonely cold and tottered painfully up the icy dirt road, feeling every day of his forty years, to the colony house. He was soaked with sweat when he reached it. When he climbed inside, the others had started to eat dinner without him.

—

L
ONG
BEFORE
THE
SUN
ROSE
, weak tea, over the clotted fields, Lancelot was pacing in the colony house’s library. The world had gone sideways; all was badly amiss. He hurried out. It was easier to move than it had been the day before, the ice having receded even further so that there was a slushy mud track all the way to Leo’s. Lancelot knocked hard on the door, but it was locked. He moved around to the windows, but the curtains were pulled so tightly no crack was available for his eye. In his mind all night there had been a terrible echo of the time in prep school when he’d discovered the hanged boy. The blue face, the terrible smell. The brush of denim on his face in the dark, his hands reaching up to touch cold dead leg.

He found one window unlatched and wedged his shoulders through, his body snaking after him, and fell so hard on his bad clavicle that the ceiling swam with sparks. “Leo,” he called out in a choked voice, but he knew before he hefted himself to his feet that Leo wasn’t in the cabin. The shoes under the bed were gone, and the closet was empty. It smelled, still, like Leo. He looked vainly for a note, anything, and found only a clean copy of Go’s aria in the piano bench, with Leo’s precise penciled notation. Framable, art even without the music. Only the word
acciaccato
in black ink.

Lancelot ran as well as he could back to the colony house, catching Blaine driving in, and waved him down.

“Oh,” Blaine said. “Oh, yes. Leo had some terrible news from home and had to fly off in the middle of the night. I’m just coming back from Hartford now. He seemed drawn. He’s a sweet kid, isn’t he? Poor boy.”

Lotto smiled. His eyes filled with tears. He was absurd.

Blaine looked uncomfortable and laid a hand on Lotto’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he said.

Lancelot nodded. “I need to go home today, too, I’m afraid,” he
said. “Please tell them in the office when they come in. I’ll hire a driver. Don’t worry about me.”

“All right, son,” Blaine said quietly. “I won’t.”

—

L
ANCELOT
STOOD
IN
THE
DOORWAY
of the country house’s kitchen, the limo shushing off through the slush. Home.

God was clicking swiftly down the stairs, Mathilde at the table in a slant of light, her eyes closed, a cup of tea steaming before her. There was a whiff of garbage in the house’s chilly air. Lancelot’s heart gave a somersault: it was his job in the family to take the garbage out. In his absence, Mathilde had been letting it build.

He didn’t know if she would look at him. He had never known her to be so angry that she would not look at him. Her face was so terribly closed. She looked older. Sad. Skinny. Her hair greasy. She was browned, as if she’d been pickled in her own loneliness. Something in him was breaking.

And then God was leaping at his knees, peeing with happiness to see him, and barking in her high-pitched semi-scream. Mathilde opened her eyes. He watched the great pupils narrowing in her irises, watched her see him, and by the look on her face, he understood that she hadn’t known he was there until now. And that she was so very, very glad to see him. Here she was. His only love.

She stood so fast her chair tumbled backward and she came to him with her hands outspread, her face bursting open, and then he pressed his face into her hair to smell it. The earth was stuck, rotating, in his throat. And then her strong and bony body was against his, her scent in his nose, the taste of her earlobe in his mouth. She pulled back a span and looked at him ferociously and kicked the kitchen door shut with her foot. When he tried to speak, she pressed her hand hard over his mouth so he couldn’t and she led him upstairs in absolute silence and had her way with him so roughly that when he woke
the next day he had plum-colored bruises on the bones of his hips and fingernail cuts on his sides, which he pressed in the bathroom, hungry for the pain.

—

A
ND
THEN
IT
WAS
C
HRISTMAS
. Mistletoe hanging from the hallway chandelier, blue spruce wrapped up the banister, a smell of cinnamon, baking apples. Lancelot stood at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at his cragged face in the mirror, fixing his tie. Looking at him, he thought, you’d never tell that he had been so broken this year. He had suffered, had come through it all stronger. Even, he thought, possibly more attractive. Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age. Poor Mathilde, with her corrugated forehead. In twenty years, she’d be silver-gray, her face full of wrinkles. Oh, but she’d still be beautiful, he thought, loyal to the marrow.

The sound of a motor broke in and he looked out to find the dark green Jaguar turning off the road onto the gravel among the bare cherry trees.

“They’re here,” he called up the stairs to Mathilde.

He was smiling: it had been months since he’d seen his sister and Elizabeth and their adopted twins, and how they would love the rocking turtle and the rocking owl he’d had carved for them by an eccentric hermit woodworker out in the deep upstate wilds. The owl bore a startled scholarly look and the turtle seemed to be chewing a bitter root. Oh, for the kids’ spritelike bodies in his arms. The soothe of his sister beside him. He came up on his toes in excitement.

But he saw, under the bowl of peppermint bark on the cherry hall stand, the corner of a newspaper peeking out. Unusual. Mathilde so neat, usually. Everything in the house in its proper place. He pushed the bowl aside to see. His legs went liquid under him.

A grainy photo of Leo Sen, smiling shyly. A small article beneath his face.

Promising British composer drowned off an island in Nova Scotia. Tragedy. Such potential. Eton and Oxford. Early prodigy on the violin. Known for his aharmonic, deeply emotional compositions. No partner. Will be missed by parents, community. Quotes by famous composers; Leo had been better known than Lancelot had believed.

What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear. Another sinkhole. Someone there, suddenly gone. Leo swimming in such cold water. December, rip currents, spray above the wild waves instantly freezing to bullets of ice. He imagined the shock of cold black water on the body, shuddered. Everything about it was wrong.

He had to breathe to keep on two feet. He gripped the table and opened his eyes to see his own face gone white in the mirror.

And above his left shoulder, he saw Mathilde at the top of the stairs. She was watching him. She was unsmiling, intent, bladelike in her red dress. The weak December daylight poured through the window above her and touched her around the shoulders.

The door opened in the kitchen and the children’s voices were in the back of the house, shouting for Uncle Lotto, and Rachel yelled out, “Hello?” and the dog barked joyfully and Elizabeth honked out a laugh, and Rachel and Elizabeth began to softly bicker, and still, Lancelot and his wife looked at each other in the mirror. And then Mathilde took one step down and then another, and her old small smile returned to her face. “Merry Christmas!” she called out gaily in her deep, clear voice. He flinched back as if he’d put his hand down on a hot stove, and she fixed him in the mirror as she slowly, slowly, descended.

  
  
6

“M
AY
I
AT
LEAST
READ
what you wrote with Leo?” Mathilde asked, one night in bed.

“Maybe,” Lancelot said, and rolled over on top of her and put his hands up her shirt.

Later, after she submarined below the sheets, she came up, flushed with his heat. “Maybe, as in I can read it?”

“M.,” he said softly. “I hate my own failure.”

“That’s a no?” she said.

“That’s a no,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

But he had to go to the city the next day to meet with his agent, and she went to his aerie at the top of the house, all scattered papers and coffee cups growing fur, and sat and read what was in the file folder.

She stood and went to the window. She thought of the boy who had drowned in the icy black water, of a mermaid, of herself. “Shame,” she said to the dog. “It could have been so great.”