Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Author:Lauren Groff
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

10

SUNSET. House on the dunes like a sea-tossed conch. Pelicans thumbtacked in the wind. Gopher tortoise under the palmetto.

Lotto stood in the window.

He was in Florida. Florida? In his mother’s house. He had no idea how he had found himself here.

“Muvva?” he called out. But his mother had been dead for six months.

The place smelled of her, talcum and roses. Dust a soft gray skin over the chintz and Lladró. Also mildew, the sea’s armpit stink.

Think, Lotto. Last thing remembered. Home, moonlight planing the surface of the desk, bone fingers of winter trees plucking stars from the sky. Papers strewn. Dog wheezing on his feet. One floor below, his wife sleeping, hair in a white-blond plume on the pillow. He’d touched her shoulder and climbed to his study, the residue of her warmth in his palm.

A slow dark bubble rising and it returned to him, the badness between them, their great love gone sour. How furious he’d been. How his anger had shrouded all he saw.

For the past month he had been standing on a thin wire between staying with her and leaving her. It had been exhausting to clench his feet, to wonder where he’d fall.

He was in the business of narrative; he knew how one loose word could make the whole edifice crumble. [A fine woman! A fair woman! A sweet woman!] For twenty-three years, he’d thought he’d met a girl who was as pure as snow, a sad, lonely girl. He had saved her. Two weeks later, they were married. But, like a squid from the deep, the story had turned itself inside out. His wife had not been pure. She’d been a mistress. Kept for money. By Ariel. It made no sense. Either she’d been a whore or Lancelot was a cuckold; he, who had been faithful from the first.

[Tragedy, comedy. It’s all a matter of vision.]

—

HE FELT THE COLD OF DECEMBER through the window. How long would this sunset take? Time was not behaving the way he had come to expect. The beach was absent of souls. Where were the marching old folks, the dog walkers, the boozy strollers, where were the sunset lovers, the lotus eaters? Gone. The sand was inexplicably smooth as skin. He felt his fear building. He reached inside the house and flicked the light switch.

The lights were as dead as, well. As dead as his mother.

No electricity; no phone. He looked down. He was wearing a pajama top. He was, however, not wearing pants. This lit the fuse. He heard the sizzle. The panic in him went off.

He saw himself running through the little house as if from above. He peered in the cupboards. He went into Sallie’s room, vacated after Antoinette died.

All the while, outside, the sun was setting, shadows creeping out of the sea on swift amphibian feet and moving toward the Gulf, over the Intracoastal Waterway, the St. Johns River, the cold springs and gatored swamps, the fountains dyed turquoise in the sad, cheap developments, half foreclosed upon.

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