Fates and Furies (17 page)

Artists! Narcissists! Some better than others at concealing, but like children standing at the edge of the playground, fingers in mouths, watching the others wide-eyed as they were one by one induced to play. Each, when invited to talk, was secretly relieved that
someone
saw them as important as they were. That the most important person in the room had recognized them as equally the most important in the room. If only potentially so. If only in the future.

Because, Lancelot knew, beaming so kindly upon all the others, that he was the only real artist at the place.

When it was his turn, the bright, blushing redheaded boy said his name so softly that Lancelot had to lean forward and ask him to say it again and the boy looked at him with a flash of something—stubbornness, amusement—and said, “Leo.”

Lancelot moved his mouth until words at last came out. “You’re Leo? Leo Sen? Leo Sen the composer?”

“In the flesh,” said Leo. “Glad to meet you.”

And when Lancelot still couldn’t speak, the ginger boy said drily, “Expecting an Indian, weren’t we. I get that often. My father’s half Indian and looks it. His genes were steamrolled by my mother’s. On the other hand, my sister looks like she should be in a Bollywood film and nobody can believe we are related one iota.”

“All this time, and you were just
standing
there?” Lancelot said. “Letting me make a fool of myself?”

Leo shrugged, and said, “I was amused. I wanted to see what my librettist was like as a person.”

“But excuse me, you can’t be a composer. You’re in kindergarten,” Lancelot said.

“Twenty-six,” Leo said. “Hardly in nappies.” For such a blusher, there was an edge to his words.

“You are nothing like what I expected,” Lancelot said.

Leo blinked hard. His hue had deepened to angry lobster. “And that, I think, is a marvelous thing. Who wants what’s expected?”

“Not I,” said Lancelot.

“Nor I,” said Leo. He regarded Lancelot for a caesura and finally relaxed into an off-kilter smile.

—

H
E
HAD
HANDS
that could palm a basketball, Leo Sen, though his frame was a slight and stooping six feet. This was their first intoxicating talk on the couch, everyone else faded back to Ping-Pong or pool or home over the dark ground to work some more, dim headlamps to light their paths.

The opera this past summer came out of his struggles with a foundering kind of sadness, the feeling of panic as the outside world came roaring in. “I work my way out of it usually,” Leo said. “I fight my music until we’re both too exhausted to feel much of anything.”

“I know exactly what you mean. It’s like Jacob wrestling with God,” Lancelot said. “Or Jesus with the devil.”

“I’m an atheist. But they sound like nice myths,” Leo said, and laughed.

He said his house on the Nova Scotia commune island was made of hay bales and mud, and that his job there was to teach music to anyone who wanted to learn. He owned few things: ten white button-down shirts, three pairs of jeans, socks, underwear, pair of boots, pair of moccasins, a jacket, musical instruments, and that was about it. Stuff had never interested him, beyond the music he could make from it. Books were necessary but borrowed. His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also
been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song. In the common house on the island there was a television, satellite dish like a cocked ear on the roof, mostly for emergencies, but they made an exception for Leo Sen’s passionate love of the game.

“I
hated
my violin as a boy,” he said, “until my father made me compose a score as a match was happening on the telly. Tottenham, Manchester, our boys losing. And suddenly, as I was playing, everything that I had felt so deeply without music deepened even more. The dread, the joy. And that was it for me, re-creating that moment was all I wanted to do. I called the composition
Audere Est Facere.
” He laughed.

“To dare is to do?” Lotto said.

“Tottenham’s motto. Not a bad way to be an artist, in fact.”

“Your life seems simple,” Lancelot said.

Leo Sen said, “My life is beautiful.”

Lancelot saw that it was. He was enough of a lover of forms to understand the allure of such a strict life, how much internal wildness it could release. Leo waking to dawn over the cold seabird ocean, the fresh berries and goat-milk yogurt for breakfast, the tisanes of his own herbs, blue crabs in the black tide pools, going to bed with the whipping winds and rhythm of waves against hard rock. Lettuce shoots glowing in the south-facing windows. The celibacy, the temperate, moderate life that Leo lived, at least on the outside, in his state of constant cold. And the feverish musical life within.

“I knew you’d be an ascetic,” Lancelot said. “I just thought you’d be a wild-bearded one who speared fish and wore a loincloth. In a saffron-colored turban.” He smiled.

“On the other hand, you,” Leo said, “were always dissolute. It’s clear in your work. Privilege is what lets you take risks. Life of oysters and champagne and houses on the beach. Coddled. Like the precious egg you are.”

Lancelot felt stung, but said, “True. If I had my druthers, I’d be three hundred fifty pounds of jollity and fun. But my wife keeps me to heel. Makes me exercise every day. Keeps me from drinking in the morning.”

“Ah,” said Leo, gazing at his own enormous hands. “So, there’s a wife.”

The way he said it. Well. It made the ideas Lancelot had about Leo reshuffle themselves once more in his head.

“There’s a wife,” Lancelot said. “Mathilde. She’s a saint. One of the purest people I’ve ever met. Just morally upright, never lies, can’t bear a fool. I’d never met someone who stayed a virgin until just before she got married, but Mathilde was. She thinks it’s unfair that other people clean up your dirt, so she cleans our house even though we can afford a housekeeper. She does it all. Everything. And everything I write I write for her first.”

“The grand love story, then,” Leo said lightly. “But it’s exhausting to live with a saint.”

Lancelot thought of his tall wife with her blaze of white-blond hair. “It is,” he said.

And then Leo said, “Oof, look at the time. I need to go to work. Nocturnal beastie, I’m afraid. Shall I see you in the afternoon?” and Lancelot saw they were alone, most lights turned out, and it was three hours past any bedtime he usually had. Also, he was drunk. He couldn’t locate the words that would tell Leo how profoundly familiar he had found him. He wanted to say how he, too, had had a good dad who understood him, and he, too, longed for a simple, clean life, and how he, too, found his fullest joy in the midst of work. But Leo’s studio was across the field and through the forest, and when they came out of the main house, the boy said good-bye quickly, invisible, though his breath plumed white into the darkness. Lancelot on his own slow shuffle through the pitch-black had to be satisfied with the thought of
tomorrow. The revelations falling off in layers, like the separate skins of an onion. He would find a true friend all the way on the inside.

He fell asleep watching the lick of flames in his fireplace, a long, slow submergence and smoky contentment that led into a sleep the depth of which he could not remember having had for years.

—

H
OT
MILK
OF
A
WORLD
, with its skin of morning fog in the window. Lunch on the porch, in a plaited basket, vegetable soup and focaccia and good cheddar and celery and carrot sticks and an apple and cookie. Glorious blue-gray day, and he couldn’t stay inside. He wanted to be working. In late afternoon, he pulled on his boots and his Barbour jacket and went out for a walk in the woods. The chill on his face turned itself inside out and he grew warm. Heat begat lustiness and lustiness carried him to a moss-covered rock, a deep cold beneath the warm green velvety nap. With his pants to his knees, engaged in heavy self-fondle. Thoughts of Mathilde had become amagnetic, rebounding off her, spinning outward, ending up hopelessly tangled in thoughts of an Asian nymphet cooing at him in a schoolgirl’s kilt, as fantasies tended to. Tree branches gray slats above and moving polka dots of crows. Frantic motions in the groinal area until the inevitable upward spin and the slick in the palm.

The lake at his heels so still. Poxed by the touch of scattered rain.

By the time he stood, anxiety was thickening in his chest: he hated putting off work when he was in the mood. It was as if the muses were singing [rather, humming] and he’d stuffed up his ears. He walked in the general direction of Leo’s cabin, the silence of the woods so eerie the ancient poems of his babyhood returned to him. He sang them to himself as if they were songs. When he arrived at Leo’s—pinkish stucco, pseudo Tudor, flanked with ferns that gleamed in the dim gray light—he understood that he’d been hoping he’d find his
collaborator noodling around on his porch. But there was no movement anywhere, and inside, the curtains were unstirred. Lancelot sat behind a birch tree, wondering what to do. When it grew dark enough, he crept near and looked in the window. No lights had been turned on, but the curtains had been opened and someone was moving in the room.

It was Leo, and he was standing, his skinny white chest bare, and he had his eyes closed, his freckled face young, almost teenaged-looking, and his hair in little sandy tufts all over his head. He was waggling his arms. Once in a while, he would move over to the sheets set on the piano and make notations and hurry back to where he had been, closing his eyes again. His bare feet were as enormous as his hands and, like the hands, red at the knuckles with cold.

How strange it felt to Lancelot to see someone else being lifted on a creative crest.

He thought of the hours and hours
he’d
spent carried along and how utterly silly he might have looked had anyone at all peeped in and seen him. First in the windowless closet they’d converted to his study in the city, and then, in the country house, in his glossy attic study, with the Shakespeare compendium on its prayer stand and the gardens in the window, Mathilde moving among them. For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter. He’d spoken in voices, strutted, cringed, marched, minced up there. Eleven major plays, two additional probably not so major, in retrospect, and he’d performed all of them as he wrote them, to blank walls, then the audience of sunflowers and Mathilde’s slim back bending toward the weeds below.

He came to when he saw Leo buttoning up one of his shirts, putting on his sweater, then his jacket, sliding moccasins over his feet. He walked around to the road and headed toward the boy’s front door, calling out to him as Leo came out and fiddled with the lock.

“Oh, hullo,” Leo said. “Have you come to find me? I’m so glad. I’m feeling rather guilty about you. I had planned to wrap up early and talk over our project, but the composition I was working on rudely insisted that I stick with it to the bitter end. We’re off to supper, then? We can talk as we walk, perhaps.”

“Let’s go,” Lancelot said. “I have a million ideas. I’m boiling over with them. I had to go for a walk to get away from them, but the problem with ideas is that the more you walk, the more you get. They breed in the brainpan.”

“Brilliant,” Leo said. “Glad to hear it. Go ahead and spin.”

By the time they sat at supper, Lancelot had gone over his top five. Leo was frowning, pink from the cold. He passed the roasted vegetable torte, then said, “No. None of those, I think. I wait for the spark, you see. And those ideas don’t have the spark, I’m afraid.”

“All right,” said Lancelot, and he was about to launch into the next five when he felt a hand on his shoulder and a voice hot in his ear saying, “Lotto!” and he looked up at first uncomprehendingly at Natalie. Natalie! Of all people! Natalie of the potato nose over the thin black moustache. She had done well in the Internet boom, but apparently had cashed out her stock and was so rich she could return to what she loved most. Which was—how very unexpected—
sculpture
, of all things. She was white with plaster dust and heavier; well, they all were heavier. Fine etchings around her eyes, which were still so strangely resentful. There was lots of hugging, lots of celebration, Natalie sitting beside Lancelot and filling him in on life. But when Lancelot turned to introduce Natalie to Leo, Leo had already bussed his plate and utensils, and had vanished, leaving an apologetic note in Lancelot’s mailbox: he was under pressure to get this commission
done, could concentrate fully on the opera when he was finished.
So very, very sorry.
His handwriting as tiny and precise as typescript.

—

A
ND
THEN
THE
ENDLESS
APOLOGIES
. Four days in a row: “I know, I know, it’s terrible, Lancelot, I’m so horribly sorry, but I really must get this commission done. It’s killing me, in fact.” Leo’s face flaming as soon as he saw Lancelot, a new nervousness borne out of shame. Whenever Lancelot staked him out, watching in the woods through the windows, the boy was working, feverish and writing; and because he wasn’t faffing about or napping or scratching himself like a sloth, Lancelot couldn’t resent him, which only made the wait more difficult.

Down in the cubby in the basement laundry room of the colony house, where he had to telephone Mathilde—no cell service here, they were truly removed from the world—he vented his frustration in a whisper. She made cooing sounds, husky noises of support, but it was five in the morning, she wasn’t at her best. “How about some telephonic kink?” she said at last. “A little sultry-sultry across the wires? Calm you down a bit.”