Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Page B

for sure, but he loved those girls’ voices. The apartment washot as hell, the late-afternoon sun shining in like a voyeur. Nothing mattered: all his college friends were together again. He took a moment to watch, standing with a beer in the doorway.
    Natalie was doing a keg stand, held up by the ankles by the guys from the coffee shop down the block, her shirt lapping over her mealy belly. Samuel, blue bags under his eyes, was talking loudly about having worked ninety hours at his investment bank last week. Beautiful Susannah was putting her face in the freezer to cool it off, radiant with the shampoo commercial she’d landed. He swallowed his envy. The girl couldn’t act, but she was dewy, doelike. They’d hooked up once junior year. She’d tasted like fresh cream. His co-captain on the crew team, Arnie, flush from mixology school, was shaking up Pink Squirrels, his skin streaked apricot from tanning lotion.
    Behind him, a voice Lotto didn’t know said, “What’s the one forbidden word in a riddle about chess?”
    And some other person paused, then said, “Chess?”
    And the first person said, “You remember our freshman Borges seminar!” and Lotto laughed out loud with love for these pretentious sperm wads.
    They would have this party year after year, he decided. It would be their annual June fête, the friends gathering, building until they had to rent out an airplane hangar to hold everyone, to drink and shout and dance into the night. Paper lanterns, shrimp boil, someone’s kid’s bluegrass band. When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family. This crowded and sweaty lurch was all he wanted of life; this was the summit. Jeez, he was happy.
    What’s this? A spray of wet coming through the open garden windows, the old lady screaming down at them with the hose trained into the roil, her voice barely audible over the music and shouting. The girls shrieked, their summer dresses clinging to their beautiful skin. Tender. Moist. He could eat them all. He had a vision of himself in apile of limbs and breasts, a red mouth open, sliding over his—but oh, that’s right, he couldn’t. He was married. He grinned at his wife, who was hurrying across the floor to the fat woman screaming down through the window, “Savages! Control yourselves! Keep the noise down! Savages!”
    Mathilde spoke mollifyingly, and the cranks were turned and the garden windows shut, and those to the street thrust open, which was cooler anyway, being in the shade. Already, the lip-locks, the grinding, though the sun still shined in. They turned the noise up a notch, the voices louder.
    “. . . cusp of a revolution. East and West Germany reunifying, there’s going to be a huge backlash to capitalism.”
    “Hélène Cixous is sexy. Simone de Beauvoir. Susan Sontag.”
    “Feminazis, ipso facto, cannot be sexy.”
    “. . . like, the fundamental human condition to be lonely.”
    “Cynic! Only you would say that in the middle of an orgy.”
    Lotto’s heart kicked froglike in his chest; sweeping toward him in her brilliant blue skirt, Mathilde. His azure lion rampant. Her long hair plaited down her left breast, she, the nexus of all the good of this world. He was reaching toward her when she shifted him over to the front door. It was open. A very small person stood there. Surprise! His baby sister Rachel in pigtails and overalls, gazing at the scene of drink and grind and cigarette with baby Baptist horror, shaking with nerves. She was only eight years old. She had an unaccompanied-minor tag hanging around her neck. There was a middle-aged couple with matching hiking boots frowning into the room behind her.
    “Rachel!” he shouted, and picked her up by the loop of her backpack and carried her in. The friends shuffled away. Kissing ceased, in this room at least; there was no telling what was happening in the bedroom. Mathilde unhooked Rachel. They had met only once before, when Lotto’s aunt had brought the