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

They were together and she was alone ©Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber

“Baby, this play is about Erasmus. You can’t name it The Oneiroi.”
“Why?” Lotto said. “It’s a good name.”
“Nobody’s going to remember it. Nobody knows what it means. I don’t know what it means.”
“The Oneiroi are the sons of Nyx. Night. They’re dreams. Brothers of Hypnos, Thanatos, Geras: Sleep, Death, Old Age. This is a play about Erasmus’s dreams, baby. Prince of the Humanists! The bastard of a Catholic priest, orphaned by the plague in 1483. Desperately in love with another man—”
“I read the play, I know this already—”
“And the word Oneiroi makes me laugh. Erasmus was the man who said, In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. One-eyed king. Roi d’un oeil. Oneiroi.”
“Oh,” she said. She’d frowned when he’d spoken French; she’d been a French, art history, and classics triple major in college. Dark purple dahlia in the garden-side window, gleam of autumn light beyond. She came over to him, rested her chin on his shoulder, put her hands down his pants. “Well. It’s a sexy play,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Your hands are very soft, my wife.”
“I’m just shaking hands with your one-eyed king.”
“Oh, love,” he said. “You’re brilliant. That is a better title.”
“I know,” she said. “You may have it.”
“Generous,” he said.
“Except that I don’t like the way your king there is looking at me. He’s giving me the evil one-eye.”
“Off with his head,” he said, and carried her into the bedroom.

“Without a family, you’re a nobody.”

“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.”

“All this time and he’d been carrying around his ugliness as confidently as if it were beauty. How strange.”

“Boys belong to their mothers.”

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

"Lotto had made the story of their meeting a coup de foudre, but he was a born storyteller. He recast reality into a different kind of truth. It was, as she knew, actually a coup de foutre. Their marriage had always been about the sex. It had been about other things at first and would be about other things later, of course, but within days it was about the sex. She’d held out until she’d settled her previous commitments, and the wait had inflamed both. For a long time after, the genital had taken primacy over other concerns.”
“How such small things can decide one’s fate.”
“Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.”
“We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.”
“She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him”

 Lauren Groff - Fates and furies (Penguin-2015)