by Lauren Groff
—
“HALLELUJAH,” Chollie said, knocking back an eggnog, mostly brandy. It was eleven o’clock. “Christ is born.” He and Lotto were silently competing to see who could be drunker. Lotto hid it better, seemed normal, but the room spun if he didn’t blink it straight.
Outside, a thickness of night. Streetlights were lollipops of bright snow.
Aunt Sallie hadn’t stopped talking for hours, and now she was saying, “. . . course, I don’t know nothing, being not sophisticated as all y’all bachelor artists, and I sure as heck can’t tell you what to do, Lotto my boy, but if it was me, which it isn’t, I know, but if it was, I’d say I done gave it my all, be mighty proud of the three-four plays I done these past years and say, well, not everybody can be Richard Burton, and maybe I got something else I can do with my life. Like maybe, oh, take over the trust or something. Get back in Antoinette’s graces. Get undisinherited. You know she’s faring poorly, that sick heart of hers. Rachel and you both stand to gain a lot when she passes, god forbid it be soon.” She looked at Lotto cannily over her canary’s beak.
The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece. Around him, a lushness of poinsettias. Below, a fire Lotto had dared to make out of sticks collected from the park. Later, there would be a chimney fire, a sound of wind like a rushing freight train, and the trucks arriving in the night.
“I’m struggling,” Lotto said. “Maybe. But come on, I was born wealthy, white, and male. I’d have nothing to work with if I don’t have a little struggle. I’m doing what I love. That’s not nothing.” It sounded mechanical even to his own ears. Bad acting, Lotto. [But acting has slipped away from him a little, hasn’t it.] His heart wasn’t in the fight anymore.
“What’s success, anyway?” said Rachel. “I say it’s being able to work as much as you want at whatever lights you up. Lotto’s had steady work all these years.”
“I love you,” Lotto said to his sister. She was in high school, as skinny as Sallie. She took after the Satterwhite side, dark and hairy and ill-favored; her friends couldn’t believe that Lotto and she were related. Only Lotto thought her stunning, planar. Her thin face reminded him of Giacometti sculptures. She never smiled anymore. He pulled her close and kissed her, feeling how tightly she was coiled inside.
“Success is money,” Chollie said. “Duh.”
“Success,” Sallie said, “is finding your greatness, hushpuppies. Lotto, you were born with it. I saw it the moment you came screaming out of Antoinette. Middle of a hurricane. You’re simply not listening to what your greatness is. Gawain told me he always thought you’d be the president of the USA or an astronaut. Something bigger than big. It’s in your stars.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Lotto said. “And my stars.”
“Well. You also disappointed our dead father,” Rachel said, laughing.
“To our disappointed dead father,” Lotto said. He raised his glass at his sister and swallowed the bitterness. It wasn’t her fault; she’d never known Gawain, didn’t know what pain she’d summoned.
Mathilde came back in the door, carrying a tray. Glorious in her silver dress, her hair platinum, in a Hitchcock twist: she’d gotten fancy since she’d been promoted six months earlier. Lotto wanted to take her into the bedroom and engage in some vigorous frustration abatement.
Save me, he mouthed, but his wife wasn’t paying attention.
“I’m worried.” Mathilde put the tray down on the counter in the kitchen, turned to them. “I left this up there for Bette this morning, and it’s eleven, and she hasn’t touched it. Has anyone seen her the last few days?”
Silence, the clicking of the heirloom clock Sallie had brought as a carry-on in her duffel. They all looked ceilingward, as if to see beyond the layers of plaster and floorboard and carpet into the cold, dark apartment [silent save for the refrigerator hum, a large cold lump on the bed, the only thing breathing the hungry tabby rubbing against the window].
“M.,” Lotto said. “It’s Christmas. She probably left yesterday for some relative’s place, forgot to tell us. Nobody’s alone on Christmas.”
“Muvva is,” Rachel said. “Muvva’s alone in her dank little beach house, watching the whales with her binocs.”
“Bullhonkey. Your mother had her choice and she chose her agoraphobia over spending Christ’s birthday with her children. Believe me, I know it’s a disease. I live with it every dang day. I don’t know why every year I buy her a ticket. This year she even packed. Put on her jacket, her perfume. Then just sat on the couch. She said she’d rather organize the photo boxes in the spare bathroom. She made her own choice, and she’s a grown woman. We can’t feel bad,” Aunt Sallie said, but her pinched lips belied her words. Lotto felt a rush of relief. Her scratching at him tonight, her picking and prodding, arose from her own guilt.
“I don’t feel bad,” said Rachel, but her face was also drawn.
“I do,” Lotto said quietly. “I haven’t seen my mother for a long time. I feel very bad.”
Chollie heaved a sarcastic sigh. Sallie glared at him. “Well, it’s not like you kids can’t go see her,” Sallie said. “I know she cut you off, but all you have to do is spend five minutes with her and she’ll love you both. And that’s a promise. I can make it happen.”
Lotto opened his mouth, but there was too much to say, and it was all sour toward his mother, un-Christmassy, and so he shut it and swallowed the words back.
Mathilde put a bottle of red wine down hard. “Listen. Antoinette’s never been inside this apartment. She has never met me. She chose to be angry and stay angry. We can’t be sorry for her choices.” Lotto saw her hands trembling; rage, he realized. He loved the rare times she showed how thin her calm surface was; how, beneath, she boiled. A perverse part of Lotto, it’s true, wanted to lock Mathilde and his mother in a room and let them claw it all out. But he wouldn’t do it to Mathilde; she was far too sweet to spend even a minute in his mother’s company without coming out maimed. She turned off the chandelier so the Christmas tree with its lights and glass icicles overcame the room, and he pulled her onto his lap.
“Breathe,” Lotto said softly into his wife’s hair. Rachel blinked in the tree’s gleam.
Sallie had been speaking hard truths, he knew. It had become evident over the past year that he could no longer count on his charm, which had faded; he tested it again and again on coffee baristas and audition gauntlets and people reading in the subway, but beyond the leeway given to any moderately attractive young man, he didn’t have it anymore. People could look away from him these days. For so long, he had thought it was just a switch he could flick. But he had lost it, his mojo, his juju, his radiance. Gone, the easy words. He could not remember a night when he didn’t fall asleep drunk.
And so he opened his mouth and began to sing. “Jingle Bells,” a song he hated, and he was never the world’s best tenor anyway. But what else was there to do but sing in the face of dismay, the image of his fat mother sitting up alone by a potted majestic palm strung in colored bulbs? The others now were joining in, miraculous, all of them save Mathilde, still rigid with anger, though even she was softening, a smile cracking her lips. At last, even she sang.
Sallie watched Lotto, cleaving. Her boy. Heart of her heart. She was clear-eyed, knew that Rachel, being of finer moral stock, kinder, humbler, deserved her affection more than Lotto. But it was for Lotto that Sallie woke praying. These years of distance were hard on her. [ . . . in a one-horse open sleigh . . . ] It came back to her now, the Christmas before he’d finished college, before Mathilde, when he had met Sallie and Rachel in Boston, where they stayed at a redoubtable ancient hotel and were snowed in under three feet of powder, like being stuck in a dream. Lotto had maneuvered a rendezvous with a girl at another table at dinner, his smoothness so like his mother’s when she was young and lovely that it took Sallie’s breath away. Antoinette, undulating, had for a moment been superimposed on
her son. Later, Sallie waited in ambush until midnight, standing at the diamond window at the end of the hallway where their rooms were, the endless snow falling into the Common at her back. [. . . o’er the fields we go . . .] At the other end, in minuscule, three housemaids with their trolleys were laughing, shushing one another. At last, her boy’s door opened and he emerged, bare but for a pair of running shorts. Such a beautiful long back he had, his mother’s, at least when she was thin. There was a towel around his neck; he was going up to the pool. The sin he intended to enact so painfully obvious that Sallie’s cheeks burned in imagining the girl’s buttocks gridded with tile marks, Lotto’s knees scabby in the morning. Where did he learn such confidence, she thought, as he became smaller, going toward the housemaids. He said something and all three pealed, and one gave him a little flick with a cloth, and another sent a slow glitter, chocolates, at his chest. [ . . . laughing all the way, ha ha ha! ] He caught them. His laugh rumbled back to Sallie. How ordinary he was becoming, she’d thought. He was turning banal. If he wasn’t careful, some sweet girl would glue herself to him, Sallie saw, and Lotto would drift into marriage, a job as some high-paid menial, a family, Christmas cards, a beach house, middle-aged flab, grandchildren, too much money, boredom, death. He’d be faithful and conservative in old age, blind to his privilege. When Sallie stopped crying, she found herself alone, the cold draft of the window at her neck, and on both sides the rows of doors went on and on, diminishing to nothing at the end. [ . . . what fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight, oh! ] But glories! Mathilde came; and though she appeared to be the selfsame sweet girl Sallie had been afraid of, she was not. Sallie saw the flint in her. Mathilde could save Lotto from his own laziness, Sallie had thought, but here they were, years later, and he was still ordinary. The chorus caught in her throat.
A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already sleeping in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver that he’d run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys in puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.
—
ALMOST MIDNIGHT and Rachel couldn’t get over the ceiling. What chutzpah had made Mathilde gild it! Their bodies echoed, globs in the brightness above. It did transform the room, shining elegantly against the dark walls. On this frigid last day of the year, it seemed a hand had peeled back the roof like the lid of a sardine can and they were standing beneath an August sun.
It was unbelievable that this was the same empty white space that she had walked into on the day of their housewarming party more than seven years earlier, with its wild roil of bodies and beer stink, the glorious sweaty heat and the garden radiant with early-summer light out the windows. Now there were icicles shining in the streetlights. There were orchids around the Buddha, overgrown money plants in the corners, Louis XIV chairs covered in French flour sacking. It was elegant, overstuffed, too beautiful. A gilded cage, Rachel thought. Mathilde had been short with Lotto all evening. She no longer smiled when she looked at him. Well, she barely looked at him. Rachel was afraid that Mathilde, whom Rachel loved as dearly as anyone, was about to bust out of it all in a commotion of wings. Poor Lotto. Poor all of them if Mathilde left him.
Rachel’s new girlfriend, Elizabeth, a girl so pale of hair and skin she seemed made of paper, felt Rachel’s nerves ratcheting up and squeezed her shoulder. The tension went out of Rachel. She took a wobbly breath and kissed Elizabeth shyly on the neck.
Outside, the swift passing of a cat body on the sidewalk. It couldn’t be the tabby owned by the old lady from upstairs. That cat had been ancient when Lotto and Mathilde had moved in; last Christmas it starved for three days, until Lotto and Mathilde got ahold of the landlord vacationing in the British Virgin Islands and had someone investigate. Poor rotted dead Bette. Lotto had to take a hysterical Mathilde to Samuel’s apartment for a week just to get her to calm down while the fumigators were in. Strange to witness composed Mathilde lose it; it made Rachel see her as the thin, big-eyed little girl she must have been, made Rachel love her even more. Now there was a couple with a new baby up there, which was why this New Year’s Eve party tonight was so small. Newborns, apparently, dislike noise.
“Breeders,” said Mathilde, out of nowhere, Mathilde, who could read minds. She laughed at the astonished face Rachel made, then returned to the kitchen, pouring champagne into glasses on the silver tray. Lotto thought of the baby upstairs, then the way Mathilde would look when pregnant, svelte as a girl from behind, but in silhouette as if she’d swallowed a calabash. He laughed at the thought. Her strap down, breast lolling out, fat enough for even his hungry mouth. Days expanding outward from clean, warm skin and milk; that was what he wanted, exactly that.
Chollie and Danica and Susannah and Samuel sat quietly, pale, serious-ish. They had come alone to the party, this year bad for breakups. Samuel was skinny, his skin cracked around his mouth. This was the first he’d been out since having surgery for testicular cancer. He seemed, for the first time, diminished. “Speaking of breeders, last week I saw that girl you dated in college, Lotto. What was her name? Bridget,” Susannah said. “Pediatric oncology fellow. Hugely pregnant. Swollen like a tick. She seems happy.”
“I didn’t date in college,” Lotto said. “Except for Mathilde. For two weeks. Then we eloped.”
“Didn’t date. Just fucked every girl in the Hudson Valley.” Samuel laughed. Chemo had suddenly balded him; without his curls he looked newly ferretlike. “Sorry, Rachel, but your brother was a slut.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard,” Rachel said. “I think that Bridget girl used to come to your parties when you first moved in here. She was so boring. You always packed about a million people in this room. I miss those days.”
Up there rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand that they were ecstatic.
Whatever happened to all of those friends of ours? Lotto wondered. The ones who had seemed so essential had faded away. Nerd princes with their twins in strollers, Park Slope and craft beers. Arnie, who owned a bar empire, still doing girls with plates in their ears and jailhouse tattoos. Natalie now a CFO of some Internet start-up in San Francisco, a hundred others faded off. The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow.
“I don’t know,” Susannah was saying softly. “I guess I like living alone.” She was still a teenager in the soap opera. She’d be a teenager until they killed her off and then she’d play mothers and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
“I get so sad sleeping alone,” Danica said. “I want to buy a sex doll just to wake up next to someone in the morning.”
“Date a model. Same thing,” Chollie said.
“I hate your face, Chollie,” Danica said, trying not to laugh.
“Yadda yadda,” Chollie said. “Keep singing that same old song. We both know the truth.”
“Less than a minute until the ball drops,” called Mathilde, carrying in the tray of champagne.
Everyone looked at Samuel, who shrugged. Even cancer couldn’t dent him.
“Poor One Ball Samuel,” Lotto said. He’d gotten into the bourbon after dinner and hadn’t recovered yet.
“Old Single Dingle?” Chollie suggested, but not unkindly, for once.
“Half-sack Sam,” Mathilde said, and kicked lightly at Lotto, who was stretched out
on the couch. He sat up, yawned. He’d unbuttoned his pants. Thirty, at the end of his youth. He felt the darkness settle on him again, and said, “This is it, you guys. The last year of humanity. Next New Year’s, it’ll be Y2K and all the planes will fall out of the sky and the computers will explode and the nuclear power plants will go off-line and we’ll all see a flash and then the great blank whiteness will come over all of us. Done. Finito, the human experiment. So live it up! It’s the last year we get!”
He was joking; he believed what he was saying. He thought of how the world without humans would be more brilliant, greener, teeming with strange life, rats with opposable thumbs, monkeys in spectacles, mutant fish building palaces below the sea. How, in the grand scheme of things, it would be better without human witness anyway. He thought of his mother’s young face flickering in candlelight, in revelation. “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration,” Lotto whispered, and his friends looked at him, saw something terrible, looked away.
He broke Rachel’s fucking heart. Her whole family broke her fucking heart. Muvva burying herself in solitude, in unhappiness. Doglike Sallie slaving away. Lotto, whose pride she couldn’t understand; only a child could stay so angry so long, only a child wouldn’t forgive in order to make things right. Mathilde saw Rachel’s eyes fill with pity and shook her head slightly: No. He’ll see it.
“Thirty seconds,” Mathilde said. Prince was playing from the computer, of course.
Chollie leaned toward Danica, angling for the midnight kiss. Horrible little man. Such a mistake to let him feel her up in the taxi one night coming back from the Hamptons this past summer. What was she thinking? She’d been between boyfriends, but still. “Not a fucking chance,” she said, but he was speaking.