by Lauren Groff
She, at some point, had stopped loving him. [He couldn’t know.] It was a sorrow of his life. But perhaps, right then she did.
He floated down until he shipwrecked on the bottom of the ocean. Poofs of sand. He opened his eyes. His nose was barely below the surface, where the last of the moon rode the tip of a stilled wave. He put his feet down and pushed, and his body rose out of the water to his thighs.
Like a dog that had followed him, the shore was ten feet behind.
—
THE DAY DAWNED FIRST ON THE CLOUDS. Golden cattle of sun. At least he’d have this comfort. The beach stretched perfect, the dunes black with foliage. Untouched by man. History, during the night, had been peeled to the beginning.
He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.
[It was clear now, what this was. His family inheritance. The final blinding salvo in the brain.]
He longed to go home. To Mathilde. He wanted to tell her he’d forgive her anything. Who cared anymore what she’d done, with whom? But all that was gone. He, too, would be gone soon.
He wished he could have known her old. He thought of how magnificent she would be then.
No sun but a dim gold. Tide tight to shore. His mother’s pink house. Three black birds huddled on the roof. He’d always loved the ocean’s scent of fresh sex. He climbed out of the water and went naked up the beach, the boardwalk, into the house of his mother, outside onto the balcony.
For years, it seemed, he stood in the dawn.
—
[THE THREAD OF SONG has been measured to its bare spool, Lotto. We’ll sing the last of it to you.]
Look, now. In the distance, a person.
Closer, it’s two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair. Blond, green bikini; tall, shining. They kiss, handsy things happening under his trunks, her top. Who wouldn’t envy such youth, who wouldn’t grieve what has been lost, in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath, while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by dunes. She pushes down his trunks; he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh, yes, you’d return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the Eastern Seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You’re unworthy of her. [Yes. [No.]] Even as you think of flight, you’re transfixed by the lovers, wouldn’t dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other and it’s hard to tell where one begins and one ends: hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand, her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it; there is an overlap; you have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing, the sex reaching its culmination [come!]. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turned skyward: is this drizzle? [It is.] Sound of small shears closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty, and here it is. The separation.
FURIES
1
ONE DAY, WHEN MATHILDE was walking in the village where they’d been so happy, she heard a carful of boys drive up behind her. They were yelling lewd things. Anatomy they suggested she suck. What they’d like to do to her ass.
The shock became a flush of warmth, as if she’d drunk a tumbler of whiskey down.
It’s true, she thought. I still have a perfect ass.
But when the car drew level to her face, the boys went dumb. She saw them, pale, in passing. They gunned the engine and were gone.
This moment returned to her a month later when she crossed a Boston street and heard someone calling her name. A small woman darted up. Mathilde couldn’t place her. She had damp eyes and reddish hair hanging around her ears. Soft at the midsection, a breeder. From the looks of things, four little girls in matching Lilly Pulitzer were at home with the au pair.
The woman stopped five feet from Mathilde with a little cry. Mathilde brought her hands to her cheeks. “I know,” she said. “I’ve looked so old ever since my husband—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“No,” the woman said. “You’re still elegant. It’s just. You look so angry, Mathilde.”
Later, Mathilde would remember the woman: Bridget, from her class in college. With the recollection came some small pang of guilt. Time, however, had obscured why.
For a breath, she studied the sidewalk waltz of chickadee and sun through windblown leaves. When she looked up again, the other woman took a step back. Then another.
Slowly, Mathilde said: “Angry. Sure. Well, what’s the point in hiding it anymore?”
And then she lowered her head, pressed on.
—
IT WOULD COME to her decades later, when she was old, in a porcelain bathtub held aloft on lion claws and her own body mercifully submerged, that her life could be drawn in the shape of an X. Her feet duck-splayed and reflected in the water.
From a terrifying expanse in childhood, life had focused to a single red-hot point in middle age. From there it had exploded outward again.
She slid her heels apart so they were no longer touching. The reflection moved with them.
Now her life showed itself to have been in a different shape, equal and opposite to the first. [Complex, our Mathilde; she can bear contradictions.]
Now the shape of her life appeared to be: greater than, white space, less than.
—
WHEN THEY WERE BOTH forty-six years old, Mathilde’s husband, the famous playwright Lancelot Satterwhite, left her.
He went away in an ambulance without sirens. Well, not him. The cold meat of him.
She called his sister, Rachel. Rachel screamed and screamed, and when she stopped, she said, ferociously, “Mathilde, we’re coming. Hang tight, we’re coming.” His aunt Sallie was traveling and hadn’t left a number, so she called Sallie’s lawyer. Within a minute after Mathilde hung up, Sallie called from Burma. “Mathilde,” she said. “You wait, darling, I’m coming.”
She called her husband’s best friend. “I’m taking the helicopter,” Chollie said. “I’m coming.”
They were soon to descend upon her. For now, she was alone. She stood on a boulder in the meadow, wearing one of her husband’s shirts, and watched the dawn hit the frost, prismatic. There was an ache in her feet from the cold stone. For a month or so, something had been eating at her husband. He’d gloomed around the house and hardly looked at her. It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back. A beating came near, and the wind started up, and she didn’t turn to watch the helicopter land, but she leaned against the freezing force of the wind. When the blades slowed, she heard Chollie’s voice at her elbow.
She looked down at him. Grotesque Chollie, gone bad with money, overrich like a pear ripened to ooze. He wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants. She’d woken him, she saw. He had to fold his hand into a visor to peer up at her.
“Insane,” he said. “He exercised every day. It should have been fat-ass me to go first.”
“Yes,” she said. He moved as if to hug her. She thought of the last warmth of her husband that she’d soaked into her skin, and said, “Don’t.”
“I won’t,” he said.
The meadow sharpened. “When we landed, I saw you standing there,” he said. “You looked the same age as when I first met you. You were so brittle. So full of light back then.”
“I feel ancient now,” she said. She was only forty-six.
“I know,” he said.
“You can’t,” she sa
id. “You loved him, too. But you weren’t his wife.”
“I wasn’t. But I had a twin sister who died. Gwennie.” He looked away, then said with cold in his voice, “She killed herself when she was seventeen.”
Chollie’s mouth was twisting in and out. Mathilde touched his shoulder.
“Not you,” he said quickly, and by this she understood him to mean that her fresh sorrow outblazed his own, that she should be the one to be comforted now. She could feel the grief coming on fast, shaking the ground like a hurtling train, but she hadn’t been hit by it yet. She had a little time still. She could soothe; it was what she was best at, after all. Being a wife.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Lotto never told me that Gwennie had killed herself.”
“He never knew. He thought it was an accident,” Chollie said, and this didn’t sound strange to her in the meadow full of winter light. It wouldn’t ring strange for some months, because here the horror was, plowing through her, and she could feel nothing for a very long time but its wild and whistling force.
—
It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said this. He, too, had found himself crashed into the desert when, just moments before, all had been open blue sky.
Where are the people? said Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. It’s a little lonely in the desert . . .
It’s lonely when you’re among people, too, said the snake.
—
LIKE CARP, the loved ones surfaced, mouthing the air around her face before sinking deep again.
They put her in a chair, put a blanket on her. God the dog sat trembling beneath.
These loved ones all day were lowering their faces at her, moving away. Lotto’s nieces and nephew creeping up to put their cheeks on her knees. Food on her lap, taken away. The children sat there through the long afternoon. They understood at an animal level, new enough to the world to be uneasy in language. Sudden night in the window. She sat and sat. She thought of what her husband might have been thinking the moment he died. A flash of light, perhaps. The ocean. He had always loved the ocean. She hoped he’d seen her own younger face coming near his. Samuel put his shoulder under one arm, Lotto’s sister put hers under the other, they deposited her in the bed that still smelled like him. She put her face in his pillow. She lay.
She could do nothing. Her whole body had turned inward. Mathilde had become a fist.
2
MATHILDE WAS NOT UNFAMILIAR with grief. That old wolf had come sniffing around her house before.
She had one picture of herself from when she was tiny.
Her name had been Aurélie. Fat cheeks, gold hair. The only child in a large Breton family. Her bangs clipped from her face in a barrette, scarves on her neck, lacy socks to her ankles. Her grandparents fed her galettes, cider, caramels with sea salt. The kitchen had rounds of Camembert ripening in the cabinet. It could knock you down to open the door, unsuspecting.
Her mother was a fishwife at the market in Nantes. She’d rise in the blue night and drive to the city and come home midmorning with her hands chapped and glittering with scales, cold to the bone from contact with ice. Her face was delicate, but she had no education. Her husband had wooed her with his leather jacket, his pompadour, his motorcycle. Small things to trade for a life, but at the time they had seemed powerful. Aurélie’s father was a stonemason, and his family had lived in the same house in Notre-Dame-des-Landes for twelve generations. Aurélie was conceived during the revolution of May 1968; though her parents were far from radical, there was so much excitement in the air that they didn’t know how to express themselves except animally. When it was impossible for the girl’s mother to hide her pregnancy, they were married with orange blossoms in her hair, a slice of coconut cake in the freezer.
Aurélie’s father was quiet, loved few things. Putting stone on stone, the wine he made in his garage, his hunting dog he called Bibiche, his mother who’d survived World War II by black-marketing blood sausages, and his daughter. She was spoiled, a happy and singing girl.
But when Aurélie was three, the new baby came. He was a fretful and screaming creature. Still, he was cooed over, that wizened turnip in blankets. Aurélie watched from under a chair, burning.
Colic arrived in the baby, and the house went piebald with vomit. Aurélie’s mother walked around as if shattered. Four aunts, smelling of butter, came to help. They gossiped viciously and their brother showed them his grapes and the aunts chased Bibiche from the house with a broom.
When the baby at last began to crawl, he got into everything, and the father had to build a gate at the top of the stairs. Aurélie’s mother cried during the day in her bed when the children were supposed to be asleep. She was so tired. She smelled of fish.
The baby liked best to crawl into Aurélie’s bed and suck his thumb and twirl her hair, the snot in his nose catching so it sounded as if he were purring. During the night, she would slowly move both of their bodies toward the edge of the bed so that when he finally fell asleep and rolled onto his back he’d tumble out and wake shrieking from the floor. She’d open her eyes in time to watch her mother rush in and pick the baby up with her swollen red hands and, scolding in whispers, carry him back to his own crib.
—
WHEN THE GIRL was four years old and the baby brother one, the family went for supper to the grandmother’s house one afternoon. The house had been the grandmother’s ancestors’ for centuries, and she’d brought it to her marriage with the neighbor boy. The fields, still conjoined, were all hers. The house was far finer than the little girl’s family’s, the bedrooms larger, a stone creamery from the eighteenth century still attached to the main building. The manure had been spread that morning and could be tasted in the milk. The grandmother was like her son, square, strong-featured, taller than most men. Her mouth was carved down into a sharp n shape. She had a granite lap and a way of puncturing the jokes of others by sighing loudly at the punch line.
The baby was put down for a nap in the grandmother’s bed and everyone else was outside under the oak, eating. Aurélie was on the downstairs potty, trying to go. She was listening to her brother upstairs thumping around in the grandmother’s room, crowing to himself. She pulled up her panties and slowly went up the stairs, collecting a gray fur on her finger from the dust between banisters. She stood in the honey-bright hallway listening to him through the door: he was singing to himself, thumping his feet on the headboard. She thought of him inside the room and smiled. She opened the door to him, and he climbed off the bed and toddled into the grandmother’s hallway, grabbing at her, but she stepped backward, away from his sticky hands.
She sucked a finger and watched him move beyond her, toward the top of the stairs. He looked at her, beamish, teetering. He reached out his daisy of a hand, and she watched as her baby brother fell.
—
WHEN AURÉLIE’S PARENTS returned from the hospital, they were silent, gray-faced. The baby’s neck had broken. There was nothing they could have done.
Her mother wanted to take Aurélie home. It was late and the girl’s face was swollen with crying, but her father had said no. He couldn’t look at her, though she clung to his knees, smelling his jeans stiff with sweat and stone dust. After the baby fell, someone had dragged Aurélie down the stairs and her arm was black with a bruise. She showed it to them, but they didn’t look.
The parents were holding up something invisible but terribly heavy between them. There was no power in them to lift anything else, certainly not their daughter.
“We’ll leave her for tonight,” the mother said. The sad face with the apple cheeks, the glorious eyebrows, came near, kissed the girl, went away. Her father slammed the door to the hatchback three times. They drove off, Bibiche gazing out the back window. T
he taillights winked in the dark, were gone.
In the morning, Aurélie woke to her grandparents’ house, the grandmother downstairs making crêpes, and she washed herself neatly. All morning, her parents didn’t come. They didn’t come and they didn’t come.
The kiss on the forehead was the last she’d smell of her mother [Arpège by Lanvin, undermusk of cod]. The brush of her father’s stiff jeans on her hand when she held it out to touch him as he walked by, the last she’d feel of him.
After the fifth time she begged her grandparents for her mother and father, her grandmother stopped answering her.
That night, when she waited by the door and they still didn’t come, a terrible rage rose in Aurélie. To get it out of her, she kicked and screamed, broke the mirror in the bathroom, the glasses one by one in the kitchen; she punched the cat in the throat; she ran into the dark and tore her grandmother’s tomato plants out of the ground with her fists. The grandmother first tried to embrace her for hours to calm her, but lost patience and had to tie her to the bed with the curtain tassels, which, being ancient, snapped.
Three scratches beading blood on her grandmother’s cheek. Quelle conne. Diablesse, she hissed.
Hard to say how long this went on. Time, to a four-year-old, is flood or eddy. Months, perhaps. Years, it’s not impossible. The darkness in her circled, landed. In her mind’s eye, her parents’ faces turned to twin smears. Was there a moustache atop her father’s lip? Was her mother bright blond or dark? She forgot the smell of the farmhouse where she’d been born, the crunch of gravel under her shoes, the perpetual twilight in the kitchen even when the lights were on. The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.