by Lauren Groff
3
THERE WERE THOUSANDS of people at Lotto’s funeral. She knew he’d been loved, and by strangers, too. But not this excess. All these people she didn’t know were lining the sidewalk, keening. O! great man. O! playwright of the bougie. She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of blackbirds. Her husband had moved people and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them. Was not hers. Was now theirs.
It felt unhygienic, this flood of snot and tears. Too much coffee breath in her face. All that assaultive perfume. She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.
After the interment, she drove to the country alone. There may have been a reception planned, she didn’t know. Or if she did know, she blocked the knowledge; she never would have gone. She’d had enough of people.
The house was hot. The pool winked sunlight. Her black clothes on the kitchen floor. The dog made herself tiny on her cushion, her eyes beading out from the corner, feral.
[God licking at Lotto’s bare bluing feet below his desk, licking and licking as if she could lick the life back into him, dumb thing.]
And then there was the strange separation of self from body so that she watched her own nakedness from very far away.
The light slid across the room and extinguished itself, and the night stole in. This impassive self watched the friends come to the back window, recoil at seeing her nude body at the kitchen table, turn their eyes away, and call through glass: “Let us in, Mathilde. Let us in.” The nude body outsat them until they eked on home.
Naked in the bed, she wrote Thank you, Thank you to all of the e-mails until she remembered control-C, control-V, and then she copied and pasted Thank you. She found hot tea in her hand and thanked naked Mathilde for her thoughtfulness and found herself in the pool under the moonlight and worried about naked Mathilde’s mental state. Naked Mathilde neglected to answer the doorbell, woke on the wrong side of the bed seeking heat that wasn’t there, let the food rot on the porch, let the flowers rot on the porch, watched the dog piddle in the middle of the kitchen, made scrambled eggs for the animal when she ran out of kibble, gave her the last of the vegetable chili that Lotto had made, and watched the dog lick her own bum, sore from the spices, until it was red. Naked Mathilde locked the doors and ignored the loved ones peering in, calling, “Mathilde, come on! Mathilde, let us in, Mathilde, I’m not going anywhere, I’m camping in the yard.” The last was her husband’s aunt Sallie, who actually did camp in the yard until naked Mathilde left the door open for her so she could come in. Aunt Sallie had lost the two loves of her life in a few short months, but she chose to peacock her grief, wearing Thai silk dresses in jewel colors, dyeing her hair blueblack. Naked Mathilde put the covers over her head when a tray appeared on the mattress, and shivered until she slept again. Tray, sleep, bathroom, tray, sleep, bad thoughts, terrible memories, God whining, tray, sleep; on and on it went, forever.
—
I REMAIN HERE, cold, a widow in your halls. Andromache, the perfect wife, railed while holding dead Hector’s head in her white arms. You have left me only bitterness and anguish. You didn’t die in bed, stretching your arms toward me. You didn’t give me one last sweet word that I might remember in all my sorrow.
Andromaque, je pense à vous!
—
ON AND ON IT WENT, forever, except that during the first week she was a widow, somewhere inside the tent of covers, in the bed that held her naked body, a lust rose so powerfully she felt choked by it. What she needed was a fuck. A series of fucks. She saw a parade of thrusting men all in silent black-and-white, like talkie movies. Jangling over it all, organ music. Organ music. Ha!
There had been a few times before when lust was just this powerful. The first year with Lotto. Also, her first year of sex, long before Lotto. He’d always believed he’d deflowered her, but she’d just gotten her period, that was all. She indulged his belief. She hadn’t been a virgin, but there had been only one man before him. This was a secret that Lotto would never know. He would never have understood; his egotism would not admit a precursor. She winced to remember herself at seventeen, in high school, how, after the first illuminating weekend, everything spoke sex to her. The way the light pulsed the leaves of the ragweed in the ditches, the way clothes teased her skin as she moved. The words leaving a person’s mouth, how they were tongued, rolled, lipped before they emerged. It was as if the man had suddenly reached into her and pulled out an earthquake and set it loose on her skin. She walked the last weeks of high school wanting to eat every one of these delicious boys. If she had only been allowed, she would have swallowed them whole. She smiled at them hugely; they scurried away. She’d laughed, but felt it was a shame.
None of this mattered. Since they were married, it had only ever been Lotto. She had been faithful. She was nearly certain he had been, too.
In her little house in the cherry orchard, the house of bleakest widowhood, Mathilde remembered and got up out of her dirty bed and showered. She dressed in the dark bathroom and crept past the room where Aunt Sallie was whistle-snoring. Past the next room, door open, where her husband’s sister Rachel looked at her passing from the pillow. In the dark, a face like a ferret’s: triangular, alert, quivering. Mathilde got into the Mercedes.
Her hair was in a wet bun, she was wearing no makeup, but it didn’t matter. Three towns north there was a yuppie bar, and in the yuppie bar was a sad-faced man in a Red Sox cap, and a mile away in a little copse of trees where the road split, where they would have been pinned like moths on a board by headlights had any passed, she stood on her right leg, the left around the sad-faced Red Sox’s jerky hips, and shouted, “Harder!” And the man’s face, which had been first set in concentration, began taking on a look of alarm, and he kept on valiantly for some time while she shouted at him, “Harder! Faster, you fucker!” until it was clear that he was spooked, and he faked an orgasm and pulled out and mumbled something about taking a whiz, and she heard his feet in the crunchy leaves as he hurried away.
Rachel’s face was still looking at Mathilde from the dark when she went back upstairs. The marital suite, the bed obscene in its empty enormity. In her absence, the sheets had been changed. When she climbed in again, they were cool and smelled like lavender and brushed her skin like accusations.
—
THERE HAD BEEN A TIME when she’d sat beside Lotto in the dark on the opening night of one of his wild earlier plays and was so overcome by what he’d done, the grandness of his vision being transmuted before her eyes, that she leaned across the space between them and licked his face from ear to lip. She couldn’t help it.
Just as, holding Rachel and Elizabeth’s newborn daughter, she so longed to have the baby’s innocence for herself that she put the tiny clenched fist in her mouth and held it there until the baby screamed.
This widow’s lust was the opposite of that.
—
WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
4
SHE HAD BEEN OVERCOME by fear over the apple crisp in the dining hall; she had fled to the bathroom and had been sitting, frozen, on the paper ring atop the toilet for a very long time. This was during the final days of college. For the previous month, she’d been frightened at the gulf the future opened before her. She who had been in one cage or another since birth was free to fly soon, but she was petrified at the thought of all that air.
The door opened and two girls came in, talking about how rich Lancelot Satterwhite was. “Bottled Water Princeling, you know,” one said. “His mom’s, like, a billionaire.”
“Lotto? Really?” said the other. “Shit! I hooked up with him freshman year. If only I’d known.”
The girls laughed, and then the first said, “Yeah, right. He’s such a bro-ho. I think I’m the only girl in
the Hudson Valley who hasn’t seen his junk. They say he never sleeps with a girl twice.”
“Except Bridget. Which I don’t get. She’s so blah. I heard her saying they’re dating, and I was, like, Really? I mean, she looks like a children’s librarian. Like one who is caught in a perpetual rainstorm or something.”
“Yeah, well, Bridget is to dating Lotto the way a remora is to dating a shark.”
The girls laughed, left.
Mathilde thought, Huh. She flushed, came out, washed her hands. She looked at herself critically in the mirror. She smiled. “Hallelujah,” she said aloud to the Mathilde in the mirror, and the Mathilde in the mirror said it back with her lovely lips, her pale and angular face.
She claimed finals and eschewed the weekend trip to the city. She dressed carefully. She saw her quarry onstage that night and was impressed: he was very good, a manic Hamlet, puppyish in his energy even if so very tall. From afar, the pits in his cheeks were not discernible, and he threw off a kind of golden light that cast even the audience in its glow. He made the shopworn monologue sexy and showed it to them anew. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” he said, with a pirate’s smile; and she imagined in seats all throughout the audience a tingly heat rising. Promising. By the aisle lights, she read his full name in the program, Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, and frowned. Lancelot. Well. She could make it work.
The cast party was in a Brutalist dorm where she’d never been. For four years, she had not allowed herself parties, friends. She couldn’t risk them. She went early and stood out of the rain under a portico, smoking a cigarette. She was watching for Bridget. When the girl and her three dour friends came trotting up under umbrellas, Mathilde followed them inside.
It was easy to separate Bridget from her friends. Mathilde only had to ask a question about serotonin reuptake inhibitors for their neurobiology class final in a few days, and the other girls faded away as Bridget earnestly explained. And then Mathilde refilled Bridget’s cup with mostly vodka and a splash of Kool-Aid.
Bridget was flattered to be talking to Mathilde, “I mean, my god!” she said. “You never, ever, ever go out! Everyone has heard about you but nobody ever talks to you. You’re like the white whale of Vassar.” Then she flushed, and said, “Like the skinniest, prettiest white whale ever,” and then said, “Aargh! You know what I mean.” She drank nervously. Mathilde refilled and Bridget drank, Mathilde refilled, Bridget drank, and then Bridget was throwing up on the common stairway and people who were trying to pass were saying, “Sick!” And, “Oh my god, Bridget.” And, “Nasty, ho-bag, take it outside.” The friends had been summoned. Mathilde was watching through the banister from a higher landing when they took her home.
Bridget went down the stairs and Lotto passed her coming up. He said, “Yikes!” and patted her on the shoulder, and leapt the last few steps and went into the party.
From her perch above, Mathilde had watched it all.
The first problem dispatched. What ease.
She stood outside in the chill rain, smoking two more cigarettes, listening to the party. She gave it ten songs. When Salt-N-Pepa was playing, she went back inside, up the stairs. She looked across the room.
There he was on the windowsill, drunk, bellowing, and it took her by surprise, how very muscular that body of his was. He was wearing some girl’s gel eye-mask as a loincloth. He had an empty water jug Ace-bandaged to his head. No dignity, but Christ there was beauty. His face was strange, as if it had once been handsome, and still was from afar; but she had seen him only clothed before now and would not have guessed at how perfect his body was. She had made so many calculations, but none involved her legs melting from under her with the instant desire to screw.
She willed him to look up, to see her.
He looked up. He saw her. His face went still. He stopped dancing. She felt the hair of her neck stand. He leapt into the crowd and crushed some poor tiny girl in falling and swam his way out and over to Mathilde. He was taller than she was. She measured six feet, six-three in these heels; men taller than she was were rare. She liked the unexpected feeling of being smaller, more delicate. He touched her hand. He went down on one knee and shouted up, “Marry me!” And she didn’t know what to do; she laughed and looked down at him, and said, “No!”
In the story he told of this—spun at so many parties, so many dinners, she listening with her smile, her head cocked, laughing slightly—she said, “Sure.” She never corrected him, not once. Why not let him live with his illusion? It made him happy. She loved making him happy. Sure! It wasn’t true, not for another two weeks when she would marry him, but it did no harm.
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.
Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure. There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.
—
YET IT’S TRUE THERE WAS, for a brief spell, a happiness that was absolute, it was sure, it swallowed her whole. Dim day, rocky beach. She felt the joy even through the tiny irritations, the sand flies that bit and the cold that soaked to her bones and the sharp stones on the Maine beach that split her hallux open like a sliced grape and made her limp back to the house they’d borrowed for their wedding day. They were twenty-two. The world drenched with potential. As fine as they’d ever be. She kept her hands warm on her new husband’s back and felt the muscles moving under his skin. A shell dug into her spine. She felt herself engulf him. First consummation as husband and wife. She thought of a boa swallowing a fawn.
If he’d had flaws then, she couldn’t see them; and perhaps it was true, perhaps she had found the only faultless person in the world. Even if she had dreamt of him, she couldn’t have come up with him. Innocent, charming, funny, loyal. Rich. Lancelot Satterwhite; Lotto. They had been married that morning. She was grateful to the sand that eked its way into the naughty bits and stung; she couldn’t trust pleasure in its pure form.
But their first married consummation was over so fast. He laughed into her ear; she into his throat. It didn’t matter. Their separate selves had elided. She was no longer alone. She was crushed with gratitude. He helped her up and they bowed to gather their clothing and the ocean over the dune applauded. All weekend she rang with joy.
One weekend should have been enough. She was given so much more than she deserved. But she was greedy.
Brilliant May sun on the drive back from their stolen honeymoon. Lotto, who would always be labile as a preteen, drove and, hearing a sweet song, burst into tears. She did the only thing she could think of and put her head in his lap and disinterred Little Lotto to make Big Lotto stop. A semi, in passing, honked its approval.
Back in Poughkeepsie, in front of her apartment, she said, “I want to know everything about you. I want to meet your mother and aunt and sister immediately. Let’s fly to Florida after graduation. I want to eat your life.” She laughed, a little, at her own earnestness. Oh, to have a mother, a family! She’d been alone for so long. She’d let herself daydream of a kind mother-in-law who took her away for spa days, who had in-jokes, who sent small presents with notes saying, “Saw this, thought of you.”
But there was something wrong. After a moment, Lotto put her knuckles to his mouth and said, “M. My love. We’ll have the rest of our lives for that.”
A vein of cold shot through her. What was this? Hesitation? Perhaps he was already ashamed of her. Before her rose the Cranach diptych, Adam and Eve with the long thighs, tiny heads, huge feet cold at the knuckles. It�
�s true that even in Eden there were snakes.
“I have to write my sociology final,” he said apologetically. “I have six hours till it’s due, but I’ll bring us dinner tonight after I hand it in. I love you beyond love.”
“Me, too,” she said, closing the car door and trying to stifle the panic.
She came into her apartment, which had contracted, filled as it was with her small and gray previous life. She took a hot bath and climbed under her down comforter for a nap. She was deep in a dream when her phone rang. It had to be bad. Nothing but badness would be calling so insistently.
She braced herself. “Yes,” she said.
“Well. Hello,” said a soft, sweet voice. “Come to find out you’re my daughter and I don’t even know you from Cain.”
It took Mathilde a moment, and then she said, “Mrs. Satterwhite. It’s so lovely to finally speak with you.”
But the voice didn’t stop. “I must confess that I did what any doting mother would do and I made inquiries as to who you are and where you’re from. My inquiries ended up in some strange places. You are lovely, just as I was told. I’ve seen your photographs, those bra catalog ones particularly, even though your bosoms seem rather smallish and I wonder at the person who hired you to show them off. To speak honestly, if I may, I didn’t love the spread in the teenybopper’s magazine where you looked like a half-drowned rat terrier, bless your heart. Funny that people would pay you to look like that in public. But some of your photos are very fine. You’re a pretty girl. Good match for my Lancelot, at least in looks.”
“Thank you,” Mathilde said, wary.
“But you’re not a churchgoing girl and, frankly, that gives me pause. A heathen in the family,” she said. “Not sure I like it. Much worse is what I come to find out about your uncle, the people he’s mixed up with. Shady beyond all measure. You only really know about a person when you know about their kin. I must say I do not like what I have come to find out. Add this to my fear of the kind of person who seduces such a kindhearted boy as mine and marries him in such a short courtship. Only a very dangerous or a very calculating person could do such a thing. All these things put together make me believe that you and I would have a hard time seeing eye to eye. Not in this lifetime, at least.”