by Lauren Groff
7
HER TONGUE WAS STILL HEALING from when she flipped the car. Mathilde said very little. The tongue hurt, true, but silence became her. When she spoke, she showed her contempt.
She went out at night and picked men up. The doctor still in his scrubs, smelling of iodine and clove cigarettes. The boy who sold gas at Stewart’s, with his downy moustache and ability to pump for hours like a lonely derrick on the dry Texas plains. The mayor of the little village where Mathilde and Lotto had lived so happily; the owner of the bowling alley; a shy divorcé with shockingly floral taste in bed linens. A cowboy with four-hundred-dollar boots, he’d informed her with pride. A black jazz saxophonist in town for a wedding.
By then she’d made a name for herself without saying anything at all. School superintendent; owner of a hunting camp; CrossFit trainer with deltoids like hand grenades; a semi-famous poet she and her husband had known from the city, who’d come up to visit her on an impulsive hajj of Lotto grief. He’d put three fingers up her and she felt the cold of his wedding band.
She picked up a fat balding man who drove school buses. He only wanted to hold her and weep.
“Disgusting,” she said. She was in the middle of the motel room, still in her bra. She’d shorn her hair to velveteen that day in the pool. The locks had drifted atop the surface like drowned snakes. “Stop crying,” she said.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You are sorry,” she said.
“You’re just so pretty,” he said. “And I’m so lonely.”
She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. There was a jungle scene on the comforter.
“Can I put my head in your lap?” he said.
“If you have to,” she said. He lowered his cheek to her thighs. She braced herself against the weight of his head. His hair was soft and smelled of unscented soap, and from this vantage, his skin was very sweet, pink and smooth like a piglet’s.
“My wife passed away,” he said, his mouth tickling her leg. “Six months ago. Breast cancer.”
“My husband died four months ago,” she said. “Aneurysm.” Pause. “I win,” she said.
His eyelashes brushed her skin while he thought about this. “So you know?” he said.
“I do,” she said.
The flick of the traffic light across the street from the motel filled the room with red and dark and red and dark. “How do you live?” she said.
“Ladies with casseroles. My kids call me every day. I’ve taken up kite building. It’s all so stupid,” he said.
“I don’t have kids,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not me. Best decision I ever made,” she said.
“How do you live?” he said.
“By fucking the brains out of disgusting men.”
“Hey!” he said, then laughed. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Awful.”
“Then why do you do it?”
Slowly, she said: “My husband was the second man I’d had sex with. I was faithful for twenty-four years. I want to know what I was missing.”
“What were you missing?” he said.
“Nothing. Men are all absolutely terrible at sex. Except for my husband.”
She thought: Well, there had been one or two surprises, but mostly that was true.
He picked his moon face up off her lap. Pink dent on her thigh, moisture. He looked at her hopefully. “I’ve been told I’m an excellent lover,” he said.
She pulled her dress on over her head and zipped her boots to her knees. “Missed your window there, buddy,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’ll be quick.”
“Christ almighty,” she said, and put her hand on the doorknob.
His voice went bitter when he said, “Have a good time being a whore.”
“You poor sad little man,” she said, and went out without turning around.
—
THERE WAS NOTHING Mathilde could do. Flickering images hurt her head; books left her hollow. She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.
She drank a great deal of wine and fell asleep, and when she woke, it was in the middle of the night to a cold bed empty of her husband. That was when she knew, with existential bitterness, that her husband had understood nothing of her.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then. There was also this: for a number of his plays, at least half, she would silently steal in at night and refine what he had written. [Not rewrite; edit, burnish, make glow.] And she ran the business side of his work; she had horrified visions of all the money he would have let evaporate in his goodwill and indolence.
Once, during the previews of The House in the Grove, when, it felt, they were on the brink of a flop, she had been in the office of the theater. Deep afternoon, rain and coffee. She had been reaming out a script supervisor with such softly vicious skill that the poor boy’s knees went out from under him and he had to sit on a crimson ottoman to gather himself. When she finished, she said, “You are dismissed.”
The boy stood and fled.
She hadn’t seen Lotto in the shadows of the hallway, glooming there.
“So,” he said. “When directors ask members of the cast to come see you, I gather it’s not for a pep talk. I had always thought it was for a pep talk. Magic cookie bars and café au lait, a nice little cry on your bosom.”
“Some people just need a different kind of motivation,” she said. She stood and stretched her neck, one side, the other.
“If I hadn’t seen it,” he said, “I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Would you like me to stop?” she said. She wouldn’t. They’d be in the poorhouse. But she could keep it quieter, make sure he wouldn’t know.
He stepped in and locked the door behind him. “In truth, it turned me on,” he said. He came close and said, “I see her indeed in the image of a Valkyrie maiden, riding her steed into the circle, amid thunder and lightning, and out again, bearing the body of some dead hero across her saddle.” He picked her up and wrapped her legs around his hips, and turned, and pressed her back against the door.
Was he quoting? She didn’t care. His voice was full of admiration. She closed her eyes. “Giddyap, steed,” she said. He nickered in her ear.
She had a self she didn’t devote to him. For one thing, she wrote, and not just invisibly in his manuscripts, which he must have thought magically tidied themselves up in the night. She wrote her own things that she kept to herself: surreptitious, sharp objects part story, part poetry. Published under a pseudonym. She’d begun in despair when she was almost forty and he’d fallen and broken himself, and in the break, she felt him moving away from her.
There was the other thing, the far worse thing. During the same time she began to write, she left him. He was wrapped up in his work. She came back and he never knew she was gone.
—
SHE’D SEEN THE ARTISTS’ COLONY when she dropped Lotto off: they brought you lunch in wicker baskets and gave you your own stone cottage, with these long laughing conversations at night over candlelight. It had seemed a version of heaven. She’d held his face as she moved over him on the small and squeaky bed, but he’d turned her over, and when he shivered and gasped and put his head on her back to catch his breath, she felt a chill. She laughed off the premonition and drove away. For a few weeks, she’d be left alone in the tiny country house with God.
So she had been fine to drop him off that gray November, to take a few weeks off from the constant care of him. He would be working with a young composer on an opera. Leo Sen.
But even the first week without Lotto, her life, her house, had been so empty. She forgot meals, ate dinners of tuna still in the can, spent too much time streaming films in bed. Time clicked by. The days grew colder, darker. Some days she never turned on the light, waking at eight when the sun rose weakly, sleeping at four-thirty when it bled itself out. She felt ursine. Norwegian. Her husband’s calls trickled down from once a day to every few days. In her half sleep, she had fiery nightmares of Lotto telling her he no longer needed her, he was leaving, he loved another woman. In her fever, she imagined some poetess, frail and young, with heifer hips molded for birthing, a girl who was respected in her own rights as an artist, which Mathilde would never be. He would divorce Mathilde, and he and his new whispery paramour would live in the apartment in the city in a glut of sex and parties and babies, endless babies, all with his face in miniature. She imagined the poetess almost into existence. She was so lonely she could choke on it. She called and called, and he never answered the telephone. His calls decreased even more; he called once the last week. He didn’t try to get kinky with her, which was so strange for Lotto that he could have been neutered.
He skipped Thanksgiving, though they’d had plans with friends and family in the house in the country; she’d had to cancel, ate the custard out of the pumpkin pie she’d made the day before and tossed the crust out the window for the raccoons. On the phone, Mathilde’s voice had wobbled. Lotto’s voice went distant. He said he was extending the stay into mid-December. She said something cutting and hung up. He called three times and she didn’t pick up. The fourth time, she would, she decided. But though she waited by the phone, he didn’t call back.
When he’d talked of Leo, there was a pulse under his words, a thrill. And suddenly, she could taste his infatuation. It left a bitterness on the back of her tongue.
Mathilde dreamt of Leo Sen. She knew he was a young man, from the few bios that existed online. And though Lotto was thoroughly straight—the daily greedy need of his hands told her this—her husband’s desire had always been more to chase and capture the gleam of the person inside the body than the body itself. And there was a part of her husband that had always been so hungry for beauty. It was out of the question that Leo Sen’s body could steal her husband; it was not out of the question that with his genius Leo could take her place in Lotto’s affections. This was worse. In the dream, they were sitting at a table, Mathilde and Leo, and there was a giant pink cake, and though Mathilde was hungry, Leo was eating the cake, delicate bite by delicate bite, and she had to watch him eat it, smiling shyly until it was gone.
—
SHE SAT FOR A LONG, LONG TIME at the kitchen table, and every moment she sat, the anger took on mass, then darkness, then scales.
“I’ll show him,” she said aloud to God. God wagged her tail sadly. The dog missed Lotto, too.
It took ten minutes to make the arrangements, another twenty to pack herself and the dog. She drove off through the cherry trees, resolutely not looking at the little white house in the rearview mirror. God had shivered when she handed her over at the kennel. Mathilde had shivered all the way to the airport, on the plane, had taken two Ambien, and stopped shivering to sleep all the way to Thailand, waking with a bleary head and a blossoming urinary tract infection from holding her bladder while she slept.
When she walked out of the airport into the humidity, the human roil, the tropical stink and wind, her legs went weak.
Bangkok flashed by, pink and gold, swarms of bodies beneath the streetlights. Strands of holiday lights snaked up the trees, a kindness to the tourists. Mathilde’s skin was thirsty for the moist wind, now blowing rotten with marsh reeds and mud, now blowing eucalyptus. She was too agitated for sleep, the hotel too hygienic, so she wandered back out into the dark. A bent woman swept a sidewalk with a bundle of sticks, a rat perched atop a wall. Mathilde wanted the bitterness of a gin and tonic on her tongue, and followed music blindly under a portico into a nightclub, empty so early in the night. Inside was tiered, balconied, the stage being set up for a band. The bartender patted Mathilde’s hand when she delivered the drink, flash of warmth on the skin, then the cold of the glass, and Mathilde wanted to touch the lushness of the woman’s black eyelashes. Someone sat beside her, an American man bursting out of his T-shirt, his head fuzzy like a ripe peach. Beside him a plump and laughing Thai woman. His voice oozed with intimacy; he’d already taken possession. Mathilde wanted to seize his words, roll them up in her fist, shove them down his throat. Instead, she left, found the hotel, lay sleepless in bed until dawn.
In the morning, she found herself on a boat to the Phi Phi Islands, salt on her lips from the wind. She had her own bungalow. She’d paid for a month, imagining Lotto coming home to an empty house, no dog, searching all the rooms for her, finding nothing, the terror hatching in his heart. Had someone kidnapped her? Had she run away with the circus? She was so agreeably flexible when it came to Lotto that she could have been a contortionist. Her hotel room was white and full of carved wood; they’d put polished strange fruits in a red bowl on the table and a towel folded in the shape of an elephant on the bed.
She opened the French door to the shushing sea, the call of children down the beach, and stripped the bed of its comforter because she wanted other people’s germs nowhere near her skin, and lay back and closed her eyes and felt the old devastation rasp itself away.
When she woke, it was dinnertime, and the devastation was back, sharp-toothed, and it had gnawed a hole inside her.
She cried in the mirror, putting on her dress, her lipstick, cried too much for eye makeup. She sat at her own table alone, among the flowers and shining cutlery, and kind people served her kindly and positioned her facing the sea so she could cry in peace. She ate a bite of her food and drank a whole bottle of wine and walked home to her bungalow in bare feet over the sand.
The only day she had in the sun she wore her white bikini that bagged on her because she’d lost so much weight. The waiters saw the tears sliding out from under her sunglasses and brought her cold glasses of fruit juice without being asked. She burned and stayed in the sun until the skin on her shoulders was blistered.
The next morning, she awoke to an elephant in the window, slowly carrying a little girl up the beach, led by the halter by a slender young woman in a sarong. In the night, the anger had struck at the sadness and chased it off. Mathilde’s body ached with yesterday’s sun. She sat up and saw her face in the mirror opposite the bed, red and lightning sharp and already resolved.
Here was the Mathilde she’d grown so accustomed to, the one who had never not fought. Hers was a quiet, subtle warfare, but she had always been a warrior. That poetess was imaginary, she had to tell herself; that skinny musician named Leo had nothing on her because he was a boy, and he was powerless. Of course she’d prevail. How dare she walk away.
Two days after she arrived, her plane lifted off the ground an
d she was in the air again. She had spent six days molten on the inside. They handed God to her at the kennel, and the dog was so happy to see her she tried to nose her way into Mathilde’s torso. Mathilde came home to the frigid house, stinking of the garbage she hadn’t bothered to take out before she left. She put her suitcase in the closet upstairs to deal with later and sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea to strategize. The problem wasn’t what she would do to go fetch Lotto back to her. It was what she wouldn’t do. There were too many choices, there was too much possibility.
In a few moments, she heard a car on the drive. On the gravel came a step with a hitch in it.
Her husband came in the door. She let him wait.
Then she looked at him across the great distance. He was thinner, finer than when he left. As if whittled. On his face there was something she dropped her eyes to keep from seeing.
He sniffed the air, and to prevent him from speaking about the smell of garbage and the coldness of the house, which would have broken something, would have made it impossible to return to him, she crossed the kitchen and locked his mouth to hers. The taste, after so long, was strange, the texture rubbery. A shock of unfamiliarity. There was a slight shifting in him, a sense of bending. He was about to speak, but she pushed her hand hard against his mouth. She would have shoved her hand inside him if she could to keep the words from coming out. He understood. He smiled, dropped his bag, walked her backward into the wall. His great body on hers. The dog whimpering at his feet. She took her husband ferociously by the hips and pulled him ahead of her through the hall and up the stairs.
She pushed him with all she had and he landed very hard on the bed, hissing at residual pain in his bad left side. He looked up at her, a puzzlement moving on his face, and again he tried to talk, but she now cupped his mouth and shook her head and took off her shoes and pants, unbuttoned his shirt, his pants. Oh, those boxer briefs with the hole along the elastic, they broke her heart. His ribs were visible in his pale chest. His was a body having undergone terrific strain. She took four of his ties from the closet, remnants of his prep school boyhood, rarely worn now in his life. He laughed when she tied his wrists to the bed frame, though she felt sickly inside. Deadly. She knotted another tie into a blindfold. He made a strange noise, but she tied the fourth as a gag, and pulled it unnecessarily tight, the blue of the silk digging into his cheeks.