by Lauren Groff
For a long time, she crouched above him, feeling powerful. She left her shirt on to hide her sunburn, the peeling skin; her face she’d explain by a long bike ride. She brushed the tip of him with her pelvis, gently, and at random. He started with every touch. He’d been reduced to this long body, so expectant, the eyes removed, the tongue removed. When he was panting behind his gag, she dropped onto him hard, not caring if it hurt him. She thought of—what? Scissors in fabric. It had been so long. It was so unfamiliar. The taut belly below her like the crisp top of crème brûlée. His face was red under the restraint; he was mouthing his fish mouth as if to free it, and she dug her fingernails into his waist, bringing up crescents of blood. His back arched off the mattress. The veins in his neck raised, blue.
He came before she did, and so she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. She’d groped toward something in the dark and had somehow seized it back to her. She thought of the words she’d kept him from speaking, building up, mounting in him until there was unbearable pressure. And though she took the blindfold off, she left the gag, kissing his purple wrists. The way he looked at her now, with the silk darkened in an egg shape by spit, was quizzical. She leaned over and kissed him between the eyebrows. He held her loosely by the waist, and she waited until she knew he wasn’t going to say anything about what he had gone through and then untied the last tie on his mouth. He sat up and kissed the pulse under her chin. His warmth, she had missed it so. His body’s palette of stinks. He respected the silence. He rose and went to the bathroom to take a shower, and she went downstairs to boil some pasta. Puttanesca. She couldn’t resist the dig.
When he came down, he showed her the cuts she’d raised on his sides. “Wildcat woman,” he said, and there was a little sadness in the way he watched her now.
This should have been the end; this was not the end. She kept a Google search on Leo Sen. When, the week before Christmas, the terrible news of the boy’s drowning in the cold ocean rose on the screen, she’d felt startled. And then victory, hot and terrible, rose in her chest. She looked away from her own face in the reflection of the computer screen.
When Lotto was upstairs, buried in his new play, she went to Stewart’s and bought a newspaper. She saved it until the morning of Christmas Eve and put it at the mirror near the front door, where, she knew, Lotto would wait for Rachel and her wife and the children. He loved the holidays, as they matched the hot and jolly center of himself; he would be staring out the window to the country road impatiently and wouldn’t fail to see the paper. He would know then what it was that she knew. She heard him whistling and came out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs to watch. He smiled at himself in the mirror, checked his profile, and his hand fell on the paper. He looked more closely and began to read. He went pale, clutched the table beneath him as if he would faint. Rachel and Elizabeth were bickering when the back door opened and they came into the kitchen, and the children were shrieking with excitement, and the dog was screaming with happiness at the prospect of them. She’d saved the paper for right now, because with company he wouldn’t argue, he wouldn’t make things worse by saying them aloud, and if he didn’t say them immediately, he wouldn’t say them at all. Lotto looked up into the mirror and saw Mathilde on the stairs behind him.
She looked at him looking at her. A new understanding came into his face and then vanished; he was frightened by this glimpse of what was in her and wouldn’t watch it unfurl.
She took a step down the stairs. “Merry Christmas!” she called out. She was clean. Pine-scented. She descended. She was a child; she was as light as air.
—
WELCH DUNKEL HIER! sings Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio, an opera about a marriage.
Most operas, it is true, are about marriage. Few marriages could be called operatic.
What darkness here! is what Florestan sings.
—
NEW YEAR’S DAY was the only day in her life she believed in a god. [Ha.] Rachel and Elizabeth and the children still asleep upstairs in the guest room. Mathilde made scones, a frittata. Her life a long and endless round of entertaining.
She turned on the television. Turmoil in black and gold, a fire in the night. A shot of bodies under sheets, neat as tents on a plain; a building with arched windows, blackened and unroofed. Someone’s cell phone video just before the conflagration, a band on a stage shouting a countdown to the new year, sparklers spitting out fire, laughing faces. Now, outside, and people being helped to ambulances, lying on the ground. Devastated skin, charred and pink. The thought of meat inescapable. Mathilde felt a slow sickness overcome her. This place she recognized, she had been there just nights before. The press of bodies at the locked doors, the choking smoke, the screams. That juicy girl next to that big American man on the barstool. The bartender with the lush eyelashes, the shock of her cold hand on Mathilde’s skin. When she heard Rachel’s step on the top stair, she turned off the television, went quickly out into the backyard with God to compose herself in the cold.
That evening over dinner, Rachel and Elizabeth announced that Elizabeth was pregnant.
In bed, when Mathilde wept and wept, in gratitude and guilt and horror for all that she had escaped, Lotto thought it was because his sister was so rich with children and they were so terribly, unfairly poor. Later, he cried, too, into her hair. And the distance between them was bridged, and they were again united.
8
THE AIRPORT DEAFENED. Aurélie, eleven, alone, understood nothing. At last she saw the man holding the sign with her name on it and knew with a rush of relief that this must be her uncle, the much older brother of her mother. The child, the grandmother always said, of her wicked youth; though her old age was wicked as well. The man was jolly, round, red, full of sympathy. Already, she liked him.
“No, mamzelle,” he said. “Non oncle. The driver.”
She didn’t understand, so he pantomimed driving a car. She swallowed her disappointment.
“No parlez français,” the driver said. “Except voulez-vous coucher avec moi.”
She blinked hard, and he said, “No, no, no, no, no. No vous. Excusez-moi. No voulez coucher avec vous.” He flushed redder and chuckled all the way to the car.
He stopped off the highway to buy her a strawberry milkshake; it cloyed and made her stomach hurt but she drank it all because it was kind of him. She was frightened of spilling on the leather seats and held the cup carefully all the way to her uncle’s house.
They stopped on a gravel drive. The house was a modest place for a man with a driver. Stern old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse of impenetrable stone and ancient windows so bubbled they played tricks with the landscape beyond. The driver carried her bag up to her room, which alone was twice the size of her grandmother’s Paris apartment. In one wall was her own marble bathroom, with a green shower mat of such thickness it was like new spring grass in the park. She wanted to lie down on it immediately and sleep for days.
In the kitchen, the driver pulled out of the refrigerator a plate with a pale chicken cutlet, potato salad, beans, and a note her uncle had written in French about how he would meet her when he got home. Television, he counseled, was the best way to learn English. Do not leave the house. Make a list of the things she needed and the driver would see to it that she got them tomorrow.
It was hard for her to overlook how many mistakes he made with his spelling.
The driver showed her how to lock the door and put on the alarm. He wore a worried look on his flabby face, but he had to go.
She ate very close to the television, warming herself against its staticky screen, watching some incomprehensible show about leopards. She washed everything and put it all back where she thought it belonged, and tiptoed upstairs. She tried every door, but every one but hers was locked, then washed her hands and face and feet, brushed her teeth, and climbed into the bed, but it was too large and the room too full of shadows. She brought the duvet and a pill
ow into the empty closet and fell asleep on the carpet that smelled like dust.
In the thick of the night, she woke suddenly to find a thin man peering down at her from the doorway. Something about his large eyes and apple cheeks brought back her grandmother. He had ears like small, pale bat wings. His face brought her mother’s, through the smoke of years, to her.
“So,” he said in French. “The devil girl.” He seemed amused, though he wasn’t smiling.
She felt her breath twist. From the first, she understood he was very dangerous, despite his mild aspect. She would have to be careful. She would have to keep to herself.
“I’m not home often,” the uncle said. “The driver will take you to buy your necessaries and the groceries you may need. He will drive you to and from the bus stop, which will take you to school. You will hardly see me.”
She said a quiet thank-you, because silence would have been worse.
He looked at her for a long moment, and said, “My mother made me sleep in her closet as well. You must try to sleep in your bed.”
“I will,” she whispered. He closed the door, and she listened to him walking, unlocking, opening, shutting, relocking a series of doors. She kept listening to the silent house until the silence filled her and she slept again.
—
WITHIN THE FIRST HOUR of American school, the boy sitting in front of Aurélie turned around. He whispered, “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine!”
She didn’t understand. “You’re stupid,” he said.
Lunch an incomprehensible slab of bread and cheese. Milk that smelled rotten. She sat on the playground trying to be as small as possible, though she was very big for her age. The boy with the joke came by with three other boys.
“Orally, orally!” they cried, and stuck their tongues in one cheek, mimed a penis going in and out with their hands.
This she understood. She went to the teacher, a babylike worm with sparse white hair who had prided herself on talking to Aurélie all morning in her high school French patois.
Aurélie said as slowly as she could that though Aurélie was her given name, nobody called her that in Paris.
The city’s name made the teacher’s face light up. “Non?” she said. “Et qu’est-ce que c’est le nom que vous préférez?”
Aurélie thought. There was a girl in the form above her at school in Paris, a short, strong, and wry girl with flowing black hair. She was mysterious, cool, the one all the other girls courted with berlingots and bandes dessinées. When she was angry, words came whiplike to her lips. She used her power sparingly. Mathilde was her name.
“Mathilde,” Aurélie said.
“Mathilde,” the teacher said. “Bon.”
Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurélie’s skin. She felt the other girl’s stillness come over her, her cool eye, her quickness. When the boy in front of her turned around to mime a blow job, she darted her hand out and pinched his tongue hard through his cheek, and he yelped, and tears rose to his eyes, and the teacher turned to find Mathilde sitting calmly. The boy was punished for making noise. She watched as, over the course of the hour, twin purple grapes developed on his cheek. She wanted to suck them.
—
AT A PARTY ONCE, in the happy underground years in Greenwich Village, when Lotto and she had been so desperately poor [holes in her socks, lunches of sunshine and water], their Christmas lights making a chain of lemons on the walls, rotgut vodka mixed with juice, she was flipping through the CDs when she heard someone shout out Aurélie! and she was immediately eleven again, desperate, lonely, confused. She spun around. But it was her husband, full-bore: Didn’t know it was a suppository, so he took it orally! Friends hooted; girls danced by with cups in their hands. Mathilde went into the bedroom, feeling robotic, passed the three engrossed bodies on the bed without looking. She hoped when they were done they’d change the duvet cover. She went into the closet that stank of cedar blocks and the dust of her own skin. She nestled among her shoes. Fell asleep. Woke to Lotto hours later opening the door and laughing and picking her up tenderly and putting her into bed. She was glad of the mattress stripped of its sheets, she and her husband alone at last, his hot, avid hand on her neck, her upper thigh. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t want to, really, but it didn’t matter. The weight of his body was pressing her into the present. Mathilde was slowly coming back. [And Aurélie, that sad, lost girl, vanished again.]
—
AURÉLIE WAS MEEK AND MILD; Mathilde boiled underneath a placid skin.
Once, she was playing tetherball and a boy in her class was winning and she deliberately hit the ball so hard into his face that he was knocked down and his head bounced on the asphalt and he had a concussion. Once, she heard her name from a pocket of girls who then laughed. She waited. At lunch a week later, she sat next to the most popular of those girls and waited until she took a big bite of her sandwich and, underneath the table, stabbed her fork into the girl’s thigh. The girl spat out the bite before screaming, and Mathilde had had time to hide the fork under a table buttress. She blinked her huge eyes at the teacher and was believed.
The other children regarded her now with fear in their faces. Mathilde floated through her days coolly, as if she were in the clouds, watching dispassionately down. Her uncle’s in Pennsylvania was only a place to stay, chill and dim, not a home. She imagined for herself a separate life, a chaotic mess with six sisters, loud pop on the radio, nail polish stink and bobby pins on the vanity. Game nights with popcorn and screaming fights. Voice from the other bed in the night. The sole welcome in her uncle’s house was the warm buzz of the television. She mocked a soap opera, The Starrs in Your Eyes, in the characters’ own voices, until she lost her accent. Her uncle was never home. Did she burn to see what was behind those locked doors? She did. But she didn’t pick the locks. [Already, a miracle of self-possession.] On Sundays, the driver took her to the grocery store, and if she was fast and they still had time, he’d drive her to a little park near a river to feed sheets of white bread to the ducks.
Her loneliness was so huge it took the form of the upstairs hallway, dark and lined with locked doors.
Once, even, swimming in the river, a leech attached to her inner thigh, so close to what mattered that it thrilled her and she left it there, thought of it throughout her days, her invisible friend. When it fell off in the shower and she accidentally stepped on it, she wept.
To stay away from the house, she joined the time-intensive clubs at school that didn’t require her to speak. She swam and joined the chess team and learned the flute for the band, a thoroughly demeaning instrument, she felt, but easy to master.
In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She’d want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run somewhere safe with her.
Instead, her uncle adopted her when she was twelve. She wasn’t aware he was going to until the day before the court hearing. The driver told her.
He’d gained so much weight over the year that his stomach had grown a little stomach. When he was lifting her groceries to the trunk, she had the urge to bury her face in the many pillows of him.
“Adopted! Isn’t that nice?” the driver said. “Now you needn’t worry, mamzelle, about having to go somewhere else. You belong here now.”
When he saw her expression, he touched her—was it the first time he’d touched her?—on the crown of the head, and said, “Oh, girl pie. Don’t take it so hard.”
On the ride home, her silence was like the fields they were passing. Ice-wracked, weary with blackbirds.
Inside the car, the driver said, “I’m supposed to call you Miss Yoder now.”
“Yoder?” she said. “But that wasn’t my grandmother’s name.”
The driver’s eyes in the rearview grew merry. “They say your uncle changed his name to the first thing he saw when he got to Philly. Reading Terminal Market, it was. Yoder’s pies.”
Then a flash of alarm in his face, and he said, “You won’t tell I said so.”
“Who would I tell? I don’t talk to anybody but you,” she said.
“Sweet thing,” he said. “You break my heart. You do.”
The day Mathilde turned thirteen, she found one door downstairs unlocked and open a crack. Her uncle must have left it for her just so. For a moment, the hunger in her tipped over and she couldn’t suppress her curiosity. She entered. It was a library, with leather couches and Tiffany lights, and save for a glass cabinet that held what Mathilde would later find out to be antique Japanese erotica, she could reach all of the books in the room without stretching. They were strange things, ancient hardcovers that seemed, despite their similar deckled edges and cloth bindings, to be gathered randomly. In her sophisticated years, she’d understand that these were books sold by the yard, mostly for decorative purposes. But in those bad years, in her early teens, they were volleys from a kinder Victorian world. She read them all. She was so versed in Ian Maclaren and Anthony Hope, Booth Tarkington and Winston Churchill [the American], Mary Augusta Ward and Frances Hodgson Burnett, that the sentences in her English papers became ever more ornate and elaborate. American education being what it is, her teachers took her rococo sentences to be evidence of a prodigious facility with language that she didn’t actually have. She won all the English awards her last year in middle school. She won them all in high school, also. On her thirteenth birthday, she thought, closing the library door behind her, that at this rate she would know what was in every room of the house by the time she was thirty.