by Lauren Groff
Except that, one month later, her uncle left a door unlocked unintentionally.
She wasn’t supposed to be home. She had walked back from school because of the half day called—there was a brutal snowstorm on the horizon—and the chauffeur couldn’t be reached on the office phone, and she missed the bus anyway. She walked in the freezing cold, her bare knees numbed after five minutes. She pushed the last two miles in a sideways wind with her fingers making blinders to keep the snow out.
When she came back to the stone house, she had to crouch on the doorstep with her hands under her bra to warm them enough to work the key. She heard voices inside, at the end of the hall where the library was. She took off her shoes, feet blocks of ice, and crept to the kitchen, where there were half-eaten sandwiches on the counter. A bag of chips splayed its barbecue guts. Someone’s cigarette burned in a teacup, quarter inch of ash. In the windows, the storm was almost black.
She tried to go toward the staircase noiselessly but stopped short: under the stairway there was a small room, and she’d never seen the door open until now. She heard footsteps and stepped inside, quietly shutting the door. The overhead light was on. She flicked it off. She crouched behind a strange statue of a horse head and breathed into her hand. The footsteps passed. There were loud male voices and more steps. In the dark, her warming skin was full of chewing ants.
The great front door slammed, and she waited and waited, but she could feel that the house was empty and that she was alone.
She turned the light on and saw what she’d only vaguely seen before. Along the wall there were canvases with their faces turned away and little pieces of statuary. She picked up a painted board. It was heavy, solid. She turned it around and almost dropped it. Never in her life had she seen a more perfect thing. At the bottom, in the foreground, there was a curvy white horse with a man in blue robes riding it, the fabric so lush she touched it to make sure it wasn’t real. Behind him were other men, other horses, a jagged rock face. Up against the blue sky was a soft, pale city so perfect it seemed made of bones.
She memorized it. At last she put it back down and took off her sweater to wipe up the snowmelt that had dripped onto the floor from her hair and clothes. She closed the door behind her and felt a keen loss when she heard the lock fall into place.
She went up the stairs and lay in the dark with her eyes closed to resee the panel. When the chauffeur came in, calling worriedly for her, she reached out her window, gathered two handfuls of snow, put both on her hair, and ran to the kitchen.
“Oh, girl,” he said, sitting heavily down. “I thought we lost you in that storm.” She didn’t mind that his concern had been for both of them, that if he had, indeed, lost her he would have been in danger himself.
“I got in a few minutes ago,” she said, still shivering, and he took her hand and felt how cold it was and made her sit and made cocoa from scratch, then chocolate chip cookies, too.
—
FOR HER FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Mathilde’s uncle took her out to dinner. In three years, they had never shared a meal. She’d opened her bedroom door to see the red dress he’d laid on her bed like a skinny girl thrown backward. Beside it was her first pair of high heels, three inches tall and black. She dressed slowly.
The restaurant was warm, a converted farmhouse not unlike her uncle’s, but with a fire burning in the hearth. Her uncle looked ill in the golden light, as if his skin were candle tallow, half melted. She steeled herself to look at him while he ordered for both of them. Caesar salad. Steak tartare with a quail’s egg atop, followed by filet mignon. Side of roasted potatoes and asparagus. Côtes du Rhône. Mathilde had been a vegetarian since she saw an exposé on television about industrial husbandry, cows hung on hooks and flayed alive, chickens squeezed into cages that broke their legs and living out their days caked in their own shit.
When the salads came, the uncle twirled a brown anchovy on his fork and congratulated her, in French, for being so poised and self-sufficient. He swallowed without chewing; like a shark, she knew from television.
“I have no choice. I’ve been left entirely alone,” Mathilde said. She hated herself for allowing her mouth to twitch and betray her.
He put his fork down and looked at her. “Oh, please, Aurélie. You weren’t beaten. You weren’t starved. You go to school and the dentist and the doctor. I had none of those things. You are being melodramatic. This isn’t Oliver Twist, you are not some child in a coal mine. I have been kind to you.”
“Blacking factory. Dickens worked in a blacking factory,” she said. She switched to English. “No, I wouldn’t say you have never been unkind.”
He sensed the insult better than he understood it. “No matter. I am all you ever would have had. Diablesse, they called you. I must say, I have seen no evidence of your devil, to my disappointment. Either it’s not there, or you have learned to dissimulate as all good devils do.”
“Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person,” she said. “Exorcism by terror.” She drank her water and poured wine to the top of the glass and drank it down.
“You have witnessed nothing you should fear,” he said. He leaned forward and smiled. “I could change that if you prefer.”
For a moment, she stopped breathing. Perhaps it was the wine that made her vision swim. “No, thank you,” she said.
“You are welcome,” he said. He finished the salad, wiped his mouth, and said, “Nobody has told you that your parents have new babies. New, well. Relatively. One is three and one is five. Little boys. Your brothers, I suppose. I’d show you the photo my sister sent, but I seem to have lost it.”
[Strange how things are associated with their particular pains: Caesar salad forever a suffocating sadness.]
She smiled at a spot above her uncle’s head, where the firelight reflected off an antique barometer. It also shined through his pointed ears. She said nothing.
He said, when the filet came, “You are very tall. Skinny. Odd-looking, which seems fashionable. You could be a model, perhaps. Even put yourself through college.”
She drank her water in slow and even sips.
“Ah,” he said. “You thought I was going to send you to college. But my obligation ends at eighteen.”
“You could afford it,” she said.
“I could,” he said. “But I’m interested in watching what you’ll do. Struggle forms character. No struggle, no character. Nobody gave me a thing in my life,” he said. “Not one thing. I earned it all.”
“And look at you now,” she said.
He smiled at her and the resemblance to her grandmother, her long-ago mother, absent all warmth, made her skin prickle. “Be careful,” he said.
The untouched meat on her plate became fuzzy and slowly cleared. “Why do you hate me?” she said.
“Oh, child. I have no feelings about you whatsoever,” he said; this was the kindest thing he would ever say to her.
He slurped down a panna cotta. There was cream in the folds of his mouth.
The check arrived and a man came up to her uncle and shook his hand, murmuring in his ear, and Mathilde gratefully turned away because, from the corner of her eye, she caught a slight movement in the doorway. A white cat had inserted its head into the room and was pulling its taut body on its forepaws, staring fixedly into the woodpile. Tiny tiger, hunting. For some time, she was lulled by the cat’s immobility, only the tiny twitch at the end of the tail to signal life; and then, without warning, the cat leapt. When it turned, a soft, boneless, gray thing hung in its mouth. A field mouse, Mathilde thought. The cat trotted off, its tail jaunty with pride. When she turned back to her uncle and his friend, they were looking at her, amused.
“Dmitri just said that you are the cat. The cat is you,” the uncle said.
No. She had always hated cats. They seemed so full of rage. She put her napkin on the table and smiled with all her teeth.
9
THE ONLY ONE WHO RETURNED and returned and returned was Rachel.
Rachel made soup and focaccia, which Mathilde fed to the dog.
Rachel returned alone, with Elizabeth, with the children, who ran in the fields with God until the dog collapsed, and then combed all the tufts and brambles out of her fur and left her lax and panting for hours afterward.
“I don’t want to see you,” Mathilde shouted at Rachel when she came alone one morning with cheese danishes and fresh juice. “Go away.”
“Abuse me all you want,” Rachel said. She put the pastries down on the mat and stood again, fierce in the dim morning light. That god-awful tattoo up her arm, all spiderweb and mermaid and a little turnip, some sort of bondage fantasia or, at the very least, a mixed metaphor. The family had a talent for figurative knots. Rachel said: “I won’t go away. I’ll come back again and again and again until you’re well.”
“I’m warning you,” Mathilde said, through the glass door. “I’m the worst person you know.”
“That is untrue,” Rachel said. “You are one of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever met. You’re my sister and I love you.”
“Ha. You don’t know me,” Mathilde said.
“But I do,” Rachel said. She laughed, and though all her life Mathilde had felt a sort of sorrow that Rachel was nothing like her brother, so great and shining, now she saw Lotto in his little sister’s face, the same semi-dimple in the cheek, the strong teeth. Mathilde shut her eyes and locked the door. Even still, with her endless nervous energy, Rachel came back and she came back and she came back.
—
SHE’D FALLEN ASLEEP in the pool house. Six months after Lotto died, grim heat of August. Their old friend Samuel had come that morning to remonstrate, nostrils flaring, and she’d waited him out in the pool house while he circled the house, bellowing her name.
Oh, little Samuel! she thought, listening. Kind son of a corrupt senator father. It had become a joke, unbelievable, the trials of Samuel, the DUIs, the divorces, the cancer, the house he’d burned down in his thirties. The racist a year ago who’d found Sam walking home at night from a movie and beat him to concussion. Not the smartest or the bravest, but he’d been born with preternatural confidence. Job was just a whiner compared with him.
Samuel was gone when she woke. Her skin was glazed in sweat. Her mouth was sandpaper and tar and she thought of the berries waiting on the countertop for her, the pie she could already taste. Butter, zest, essence of summer, salt. She heard another car turn onto the gravel. God was barking in the kitchen. She came across the too-bright grass and into the house and up the stairs to see from her bedroom who had arrived. Even the tiger lilies Mathilde had cut for herself seemed to be sweating.
A young person stepped out of an inexpensive little car: some kind of Hyundai or Kia. Rental. City boy. Boy, well. Thirty or thereabouts. Alone so long, Mathilde had taken to thinking of herself as wizened, ancient. To see herself in the mirror was to see the shock of unexpected youth.
There was something about this person’s loose-limbed walk across the drive that held her. He was medium-sized, dark-haired, handsome with his long eyelashes and defined jaw. Something whirred in her chest uncomfortably, which she had come to recognize in the past months as a strange chimera of rage and lust. Well! Only one way to exorcise it! She sniffed her armpits. They’d do.
She startled when she saw that the boy was looking up at her in the window as he came up to the door: she had taken to wearing Lotto’s white T-shirts and had sweated through this one so it was transparent, her nipples saying a double hello. She pulled on a tunic and descended and opened the door to the boy. God snuffled at his shoes, and he knelt and petted her. When he stood to shake Mathilde’s hand, his palm was covered with a fine layer of dog down and was clammy beneath. When he touched her, he burst into tears.
“Well,” she said. “Another of my husband’s mourners, I see.”
Her husband, patron saint of failed actors. Because it was clear now that this boy was an actor. He had that cocksure carriage, the observant brightness. So many of them had shown up to touch the great man’s hem, but there was no hem left, Mathilde having given away or burned nearly everything, save the books and manuscripts. Only Mathilde was left, his homelier husk. The old wifey-wife.
“I never knew him. But you can say I’m a mourner, I guess,” the boy said, turning away to wipe his face. When he turned back, he was red, embarrassed. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
“I’ve made iced tea,” Mathilde heard herself say. “Wait here in the rocker and I’ll bring some.”
By the time she came back, the boy had calmed. Sweat curled the hair at his temples. She put on the overhead porch fan and set the tray down on the little table, taking a lemon bar for herself. She’d survived on wine and sugar for months because, fuck it, she never really got a childhood, and what was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?
The boy-man picked up his tea and touched the tray, which she’d gotten in some rag-and-bone shop in London. He touched the herald and read aloud, “Non sanz droict.” He bolted up in his chair, spilling iced tea on his lap, and said, “Oh my god, that’s Shakespeare’s family—”
“Calm down,” she said. “It’s Victorian, a fake. He reacted exactly the way you did. He thought we had something that passed through old Willie’s hands and almost wet himself.”
“For so many years, I dreamt of driving up here,” the boy said. “Just to say hello. I dreamt that he’d invite me in and we’d have a nice dinner and talk and talk. I always knew we’d get along famously, he and I. Lancelot. And me.”
“His friends called him Lotto,” she said. “I’m Mathilde.”
“I know. The Dragon Wife,” he said. “I’m Land.”
With extreme slowness, she said, “Did you just call me the Dragon Wife?”
“Oh. Sorry. That’s what all the actors in the company called you when I was in Grimoire and One-Eyed King. Revival, not first-run. Of course, you’d know that. Because you protected him. You made sure he was paid on time, and kept people away, and you did it all while seeming so nice. I thought it was an honorific. Like, a joke you were in on.”
“No,” she said. “I was not in on this particular joke.”
“Whoops,” he said.
“It’s true,” Mathilde said, after some time. “I could breathe fire.”
She thought of how Lotto, in later years, had been called the Lion. With his dander up, he could roar. He looked leonine, too: his corona of white-shot gold, the fine, sharp cheekbones. He’d leap onstage, offended by some actor flubbing his precious lines, and there he’d pace, sleek and swift with his long lovely body, growling. He could be deadly. Fierce. The name was not inapt. But please, Mathilde knew lions. The male lolled beautifully, lazy in the sun. The female, less lovely by miles, was the one who brought back the kill.
The boy was sweating. His blue oxford shirt was hooped wetly under the arms. He was emitting a smell that was not unpleasant, exactly. It was a clean stink. Funny, she thought, looking over the banks of snapdragons to the river. Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband’s mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, although her stationery had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sallie was starch, cedar. Her dead grandmother, sandalwood. Her uncle, Swiss cheese. People told her that she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin.
She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought, would not return.
“Land,” Mathilde said. “Odd name for a guy like you.”
“Short for Roland,” the boy said.
Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It w
as still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.
“All right, Roland,” Mathilde said, suppressing a sigh. “Sing your song.”
Land told her what she already knew: actor. Had a recurring role on this soap opera, minor, but it paid the bills. “The Starrs in Your Eyes?” he said. “Heard of it?” He looked at her hopefully then grimaced. “I see,” he said. “Soaps aren’t your thing. Mine, either. It’s hackwork. But I got the job as soon as I got to the city. Fifteen years ago, literally the first audition I walked into. And it’s good money. And I can do plays in the summer when we don’t film.” He shrugged. “I’m not a superstar, but I work all the time. That’s a kind of success, I guess.”
“You don’t need to argue for the benefits of a steady gig,” she said. She felt reckless, disloyal. “Lotto never got one when he was an actor. It would have been an immense relief to have some pay coming in all those years. I worked my ass off and he made, maximum, seven thousand dollars a year until he started writing.”
“Thank god he started writing,” Land said. He told her that every birthday he took the day off to drive out to the beach and read The Springs. Lancelot never got his fair shakes as the genius he was.
“He would have agreed,” Mathilde said drily.
“But I love that about him. That arrogance,” Land said.
“I did, too,” Mathilde said.
The clouds like blackberry jam in the sky, faint double-boiler thunder from the north. All the things she could do, other than sit here, were gathering in the cool shadows of the house behind her, watching through the window. She was nailed to the chair.
She liked this boy, liked him enormously, more than anyone she’d met since Lotto died. She could just open her mouth and eat him he was so sweet; there was something easy about him, a gentleness she’d always loved in manly men.