by Lauren Groff
“To tell you the truth, I wanted to meet you almost as much as I wanted to meet him,” Land said.
“Why?” she said. She was blushing. Flirting? It wasn’t impossible.
“You’re the untold story,” he said. “The mystery.”
“What mystery?” she said.
“The woman he chose to spend his life with,” Land said. “He’s easy to know. There are billions of interviews, and his plays come from him and give you a little window in. But you’re back in the shadows, hiding there. You’re the interesting one.”
It took a very long moment as they sat there on the porch, sweating in silence, for Mathilde to say to the boy, “I am not the interesting one.”
She knew she was the interesting one.
“You’re a bad liar,” he said.
She looked at him and imagined him in bed, those lovely fingers with the buffed nail beds, the neck with the visible cords, the strong jaw, that good body clear under his clothes, that sensitive face, and knew he’d be very good at fucking.
“Let’s go inside,” she said, and stood.
He blinked, startled. Then he stood and opened the door for her, following her in.
He was attentive, soft where he should be, strong under her arms. But there was something off. It wasn’t that she was so much older than he was; she estimated ten years. Fifteen, max. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know him, really. She hadn’t really known anybody she’d taken to bed with her the past six months. The absence of story was what she liked about them. But they were in the bathroom and she was watching his high-boned face behind her, his hand gripping her short hair, the other on her shoulder, and though it felt marvelous, she couldn’t focus.
“I can’t hold out any longer,” he said. He was shining with sweat.
“Don’t,” she said, and he was a gentleman and pulled out and groaned, and there was a heat on her back just above the coccyx.
“Nice,” she said. “Supersexy porn move.”
He laughed and dabbed her off with a warm washcloth. In the window, the bushes by the river were being flattened by wind and the hard, sparse rain that had begun to fall. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t want to, you know. Get you in the family way.”
She stood and stretched her arms above her head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m old.”
“You are not,” he said.
“Well. I’m barren,” she said. She didn’t say by choice. He nodded and went a little inward, then said, suddenly, “Is that why you didn’t have any kids?” Then he blushed and crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “I’m so sorry. That was rude. I was just wondering why you and he didn’t. Have kids, I mean.”
“That’s why,” she said.
“Something medical?” he said. “I’m prying. Don’t answer if it’s annoying.”
“I was sterilized when I was younger.” His silence was pointed, and she said, “He didn’t know. He thought I was just plain barren. It made him feel noble to suffer in silence.”
Why was she telling this boy all of this? Because there were no stakes. Lotto was gone. The secret would hurt nobody. Plus, she liked the boy, wanted to give him something; the previous pilgrims had carried off almost everything else. She suspected he had ulterior motives. An article, a book, an exposé at some point. If he wrote about the sex, the rainstorm, she would come off as desperate or sad or desperately sad. It was all accurate. So be it.
“But why wouldn’t you tell him?” he said. Oh, the puppy, he sounded wounded on her husband’s behalf.
“Because nobody needs my genes in the world,” she said.
Land said, “But his genes. I mean, the kid might have been a genius, too.”
Mathilde pulled on the bathrobe and swept her hand through her short hair. She looked at herself in the mirror and admired the rosy flush. The rain pounded harder on the roof; she liked the sound, the sense of coziness of the gray and falling day outside.
“Lotto would have been a terrific father,” she said. “But the kids of geniuses are never geniuses.”
“True,” Land said.
She touched his face and he flinched, then leaned forward to rest his cheek in her hand. Little pet, she thought. “I want to make you dinner,” she said.
“I’d love dinner,” he said.
“And then I want you to fuck me again,” she said.
“I’d love to fuck you again,” he said, laughing.
At dawn, when she woke, the house had gone quiet and she knew that Land had left.
A shame. I could have kept him around for a little while, she thought. Used him as a pool boy. As human cardio machine. God grumbled at the door, having been banished. When Mathilde went out, the dog came in and flounced herself down on the bed.
In the kitchen, there was a fruit salad macerating in its juices. He’d made a pot of coffee, which was lukewarm now. In the blue bowl with the slowly ripening green tomatoes from the garden, the sweet boy had left a note in an envelope. Mathilde would leave it there for weeks before she opened it. Seeing it there, the white in the red in the blue, made her feel for the first time since her husband left her as if she had kind and gentle company in the house with her. Something hot in her began to cool and, in cooling, began to anneal.
—
MAKE ME HAPPY, Frankenstein’s monster pleaded with its maker, and I shall again be virtuous.
10
MATHILDE WAS SIXTEEN. She woke to find her uncle swaying over her; she had learned to sleep in a bed. He was saying, “Aurélie, this is important. Do not go downstairs,” and in the hollow after his words, she could hear men’s voices below, shouting, music. His face was expressionless but the color in his cheeks was high. Without anyone’s saying a thing, she’d begun to understand that her uncle was some kind of manager in a bad organization. He was often in Philadelphia. He hissed orders into a huge, clunky early version of a mobile phone, was inexplicably gone for weeks, and came back if not tan, then tanner. [Still apparent in him, the tiny boy, mewling in cold and hunger. It’s less delicious, this badness bred from survival.] He left, and she lay frozen for some time. The shouting now did not seem so joyous. She heard anger, fear. When she could move, she pulled the couch out from where it rested against the wall and brought the duvet and pillow behind it and in that place, the exact shape of her body, she fell asleep swiftly, as if held there. Nobody, as far as she knew, had come to her room in the night. Still, the air felt disturbed, as if she’d narrowly avoided something.
She crept like a mouse through her teenaged years. Flute and swimming and books, all the wordless arts. She made herself so small her uncle would forget her.
—
HER SENIOR YEAR, she opened the letter telling her she’d been accepted to the one school she’d applied to, early, for no other reason than that she’d loved the oddball essay questions in the application. How such small things can decide one’s fate. But the whistling conflagration of joy had ebbed to embers days later, when she understood she couldn’t pay. If she couldn’t pay, she couldn’t go. Simple as that.
She took a train to the city. Her life, she would later understand, would be scarred with them.
A Saturday express. Her heart sang with desperation in her rib cage. A newspaper spun slowly on the platform in the wind.
She wore the red dress her uncle had bought for her fourteenth birthday and the high heels that pinched savagely. She made a crown of her blond braids. In the mirror, she’d seen no beauty in her angles and strange lashes, in her grossly fat lips, but hoped others might. She would burn, later, with what she didn’t know. That she should have worn her bra, trimmed her pubic hair back to prepubescence, brought photographs. That such things as headshots even existed in the world.
A man had watched her climb into the car from his seat in the rear. He smiled at the way she moved her body as if it w
ere new out of the box, at the dangerous jut to her chin. After some time, he came up the corridor and sat across from her, though the car was otherwise empty. She felt him looking at her and ignored him as long as she could, and when she looked up, he was there.
He laughed. He had an ugly mastiff’s face, all bulging eyes and jowl. He had the eyebrows of a jokester, peaked high, giving him an air of intimate mischief, as if he were about to whisper a punch line in her ear. Despite herself, she leaned forward. This would be his effect, a pleasant mirroring, a swiftly established accord. He was the quiet hit of every party; he never said a word, but everyone believed he was simpatico.
He looked at her, and she pretended to read her book, her head on fire. He leaned forward. He put his hands on her knees, the thumbs gentle on the skin of her inside thighs. He smelled delicious, like verbena and cordovan.
She looked up. “I’m only eighteen,” she said.
“All the better,” he said.
She stood and went shakily to the bathroom and sat there through the pulses of the train, holding herself with her arms, until the conductor said Penn Station. When she got off, she felt liberated—she was in the city!—and she wanted to run and laugh. But as she walked swiftly toward what she knew was her future, she looked up into the mirrored glass by a doughnut store and saw the man from the train ten feet behind her. He was unhurried. She felt the back of her heel go hot then blister and, on the street, a warm wash of relief when the blister burst, then the sting. She was too proud to stop.
She didn’t pause until she reached the building where the agency was. The guards, used to pretty, wobbly, underage girls, parted to let her in.
She was inside for hours. For hours, he sat in the café opposite, with a hardcover book and a lemonade, waiting.
When she came out, she felt deboned, her bottom lids red. Her braids had frizzed in the unseasonable heat. He followed her down the street, a plastic bag and the book in his hand, until her stride became a limp and he stepped in front of her and offered a coffee. She’d eaten nothing since dinner the night before. She put her hands on her hips, staring, then right-faced into a sandwich shop and ordered a cappuccino and a mozzarella panini. “Porca madonna,” he said. “Panino. It’s singular.”
She turned to the girl at the counter and said, “I’d like two. Panini. Two cappuccini.”
He chuckled and paid. She ate the sandwiches slowly, chewing thirty times with each bite. She looked everywhere but at him. She’d never had caffeine before and it filled her fingers with a kind of elation. She decided to drive the man off with her exigency and ordered an éclair and another cappuccino, but he paid without comment and watched her eat.
“You don’t eat?” she said.
“Not much,” he said. “I used to be a fat boy.”
Now she could see the sad, fat child in the mismatched jowls and thin shoulders, and felt something heavy in her shifting toward him.
“They said I needed to lose ten pounds,” she said.
“You’re perfect,” he said. “They can jump off a bridge. They said no?”
“They said I need to lose ten pounds and send them pictures and they’d start me out with catalog work. Build my way up.”
He considered her with a straw in the corner of his mouth. “But you were unhappy with that. Because you’re not a girl who starts small,” he said. “You are a young queen.”
“No,” she said. She fought the emotion rising to her face and mastered it. It had begun to rain outside, hard, thick spatters on the hot pavement. A low miasma rose from the ground, and the air shifted toward coolness.
She listened to the pounding of the rain as he leaned forward and took her foot in his hand and took off the shoe. He looked at the bleeding, jagged blister. He dabbed it with a paper napkin dipped in ice water and took from his plastic bag from the drugstore, which he’d visited while she was at the agency, a big box of bandages and a tube of ointment. When he was finished administering to her feet, he took out a pair of plastic shower sandals with massaging nubs.
“You see,” he said, lowering her feet to the ground. She could weep for the relief. “I take care of things,” he said. He took a wet wipe from his pockets and fastidiously cleaned his hands.
“I see,” she said.
“We can be friends, you and I. I’m unmarried,” he said. “I’m kind to girls. I don’t hurt anybody. I’ll make sure you’re looked after. And I’m clean.”
Of course he was clean; his nails were pearly; his skin had the sheen of a soap bubble. Later, she’d hear of AIDS and understand.
She closed her eyes and pulled the long-ago Mathilde, the one from the Parisian schoolyard, tighter to her body. She opened her eyes and put on her lipstick by feel. She blotted her lips on a napkin, crossed her legs, and said, “So.”
He said, in a low voice, “So. Come to my apartment. I’ll make you dinner. We can”—and his eyebrows shot skyward—“talk.”
“Not dinner, no,” she said. He looked at her, calculating.
“We can make a deal, then. Negotiate. Stay the night,” he said. “If you can convince your parents. Say you met a school friend in town. I can do a passable imitation of a schoolgirl’s father.”
“Parents aren’t an obstacle,” she said. “I only have an uncle. He doesn’t care.”
“Then what is the obstacle?” he said.
“I’m not cheap,” she said.
“All right.” He leaned back. She wanted to crush the latent joke he never quite delivered, flatten it under her knuckles. “Tell me. What is it that you most want in the world, young queen.”
She took a deep breath and pressed her knees together to stop them from shaking. “College tuition,” she said. “For all four years.”
He put both hands flat on the table and gave a sharp laugh. “I was thinking a handbag. But you were thinking indentured servitude?” he said.
She thought: Oh. [So young! So capable of surprise.] Then she thought: Oh, no, he had laughed at her. Her face was on fire, she felt, striding out. He was behind her at the door; he put his suit coat over her head and gestured for a cab from the awning. Maybe he was made of spun sugar, would melt in the wet.
She slid in, and he stood bent in the door, but she wouldn’t move over to let him in. “We can talk about this,” he said. “I’m sorry. You astonished me. That’s all.”
“Forget it,” she said.
“How can I?” he said. He touched her gently under the chin and she had to fight the urge to close her eyes and rest her head in his palm.
“Call me on Wednesday,” he said, putting a card in her hand, and though she wanted to say no again, she didn’t, and she didn’t crumple it up. He tossed a bill over the seat to the driver and shut the door gently behind her. Later, in the window of the train, her face was pale and floating over a green spin of Pennsylvania. She was thinking so hard she noticed neither face nor landscape.
—
SHE CAME INTO THE CITY again the next Saturday. There had been a phone call, trial gently proposed. Same red dress, heels, hair. A trial? She thought of her grandmother in Paris, her rumpled elegance, the rat-gnawed cheese on the windowsill, the blaze of her crazed dignity. Mathilde had listened from her closet and thought: Never. Never for me. I’d die first.
Never’s a liar. She had nothing better, and time was running out. The man was waiting outside the train station, but he didn’t touch her as she sat on the leather seat of the town car. He ate a throat lozenge and the air smelled of it. Her eyes were dry, yet the world had gone misty. A lump in her throat bigger than the neck could contain.
She registered the doorman as hairy, squat, Mediterranean, though she didn’t look directly at him. All inside was smooth marble.
“What’s your name?” the silvery man said in the elevator.
“Mathilde,” she said. “Yours?”
“Ariel,” h
e said.
She looked at herself in the reflective brass doors, a smear of red and white and gold, and said in a very low voice, “I’m a virgin.”
He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his forehead. “I would never have expected less of you,” he said, and bowed elaborately as if for a joke and held the door for her as she went in.
He handed her a glass of cold sparkling water. The apartment was enormous, or at least appeared so, walled on two sides with glass. The other walls were white, with huge paintings that registered as shimmers of color. He took off his suit jacket and hung it up and sat down, and said, “Make yourself at home.”
She nodded and went to the window and looked out onto the city.
After some time, he said, “By make yourself at home, what I really meant was for you to please undress.”
She turned away from him. She took off the shoes and unzipped the dress and let it pool at her feet. Her underwear was black cotton, a little girl’s cut, which had made the people at the agency smile the week before. She didn’t wear a bra; she didn’t need one. She turned back, her arms behind her, and looked at him gravely.
“All of it,” he said, and she slowly took off her underwear. He made her wait while he looked at her. “Please turn around,” he said, and she did. Outside, the buildings were obscured in the fog and dim, so that when the lights in the buildings opposite came on they were squares floating in space.
She was shuddering by the time he stood and came toward her. He touched her between the legs and smiled at the moisture he found on his fingertips.
His body seemed too bony for his fleshy face and was almost hairless, save for brown coronas around his nipples and a darker arrow from navel to groin. He lay on the white couch and made her crouch above him until her thighs burned and shook. Then he seized her hips and pulled her suddenly down, smiling at the pain on her face.