Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  “Easier to dive than wade in, my dear,” he said. “Lesson one.”

  She didn’t know what kept her from standing, dressing, escaping. The pain felt like hate. She bore the pressure by counting, staring fixedly at a golden square of window in the dark. He took her face and forced it to his. “No,” he said, “please look at me.” She looked. There was a technological glow from the corner of the room, some digital clock, which turned the side of his head slightly green in pulses. He seemed waiting for her to flinch, but she wouldn’t; she willed her features into stone, and there was a pressure that built and burst and the relief, removal, and she stood, feeling knots in her legs and an internal burn.

  He cut a banana into slices and laid them on her body and slowly ate them off her, which was his dinner. “More than that,” he said, “I inflate.” For her, he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and fries from the diner across the street and watched her mouth closely as she ate every bite. “More ketchup,” he said. “Lick that cheese off your finger.”

  In the morning, he washed her very carefully and instructed her how to trim herself and watched from a hot bath as she put her leg on a teak chair and did so.

  And then he had her lie on her back in the huge white bed and point her knees upward. On the television embedded in the wall, he put on a tape with two women, redheaded and dark-haired, licking each other. “Nobody likes what I’m about to do to you at first,” he said. “You need to fantasize to make it work. Stay with it. A few times from now, you’ll understand.”

  It was terrifying, his unlovely face there. The heat of his mouth and the scrape of the stubble. The way he watched her in her shame. It was the closest anyone had ever come to her. She’d never been kissed on the lips. She put a pillow on her face and breathed and thought of a young man without a face, just a muscular, shining body. She felt a long, slow wave building in her until it turned huge and dark and crashed down on her, and she shouted into the pillow.

  He pulled away from her, sudden flood of white light. “You surprising little thing,” he said, laughing.

  She didn’t know she hated Chinese food until he ordered it and asked her to eat it all on the rug, moo shu tofu to steamed shrimp and broccoli to the last grain of rice. He had nothing; he watched. “If you need to go home, I’ll take you back to the station after you shower again.” There was a kindness in him despite his gargoyle’s face.

  Mathilde nodded; she’d already bathed three times in his marble shower, always after eating. She had begun to understand him. “I just need to be back in time to go to school tomorrow,” she said.

  “Do you wear a uniform?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, lying.

  “Oh god,” he groaned. “Wear it next weekend.”

  She put down the chopsticks. “You’ve decided.”

  “Depends on where you’re going to college.”

  She told him. “You’re smart,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, motioning at the apartment around her, her own naked body with a grain of rice on her breast. She smiled, then took the smile off her face. He didn’t get to know she had a sense of humor.

  He stood and moved to the door. “All right. We have a deal,” he said. “Come to me from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. I’ll call you my goddaughter to avoid unnecessary questions. Four years. Starting now. Intern with me at the gallery during the summers. I am eager to see how well I can teach you what you’ll need to know. Do your catalog modeling if you think you need to explain your money. We’ll get you on birth control. While we’re together, to avoid diseases, among other horrors, please do not touch or look at another boy or girl. If I hear you even kissed someone else, our deal is off.”

  “I won’t even think a lewd thought,” she said, deliberately thinking: black cock. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Buying you underwear and a bra. It’s disgraceful, your going around like that underneath. You shower and take a nap, and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  He went toward the door, then stopped. He turned around. “Mathilde,” he said kindly. “No matter what, you need to understand that this is only business. I can’t have you thinking that it’s more than that.”

  She smiled broadly for the first time. “Business,” she said. “Not a single emotion will occur. We will be as robots.”

  “Excellent,” he said, and closed the door.

  Alone, she felt sick, dizzy. She looked at herself reflected in the window, the city slowly moving beyond. She touched her stomach, her chest, her neck. She looked at her hands and saw they were shaking. She was no more rotten than she’d been as the girl on the train, but still she turned away from the Mathilde in the glass.

  —

  TWO MONTHS. High school finished and she moved into Ariel’s apartment. She had so little to take from her uncle’s house. A few books, the red dress, glasses, a dog-eared photograph of herself—fat-cheeked, pretty, French—before she went bad. It all fit into her school knapsack. She left a note under the chauffeur’s seat when he was using the bathroom; she couldn’t see his many stomachs and chins one last time without bursting into tears. She knocked for the first time on her uncle’s study door, and without waiting for him to speak, she went in. He looked up over the top of his glasses. A wedge of light from the window fell on the papers on his desk.

  “Thank you for the shelter you’ve given me these past few years,” she said.

  “You’re leaving?” he said, in French. He took his glasses off and sat back, looking at her. “Where are you going?”

  “A friend’s,” she said.

  “Liar,” he said.

  “Correct,” she said. “I have no friends. Call him a protector.”

  He smiled. “An efficacious solution to all of your problems,” he said. “If, however, a more carnal one than I’d hoped. But I shouldn’t be surprised. You grew up with my mother, after all.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, and turned toward the door.

  “Frankly,” he said, and she stopped, her hand on the doorknob. “I had thought better of you, Aurélie. I had believed you’d work for a few years, head off to Oxford or something. I had thought you would fight harder. That you were more like me. I must admit that I find myself disappointed.”

  She said nothing.

  “Know that if you have nothing else, you can find food and a bed here. And do visit, from time to time. I am curious to see how you change. I predict either something ferocious or something thoroughly bourgeois. You will be a world-eater or a mother of eight.”

  “I won’t be a mother of eight,” she said. She wouldn’t visit, either. There was nothing of her uncle’s that she wanted. She took a last look at him, the lovely winglike ears and round cheeks that made a liar of his face, and one side of her mouth curled up, and she bid a silent good-bye to the house as she went through, the secret masterpiece under the stairwell that she yearned to see again and the long dark hallways with locked doors and the huge oak front door. Then she was in the air. She began to run down the packed dirt lane in its blaze of white sun, her legs swinging good-bye, good-bye, to the ruminants in the Mennonite fields, the June breeze, the wild blue phlox on the bank. This sweat she worked up was a glorious one.

  —

  THE LONG SUMMER of her nineteenth year. The things one can do with a tongue, a breath. The taste of latex, smell of oiled leather. Box seats at Tanglewood. Her blood thrilled. His voice warm in her ear before a Jackson Pollock spatter, and suddenly, she saw the brilliance. Sultry heat, pisco sours on the terrace, an ice cube’s painful slow melt on her nipples as he watched from the door. He taught her. This is how you cut your food, order your wine. This is how you make people believe you agree with their opinions without saying anything at all.

  Something softened around his eyes, but she pretended not to see it. “Business,” she said to herself,
her knees burning on the tile in the shower. He put his hands in her hair. He brought her presents: bracelets, videos that made her face hot, underwear no more than three strings and a patch of lace.

  And then college. It went far faster than she thought it would. Classes like flashes of light, blips of dark weekends, light again. She drank her classes in. She did not make friends; Ariel took up so much time, and the rest was taken by studying, and she knew that if she made one friend, she’d be too hungry to stop. On soft spring days, forsythia sunbursts in the corners of her eyes, her heart was rebellious; she would easily have fucked the first boy who walked by, but she had so much more to lose than the thrill she’d gain. She watched, longingly, chewing her fingernails to blood, as the others hugged, laughed, passed inside jokes. On Friday afternoons, on the trains down the dusk-sparked Hudson, she hollowed herself out. When she modeled, she pretended to be the kind of girl who felt insouciant in bikinis, who was glad to show her new lace brassiere to the gaping world. Her best shots were those where she thought of doing physical violence to the photographers. In the apartment: rug burn, lips bitten. He ran a hand down her back, cleaved her buttocks: Business, she thought. The train back to college, each mile an expansion. One year, two. Summers in the apartment and the gallery, like a fish in an aquarium. She learned. Three years, four.

  Senior spring. Her whole life ahead of her. Almost too much brightness to look at directly. Something in Ariel had grown frantic. He took her to four-hour dinners, told her to meet him in the bathroom. She woke Sunday mornings to find him watching her. “Come work for me,” he said, thickly, once when she, on his cocaine, unspooled a full essay out of her brain about the genius of Rothko. “Work for me at the gallery and I’ll train you and we can take over New York.” “Maybe,” she said agreeably, thinking, Never. Thinking, Business. Soon, she promised herself. Soon she would be free at last.

  11

  SHE WAS ALONE for an afternoon. She came downstairs to find that God had chewed the kitchen rug, had left a mess of urine on the floor, was looking at her with a bellicose light in her eye. Mathilde showered, put on a white dress, let her hair drip the fabric wet. She put the dog into her crate, her toys and food in a plastic bag, put it all in the car. The dog screamed in the back, then settled.

  She stood outside the general store in town until she saw a family she vaguely knew. The father was the man they’d hired to plow their driveway in winter, with a steer rustler’s face, maybe a little slow. The mother was the dental receptionist, a big woman with small ivory teeth. The children had gorgeous fawn eyes. Mathilde knelt to their level, and said, “I want to give you my dog.”

  The boy sucked three fingers, looked at God, nodded. The girl whispered, “I can see your boobies.”

  “Mrs. Satterwhite?” the mother said. Her eyes flicked over Mathilde; and by this, Mathilde knew she was dressed inappropriately. Ivory dress, designer. She hadn’t been thinking. Mathilde put the dog in the husband’s arms. “Her name is God,” she said. The woman gasped, then said, “Mrs. Satterwhite!” but Mathilde was walking to her car. “Hush, Donna,” she heard the man say. “Let the poor lady be.” She drove home. The house echoed, empty. Mathilde had been liberated. She had nothing to worry about now.

  —

  SO LONG AGO, it was. That day the light had fallen from the sky as if through green blown glass.

  Her hair had been long then, sun-shot blond. Skinny legs crossed, reading The Moonstone. She bit her cuticle to blood and thought of her boyfriend, a love one week tender, and the world was made bright with him. Lotto, said the train as it came: Lotto-Lotto-Lotto.

  The short, greasy boy watching her from the bench was invisible to her because she had her book; she had her joy. To be fair, she hadn’t met Chollie yet. Since Mathilde and Lotto had found each other, Lotto had spent every spare moment with her; had ceded his dorm room to his childhood friend, who was illegally auditing classes, not an actual student at the school. Lotto had time for nothing but Mathilde, rowing, and classes.

  But Chollie knew of her. He was there at the party when Lotto looked up and saw Mathilde and she saw him; when Lotto crushed a crowd of people to get to her. It had been only a week. It couldn’t be serious yet, Chollie had believed. She was pretty, if you were into stick figures, but he figured Lotto would never tie himself to one pussy at twenty-two, with his whole life of glorious fuckery ahead of him. Chollie was sure that if Lotto had been perfectly handsome he would never have the success he did. His bad skin, his big forehead, the slightly bulbous nose moderated what was an almost girlishly pretty face into something sexy.

  And then, just the day before, he’d caught sight of Lotto and Mathilde together under the confetti of an overblown cherry tree, and he felt the air knocked out of his chest. Look at them together. The height of them, the shine on them. Her pale and wounded face, a face that had watched and never smiled now never stopped smiling. It was as if she’d lived all her life in the chilly shadows and someone had led her out into the sun. And look at him. All his restless energy focused tightly on her. She sharpened something that threatened to go diffuse in him. He watched her lips as she spoke, and took her chin gently between his fingers and kissed her with his long lashes closed, even while she was speaking, so that her mouth moved and she laughed into his kiss. Chollie knew immediately that it was correct, that they were in very deep. Whatever was between them was explosive, made even the professors gape as they passed by. The threat of Mathilde, Chollie had understood then, was real. He, striver, knew another striver when he saw one. He who’d had no home had found a home in Lotto; and she had usurped even this.

  [The Saturday after this one in the train station, Chollie would be napping in Lotto’s bed, hidden under a heap of clothes, and Lotto would come in, smiling so broadly that Chollie would stay silent when he could have spoken and made his presence known. Lotto, ecstatic, would pick up the phone and call his fat hog of a mother in Florida, who had once threatened to castrate Chollie years ago. There would be banter. Weird relationship, that one. And then Lotto would tell his mother he was married. Married! But they were babies. Chollie was shocked cold, missing much of the conversation, until Lotto left again. It couldn’t be true. He knew it was true. After some time had passed, he had wept bitterly, poor Chollie, under his heap of clothes.]

  But on this day, before they were married, there was still time to save his Lotto from this girl. So here he was. He climbed onto the train behind Mathilde, sat behind her. A lock of her hair escaped the crevasse between seat backs, and he sniffed it. Rosemary.

  She got off at Penn Station and he followed. Up from the underground stink to heat and light. She went toward a black town car, and the chauffeur opened the door and she was swallowed up. Midday in crowded Midtown, Chollie kept up on foot, though he was quickly sweating and his breastlets were heaving with effort. When the car paused before an Art Deco building, she got out and went in.

  The doorman was a silverback gorilla in a costume, some kind of Staten Island accent: bluntness would be key. Chollie said, “Who was that blond?” The doorman shrugged. Chollie took out a ten and gave it to him. The doorman said, “Girlfriend of 4-B.” Chollie looked at him but the doorman put out his hand and Chollie gave him all he had, which was a joint. The man grinned and said, “She been coming for too many years for a girl so young, you dig me? He’s some kind of art dealer. Name’s Ariel English.” Chollie waited, but the man said mildly, “That’s all you get for a little bud, little bud.”

  Later, Chollie sat waiting in the window of the diner across the street. He watched. His sweaty shirt dried, and the waitress grew tired of asking if he wanted to order and just slopped coffee into his mug and went away.

  When the shadows engulfed the building across the street, he almost gave up, headed back to his squat in academia. There were options. He’d look in the phone book for galleries. He’d research. But then the doorman straightened and opened the door crisply, and ou
t came a chimera, a man with a jowly face and a body like a wisp of smoke poured into a suit. Wealth in the way he moved, his sleek grooming. Behind him, there was an animated mannequin. It took Chollie a moment to recognize Mathilde. Her heels were tall, her schoolgirl’s skirt cut nearly to the crotch, her hair swept high, far too much makeup. [She had refused to extend the terms of the arrangement beyond four years; in pique, Ariel had dressed her, knowing her, knowing how to cut.] Her face was bare of that constant low-level smile that she wore, both shield and magnet. Blank, it was something like an abandoned building. She walked as if unaware of the world around her, that her nipples were visible under her gauzy shirt.

  They crossed the street, and there was dread in Chollie when he saw that they were coming into the diner toward him.

  They sat in a corner booth. The man ordered for both—egg-white Greek omelet, him, chocolate milkshake, her. He watched their upside-down bodies in the chrome napkin dispenser. She ate nothing, gazed at air. Chollie saw the man whispering in her ear, saw his hand disappear in the darkness between her legs. She let it, passive. [On the surface; beneath, the controlled burn.]

  Chollie was overwhelmed. He felt a swift spinning in him. Fury for Lotto; fear of losing what he, Chollie, had worked so hard to keep. He stood in agitation and went back on the train drawn through the dusk and pressed his burning face against the cool glass and, at last home at Vassar, collapsed for a brief nap into Lotto’s bed to plan how to tell him about his new girl, who she secretly was. A whore. But he fell asleep. He woke to laughter in the common room, the sound of a television. Past midnight on the flashing clock.

  He came out and almost fell down with astonishment. The only explanation: Mathilde must have a twin. He’d followed the wrong girl to the city. There was a girl in Lotto’s lap in sweatpants and a messy ponytail, laughing at something he was whispering in her ear. She was so different from what he’d seen that he knew he was wrong in having seen it. A dream? A half-eaten popover with apple butter was on the table, and Chollie almost lurched for it, he was so hungry.