by Lauren Groff
“Oh, I know,” said Sallie. And Lotto beamed with pleasure, preening, eyes darting around to see which kind soul in the room could have sent along the champagne, the force of his delight such that wherever his eyes landed, the recipients of the gaze would look up out of their food and conversation, and a startled expression would come over their face, a flush, and nearly everyone began grinning back, so that, on this spangled early evening with the sun shining through the windows in gold streams and the treetops rustling in the wind and the streets full of congregating relieved people, Lotto sparked upwellings of inexplicable glee in dozens of chests, lightening the already buoyant mood of the room in one swift wave. Animal magnetism is real; it spreads through bodily convection. Even Ariel smiled back. The stunned grins stayed on the faces of some of the people, an expression of speculation growing, hoping he would look at them again or wondering who he was, because on this day and in this world, he was Someone.
“While we have champagne,” Mathilde said, watching the tiny bubbles flea-jump out the top of her glass, “Lotto and I have an announcement to make.”
Lotto looked across the table at Mathilde, blinked, then grinned and turned to his aunt and his sister. “I’m sorry Muvva isn’t here to witness this. But I guess we can’t hold it in any longer. We’re married,” he said. And he kissed Mathilde’s hand. She looked at him. Waves of heat built in her, one atop another. She would do anything in the world for this man.
In the ensuing flutter and exclamations, the tables closest breaking out into applause, eavesdroppers all, Rachel bursting into happy tears, Sallie fluttering her hands near her face though it was evident she’d already known the news, Mathilde looked for a long moment at Ariel. But he had stood and left the dining room, his slim navy back winking out the door. She was shed of him. For good, she thought. There was a relief like a cold wind blowing through her. She downed her glass and sneezed.
—
A WEEK AFTER GRADUATION, Mathilde was looking up through the casement windows into the courtyard garden where the Japanese maple waggled its leaves in the wind like tiny hands.
Already she knew it. This apartment would be her first real harbor in so many years adrift. She was twenty-two. She was so terribly tired. Here, at last, she could rest.
She could feel Lotto to her right behind her shoulder, emanating Lottoness. In a moment, she knew, he’d turn and crack a joke and the realtor would laugh and a warmth would come into her voice for the first time; despite herself, despite knowing better than to invest in such young and penniless people, she would take an interest in them. She would deliver a quiche on the day they moved in; she would stop by when she was in the neighborhood and bring them gifts of candy. Oh, Lotto, Mathilde thought with loving despair. Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back.
Mathilde smelled the beeswax on the floor. She heard the neighbor’s cat mewling in the hallway. The soft scrape of leaf against sky. It filled her, the kindness of this place.
She had to push down the tiny loud thing in her that willed her to say no, to walk away. She deserved none of this. She could still explode it all by shaking her head sadly, saying they should continue to look. But then the problem of Lotto would remain. He had become, after all, her home.
On cue: the joke, the laugh. Mathilde turned. Her husband—god, my god, hers, for life—was smiling. He lifted his hands and cupped her jaw and traced her eyebrows with his thumbs. “I think she likes it,” he said, and Mathilde nodded, unable to speak.
They could have lived on happiness alone, in their glamorous poverty, in their apartment. They were as slender as fauns with lack; their apartment was spacious with it. Rachel’s gift—the girl’s saved-up allowance—was gone in three parties and as many months’ rent and groceries. Happiness feeds but doesn’t nourish. She tried bartending, canvassing for the Sierra Club, failing at both. The lights went out; they lit candles she’d stolen from a restaurant’s alfresco tables and went to bed at eight PM. They held potlucks with their friends so they could eat as much as they wanted, and nobody minded if they kept the leftovers. In October, they had thirty-four cents in their checking account and Mathilde walked into Ariel’s gallery.
He was looking at a vast green painting on the wall at the end of the room. He looked at her when she said, “Ariel,” but he didn’t move.
The receptionist was new, skinny, brunette, bored. Harvard, for sure. That gleam of entitlement, the length and gloss of hair. This would end up being Luanne. “Have an appointment?” she said.
“No,” Mathilde said.
Ariel folded his arms, waiting.
“I need a job,” she called to him across the expanse.
“There are no openings,” the receptionist said. “Sorry!”
For a long moment, Mathilde looked at Ariel, until the receptionist said very sharply, “Excuse me. This is a private business. You need to leave. Excuse me.”
“You are excused,” Mathilde said.
“Luanne, please go get three cappuccini,” Ariel said.
Mathilde sighed: cappuccini. The girl slammed the door when she went out.
“Come here,” Ariel said. Mathilde’s fight with herself was not visible as she neared. “Mathilde,” he said softly, “in what world could I possibly owe you a job?”
“You owe me nothing at all,” she said. “I agree.”
“How can you ask me for anything after your behavior?”
“Behavior?” she said.
“Ingratitude, then,” he said.
“Ariel, I was never ungrateful. I’d fulfilled the contract. As you always say, it was business.”
“Business,” he said. His face had grown red. His eyebrows were spiked high. “You married this Lancelot person two weeks before you graduated. I can only assume a conjugal relation. That’s not fulfilling the contract.”
“I met you in April of my senior year in high school,” she said. “If you’re counting, I extended the contract by two weeks.”
They smiled at each other. He closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them, they were moist. “I know it was business. But you hurt my feelings very much,” he said. “I was not unkind to you. To walk away without keeping in touch, that surprised me, Mathilde.”
“Business,” she said again.
He looked her up and down. He’d bought these beautiful shoes she was wearing, worn at the toe. He’d bought the black suit. Her hair had not been cut since summer. He narrowed his eyes, cocked his head to the side. “You’re skinny. You need the money. I understand. All you have to do is beg,” he said softly.
“I don’t beg,” she said.
He laughed and the sullen receptionist clanged back in with a tray of cappuccinos in her hand and Ariel said, sotto voce, “You are lucky I feel fondness for you, Mathilde.” Louder, he said, “Luanne, meet Mathilde. She’ll be joining us here tomorrow morning.”
“Oh. Goody,” Luanne said, and fell back into her seat. She watched them carefully, sensing something.
“The gallery’s employee,” Mathilde said, as they walked slowly up to the front. “Not yours. I’m off-limits.”
Ariel looked at her, and she, who’d been with him so long, could see him thinking, We’ll see.
“Touch me,” she said, “I walk. That’s a promise.”
—
LATER, WHEN SHE WAS SIXTY and Ariel seventy-three, she’d hear he was sick. From where the news came, she couldn’t say. The sky would speak it in her ear, maybe. The air itself. She’d know only that he had pancreatic cancer. Swift and ferocious. For two weeks she perseverated, and at last she went to see him.
He was on a hospital bed on the deck outside his apartment. All copper and topiary and view. She held her eyes wide open and breathed. He was a droop of flesh with bones in i
t.
“I like,” he rasped, “to see the birds.” She looked up. No birds.
“Hold my hand,” he said. She considered the hand but did not. He moved his head toward her. The flesh slid on the jaw.
She waited. She smiled at him. Buildings were sun-shocked in the corners of her eyes.
“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She won’t be forced.”
“Correct,” she said. But she thought, Oh, you murderous girl, hello. I haven’t seen you for so long.
“Please,” he said. “Mathilde. Take the cold hand of a dying man.”
And then she took his hand and pressed it to her chest with both of hers and held it there. What didn’t need to be said stayed unspoken. He fell asleep and the nurse came out on angry tiptoes. Mathilde went into the apartment, sterile and tasteful, and didn’t linger at the pictures she once knew too well for the ferocity with which she stared at them, counting the minutes until she could leave. Later, she walked through the cold shadows and blaze of concentrated afternoon light that poured between the buildings, and she couldn’t stop; she could barely breathe; it felt too good to be on those coltish terrified legs once more, not to know, once more, where she was going.
15
THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR her attorney had hired was not what Mathilde had expected. Not the weary hard-boiled whiskey-barrel type. Not the soft-haired British-grandmother type. Reading had infected Mathilde, she saw of herself, amused. Too much Miss Marple and Philip Marlowe. This girl was young, nose like a hatchet, shaggy peroxided hair. An ample display of bosoms, with a dolphin over the top curve of a breast, as if it were leaping into her décolletage. Huge earrings. She was all abubble on the surface with a watchfulness beneath.
“Ugh,” Mathilde had said out loud, when they shook hands. She hadn’t meant to. She’d been left too long alone, had neglected the upkeep of niceties. It was two days after Chollie ambushed her naked in the pool. They were meeting in the courtyard of a Brooklyn coffee roastery and the wind was in the trees overhead.
But the girl hadn’t taken offense; she laughed. Now she opened the folder with Chollie’s photograph, address, phone number, all the details Mathilde could think of to tell her on the phone.
“I don’t know how far you’ve gotten in your research,” Mathilde said. “He was the one who started the Charles Watson Fund. You know, the investment brokerage firm. I don’t know if you know that yet. About twenty years ago, he started it when he was just a kid. Total Ponzi scheme, I’m pretty sure.”
The girl looked up, spark of interest in her face. “You invest?” she said. “Is that what this is?”
“I’m not a fucking moron,” Mathilde said.
The girl blinked and sat back. Mathilde said, “Anyway. Ponzi scheme is the way to go, and I need proof of it, but I also need more. Personal stuff. The worst you can get. You meet the guy for three seconds, and you know he has a closet full of skeletons. Possibly literal ones. He’s a fat shithead puckered-asshole sniffer and I want to flay him alive.” She smiled sunnily.
The girl considered Mathilde. She said, “I’m good enough that I can pick and choose my cases, you know.”
“Glad to hear it,” Mathilde said. “I don’t hire ninnies.”
“My only hesitation about yours is that it seems like a personal vendetta,” the girl said. “And those get sticky.”
“Oh, well. Murder’s too easy,” Mathilde said.
The girl smiled, and said, “I like a bit of spunk in a lady.”
“But I’m no lady,” Mathilde said, already tired of this strange flirtation, drinking her coffee down so that she could go.
Mathilde stood, and the girl said, “Wait.” She pulled the arms of her shirt through the sleeves and turned it around so the low collar was in the back, now crisp-looking, professional. She pulled off her shaggy wig to show brown hair, cut boyishly short. She took off the earrings, the false eyelashes. She was a different person, severe and sharp. She looked like the only female grad student at a math department mixer.
“That was some Bond-level disguisecraft,” Mathilde said. “Hilarious. I bet it usually seals the deal for you.”
“Usually,” the investigator said. She seemed abashed.
“And the boob dolphin?” Mathilde said.
“I had a stupid youth,” the girl said.
“We have all had stupid youths,” said Mathilde. “I find them delicious.” They smiled at each other across the table freckled with pollen. “All right. You’ll do,” Mathilde said.
“Honey, I’ll more than do,” the girl said, and leaned forward and touched Mathilde’s hand just long enough to make her meaning clear.
Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding.
Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She—steely, controlling—is far more interesting than Coriolanus.
Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.
16
THE CLOUDS HAD DESCENDED, though the day through the window gleamed with sunlight.
She was new to her Internet company. It was a dating site that would later be sold for a billion. She’d been at the gallery for three years; every morning she would take a breath on the sidewalk, shut her eyes, steel herself to walk in. All day, she’d feel Ariel looking at her. She did her job. She took care of the artists, calming them, sending them birthday gifts. “My prodigy,” Ariel would say, introducing her. “One day Mathilde will run the show.” Luanne’s face pinched every time he said so. And the day came when a jittery artist flew in from Santa Fe, and Ariel and he went out for a long dinner, and when they came back, Mathilde was still in the dark in the back office, writing catalog copy for an exhibit. She looked up, froze. Ariel was in the door, watching her. He came close, closer. He put his hands on her shoulders and began massaging. He pressed himself to her back. After so long waiting for the end, she was obscurely disappointed in his lapse of taste: an unexpectedly gross gesture, frottage. She stood, and said, “I’m done,” and walked past Luanne, who’d been watching from the front, and took all her sick leave at once and found a new job in days without ever telling Ariel she was leaving the gallery for good.
But this morning, Mathilde could not keep her eyes on her work. She begged off in her boss’s office, and he watched her go with his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, his mouth in a sour twist.
In the park, the maple leaves had a sheen to them, as if gilded at the vein. She walked so far, was so lost, that when she came home her knees felt jellied. There was a bitterness on the back of her tongue. She took a stick from the twenty-pack she kept, in her terror, beneath the towels. Pissed on it. Waited. Drank an entire Nalgene of water. Did it again and again and again, and every time the patient stick told her yes. Plus sign. You’re cooked! She shoved the wands into a bag, put the bag as deep in the trashcan as she could.
She heard Lotto come in and ran her eyes under cold water. “Hey, baby,” she called out. “How was your day?” He clattered around, talking about an audition, some mean little bit in a commercial, he didn’t even want it, it was humiliating, but he saw that boy from that television show in the late seventies, the one with the cowlick and weird ears, remember? She dried her face, finger-brushed her hair, practiced her smile until it wasn’t so ferocious. She came out, still in her coat, and said, “I’m just off to pick up a pizza,” and he said, “Mediterranean?” And she said, “Yup,” and he said, “I adore you with all the marrow in my bones.” “Me, too,” she said, with her back turned.
She closed their front door and sank down on the steps that led to the lady upstairs, lay back, her arms crossed above her eyes because what was she going to do, what was she going to do?
Mathilde became aware of a strong smell of feet. She saw on the steps beside her face a pair of battered embroidered slippers held together with string.
Bette, the upstairs neighbor, gloomed down at Mathilde. “Come along,” she said, in her prim British way.
Numb, Mathilde followed the old woman up the stairs. A cat pounced at her like a tiny clown. Apartment painstakingly clean, midcentury modern, Mathilde saw with surprise. Walls a high-gloss white. Bouquet of magnolia leaves on a table, deep green shine with a luscious brown underneath. On the mantel, three burgundy chrysanthemums burned. None of this was expected.
“Sit,” Bette said. Mathilde sat. Bette shuffled away.
Presently, the old lady came back. A cup of hot chamomile, a LU Petit Écolier Chocolat Noir. Mathilde tasted it, returning to a schoolyard, light through leaves on the dust, snap of a new cartouche in her pen.
“I can’t blame you. I never wanted a child, either,” the old woman said, looking at Mathilde down her long nose. There were crumbs on her lips.
Mathilde blinked.
“In my day, we didn’t know anything. Didn’t live in a time when there was any choice. I douched with Lysol, you see. Such ignorance. When it was my time, there was a lady over the stationery store with a thin-bladed knife. Terrible. I wanted to die. Could have, easy. Instead, I got the gift of barrenness.”
“Christ,” Mathilde said. “Have I been speaking aloud to myself?”
“No,” Bette said.
“But how did you know?” Mathilde said. “I barely know myself.”
“It’s my superpower,” Bette said. “I see it in the way a woman carries herself. Many times I have gotten myself in trouble by mentioning it when it was an unpleasant surprise. Been clear to me in your case for about two weeks.”
They sat there in the long afternoon. Mathilde watched the chrysanthemums and remembered to drink her tea only when it was lukewarm.
“Forgive me,” Bette said. “It must be said that from my viewpoint, at least, a child wouldn’t be the worst thing. You have a husband who adores you, a job, a place to live. You seem to be almost thirty, old enough. A child in this house wouldn’t be the worst thing. I should like to watch over a baby once in a while, teach it the nursery rhymes of my Scottish granny. Eenity feenity, fickety feg. Or, no, As eh gaed up a field o neeps, eh? Spoil it rotten with biscuits. When it could eat biscuits, of course. Not the worst thing.”