Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  “It would be the worst thing,” Mathilde said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the world. Or to the child. Also, I’m only twenty-six.”

  “Twenty-six!” Bette said. “Your womb is practically antique. Your eggs are getting all wonky up in there. And what, you think you’d bear a monster? A Hitler? Please. Look at you. You’ve won the genetic lottery.”

  “You laugh,” Mathilde said. “But my children would come out with fangs and claws.”

  Bette looked at her. “I hide mine well,” Mathilde said.

  “I am not one to judge,” Bette said.

  “You’re not,” Mathilde said.

  “I’ll help,” Bette said. “Don’t get your hackles up. I will help you. You won’t be alone in this.”

  —

  “SHOOT, THAT TOOK A BILLION YEARS,” Lotto said, when she entered with the pizza. He was too hungry to see her until he’d eaten four slices. By then she had recomposed herself.

  In the night, she dreamt of things that lived in the dark. Writhing blind worms with a pearly gleam, flurries of blue-veined parchment. Slick and drip.

  She’d always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they.

  Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts. Much later, at the grocery store, Mathilde would watch a woman swollen to bursting, reaching up for the popsicles on the high shelf, and she’d imagine what it was like to have a person inside one that one hadn’t swallowed whole. One that wasn’t doomed from the start. The woman looked irritably over at Mathilde, who was gigantic, tall enough to reach; then her face changed back to the thing that Mathilde most disliked about pregnant ladies, the reflexive saintliness. “Can I help you?” the woman said, all treacle. Mathilde turned abruptly away.

  Now she rose from the bed where Lotto lay breathing sweetly in his sleep, and took a bottle of rum up to Bette’s apartment. She stood outside the door, not knocking, but still Bette opened it in a slattern’s nightgown, her hair a gray swirl.

  “In you go,” she said. She put Mathilde on the couch, covered her with a woolen blanket, plunked the cat onto her lap. By Mathilde’s right hand, hot chocolate with a glory of rum. On the television, Marilyn Monroe in black-and-white. Bette lay back on the ottoman and snored. Mathilde tiptoed home before Lotto woke, and got dressed as if going in to work and then called in sick. Bette, face up against the steering wheel, sitting on pillows from her sofa, drove her to the clinic.

  —

  [MATHILDE’S PRAYER: Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.]

  —

  FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD, Mathilde was clammy on the inside. A grayish clay crumbling on its surface. It wasn’t that she regretted a thing; it was that the call had been so close. Lotto was distant from her, on the peak of some hill she was too tired to climb. She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them.

  But there were tiny miracles to rouse her. A rosewater macaroon in the brass mailbox, in a waxed paper envelope. One blue hydrangea like a head of cabbage on the doorstep. Cold, wrinkled hands pressed to her cheeks, passing on the stairs. Bette’s small gifts. Bright lights in the dark.

  “A difficult thing,” Bette had said in the waiting room. “But right. What you’re feeling will slowly lessen.” It would.

  When Mathilde was twenty-eight, her husband left for Los Angeles for a week for a small speaking role in a cop drama, and she scheduled the sterilization.

  “Are you sure?” the doctor said. “You’re young enough that you might change your mind. You never know when the clock will start ticking.”

  “My clock is broken,” she said. And he looked at her, high boots to blond crown, the eyeliner she wore those days curved on the outside to make cat’s eyes. He thought he saw her, and he believed her vain. He nodded, turned curtly away. He planted the tiny coils in her tubes; she ate Jell-O and watched cartoons and let the nurses change her catheter. It was a very pleasant afternoon, in fact.

  She would do it again if she had to. To save the horror. To save herself. She would do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, if she had to.

  17

  MATHILDE DIDN’T RECOGNIZE the private investigator on the steps of the Met. She was looking for the girl from the coffee roastery in Brooklyn from two weeks earlier, either incarnation, frizzled and dolphined or sleek and sharp. There was a family of heavyset tourists, a cashmere-skinned young man whom Mathilde looked at carefully, and a scowling blond schoolgirl in a kilt and blazer with an overflowing backpack. She chose to sit next to the schoolgirl, and the girl turned to wink at her.

  “Holy god,” Mathilde said. “Body language and all. Gangly legs and attitude. I thought I was looking at my own doppelgänger from thirty years ago.”

  “I had a stakeout earlier,” the investigator said. “I love my job.”

  “You were that little girl with a costume box, huh,” Mathilde said.

  The investigator smiled and there was a sadness there. She looked her age briefly. “Well, I was an actress,” she said. “A younger Meryl Streep, that’s what I wanted to be.”

  Mathilde said nothing and the investigator said, “And yes. Of course, I knew of your husband. Knew him, in fact. I was in one of his plays in my youth. The workshop for Grimoire at ACT in San Francisco. Everyone was in love with him. I always thought of him in terms of a duck, you know? Lancelot Satterwhite is to adoration as a duck is to water. He only wanted to be swimming around in a great pool of it, but it never soaked in to touch him, just always rolled off.”

  “Sounds about right,” Mathilde said. “I see that you did know him.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” the girl said. “But I don’t see the harm, now that he’s gone. You of all people knew the way he was. But the cast and crew had a sort of bet. Whenever anybody flubbed something in rehearsal, they had to put a quarter in the pot, and whoever was able to seduce Lancelot first got to keep the cash. Guys and girls both. All twelve of us.”

  “Who won?” Mathilde said. There was a twitch at the corner of her lip.

  “Don’t fret,” the girl said. “Nobody. Opening night, we gave the cash to our stage manager because he had a new baby at home.” She took a file from her backpack and handed it to Mathilde. “I’m still working the personal angle. There’s definitely something there, but I just have to find it. In the meantime, I’ve bought us an informant at Charles Watson. Senior VP. Sees himself as a noble whistle-blower, but only after he amassed a fortune, a house in the Hamptons, ad nauseam. This file right here is the skim off the surface. And boy, does it go deep.”

  Mathilde read, and by the time she looked up, the street had gone bright with sun. “Holy of holies,” she said.

  “There’s more,” the investigator said. “It’s pretty dire. There’s going to be lots of pissed-off rich people. Whatever the motivation, we’re doing the world a good thing.”

  “Ah, well. I’ve always been suspicious of self-congratulation,” Mathilde said. “We’ll celebrate properly when you hand me the personal stuff.”

  “Celebrate? You and me and champagne and a suite at the St. Regis?” the investigator said, standing.

  Mathilde looked at her strong bare legs, the narrow hips, her watchful face buried under all that blond. She smiled, felt the rusty mechanism of flirting begin to move. She’d never been with a woman. It would probably be softer, less muscular, like sexual yoga. It’d at least be novel. She said, “Maybe so. Depends on what you give me.”

  The investigator gave a low whistle, and said, “Off to work I go.”

  —

  FOUR YEARS AFTER LOTTO DIED, when Mathilde was fifty, she bought a ticket to Paris.

  Everything was so bright off the plane that she had to wear sunglasses. Even then
, the brightness got in, bounced around her brain like a Spaldeen. Also, she wanted nobody to see how the smell of the place she was returning to ravaged her, made her eyes leak.

  She had become tiny again here. In this language, she was again unable to be seen. She gathered herself at a café outside the gate. When the waiter in the airport brought her the espresso and pain au chocolat in a plastic pouch, he spoke to her in crisp French even though he turned and spoke uninflected English to the sophisticates at the table beside her. When it came time to pay, she didn’t understand this euro business. She searched her purse for francs.

  In the grainy gray day, Paris overwhelmed her with the scents. Exhaust and piss and bread and pigeon shit and dust and shedding plane trees and wind.

  The cabdriver, his nose besponged by pores, looked at her for a long while in the rearview mirror and asked her if she was all right. When she didn’t answer, he said soothingly, “You may cry here, cabbage. Cry as much as you wish. It is no hardship to watch a pretty woman cry.”

  She showered and changed in the hotel, then rented a white Mercedes and drove out of the city. The roaring river of traffic comforted the American in her.

  The roundabouts became tighter. The roads smaller. Eventually, they were dirt. There were cows, tractors, semi-abandoned villages of a sooty gray stone.

  What had been so huge in her mind was, in fact, terribly small. The house’s stucco had been refreshed, painted white under the climbing ivy. The stones on the driveway were new, creamy, soft-edged gravel. The yews had grown, were neatly shaved across their tops like boys on the first day of school. The wine grapes in the back twined green as far as she could see, deep into her grandmother’s old cow fields.

  A man a little younger than Mathilde was fixing a motorcycle’s wheel in the drive. He had a cycling jacket on and a swoop of gelled bangs cresting over his forehead. Mathilde recognized her own long fingers in his. Her own long neck. The same folded tip of the left ear.

  “Papa,” she said aloud, but no, this man was far too young.

  Into the bay window came a woman. Stout, bleary-eyed, elderly, though her hair was dyed a squid-ink black. She was wearing a thickness of eyeliner below her lower lids. She peered at Mathilde in the car and her puckered mouth moved, as if she were chewing something. The hand clutching the curtain was red, ragged, as if it had spent a lifetime among the cold guts of fish.

  Mathilde remembered a cabinet full of ripening cheeses, the overwhelming smell. Blind at first, she drove away.

  In the little village, the cathedral was embarrassing. A Romanesque pebble, when she remembered it grand, shocking, Gothic. The tabac sold eggs still crotted with chicken shit. It was barely noon and the boulangerie was closing. She went into a salon that was also a pizza takeout and the mairie.

  When the mayor sat down and Mathilde told her what she wanted, the mayor blinked so furiously she left streaks of black mascara on the insides of her glasses. “But you are absolutely sure?” she said. “That house, well. It has been in their family for hundreds of years.”

  “It is the only house in the world for me,” Mathilde said. The Breton accent came back easily to her tongue. Sturdy as heifers, as the rocks in the fields.

  “It will cost you,” the mayor said. “They are very cheap, that family, very close with their money.” She puckered her mouth, made a rubbing motion with her fingertips close to her chest.

  “I can see myself being happy there,” Mathilde said. “And only there. I long to come to this town in the summer. Maybe even open up a little antique shop with a tea place, draw the tourists.” The mayor’s face loosed with this. Mathilde pulled out the creamy card of her attorney and pushed it across the table. “Please conduct all business through this man. Of course, you’ll get a five percent commission.”

  “Six,” said the mayor.

  “Seven. I don’t care. Whatever it takes,” Mathilde said, and the mayor nodded, and Mathilde stood and in leaving said, “Do your magic.”

  She returned to Paris feeling as if someone else were steering the car. It had been twenty-four hours since she’d last eaten when Mathilde sat down at her own table at La Closerie des Lilas. Not the best food in Paris. The most literary of restaurants, though. She’d dressed in a silver silk sheath, her hair back, her face flushed prettily.

  When the waiter came over, Mathilde said only, “It has been a long time since I’ve been in France. I miss the food like a phantom limb.”

  His brown eyes sparkled. His moustache gave a leap like a goosed mouse. “I shall bring you our best dishes,” he promised.

  “And the wine to pair with them,” she said.

  He feigned exasperation. “But of course,” he said. “Would I blaspheme?”

  When he set the champagne before her, and the langoustine in its herbed mayonnaise, she said, “Thank you.” She ate, her eyes half closed.

  All along, she’d known Lotto was with her, across the table, enjoying her food with her. He would have loved this night, her dress, the food, the wine. The lust welled in her until it was almost unbearable. If she looked up, she knew, she would see only an empty chair. She would not look up.

  After the cheese, the waiter brought her a plate of tiny pastel marzipan fruit, and Mathilde smiled up at him. “À la victoire,” she said.

  “À l’amour,” he said, twinkling.

  She walked slowly back to her hotel over the cobblestones steaming from the swift summer storm that had passed lightly over the city while she ate. Her shadow paced beside her. She was able to make it to the bathroom, sitting calmly on the yellow travertine tub before she leaned over and vomited.

  She flew home to the little white house in the cherry orchard. The purchase of the house in France took months. On the day the sale was finalized—for a fraction of what Mathilde would have paid, but, apparently, a great deal more than the house was worth—her lawyer sent her a bottle of Château d’Yquem.

  She called him. “Excellent work, Klaus,” she said.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Satterwhite,” he said. “They were . . . exigent.”

  “Oh, but they’re exigent people,” she said lightly. “Sorry to say it, but I’m afraid I have more work for you.”

  “Of course. That is why I am here,” he said.

  “Now, if you please, have the house torn down. Roof to joists. The vines in the back ripped from the ground. All of it. I know it is ancient and against all sorts of laws, but do it so fast nobody has time to know what you’re doing. And do it as soon as possible.”

  Only the slightest hesitation. She adored this discreet man. “As you wish,” he said. In the photographs he sent a week later, there was sky where there had been chimney, a clear view to the orchard where the four-hundred-year-old stone walls had been. The ground was a smoothly spread cloak of dirt.

  It was less, she thought, like looking at a corpse than like looking at the place where a corpse had been buried.

  Her heart cracked open and leaked. This one had been for her.

  She sent Klaus a car much nicer than her own. His voice was amused this time when she called him. “The work is done,” he said, “but not without much screaming and much, much rage. Many tears. I am afraid you cannot show your face in that town at any time soon.”

  “Ah, well,” she said. “What else is new.”

  She said it lightly, yes. Still, she felt the old beast stirring in her.

  18

  “YOU’RE A PATHOLOGICAL TRUTH-TELLER,” Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn’t sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying.

  Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.

  She didn’t tell him that she never minde
d being the breadwinner during the long span of their twenties, even the poverty, even the skipped lunches and the suppers of rice and beans, even the shifting of money from one tiny account to pay off the most pressing bills, even accepting money from Lotto’s little sister, who gave it because she was one of the few people in the world who were truly good. His gratitude for what he thought was Mathilde’s sacrifice indebted him to her.

  She did mind something she never said aloud: she’d wished her husband were better at what he chose to do.

  All of that standing in line in the rain. Going in only to perform a monologue. Home again to wait by the phone that rang with no job. Sulking, drinking, throwing parties. Growing fat, losing his hair, losing his charm. Year after year after year.

  The very last winter in the underground apartment, she painted the ceiling gold to simulate sunshine, to cheer herself up, to give herself courage to sit Lotto down and tell him, gently, the truth: that though she believed in him, he might want to find a career he believed in as well. This acting pursuit was not going to work out.

  Before she could gather the courage, New Year’s Eve came around. He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up and at a white heat wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades. When she woke in the very early morning, she saw the computer and thought, first, of her jealousy, so assiduously suppressed, of him chatting on Instant Messenger with some pretty, blond avatar of a sad sixteen-year-old outcast. She picked the laptop up to read what he’d written. And she saw with wonder that it was a play and that it had the bones of a marvel in it.