Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  Mathilde sat up, looking at the girl, who was putting her bra back on. “Other than my sister-in-law, I don’t think I’ve ever had a real female friend,” she said.

  “Your friends are all guys?” the girl said.

  It took a very long time before Mathilde could say, “No.” The girl looked at her for a moment and leaned forward and gave her a long motherly kiss on the forehead.

  —

  LOTTO’S AGENT CALLED HER. It was time, he intimated with a quaver in his voice, that she begin to take over business matters again. A few times he had been the recipient of her soft venom.

  She paused for so long that he said, “Hello? Hello?”

  There was a large part of her that wanted to put the plays behind her. To face forward into the unknown.

  But she held the phone to her ear. She looked around. Lotto wasn’t in this house, not on his side of the bed, not in his study in the attic. Not in the clothes in the closets. Not in their first little underground apartment, where, a few weeks ago, she’d found herself looking through the casement windows, seeing only a stranger’s purple couch and a pug dog leaping at the doorknob. Her husband wasn’t about to pull up the drive, though she was always on alert, listening. There were no children; his face wouldn’t shine up out of a smaller one. There was no heaven, no hell; she wouldn’t find him on a cloud or in a pit of fire or in a meadow of asphodel after her body quit her. The only place that Lotto could be seen anymore was in his work. A miracle, the ability to take a soul and implant it, whole, in another person for even a few hours at a time. All those plays were fragments of Lotto that, together, formed a kind of whole.

  So she told the agent to send her what needed to be done. Nobody would forget Lancelot Satterwhite. Not his plays. Not the tiny fragments of him in his work.

  —

  EIGHT MONTHS AFTER she’d been made a widow, almost to the day, Mathilde was still feeling the shocks in the ground where she stepped. She climbed out of the cab into the dark city street. In her silvery dress, in her new boniness, in the hair she’d bleached white in its boy’s cut, she was Amazonian. She wore bells on her wrists. She wanted them to hear her coming.

  “Oh my god,” Danica cried out when Mathilde opened the door and walked into the apartment, handing her coat to a servant girl. “Widowhood sure as shit becomes you. Christ, look at you.”

  Danica had never been pretty, but she hid it now with skin orange and pumped with botulism, sinewy yoga muscles underneath. Her flesh was so thin one could see the delicate ribs where they met in the center of her chest. The necklace she wore cost a middle manager’s yearly salary. Mathilde always hated rubies. Dried corpuscles polished to a gloss, she thought.

  “Oh,” said Mathilde. “Thanks.” She let the other woman air-kiss her.

  Danica said, “God. If there was a guarantee that I’d look like you when I’m a widow, I’d let Chollie eat bacon for every meal.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Mathilde said. And Danica said, her black eyes moistening, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I was trying to make a joke. God, I’m the worst. Always putting a foot in it. I’ve had too many martinis, haven’t eaten a thing, trying to fit into this dress. Mathilde, I’m sorry. I’m a jerk. Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying,” Mathilde said, and went over and took the glass from Chollie’s hand and drank the gin down. On the piano, she put Danica’s present, the Hermès scarf that Antoinette—well, really, it was Sallie—had sent her a few birthdays ago, still in its ostentatious orange box. “Oh, so generous!” said Danica, and she kissed Mathilde on the cheek.

  Danica went to the door to greet other friends, a former candidate for mayor and his shellacked wife.

  “Forgive her. She’s drunk,” Chollie said. He had slid up unnoticed. As usual.

  “Yes, well, when is she not?” Mathilde said.

  “Touché. She deserves that,” he said. “Life is hard for her. She feels so insignificant, trying to keep up with all those purebred socialites. Do you want to head to the powder room to compose yourself?”

  “I am never not composed,” Mathilde said.

  “True,” Chollie said. “But your face, it looks. I don’t know, strange.”

  “Oh. That’s because I’ve stopped smiling,” Mathilde said. “For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don’t know why I didn’t stop earlier. It’s enormously relaxing.”

  He looked pained. He held his own hands and flushed, and said, darting a look at her face, “I was surprised you RSVP’d, Mathilde. It shows maturity after our talk. After what I revealed. Forgiveness. Kindness. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “You know, Chollie, I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted to garrote you with my shoelaces. I almost killed you with that ice cream spoon. But then I realized that you were full of shit. Lotto would never have left me. I know this as deep as my bones. No matter what you did, you couldn’t have hurt us. What we had was so far beyond anything you could ever do to ruin it. You’re just a little mosquito, Chollie. All itch, no poison. You are less than nothing.”

  Chollie was about to say something, but only looked weary and sighed.

  “Anyway. Despite it all, we are old friends,” she said, squeezing his forearm. “One doesn’t get many old friends in life. I missed you. Both of you. Even Danica.”

  He stood still for a long time, looking at her. At last, he said, “You always were too kind, Mathilde. We are all undeserving of you.” He was sweating. He turned away, either annoyed or moved. For some time, she flipped through a lavish book on the coffee table called Winged Cupid Painted Blind that seemed strangely familiar to her, but the panels all blended together and she saw nothing at all.

  Later, as everyone was moving through the living room on the way into dinner, Mathilde stayed a few seconds behind, ostensibly looking at the small Rembrandt that Chollie had just bought. If a Rembrandt could be boring, this was. Classical composition, three bodies in a dark room, one pouring some unguent from a vase, one sitting, one speaking. Well, nobody had ever accused Chollie of having taste. She went back toward the piano. She pulled a second gift out of her handbag, this one in light blue paper. It was thin. The size of an envelope, wrapped. There was no card on this one, but she was sure it was the best gift of the bunch. Almost artistic, strobe-lit naked Chollie among all that stranger flesh.

  At noon the next day after Danica’s birthday party, Mathilde was waiting. She sat reading the paper in the breakfast room, luxuriating in her pajamas. She picked up the phone on the first ring, already grinning.

  “She left me,” Chollie spat. “You hell-dog monster bitch-face cunt.”

  Mathilde took off her reading glasses and propped them on her head. She fed God a rind of her pancake. “Would you look at that. My dick’s on the table,” she said. “Seems my game’s longer than yours. Just wait until you see what’s coming for you next.”

  “I’ll kill you,” he said.

  “Can’t. I died eight months ago,” she said. She gently hung up.

  —

  SHE SAT IN THE KITCHEN, SAVORING. The dog on her bed, the moon in the window. In the beautiful blue bowl, the tomatoes from her summer garden had gone wrinkled and were emitting a powerful earthy sweetness, just before rot. For two months, she had left the letter from Land there, for what she imagined was in it. What? Gratitude? Sexy words? An invitation for her to visit him in the city? She’d liked him immensely. Something in him was balm to her. She would have gone, spent the night in his surely overpriced exposed-brick loft in a trendy riverfront area, and would have driven home at dawn feeling ridiculous. Also, she would have felt smooth and fine, loudly singing to thirty-year-old pop. Sexy. Young again.

  She had just come back from her penultimate meeting with the FBI detective. He had salivated for what she told him she had. The filthy photographs of Chollie had done their magic. [In three months, Da
nica would be a divorcée rich beyond measure.] The box of files that, tomorrow, she would give to the sweaty small agent with the sideburns was her footrest in the kitchen tonight. She kept looking down through the dark where the box was as lunar pale as a toadstool.

  On her laptop there was a French movie. In her hand, a globe of malbec. There was something satiated in her; something calmed. She was imagining Chollie’s headlong fall. She pictured his fat face on the television as he was squeezed into the cop car; how childlike he would look, how at a loss.

  The doorbell rang. She opened the door to Rachel and Sallie. On the porch, doubled, her husband briefly shining out.

  Mathilde let herself lean for a few breaths into the buttress of their arms, felt the weight of her own body relieved for the first time in so long.

  She opened cold champagne for them. [Why the hell not.]

  “Celebrating?” Rachel said.

  “You tell me,” Mathilde said. She’d noted Sallie’s collar askew, the ring twisted wrong around Rachel’s finger. Nerves. Something was up. But they didn’t tell her, not yet. They sat drinking. With her long and bony face, Rachel in the twilight looked molded of resin; Sallie polished in a silk jacket, chic haircut. Mathilde thought of Sallie on her world tour, imagined lushness, fruit in the shape of swans, lovers in damp sheets. The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?

  Rachel put the glass down and leaned forward. The emerald tapped three slowing swings against her clavicle, dully gleamed when it came to rest in the air.

  Mathilde closed her eyes, said, “Say it.”

  From her pocketbook, Sallie pulled a thick kraft file and put it on Mathilde’s knees, and Mathilde lifted a corner with her index finger and opened it. From most recent to least, a gallery of vice. Most were not even hers. From freshest to oldest; all before Lotto died. Grainy photo of Mathilde in a bikini on a beach in Thailand, the failed separation. Mathilde kissing Arnie’s cheek on a street corner. [Ludicrous, even if she were canted toward infidelity, he was too slimy.] Mathilde, drawn, a skeleton, young, walking into the abortion clinic. Her uncle, strange shiny pages smuggled from some sort of secret file delineating his purported offenses as of 1991—she would read it like a novel much later. Finally, her Paris grandmother and her rap sheet in French, smiling wickedly at the camera, prostituée like flyspecks across the page.

  Great gaps here: a lacework of her life’s tissue. Thank god that the worst of it remained holes. Ariel. The sterilization, the baseless hope for children she’d let live in Lotto. What Aurélie had done all those years ago. All the deficits of goodness that added up to a shadow Mathilde.

  Mathilde reminded herself to breathe, looked up. “You researched me?”

  “No. Antoinette did,” Sallie said, clicking her teeth against her glass. “From the first.”

  “All this time?” Mathilde said. “She was committed.” A pang. All this time, and Mathilde had been vibrantly alive in Antoinette’s head.

  “Muvva was a patient woman,” Rachel said.

  Mathilde closed the file and tapped the papers neatly back. She poured the rest of the champagne equally into the glasses. When she looked up, Sallie and Rachel were both making grotesque puffed-up faces that startled her. Together, they began laughing.

  “Mathilde thinks we’re about to hurt her,” Sallie said.

  “Sweet M.,” Rachel said. “We wouldn’t.”

  Sallie sighed, wiped her face. “Don’t fret. We kept you from harm. Twice Antoinette tried to send packets to Lotto, once with your uncle and then the abortion, and again when you left him. She overlooked that I was the one to walk mail down to the box at the end of the drive and back.”

  Rachel laughed. “The will she sent me to have notarized was lost. Donating Lotto’s share of the trust to a chimp rescue. Poor needy monkeys are going to go without their bananas,” she said. She shrugged. “It was Muvva’s fault. She never expected gross perfidy from the meek and mild.”

  Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees.

  She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women. Such kindness. Their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her and they loved her even still.

  “There’s one more thing,” Rachel said, so quickly Mathilde had to concentrate to understand. “You don’t know this. We didn’t until my mother died. I mean, it was a total shock. We had to process it before we did anything. And then we were going to tell Lotto after we put things in order. But he.” She left the sentence unfinished. Mathilde watched as her face, as if in slow motion, collapsed. She handed over a photo album in inexpensive cordovan. Mathilde opened it.

  Inside: a confusion. A face startlingly familiar. Handsome, dark-haired, smiling. With each successive page, the face grew younger until it was a red, wrinkled baby asleep in hospital blankets.

  An adoption certificate.

  A birth certificate. Satterwhite, Roland, born July 9, 1984. Mother: Watson, Gwendolyn, aged 17. Father: Satterwhite, Lancelot, aged 15.

  Mathilde dropped the book.

  [A puzzle she’d thought she’d solved revealed itself to go endlessly on.]

  22

  MATHILDE HAD ALWAYS BEEN a fist, in truth. Only with Lotto had she been an open hand.

  —

  SAME NIGHT; ROTTING TOMATOES. Sallie’s perfume lingered, though she and Rachel were dreaming drunkly in the guest rooms above. In the window, a paring of moon. Bottle of wine, kitchen table, dog snoring. Before Mathilde, an expanse of white paper, easy as a child’s cheeks. [Write it, Mathilde. Understand.]

  Florida, she wrote. Summer. 1980s. Outside, sun blaze unbearable over the ocean. Inside, carpets in beige. Popcorn ceilings. Potholders in the olive kitchen silkscreened with the lewd shape of Florida, mermaids on the left, rockets on the right. Naugahyde recliners; a bestiary of modern American life flashing on the television. Floating alone in the hot cave of the house: a boy and a girl. Twins, barely fifteen. Charles, called Chollie; Gwendolyn, called Gwennie.

  [Odd, how easy it all is to summon. Like a pain from a dream. A life you’d imagined so long that it had almost become a memory; this middle-class American childhood of the eighties that you’d never had.]

  In her room, the girl rubbed Vaseline on her lips, face blooming white breath in the mirror.

  She would emerge in pink pajamas when the father came home, her wild curly hair in two braids, and warm up the dinner she’d saved for him, some chicken and a boiled vegetable. She’d yawn and pretend sleep. Keeping their father company in the kitchen, her brother would imagine the metamorphosis inside his sister’s bedroom: legs peeled, pale in the miniskirt, eyes darkened with makeup. A strange creature, so different from the sister he knew, breaching into the night through the window.

  Her nighttime changes were not despite the fear; they were about it. Small even for a fifteen-year-old, she could have been held down by any passing boy. A refutation of the girl who had already studied calculus, who had won science fairs by building her own robots. She went shivering down the dark streets, toward the convenience store, feeling acutely the untouched place under her skirt. She walked it down the aisles. Burt Bacharach; the cashier watching her with open mouth, skin piebald with vitiligo. Man in a white jumpsuit, watching her in the soda section, jangling the change in his pocket. Get me one a those, he ordered, but about the greasy spinning hot dog. Under the angry moth light outside, three or four kids were flipping their skateboards. She didn’t know them. They were older, college-aged though she doubted—greasy hair, baja hoodies—they were in college. She stood by the pay phone, dipping her finger in and out of the coin slot. No change, no change, no change. Slowly, one came closer. Bright blue eyes under a monobrow.

  Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifte
r these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual highwire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]

  For nearly a year, a besotment of fingers and tongues. Out the window in the dark she went, again and again; and school came and debate team and band practice. Slow solidification beneath the ribs like rubber cement exposed to air. The body knows what the brain refutes. She wasn’t dumb. That year she was lucky in fashion: sweatshirts worn huge, to the knees. The mother came home late on Christmas Eve. The girl came out on Christmas morning in her flannel nightgown and the mother turned, singing. She saw her daughter, the bulge at the waist, and dropped the monkey bread she’d been making.

  The girl was taken to a cool place. Nobody was unkind. Her insides were scrubbed. Voices soft. She left, not the same girl as she’d been when she went in.

  [The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark. Brains are miraculous; humans storytelling creatures. The shards draw themselves together and make something whole.]

  The twins turned sixteen in the spring. There were the new locks outside her door, on the windows. Her brother suddenly three inches taller than she. He began to follow her around, a goofy-looking shadow. “Play Monopoly?” he’d say, as she crossed through the room one of the dull Saturday nights. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. She was grounded, she had to murmur to the skateboarding boys who hung around the school gates waiting, to the girls she’d known since kindergarten, who’d wanted her to join them watching The Dark Crystal and eating Jiffy Pop and crimping their hair. She was always more popular than her twin, but soon a whiff of sex sullied her. She had only her brother. Then Michael.

  —

  MICHAEL WAS BEAUTIFUL, half Japanese, tall and dreamy with a fashionable slab of black hair over one eye. In class, Gwennie had spent weeks surreptitiously imagining her tongue licking the pale skin of his inner wrist. He dreamt of boys; Gwennie dreamt of him. Chollie liked him grudgingly; her brother required absolutes: loyalty, generosity, things Michael couldn’t give. But the marijuana he shared relaxed Chollie enough to make him begin to crack jokes, to smile. So it passed until the end of school. Her mother in San Diego, Milwaukee, Binghamton; she was a traveling nurse who took care of babies almost too tender to survive.