by Lauren Groff
Chollie had showed her his stash of Ecstasy and slyly said, “This is how my quest for world dominance begins.” Said he’d be out all night selling at a rave, would she be okay? “Go,” she said, “make your money.” He went. Their father was in his room, sleeping. Now she put the envelope of Antoinette’s cash under her brother’s pillow and considered it; then she changed his smelly sheets and placed the money under the pillow again. She took the bag of drugs from under her own mattress and swallowed one pill and waited for it to seize her, then shook the whole bottle in her mouth and swallowed the pills with milk from the carton. The ache began in her stomach.
Already woozy. The air had turned muddy. She collapsed into bed. Vaguely, she heard her father leave for work. Sleep stole over her like waves. In the waves, a sweetness, a peace.
[Go ahead and weep into your wine, angry woman, half a life away. What do you hope will follow you out of the dark? Morning coming into the window as every day it does, the dog waking on her bed out of dreams of chipmunks; but there is no such thing as resurrection. Still, you did it anyway, didn’t you, brought the poor girl back. Now what are you going to do? Here she is before you, as alive as she’ll ever be, and your apology would never have meant a thing.]
Chollie came home to a heavy silence and knew something was wrong. The father away at work, Chollie overdue because of the concert. He stood in the door, hearing nothing, then he ran. Found what he found. Everything in him flipped over. He waited for the ambulance, and as he waited, the plan emerged, what he would do, the years it would take. He slid his sister’s head on his lap and held it there. From a mile away, the sound. The sirens.
—
IT WAS DAWN, a thin pale spreading over the distance. Mathilde was shaking, but not from cold. She pitied them, the cowardly ones. Because she, too, despaired; she, too, was blinded by the dark, but to turn your back is too easy. Cheating. The handful, the cold glass, the swallow. The chair kicked back, the burn on the skin of the throat. A minute of pain, then stillness. Despicable, such lack of pride. Better to feel it all. Better the long, slow burn.
Mathilde’s heart was a bitter one, vengeful and quick. [True.]
Mathilde’s heart was a kindly one. [True.]
Mathilde thought of Land’s gorgeous back, muscled and long, the spine a delicate splitting serration. It had been Lotto’s back as well. The lips, the cheekbones, the eyelashes, all the same. The ghost manifest in the living flesh. She could give the boy this gift. If not father or mother, still blood, an uncle. Chollie had known Lotto second best, after all; he could tell Land about Lotto, summon a person out of what, to Land, had just been details, gleanings: interviews, plays, a brief moment with the widow, but Mathilde knew how closed off she was, how she’d shown him only her body, nothing real. Chollie could bring Gwennie to him, a mother. Mathilde could leave Land with something living. She could give Land and his uncle time.
She stood. The thing that had given her lightness these past months had fled, and her bones felt made of granite, her skin stretched like an old tarp over them. She hefted the box, feeling all the weight of Chollie’s evil in her arms, and set it in the sink.
She lit a match and watched its blue edge suck down the stick, and for a moment, the lightness returned, the breath to blow out the flame just behind her lips—fuck it, Chollie deserved the worst for what he’d done to Lotto in his last days, the doubt he’d created—but something stopped her breath. [Internal; not us.] Just before the flame singed her skin, she dropped the match onto the box. She watched the papers burn, bereft, her curse on Chollie going up in a tongue of smoke. She would send a letter in her own hand, later, to both men. Land could call his newfound uncle every day of his life. He would. Chollie would host Land’s wedding at his palace by the sea. Chollie would be at Land’s children’s graduations, would drive up in the Porsches he’d give them. Land would be loved.
“That’s not nothing,” she said aloud.
The dog woke, screaming at the smoke. When Mathilde looked up from the charred mess, the small, dark girl she’d summoned had gone.
23
DECADES LATER, the nursemaid would come into the tea room in Mathilde’s house. [Blue canvas on the wall; a cool, twilit sense of being young and lovelorn.] She would carry a platter of the cakes that were the only thing Mathilde would eat anymore. She would talk, this woman, talk and talk, because there was a smile on Mathilde’s lips. But when she touched her, the nursemaid would find the old woman gone. No breath. Skin cooling. The last spark in Mathilde’s brain was pulling her toward the sea, the raspy beach, a fiery love like a torch in the night almost imperceptible down the shoreline.
Chollie, who heard the news an hour later, took a flight. In the middle of the morning, he outsmarted the locks of Mathilde’s flat in London and came in with his halting, panting steps. He was as fat and antique these days as a potbellied stove. Through everything, he survived, like the rats, the jellyfish, the cockroaches would. He took the three slender books that Mathilde had written to an echoing lack of acclaim and put them in his bag. [Alazon, Eiron, Bomolochos; she was sly but unsubtle in this. In a room in his house the rest of the print runs sat in cardboard boxes, being eaten by cockroaches.] Though he was old, he was as sharp as ever. He poured bourbon, then neglected the glass and took the bottle to the attic with him. He spent a night paging through the valuable first drafts of Lancelot Satterwhite’s plays in their careful archival boxes, searching for the first ludicrously yellowed printed-out draft of The Springs. It would be worth more than this entire house. He wouldn’t find it. It was no longer kin of the other plays, having left Mathilde decades earlier one dawn, filched by the hand of a young man who had woken in shame and fury in an alien house, who had let the dog out in the dark to pee and made fruit salad and coffee without turning on the light. He had slid the papers under his shirt, had warmed them with his skin as he drove back to the city. In the end, it didn’t matter. Land had had a claim as strong as any, it is true; a boy who had explained the theft in a letter he’d tucked in a great blue bowl full of ripening tomatoes, a boy who had felt in his bones what only one other person had truly known.
—
TWO YEARS A WIDOW, Mathilde went to see Land in New Jersey. A production of The Tempest. He’d been Caliban. He acquitted himself well, but alas, there was no spark. The children of geniuses rarely being geniuses, et cetera. His greatest talent was the gorgeous face he hid behind the latex.
After the curtain call, she walked into the dusk. She hadn’t disguised herself, thinking there would have been no need; she was a healthy weight, her hair had returned, and it was a natural soft brown. But there he was in front of the theater, smoking a cigarette in his lumpy makeup, the hump on his back, the rags. “What did you think, Mathilde?” he called across the eddy of people leaving for dinner, for the babysitter, for a drink.
The look he gave her. Christ. It was as if he could see into her dark heart and was sickened to death by what he saw.
Well, it’s true, Lotto had the same moral rigidity. Had he known—all that she had done, all that she was, the anger sparking like lightning under her skin, the times when she would hear him boast at some party, jovially drunk, and hate the words coming out of that beautiful mouth, how she wanted to incinerate the shoes he kicked off everywhere, the lazy way he had with people’s swift and delicate feelings, the ego heavier than the granite slab their house was hitched to, how she was sometimes sick of his body that had once been hers, the smell of the body, the flab on the waist, the unsightly hairs of that body that was now bones—would he have forgiven her? Oh, Christ, of course he would.
She stopped still. Stand straight, she told herself. She gave poor Land her largest smile. “Don’t lose heart. Onward!” she said.
She saw his face again and again as she drove back fast through the night to get home to her house, her dog. How ugly a handsome man can sometimes be. Perhaps Land was a far better actor than
she’d ever believed him to be; better, for sure, than Lotto had been. Well, she knew what that was like.
—
EMPTY THEATERS ARE MORE SILENT than other empty places. When theaters sleep, they dream of noise and light and motion. She found only one door unlocked to the street and stepped out of the freezing wind. Even now, bird-bone Danica and pretty Susannah were exhausting their small talk, waving off the waiter, almost ready to start badmouthing Mathilde for standing them up. So be it. All day at work she’d felt a ratcheting of anxiety, and when Lancelot wouldn’t answer her texts, when he didn’t come home, she went to find him. Gacy on the marquee. Play about evil, corroding him internally. She followed the faint traces of his voice through the backstage, hands out, shuffling, to feel her way in the dark; she wouldn’t turn on a light and warn him she was there. At last she was in the wings, and there he was onstage, of course, in dim light, saying:
Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart,
Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood,
When man’s worst sin is, he does too much good!
Who, then, dares to be half so kind again?
For bounty, that makes gods, does still mar men.
It took her to the end of the scene to identify it: Timon of Athens. Her least favorite Shakespeare. He started the next scene. Oh. He was doing the whole play. Alone. To nobody.
She was safe in the darkness, and there allowed herself to smile at him—ludicrous, sweet man—and the smile expanded alarmingly in her diaphragm so that she had to breathe deep, stern breaths to keep from laughing. Because look at him, too tall, stalking the stage. Keeping the old dream moribund with these infusions of acting; the old self she thought dead still secretly alive. But stagy, too loud. Not the actor he thought he was.
She stood in the black folds of the curtain, and he finished and bowed and bowed; then he caught his breath and came back down into his body again. He flicked off the lights. He had a light on his cell, and he guided himself out with it, but she was careful to stay away from its dim circle. He passed close by her and she caught a whiff of him: sweat and coffee and his own human smell, and maybe bourbon to loosen him. She waited until the door echoed closed, and then she came more swiftly through the dark by feel, outside into the icy street, and jumped into a cab and raced him home. When he came in, it was only minutes after her, but she’d smelled the winter in his hair when he leaned his head against her neck. She held his head gently, feeling his secret happiness moving in him.
—
LATER, UNDER HER NOM DE PLUME, she wrote a play called Volumnia. It played in a fifty-seat theater. She gave it her all.
[She shouldn’t have been surprised when nobody came.]
24
SO LONG AGO, and she had been so little then. There was a long darkness between what she remembered and the results. There was something ajar here. A four-year-old is still an infant. It seemed too harsh to hate a baby for being a baby, for making a baby’s mistake.
Perhaps it was always there; perhaps it was made in explanation, but all along she had held within her a second story underneath the first, waging a terrible and silent battle with her certainty. She had to believe of herself that the better story was the true one, even if the worse was insistent.
She was four years old, and she heard her brother playing upstairs in her grandmother’s house when the rest of the family was eating pheasants her father had shot that morning. In the window, the family was gathered under the tree, baguettes and cassoulet on the table, wine. Her mother’s rosy face was tipped back, sun full on her skin. Her father was feeding Bibiche a morsel. Her grandmother’s mouth was more dash than n, signaling happiness. The wind was rising, the leaves shushing. There was a smell of good manure on the air and a delicious far Breton waiting clammy on the countertop for dessert. She was on the potty, trying to go, but her brother was more interesting with his songs and thumps above. He was supposed to be sleeping. Bad boy, he would not.
The girl went up the stairs, gathering dust with her fingertip.
She opened the door to the room. Her baby brother saw her and crowed with happiness. Come on, she said. He tottered out. She followed him to the stairs, golden old oak shining from the slippers that buffed it up and down, day after day.
Her brother stood at the top of the steps, wobbly, his hands reaching for hers, sure she would help him. He pressed up against her. But instead of taking his hand in hers, she moved her leg where it was touching him. She didn’t mean to, not really, well, maybe some of her meant it, perhaps she did. He tottered. And then she watched the baby tumble slowly down the stairs, his head like a coconut, thump-a-bump all the way down.
The still knot of him at the bottom. Thrown laundry.
When she looked up, she saw the ten-year-old cousin where she hadn’t seen her before, standing in the door of the upstairs bathroom, gaping.
This was the bad version. This version was what later events told her had happened. It was as real as the other. They played simultaneously in a loop.
Yet Mathilde could never quite believe it. That twitch of a leg a later insertion, surely. She could not believe and yet something in her did believe, and this contradiction that she held within her became the source of everything.
All that remained were the facts. Before it all happened, she had been so beloved. Afterward, love had been withdrawn. And she had pushed or she hadn’t; the result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she’d been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this, how could she not have been forgiven?
25
IT WAS MATHEMATICAL, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.
This one man nervous in a suit a size too small for his long, lean self. This woman in a green lace dress cut to the upper thigh with a white rose behind her ear. Christ, so young.
The woman before them was a Unitarian minister and on her buzzed scalp the gray hairs shone in the swab of sun through the lace in the window. Outside, Poughkeepsie was waking. Behind them, a man in a custodian’s uniform cried softly beside a man in pajamas with a dachshund: their witnesses. A shine in everyone’s eye. One could taste the love on the air. Or maybe that was sex. Or maybe it was all the same then.
“I do,” she said. “I do,” he said. They did; they would.
Our children will be so fucking beautiful, he thought, looking at her.
Home, she thought, looking at him.
“You may kiss,” said the officiant. They did; would.
Now they thanked everyone and laughed, and papers were signed, and congratulations offered, and all stood for a moment unwilling to leave this genteel living room where there was such softness. The newlyweds thanked everyone again shyly and went out the door into the cool morning. They laughed, rosy. In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.
—
HER LIFE. In the window the parakeet. Scrap of blue midday in the London dusk. Ages away from what had been most deeply lived. Day on a rocky beach, creatures in the tide pool. All those ordinary afternoons, listening to footsteps in the beams of the house and knowing the feeling behind them.
Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life. The hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often that this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell, delineated the warmth she’d found in that house in the cherry orchard. Or this: every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her up with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black. Almost unremarked upon, this kindness. He would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she’d feel something in her rising through her body to meet him. These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.
[That’s not true, Mathilde; the whisper in the ear.]
Oh. Christ. Yes, there was one. Solitary, gleaming. A regret.
It was that, all her life, she had said no. From the beginning, she had let so few people in. That first night, his young face glowing up at hers in the black light, bodies beating the air around them, and inside her there was the unexpected sharp recognition; oh, this, a sudden peace arriving for her, she who hadn’t been at peace since she was so little. Out of nowhere. Out of this surprising night with its shatters of lightning in the stormy black campus outside, with the heat and song and sex and animal fear inside. He had seen her and made the leap and swum through the crowd and had taken her hand, this bright boy who was giving her a place to rest. He offered not only his whole laughing self, the past that built him and the warm beating body that moved her with its beauty and the future she felt compressed and waiting, but also the torch he carried before him in the dark, his understanding, dazzling, instant, that there was goodness at her core. With the gift came the bitter seed of regret, the unbridgeable gap between the Mathilde she was and the Mathilde he had seen her to be. A question, in the end, of vision.