Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

They laughed. Danica rang the doorbell in Morse code: SOS. “I’d take that bet,” Chollie said. “Lotto won’t cheat. I’ve known him since he was fourteen. He’s arrogant as shit but loyal.”

“A million bucks,” Danica said. Chollie put the Buddha down and they shook.

The door swung open and there was glossy Lotto with sweat beads at his temples. Through the empty living room, they could see a slice of Mathilde as she shut the bathroom door on herself, a blue morpho folding its wings. Danica had to restrain herself from licking Lotto’s cheek when she kissed him. Salty, oh my god, delicious, like a hot soft pretzel. She always went a little weak around him.

“A hundred thousand welcomes. I could weep and I could laugh, I am light and heavy. Welcome,” Lotto said. Oh dear. They had so little. Bookshelves made of cinder blocks and plywood, couch from the college common room, rickety table and chairs meant for a patio. Still, how happy the place felt. In Danica, a pulse of envy.

“Spartan,” Chollie said, and hefted the giant Buddha to the mantelpiece, where it beamed over the white room. Chollie rubbed the statue’s belly, then went into the kitchen and had a bird bath of dish soap and handfuls of water to wash all the dumpster stink off his person. From there, he watched the arriving flood of the poseurs, phonies, and jolly prepsters with whom he’d had to contend since Lotto had been sent off to boarding school, then college; his friend had taken him in when Chollie had no one else. That awful Samuel kid who pretended he was Lotto’s best friend. False. No matter how much Chollie insulted him, Samuel was unperturbed: Chollie knew he was too low, too much of a slug, for Samuel to care about. Lotto was taller than all, shooting off laser beams of joy and warmth, and everyone coming in blinked, dazzled by his grin. They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

In twenty years, Chollie announced silently, I will own you all. He snorted. Smoldered.

Mathilde was standing at the refrigerator, frowning at the puddle around Chollie’s feet, the water stains on his khaki shorts. On her chin there was a raspberry abrasion shining through her cover-up.

“Hey, there, Sourpuss,” he said.

“Hi, Sour Pussy,” she said.

“You kiss my friend with that dirty mouth of yours?” he said, but she only opened the fridge and took out a bowl of hummus and two beers and gave him one. He could smell her, the rosemary of her silky blond hair, the Ivory soap, the unmistakable starch of sex. Ah, so. He’d been right.

“Mingle,” she said, moving off. “And don’t make anyone punch you, Chollie.”

“Risk destroying this perfection?” he said, and gestured at his face. “Never.”

Like fish in an aquarium, bodies moved through the hot space. In the bedroom, a ring of girls was forming. They were looking at the bank of irises in the window above their heads.

“How can they afford this?” Natalie murmured. She’d been so nervous to come — Lotto and Mathilde so glamorous — that she’d had a few shots before leaving her house. She was actually pretty drunk now.

“Rent-controlled,” a girl in a leather miniskirt said, looking around for somebody to save her. The others had melted away when Natalie joined them; she was one of those people it was nice to see when you’re tipsy at some college party, but now they were in the real world, all she did was complain about money. It was exhausting. They were all poor, they were supposed to be poor out of college, get over it. Miniskirt snagged a freckled girl passing by. All three had at one time slept with Lotto. Each of them secretly believed he liked her best.

“Yeah,” Natalie said. “But Mathilde doesn’t even have a job. I’d get how they could pay if she was still modeling, but she already caught a husband, so she stopped, yadda yadda who knows. I wouldn’t stop modeling if anyone wanted me. And Lotto’s an actor , and though we all think he’s amazing, it’s not like he’s going to star in the next Tom Cruise movie or anything. I mean, that awful skin of his. No offense! I mean, he’s totally brilliant , but it’d be hard to make ends meet even as an Equity actor, and he’s not even that.”

The other two looked at Natalie as if from a great distance, saw the bulging eyes, the unplucked moustache, sighed. “You don’t know?” Miniskirt said. “Lotto’s an heir to a fucking fortune. Water bottling. You know Hamlin Springs water? That’s them. His mom, like, owns all of Florida. She’s a bazillionaire. They could have bought a three-bedroom with a doorman on the Upper East Side with the change in their pockets.”

“It’s actually kind of humble that they live like this,” Freckles said. “He’s the best.”

“She, on the other hand,” Natalie said, lowering her voice. The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt. “Mathilde’s a conundrum wrapped in a mystery wrapped in bacon. She didn’t even have any friends in college. I mean, everybody has friends in college. Where did she come from? Nobody has any idea.”

“I know,” Miniskirt said. “She’s so calm and quiet. Ice queen. And Lotto’s the loudest. Warm, sexy. Opposites.”

“I don’t get it, honestly,” Freckles said.

“Eh. First marriage,” Miniskirt said.

“And guess who’ll be there with casseroles when it all comes apart!” Freckles said. They laughed.

Well, Natalie thought. It was clear now. The apartment, the way Lotto and Mathilde floated on their own current. The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism. Natalie had once wanted to be a sculptor and was pretty damn good at it. She’d welded a nine-foot stainless-steel DNA helix that sat in the science wing of her high school. She’d dreamt of building gigantic moving structures like gyroscopes and pinwheels, spun only by the wind. But her parents were right about getting a job. She studied economics and Spanish at Vassar, which was only logical, and yet she had to rent someone’s mothball-smelling closet in Queens until her internship ended. She had a hole in her one pair of high-heeled shoes, which she had to fix every night with superglue. Grinding, this life. Not what she had been promised. It was explicit in the brochures she’d looked at like porn in her suburban bed when she was applying: you get to Vassar, those laughing, beautiful kids promised, you live a gilded life. Instead, this dingy apartment with its bad beer was as high a life as she was going to live anytime soon.

Through the door to the living room, she saw Lotto laughing down at some joke made by Samuel Harris, son of the shadiest senator in D.C. The senator was the kind of man who, having expended all his empathetic capital on marrying someone surprising, wanted to make sure no other people had the ability to make their own choices for themselves. He was anti-immigration, antiwoman, antigay, and that was just for starters. To his credit, Samuel started up the Campus Liberals, but Lotto and Samuel had both picked up the aristocrat’s inbred sense of condescension from Samuel’s snotty mom. She’d made Natalie feel like shit once for blowing her nose in her dinner napkin when she and Samuel briefly dated. Lotto, at least, had enough charm to make you feel that you were interesting. Samuel just made you feel inferior. Natalie had an urge to put her Doc Marten through both of their stupid richy-rich faces. She heaved a sigh. “Bottled water is terrible for the environment,” she said, but the others had vanished, comforting that chick Bridget who was crying in the corner, still in love with Lotto. She was just embarrassing to look at next to Mathilde’s tall bony blond. Natalie frowned at herself in the cracked mirror, seeing only a fractured girl with a bitter mouth.