Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

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THE SUN SHIFTED TO RECLINING. It was eight at night.

Calm. Mild. End of autumn. Chill in the air like a premonition.

Susannah came through the door that led up into the garden. The apartment with its new jute rug was still. She found Mathilde alone, tossing vinaigrette into Bibb lettuce in the galley kitchen.

“Did you hear?” Susannah murmured, but was struck silent when Mathilde turned her face toward her. Earlier, Susannah had thought that walking into the apartment with its new coat of bright yellow paint had been like walking into the sun, blinding. But now the color played with the cinnamon freckles on Mathilde’s face. She’d gotten an asymmetrical haircut, her blond lopped at the right jawbone, at the left collar, and it set off her high cheekbones. Susannah felt a pulse of attraction. Odd. All this time, Mathilde had seemed plain, shadowed by her husband’s light, but now the pairing clicked. Mathilde was, in fact, ravishing.

“Did I hear what?” Mathilde said.

“Oh, Mathilde. Your hair,” Susannah said. “It’s wonderful.”

Mathilde put a hand up to it, and said, “Thanks. What did I hear?”

“Right,” Susannah said, and picked up the two bottles of wine Mathilde indicated with her chin. She said, as she followed Mathilde out the entryway, up the back stairs, “You know Kristina from our class? In that a cappella group the Zaftones? Inky hair and, well, zaftig. I think Lotto and she—” Susannah made a face to herself, Oh, you dummy, and Mathilde paused on the step, then waved a hand as if to say, Oh, yes, Lotto and everybody screwed like bonobos, which Susannah had to admit was true, and they came up into the garden. They stopped, autumn-struck. Lotto and Mathilde had spread out thrift-store sheets on the grass and the friends had arranged the potluck in the middle, and everyone was lounging quietly, eyes closed in the last morsel of chill fall sun, drinking the cold white wine and Belgian beer, waiting for the first person to reach in and take food.

Mathilde put her salad bowl down, and said, “Eat, kiddos.” Lotto smiled up at her and took a mini-spanakopita from a warm pile. The rest of them, a dozen or so, huddled into the food and began talking again.

Susannah stood on her toes and whispered up into Mathilde’s ear, “Kristina. She killed herself. Hanged herself in the bathroom. Out of the blue, only yesterday. Nobody knew she was miserable. She had a boyfriend and everything and a job with the Sierra Club and an apartment in the nice part of Harlem. Makes no sense.”

Mathilde had gone very still and had lost her constant small smile. Susannah knelt and served herself watermelon, cutting the big pieces into slivers: she wasn’t eating real food anymore because she had a new TV role she was too embarrassed to talk about in front of Lotto. For one thing, it wasn’t Hamlet , in which he’d shined so brilliantly their last semester in college. It was just a job as a teenager on a soap opera, she knew she was selling out. And yet it was more than anything Lotto had gotten since they graduated. He’d been the understudy in a few off-off-Broadway things; he’d had a tiny role at the Actors Theatre in Louisville. That was it for a year and a half. Lotto returned to her again as he’d looked at the end of Hamlet , bowing, having sweated through his costume, and she’d felt awe, had shouted “Bravo!” from the audience, having lost the role of Ophelia to a girl with huge boobs bared naked in the pond scene. Ho-bag slut. Susannah bit into her watermelon and swallowed a pulse of victory. She loved Lotto more, in pitying.

Above the scrum, Mathilde shivered and pulled her cardigan closer. A burgundy leaf fell from the Japanese maple and landed upright in a spinach-artichoke dip. It was chilly in the shadow under the tree. Soon, there would be the long winter, cold and white. An erasure of this night, the garden. She plugged in the strand of Christmas lights that they had twined through the branches above, and the tree sparked into a dendrite. She sat behind her husband because she wanted to hide, and his back was so beautiful, broad and muscled, that she rested her face there and felt comforted. She listened to his voice muffled through his chest, the smooth edge of his Southern accent.

“… two old men sitting on a porch, shooting the sea breeze,” Lotto was saying; so, a joke. “This old hound dog comes out and circles around in the dust and sits down and starts licking at his junk. Slurping and gulping and loving the heck out of his pink little stump. A tube of lipstick all the way extended. So one of the old guys winks at his friend and says, Man, I sure wish I could do that. And the other old guy says, Pshaw! That dog would BITE you.”

They all laughed, not so much at the joke, but at the way Lotto delivered it, the pleasure he took. Mathilde knew it had been his father’s favorite, that it had made Gawain guffaw into his hand and turn red every time Lotto told it. The warmth of her husband through his emerald polo shirt began to break up the clod of dread in Mathilde. Kristina had lived on her freshman floor. Mathilde had walked in on her once crying in the coed showers, had recognized her beautiful alto voice, and had walked out again, choosing to give the gift of privacy over that of comfort. Only in retrospect was that the worse choice. Mathilde felt a slow welling of anger at Kristina in her gut and breathed into Lotto to quell it.

Lotto reached behind him for Mathilde and scooped her sideways into his lap with his paw. His stomach rumbled but he couldn’t eat more than a bite or two: he’d been waiting for a callback for a week now, unwilling to leave the apartment for fear of missing it. Mathilde had proposed the potluck to get his mind off it all. The role was for Claudio in Measure for Measure , Shakespeare in the Park next summer. He could see himself in a doublet in front of thousands. Bats darting. Dusk shooting pink flares overhead. Since graduation, he had worked steadily, if in small roles. He had gotten Equity. This was the next step skyward.

He looked through the window inside the apartment, where the phone persisted unringing on the mantel. Behind it stood the painting Mathilde had brought home a few months earlier from the gallery where she’d worked for the past year. After its artist had stormed out, flinging the canvas against the wall and breaking the stretcher, the gallery owner, Ariel, told her to toss it in the dumpster. Instead, Mathilde took the broken painting, restretched it, framed it, hung it behind the brass Buddha. It was a blue abstract and reminded Lotto of the moment every morning before dawn, a misty dim world between worlds. What’s the word? Eldritch. Like Mathilde, herself. He would come home some days after auditions to find her sitting in the dark, staring up at the painting with a glass of red wine cradled between both hands, a vague look on her face.

“Should I be worried?” he’d said once, after an audition for a show he didn’t even want, when he came home to find her sitting there in the darkening room. He kissed her behind the ear.

“No. I’m just so happy,” she had said.

He didn’t say that it had been a long day, that he’d had to wait in the drizzle on the street for two hours, that after he finally went in and read his lines and went out the door, he’d heard the director say, “Stellar. Too bad he’s a giant.” That his agent wasn’t returning his calls. That he would have relished a nice dinner for once. Because, in truth, he didn’t mind. If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him; and it had become painfully apparent over their short marriage that he was not worth the salt she sweated. The woman was a saint. She saved, fretted, somehow paid their bills when he brought in nothing. He had sat beside her until it was fully dark, and she turned with a rustling of silk and kissed him suddenly, and he carried her to bed without eating.