Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

The panic deepened. What if she was getting ready to leave him, what if her dark span wasn’t about her, but rather about him ? He knew he’d disappointed her; what if she knew she could do better? He opened his arms to her, more to console himself, but she only brought over a paper towel so he could fashion a bow around her bleeding finger.

“I don’t know. I think this is fun,” said Rachel. Loyal Rachel with the sharp little face, hungry eyes. She was down in the city from her prep school for the weekend. Barely fourteen years old, but she looked weary. Her nails were bitten beyond the quick, Lotto noticed. He’d have to ask Sallie if there was anything going on with her that he should know about. “I’m learning a lot. Beats Friday night’s all-dorm slumber party for sure.”

“I can imagine. Bottle of peppermint schnapps. The Breakfast Club on the VCR. Someone would be crying in the bathroom all night long. Midnight streaking across the quad. A game of all-girls’ spin the bottle. My Rachel reading a book in the corner in her lobster-print pajamas, judging them all like a mini-queen,” Lotto said. “The review in her journal would be devastating.”

Rachel said, “Disappointing, trite, and vapid. Two thumbs down.” They chuckled, the knot of desperation in the room gently loosed. This gentling would be Rachel’s effect, not a flashy gift, but good.

In the silence afterward, Luanne said, “Of course, there were professional ethics that should have precluded you taking the canvas, Mathilde.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Mathilde said. “It’d have been all right had someone else dug it from the dumpster? You? What is it, Luanne? You’re jealous?”

Luanne made a face. Of course she was jealous. It must have been so hard for Luanne, Lotto thought, back when Mathilde worked at the gallery. Mathilde was always the second in charge. Knowledgeable, clever, gracious. Surely Ariel had favored Mathilde. Everyone favored Mathilde.

“Ha,” Luanne said. “That’s hilarious. Jealous of you ?”

“Please stop,” said Chollie. “If it had been a Picasso, everyone would have praised Mathilde for her foresight. You’re being a total vagina.”

“You’re calling me a vagina? I don’t even know who you are,” Luanne said.

“We’ve met a million times. You say that every time,” Chollie said.

Danica was watching the argument as if it were a game of Ping-Pong. She’d lost even more weight; her arms and cheeks were downy with strange fur. She was laughing.

“Please stop fighting,” Rachel said quietly.

“I don’t know why I come to your stupid freaking parties anyway,” Luanne said, standing. She started to cry with anger. “You’re a total fake, Mathilde, and you know what I’m talking about.” She turned toward Lotto, and said, venomously, “Not you, Lotto, you’re just a freaking Bambi. Anybody but you would understand by this point you don’t have enough talent for the stage. But nobody wants to hurt you by saying it. Least of all your wife, who thrives on making you a freaking infant in your own life.”

Lotto was out of his chair so fast the blood fled from his head. “Shut your pig face, Luanne. My wife is the best human being on the planet and you know it.”

Rachel said, “Lotto!” and Mathilde said, low, “Lotto, stop,” and Natalie and Susannah said, “Hey!”

Only Chollie burst into high-pitched laughter. Olga, whom they had all forgotten, whipped around and socked him hard on the shoulder, then stood and clattered across the floor in her high heels, threw open the apartment door, shouted, “You are monsters!” and stormed up to the street. The frigid wind blew down the stairs from the front door and spangled them with snowflakes.

For a long moment, nothing. Then Mathilde said, “Go after her, Chollie.”

“Nah,” he said. “She won’t get far without her jacket.”

“It’s ten below, you fuck,” said Danica, and threw Olga’s synthetic fur at Chollie’s face. He got up grumbling and went out, slamming both doors. Mathilde rose and lifted the painting off the wall, over the shining pate of the brass Buddha, and handed it to Luanne.

Luanne looked at the painting in her hands. She said, “I can’t take this.” The others in the room had the sense of a ferocious battle being fought in the silence.

Mathilde sat, folded her arms, closed her eyes. Luanne put the painting against Mathilde’s knees. She went out and the door closed on her forever. In her absence, the room seemed brighter, even the overhead lights mellowed.

The friends left, one by one. Rachel shut herself into the bathroom, and they could hear the bath running.

When they were alone, Mathilde knelt in front of Lotto and took off her glasses and buried her face in his chest. He held her helplessly, making soothing sounds. Conflict nauseated him. He couldn’t bear it. His wife’s thin shoulders shook. But when at last she lifted her head, he was startled; her face was flushed and swollen, but she was laughing. Laughing? Lotto kissed the plum presses under her eyes, the freckles on her pale skin. He felt a vertiginous awe.

“You called Luanne a pig face,” she said. “You! Mr. Genial. Leaping in to save the day. Ha!”

Marvelous girl. He saw, with a warm rush, that she would come through this period of stringiness and woe so terrible she couldn’t share it with him. She would return. She would love him again. She wouldn’t leave. And in every place where they lived from then on, that painting would blue the air. It would be a testament. Their marriage picked itself up off the ground, stretched, looked at them with its hands on its hips. Mathilde was coming back to Lotto. Hallelujah.

—

“HALLELUJAH,” Chollie said, knocking back an eggnog, mostly brandy. It was eleven o’clock. “Christ is born.” He and Lotto were silently competing to see who could be drunker. Lotto hid it better, seemed normal, but the room spun if he didn’t blink it straight.

Outside, a thickness of night. Streetlights were lollipops of bright snow.

Aunt Sallie hadn’t stopped talking for hours, and now she was saying, “… course, I don’t know nothing, being not sophisticated as all y’all bachelor artists, and I sure as heck can’t tell you what to do, Lotto my boy, but if it was me, which it isn’t, I know, but if it was, I’d say I done gave it my all, be mighty proud of the three-four plays I done these past years and say, well, not everybody can be Richard Burton, and maybe I got something else I can do with my life. Like maybe, oh, take over the trust or something. Get back in Antoinette’s graces. Get undisinherited. You know she’s faring poorly, that sick heart of hers. Rachel and you both stand to gain a lot when she passes, god forbid it be soon.” She looked at Lotto cannily over her canary’s beak.

The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece. Around him, a lushness of poinsettias. Below, a fire Lotto had dared to make out of sticks collected from the park. Later, there would be a chimney fire, a sound of wind like a rushing freight train, and the trucks arriving in the night.

“I’m struggling,” Lotto said. “Maybe. But come on, I was born wealthy, white, and male. I’d have nothing to work with if I don’t have a little struggle. I’m doing what I love. That’s not nothing.” It sounded mechanical even to his own ears. Bad acting, Lotto. [But acting has slipped away from him a little, hasn’t it.] His heart wasn’t in the fight anymore.

“What’s success, anyway?” said Rachel. “I say it’s being able to work as much as you want at whatever lights you up. Lotto’s had steady work all these years.”

“I love you,” Lotto said to his sister. She was in high school, as skinny as Sallie. She took after the Satterwhite side, dark and hairy and ill-favored; her friends couldn’t believe that Lotto and she were related. Only Lotto thought her stunning, planar. Her thin face reminded him of Giacometti sculptures. She never smiled anymore. He pulled her close and kissed her, feeling how tightly she was coiled inside.