Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“Thirty seconds,” Mathilde said. Prince was playing from the computer, of course.

Chollie leaned toward Danica, angling for the midnight kiss. Horrible little man. Such a mistake to let him feel her up in the taxi one night coming back from the Hamptons this past summer. What was she thinking? She’d been between boyfriends, but still. “Not a fucking chance,” she said, but he was speaking.

“… owe me two million dollars,” he said.

“What?” she said.

He grinned, said, “Twenty-something seconds until 1999. You bet me they’d be divorced by 1998.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Fuck you, welsher,” he said.

“We have until the end of the year,” she said.

“Twenty seconds,” Mathilde said. “Good-bye, 1998, you slow and muddy year.”

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” Lotto said drunkenly.

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing,” Mathilde said. Lotto recoiled, opened his mouth, closed it.

“See?” Danica muttered. “They’re fighting. If one of them storms out, I’m calling it a win.”

Mathilde snatched a glass from the tray, and said, “Ten.” She licked at the champagne she spilled on her hand.

“I’ll absolve your debt if you go on a date with me,” Chollie said, his hot breath in Danica’s ear.

“What?” Danica said.

“I’m rich. You’re mean,” Chollie said. “Why the hell not.”

“Eight,” Mathilde said.

“Because I loathe you,” Danica said.

“Six. Five. Four,” the others said. Chollie raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, fine,” Danica sighed.

“One! Happy New Year!” they shouted, and someone gave three stomps from the apartment above, and the baby wailed, and outside they could hear the very faint noise of voices shouting all the way over the crystalline night from Times Square, then a blast of fireworks in the street.

“Happy 1999, my love,” Lotto said to Mathilde; and it had been so very long since they had kissed like this. A month at least. He had forgotten about the freckles on her pretty nose. How had he forgotten such a thing? Nothing like having a wife who worked herself to death to stifle the mood for love. Nothing like dying dreams, he thought, and disappointment.

Mathilde’s irises shifted smaller when she pulled her head back. “This will be your breakthrough year,” she said. “You’ll be Hamlet on Broadway. You’ll find your groove.”

“I love your optimism,” he said, but felt sick. Elizabeth and Rachel were both kissing Susannah’s cheeks because she looked so lonely. Samuel kissed her also, blushing, but she laughed him off.

“I’m trashed,” Danica said, pulling away from her kiss with Chollie. She looked startled.

They left, two by two, and Mathilde turned off the lights, yawned, piled the food and glasses on the counters to clean them up in the morning. Lotto watched as she shimmied off her dress in the bedroom and climbed under the duvet in her thong.

“You remember when we used to have sex before we even went to bed on New Year’s Day? A bodily blessing for the new year,” he called to her through the doorway. He considered saying more; that this year, maybe, they could have a kid. Lotto could be the stay-at-home parent. For sure, if he was the one who had the relevant anatomy, a mistake would already have been made with the birth control and a little Lotto would be even now kicking its heels in his gut. It was unfair that women could have such primordial joy and men could not.

“Baby, we used to have sex on garbage day and grocery-shopping day, too,” she said.

“What changed?” he said.

“We’re old,” she said. “We still do it more than most of our married friends. Twice a week’s not bad.”

“Not enough,” he muttered.

“I heard that,” she said. “As if I’ve ever made myself unavailable to you.”

He heaved a sigh, prepared to stand.

“Fine,” she said. “If you come to bed now, I’ll let you do me. But don’t be mad if I fall asleep.”

“Glory. How tempting,” Lotto said, and sat back down with his bottle in the dark.

He listened to his wife’s breath even into snores and wondered how he had arrived here. Drunk, lonely, stewing in his failure. Triumph had been assured. Somehow, he’d frittered his potential away. A sin. Thirty and still a nothing. Kills you slowly, failure. As Sallie would have said, he done been bled out.

[Perhaps we love him more like this; humbled.]

Tonight, he understood his mother, burying herself alive in her beach house. No more risking the hurt that came from contact with others. He listened to the dark beat under his thoughts, which he had had forever, since his father had died. Release. A fuselage could fall from a plane and pin him into the earth. One flick of a switch in his brain would power him down. Blessed relief at last, it would be. Aneurysms ran in the family. His father’s had been so sudden, forty-six, too young; and all Lotto wanted was to close his eyes and find his father there, to put his head on his father’s chest and smell him and hear the warm thumpings of his heart. Was that so much to ask? He’d had one parent who’d loved him. Mathilde had given him enough but he’d ground her down. Her hot faith had cooled. She’d averted her face. She was disappointed in him. Oh, man, he was losing her, and if he lost her, if she left him — the leather valise in her hand, her thin back unturning — he might as well be dead.

Lotto was weeping; he could tell from the cold on his face. He tried to keep quiet. Mathilde needed sleep. She had been working sixteen-hour days, six days a week, kept them fed and housed. He brought nothing to their marriage, only disappointment and dirty laundry. He fished out the laptop he’d stored under the couch when Mathilde had ordered him to clean up before everyone had come over tonight. He just wanted the Internet, the other sad souls of the world, but instead, he opened a blank document, shut his eyes, thought of what he’d lost. Home state, mother, that light he’d once lit in strangers, in his wife. His father. Everyone had underestimated Gawain because he was quiet and unlettered, but only he had understood the value of the water under the scrubby family land, had captured and sold it. Lotto thought of the photos of his mother when she was young, once a mermaid, the tail rolled like a stocking over her legs, undulating in the cold springs. He remembered his own small hand immersed in the source, the bones freezing past the point of numbness, how he’d loved that pain.

Pain! Swords of morning light in his eyes.

Mathilde was haloed blindingly in the icicles in the window. She was in her slattern’s robe. Her feet were red at the knuckles with cold. And her face — what was it? There was something wrong. Eyes puffed and red. What had Lotto done? Surely something awful. Maybe he’d left porn on his laptop and she’d seen it when she had woken up. Maybe a terrible kind of porn, the worst, maybe he’d been led into it by wild curiosity, clicking through wormholes so progressively more evil that he ended up at the unforgivable. She would leave him. He’d be finished. Fat and alone and a failure, not even worth the air he’d breathe. “Don’t leave me,” he said. “I’ll be better.”

She looked up, then stood and came across the rug to the couch and put the computer down on the coffee table and took his cheeks in her cold hands.

Her robe parted, revealing her thighs, like sweet pink putti. Practically bearing wings.

“Oh, Lotto,” Mathilde said, and her coffee breath mingled with his own dead muskrat breath, and he felt the swoop of her eyelashes on his temple. “Baby, you’ve done it,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“It’s so good. I don’t know why I was so surprised, of course you’re brilliant. It’s just been a struggle for so long.”