Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.

[It was clear now, what this was. His family inheritance. The final blinding salvo in the brain.]

He longed to go home. To Mathilde. He wanted to tell her he’d forgive her anything. Who cared anymore what she’d done, with whom? But all that was gone. He, too, would be gone soon.

He wished he could have known her old. He thought of how magnificent she would be then.

No sun but a dim gold. Tide tight to shore. His mother’s pink house. Three black birds huddled on the roof. He’d always loved the ocean’s scent of fresh sex. He climbed out of the water and went naked up the beach, the boardwalk, into the house of his mother, outside onto the balcony.

For years, it seemed, he stood in the dawn.

—

[THE THREAD OF SONG has been measured to its bare spool, Lotto. We’ll sing the last of it to you.]

Look, now. In the distance, a person.

Closer, it’s two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair. Blond, green bikini; tall, shining. They kiss, handsy things happening under his trunks, her top. Who wouldn’t envy such youth, who wouldn’t grieve what has been lost, in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath, while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by dunes. She pushes down his trunks; he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh, yes, you’d return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the Eastern Seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You’re unworthy of her. [Yes. [No.]] Even as you think of flight, you’re transfixed by the lovers, wouldn’t dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other and it’s hard to tell where one begins and one ends: hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand, her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it; there is an overlap; you have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing, the sex reaching its culmination [come!]. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turned skyward: is this drizzle? [It is.] Sound of small shears closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty, and here it is. The separation.

ONE DAY, WHEN MATHILDE was walking in the village where they’d been so happy, she heard a carful of boys drive up behind her. They were yelling lewd things. Anatomy they suggested she suck. What they’d like to do to her ass.

The shock became a flush of warmth, as if she’d drunk a tumbler of whiskey down.

It’s true, she thought. I still have a perfect ass.

But when the car drew level to her face, the boys went dumb. She saw them, pale, in passing. They gunned the engine and were gone.

This moment returned to her a month later when she crossed a Boston street and heard someone calling her name. A small woman darted up. Mathilde couldn’t place her. She had damp eyes and reddish hair hanging around her ears. Soft at the midsection, a breeder. From the looks of things, four little girls in matching Lilly Pulitzer were at home with the au pair.

The woman stopped five feet from Mathilde with a little cry. Mathilde brought her hands to her cheeks. “I know,” she said. “I’ve looked so old ever since my husband—”

She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“No,” the woman said. “You’re still elegant. It’s just. You look so angry , Mathilde.”

Later, Mathilde would remember the woman: Bridget, from her class in college. With the recollection came some small pang of guilt. Time, however, had obscured why.

For a breath, she studied the sidewalk waltz of chickadee and sun through windblown leaves. When she looked up again, the other woman took a step back. Then another.

Slowly, Mathilde said: “Angry. Sure. Well, what’s the point in hiding it anymore?”

And then she lowered her head, pressed on.

—

IT WOULD COME to her decades later, when she was old, in a porcelain bathtub held aloft on lion claws and her own body mercifully submerged, that her life could be drawn in the shape of an X. Her feet duck-splayed and reflected in the water.

From a terrifying expanse in childhood, life had focused to a single red-hot point in middle age. From there it had exploded outward again.

She slid her heels apart so they were no longer touching. The reflection moved with them.

Now her life showed itself to have been in a different shape, equal and opposite to the first. [Complex, our Mathilde; she can bear contradictions.]

Now the shape of her life appeared to be: greater than, white space, less than.

—

WHEN THEY WERE BOTH forty-six years old, Mathilde’s husband, the famous playwright Lancelot Satterwhite, left her.

He went away in an ambulance without sirens. Well, not him. The cold meat of him.

She called his sister, Rachel. Rachel screamed and screamed, and when she stopped, she said, ferociously, “Mathilde, we’re coming. Hang tight, we’re coming.” His aunt Sallie was traveling and hadn’t left a number, so she called Sallie’s lawyer. Within a minute after Mathilde hung up, Sallie called from Burma. “Mathilde,” she said. “You wait, darling, I’m coming.”

She called her husband’s best friend. “I’m taking the helicopter,” Chollie said. “I’m coming.”

They were soon to descend upon her. For now, she was alone. She stood on a boulder in the meadow, wearing one of her husband’s shirts, and watched the dawn hit the frost, prismatic. There was an ache in her feet from the cold stone. For a month or so, something had been eating at her husband. He’d gloomed around the house and hardly looked at her. It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back. A beating came near, and the wind started up, and she didn’t turn to watch the helicopter land, but she leaned against the freezing force of the wind. When the blades slowed, she heard Chollie’s voice at her elbow.

She looked down at him. Grotesque Chollie, gone bad with money, overrich like a pear ripened to ooze. He wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants. She’d woken him, she saw. He had to fold his hand into a visor to peer up at her.

“Insane,” he said. “He exercised every day. It should have been fat-ass me to go first.”

“Yes,” she said. He moved as if to hug her. She thought of the last warmth of her husband that she’d soaked into her skin, and said, “Don’t.”

“I won’t,” he said.

The meadow sharpened. “When we landed, I saw you standing there,” he said. “You looked the same age as when I first met you. You were so brittle. So full of light back then.”

“I feel ancient now,” she said. She was only forty-six.

“I know,” he said.

“You can’t,” she said. “You loved him, too. But you weren’t his wife.”

“I wasn’t. But I had a twin sister who died. Gwennie.” He looked away, then said with cold in his voice, “She killed herself when she was seventeen.”

Chollie’s mouth was twisting in and out. Mathilde touched his shoulder.

“Not you,” he said quickly, and by this she understood him to mean that her fresh sorrow outblazed his own, that she should be the one to be comforted now. She could feel the grief coming on fast, shaking the ground like a hurtling train, but she hadn’t been hit by it yet. She had a little time still. She could soothe; it was what she was best at, after all. Being a wife.