Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Rachel’s face was still looking at Mathilde from the dark when she went back upstairs. The marital suite, the bed obscene in its empty enormity. In her absence, the sheets had been changed. When she climbed in again, they were cool and smelled like lavender and brushed her skin like accusations.

—

THERE HAD BEEN A TIME when she’d sat beside Lotto in the dark on the opening night of one of his wild earlier plays and was so overcome by what he’d done, the grandness of his vision being transmuted before her eyes, that she leaned across the space between them and licked his face from ear to lip. She couldn’t help it.

Just as, holding Rachel and Elizabeth’s newborn daughter, she so longed to have the baby’s innocence for herself that she put the tiny clenched fist in her mouth and held it there until the baby screamed.

This widow’s lust was the opposite of that.

—

WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.

SHE HAD BEEN OVERCOME by fear over the apple crisp in the dining hall; she had fled to the bathroom and had been sitting, frozen, on the paper ring atop the toilet for a very long time. This was during the final days of college. For the previous month, she’d been frightened at the gulf the future opened before her. She who had been in one cage or another since birth was free to fly soon, but she was petrified at the thought of all that air.

The door opened and two girls came in, talking about how rich Lancelot Satterwhite was. “Bottled Water Princeling, you know,” one said. “His mom’s, like, a billionaire.”

“Lotto? Really?” said the other. “Shit! I hooked up with him freshman year. If only I’d known.”

The girls laughed, and then the first said, “Yeah, right. He’s such a bro-ho. I think I’m the only girl in the Hudson Valley who hasn’t seen his junk. They say he never sleeps with a girl twice.”

“Except Bridget. Which I don’t get. She’s so blah. I heard her saying they’re dating, and I was, like, Really? I mean, she looks like a children’s librarian. Like one who is caught in a perpetual rainstorm or something.”

“Yeah, well, Bridget is to dating Lotto the way a remora is to dating a shark.”

The girls laughed, left.

Mathilde thought, Huh. She flushed, came out, washed her hands. She looked at herself critically in the mirror. She smiled. “Hallelujah,” she said aloud to the Mathilde in the mirror, and the Mathilde in the mirror said it back with her lovely lips, her pale and angular face.

She claimed finals and eschewed the weekend trip to the city. She dressed carefully. She saw her quarry onstage that night and was impressed: he was very good, a manic Hamlet, puppyish in his energy even if so very tall. From afar, the pits in his cheeks were not discernible, and he threw off a kind of golden light that cast even the audience in its glow. He made the shopworn monologue sexy and showed it to them anew. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” he said, with a pirate’s smile; and she imagined in seats all throughout the audience a tingly heat rising. Promising. By the aisle lights, she read his full name in the program, Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, and frowned. Lancelot. Well. She could make it work.

The cast party was in a Brutalist dorm where she’d never been. For four years, she had not allowed herself parties, friends. She couldn’t risk them. She went early and stood out of the rain under a portico, smoking a cigarette. She was watching for Bridget. When the girl and her three dour friends came trotting up under umbrellas, Mathilde followed them inside.

It was easy to separate Bridget from her friends. Mathilde only had to ask a question about serotonin reuptake inhibitors for their neurobiology class final in a few days, and the other girls faded away as Bridget earnestly explained. And then Mathilde refilled Bridget’s cup with mostly vodka and a splash of Kool-Aid.

Bridget was flattered to be talking to Mathilde, “I mean, my god!” she said. “You never, ever, ever go out! Everyone has heard about you but nobody ever talks to you. You’re like the white whale of Vassar.” Then she flushed, and said, “Like the skinniest, prettiest white whale ever,” and then said, “Aargh! You know what I mean.” She drank nervously. Mathilde refilled and Bridget drank, Mathilde refilled, Bridget drank, and then Bridget was throwing up on the common stairway and people who were trying to pass were saying, “Sick!” And, “Oh my god, Bridget.” And, “Nasty, ho-bag, take it outside.” The friends had been summoned. Mathilde was watching through the banister from a higher landing when they took her home.

Bridget went down the stairs and Lotto passed her coming up. He said, “Yikes!” and patted her on the shoulder, and leapt the last few steps and went into the party.

From her perch above, Mathilde had watched it all.

The first problem dispatched. What ease.

She stood outside in the chill rain, smoking two more cigarettes, listening to the party. She gave it ten songs. When Salt-N-Pepa was playing, she went back inside, up the stairs. She looked across the room.

There he was on the windowsill, drunk, bellowing, and it took her by surprise, how very muscular that body of his was. He was wearing some girl’s gel eye-mask as a loincloth. He had an empty water jug Ace-bandaged to his head. No dignity, but Christ there was beauty. His face was strange, as if it had once been handsome, and still was from afar; but she had seen him only clothed before now and would not have guessed at how perfect his body was. She had made so many calculations, but none involved her legs melting from under her with the instant desire to screw.

She willed him to look up, to see her.

He looked up. He saw her. His face went still. He stopped dancing. She felt the hair of her neck stand. He leapt into the crowd and crushed some poor tiny girl in falling and swam his way out and over to Mathilde. He was taller than she was. She measured six feet, six-three in these heels; men taller than she was were rare. She liked the unexpected feeling of being smaller, more delicate. He touched her hand. He went down on one knee and shouted up, “Marry me!” And she didn’t know what to do; she laughed and looked down at him, and said, “No!”

In the story he told of this — spun at so many parties, so many dinners, she listening with her smile, her head cocked, laughing slightly — she said, “Sure.” She never corrected him, not once. Why not let him live with his illusion? It made him happy. She loved making him happy. Sure! It wasn’t true, not for another two weeks when she would marry him, but it did no harm.

Lotto had made the story of their meeting a coup de foudre , but he was a born storyteller. He recast reality into a different kind of truth. It was, as she knew, actually a coup de foutre. Their marriage had always been about the sex. It had been about other things at first and would be about other things later, of course, but within days it was about the sex. She’d held out until she’d settled her previous commitments, and the wait had inflamed both. For a long time after, the genital had taken primacy over other concerns.

Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure . There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.

—

YET IT’S TRUE THERE WAS, for a brief spell, a happiness that was absolute, it was sure , it swallowed her whole. Dim day, rocky beach. She felt the joy even through the tiny irritations, the sand flies that bit and the cold that soaked to her bones and the sharp stones on the Maine beach that split her hallux open like a sliced grape and made her limp back to the house they’d borrowed for their wedding day. They were twenty-two. The world drenched with potential. As fine as they’d ever be. She kept her hands warm on her new husband’s back and felt the muscles moving under his skin. A shell dug into her spine. She felt herself engulf him. First consummation as husband and wife. She thought of a boa swallowing a fawn.