Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

She didn’t pause until she reached the building where the agency was. The guards, used to pretty, wobbly, underage girls, parted to let her in.

She was inside for hours. For hours, he sat in the café opposite, with a hardcover book and a lemonade, waiting.

When she came out, she felt deboned, her bottom lids red. Her braids had frizzed in the unseasonable heat. He followed her down the street, a plastic bag and the book in his hand, until her stride became a limp and he stepped in front of her and offered a coffee. She’d eaten nothing since dinner the night before. She put her hands on her hips, staring, then right-faced into a sandwich shop and ordered a cappuccino and a mozzarella panini. “Porca madonna,” he said. “ Panino. It’s singular.”

She turned to the girl at the counter and said, “I’d like two. Panini. Two cappuccini .”

He chuckled and paid. She ate the sandwiches slowly, chewing thirty times with each bite. She looked everywhere but at him. She’d never had caffeine before and it filled her fingers with a kind of elation. She decided to drive the man off with her exigency and ordered an éclair and another cappuccino, but he paid without comment and watched her eat.

“You don’t eat?” she said.

“Not much,” he said. “I used to be a fat boy.”

Now she could see the sad, fat child in the mismatched jowls and thin shoulders, and felt something heavy in her shifting toward him.

“They said I needed to lose ten pounds,” she said.

“You’re perfect,” he said. “They can jump off a bridge. They said no?”

“They said I need to lose ten pounds and send them pictures and they’d start me out with catalog work. Build my way up.”

He considered her with a straw in the corner of his mouth. “But you were unhappy with that. Because you’re not a girl who starts small,” he said. “You are a young queen.”

“No,” she said. She fought the emotion rising to her face and mastered it. It had begun to rain outside, hard, thick spatters on the hot pavement. A low miasma rose from the ground, and the air shifted toward coolness.

She listened to the pounding of the rain as he leaned forward and took her foot in his hand and took off the shoe. He looked at the bleeding, jagged blister. He dabbed it with a paper napkin dipped in ice water and took from his plastic bag from the drugstore, which he’d visited while she was at the agency, a big box of bandages and a tube of ointment. When he was finished administering to her feet, he took out a pair of plastic shower sandals with massaging nubs.

“You see,” he said, lowering her feet to the ground. She could weep for the relief. “I take care of things,” he said. He took a wet wipe from his pockets and fastidiously cleaned his hands.

“I see,” she said.

“We can be friends, you and I. I’m unmarried,” he said. “I’m kind to girls. I don’t hurt anybody. I’ll make sure you’re looked after. And I’m clean.”

Of course he was clean; his nails were pearly; his skin had the sheen of a soap bubble. Later, she’d hear of AIDS and understand.

She closed her eyes and pulled the long-ago Mathilde, the one from the Parisian schoolyard, tighter to her body. She opened her eyes and put on her lipstick by feel. She blotted her lips on a napkin, crossed her legs, and said, “So.”

He said, in a low voice, “So. Come to my apartment. I’ll make you dinner. We can”—and his eyebrows shot skyward—“talk.”

“Not dinner, no,” she said. He looked at her, calculating.

“We can make a deal, then. Negotiate. Stay the night,” he said. “If you can convince your parents. Say you met a school friend in town. I can do a passable imitation of a schoolgirl’s father.”

“Parents aren’t an obstacle,” she said. “I only have an uncle. He doesn’t care.”

“Then what is the obstacle?” he said.

“I’m not cheap,” she said.

“All right.” He leaned back. She wanted to crush the latent joke he never quite delivered, flatten it under her knuckles. “Tell me. What is it that you most want in the world, young queen.”

She took a deep breath and pressed her knees together to stop them from shaking. “College tuition,” she said. “For all four years.”

He put both hands flat on the table and gave a sharp laugh. “I was thinking a handbag. But you were thinking indentured servitude?” he said.

She thought: Oh. [So young! So capable of surprise.] Then she thought: Oh, no, he had laughed at her. Her face was on fire, she felt, striding out. He was behind her at the door; he put his suit coat over her head and gestured for a cab from the awning. Maybe he was made of spun sugar, would melt in the wet.

She slid in, and he stood bent in the door, but she wouldn’t move over to let him in. “We can talk about this,” he said. “I’m sorry. You astonished me. That’s all.”

“Forget it,” she said.

“How can I?” he said. He touched her gently under the chin and she had to fight the urge to close her eyes and rest her head in his palm.

“Call me on Wednesday,” he said, putting a card in her hand, and though she wanted to say no again, she didn’t, and she didn’t crumple it up. He tossed a bill over the seat to the driver and shut the door gently behind her. Later, in the window of the train, her face was pale and floating over a green spin of Pennsylvania. She was thinking so hard she noticed neither face nor landscape.

—

SHE CAME INTO THE CITY again the next Saturday. There had been a phone call, trial gently proposed. Same red dress, heels, hair. A trial? She thought of her grandmother in Paris, her rumpled elegance, the rat-gnawed cheese on the windowsill, the blaze of her crazed dignity. Mathilde had listened from her closet and thought: Never. Never for me. I’d die first.

Never’s a liar. She had nothing better, and time was running out. The man was waiting outside the train station, but he didn’t touch her as she sat on the leather seat of the town car. He ate a throat lozenge and the air smelled of it. Her eyes were dry, yet the world had gone misty. A lump in her throat bigger than the neck could contain.

She registered the doorman as hairy, squat, Mediterranean, though she didn’t look directly at him. All inside was smooth marble.

“What’s your name?” the silvery man said in the elevator.

“Mathilde,” she said. “Yours?”

“Ariel,” he said.

She looked at herself in the reflective brass doors, a smear of red and white and gold, and said in a very low voice, “I’m a virgin.”

He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his forehead. “I would never have expected less of you,” he said, and bowed elaborately as if for a joke and held the door for her as she went in.

He handed her a glass of cold sparkling water. The apartment was enormous, or at least appeared so, walled on two sides with glass. The other walls were white, with huge paintings that registered as shimmers of color. He took off his suit jacket and hung it up and sat down, and said, “Make yourself at home.”

She nodded and went to the window and looked out onto the city.

After some time, he said, “By make yourself at home, what I really meant was for you to please undress.”

She turned away from him. She took off the shoes and unzipped the dress and let it pool at her feet. Her underwear was black cotton, a little girl’s cut, which had made the people at the agency smile the week before. She didn’t wear a bra; she didn’t need one. She turned back, her arms behind her, and looked at him gravely.

“All of it,” he said, and she slowly took off her underwear. He made her wait while he looked at her. “Please turn around,” he said, and she did. Outside, the buildings were obscured in the fog and dim, so that when the lights in the buildings opposite came on they were squares floating in space.