Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

She was shuddering by the time he stood and came toward her. He touched her between the legs and smiled at the moisture he found on his fingertips.

His body seemed too bony for his fleshy face and was almost hairless, save for brown coronas around his nipples and a darker arrow from navel to groin. He lay on the white couch and made her crouch above him until her thighs burned and shook. Then he seized her hips and pulled her suddenly down, smiling at the pain on her face.

“Easier to dive than wade in, my dear,” he said. “Lesson one.”

She didn’t know what kept her from standing, dressing, escaping. The pain felt like hate. She bore the pressure by counting, staring fixedly at a golden square of window in the dark. He took her face and forced it to his. “No,” he said, “please look at me.” She looked. There was a technological glow from the corner of the room, some digital clock, which turned the side of his head slightly green in pulses. He seemed waiting for her to flinch, but she wouldn’t; she willed her features into stone, and there was a pressure that built and burst and the relief, removal, and she stood, feeling knots in her legs and an internal burn.

He cut a banana into slices and laid them on her body and slowly ate them off her, which was his dinner. “More than that,” he said, “I inflate.” For her, he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and fries from the diner across the street and watched her mouth closely as she ate every bite. “More ketchup,” he said. “Lick that cheese off your finger.”

In the morning, he washed her very carefully and instructed her how to trim herself and watched from a hot bath as she put her leg on a teak chair and did so.

And then he had her lie on her back in the huge white bed and point her knees upward. On the television embedded in the wall, he put on a tape with two women, redheaded and dark-haired, licking each other. “Nobody likes what I’m about to do to you at first,” he said. “You need to fantasize to make it work. Stay with it. A few times from now, you’ll understand.”

It was terrifying, his unlovely face there. The heat of his mouth and the scrape of the stubble. The way he watched her in her shame. It was the closest anyone had ever come to her. She’d never been kissed on the lips. She put a pillow on her face and breathed and thought of a young man without a face, just a muscular, shining body. She felt a long, slow wave building in her until it turned huge and dark and crashed down on her, and she shouted into the pillow.

He pulled away from her, sudden flood of white light. “You surprising little thing,” he said, laughing.

She didn’t know she hated Chinese food until he ordered it and asked her to eat it all on the rug, moo shu tofu to steamed shrimp and broccoli to the last grain of rice. He had nothing; he watched. “If you need to go home, I’ll take you back to the station after you shower again.” There was a kindness in him despite his gargoyle’s face.

Mathilde nodded; she’d already bathed three times in his marble shower, always after eating. She had begun to understand him. “I just need to be back in time to go to school tomorrow,” she said.

“Do you wear a uniform?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, lying.

“Oh god,” he groaned. “Wear it next weekend.”

She put down the chopsticks. “You’ve decided.”

“Depends on where you’re going to college.”

She told him. “You’re smart,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“Maybe not,” she said, motioning at the apartment around her, her own naked body with a grain of rice on her breast. She smiled, then took the smile off her face. He didn’t get to know she had a sense of humor.

He stood and moved to the door. “All right. We have a deal,” he said. “Come to me from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. I’ll call you my goddaughter to avoid unnecessary questions. Four years. Starting now. Intern with me at the gallery during the summers. I am eager to see how well I can teach you what you’ll need to know. Do your catalog modeling if you think you need to explain your money. We’ll get you on birth control. While we’re together, to avoid diseases, among other horrors, please do not touch or look at another boy or girl. If I hear you even kissed someone else, our deal is off.”

“I won’t even think a lewd thought,” she said, deliberately thinking: black cock. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Buying you underwear and a bra. It’s disgraceful, your going around like that underneath. You shower and take a nap, and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

He went toward the door, then stopped. He turned around. “Mathilde,” he said kindly. “No matter what, you need to understand that this is only business. I can’t have you thinking that it’s more than that.”

She smiled broadly for the first time. “Business,” she said. “Not a single emotion will occur. We will be as robots.”

“Excellent,” he said, and closed the door.

Alone, she felt sick, dizzy. She looked at herself reflected in the window, the city slowly moving beyond. She touched her stomach, her chest, her neck. She looked at her hands and saw they were shaking. She was no more rotten than she’d been as the girl on the train, but still she turned away from the Mathilde in the glass.

—

TWO MONTHS. High school finished and she moved into Ariel’s apartment. She had so little to take from her uncle’s house. A few books, the red dress, glasses, a dog-eared photograph of herself — fat-cheeked, pretty, French — before she went bad. It all fit into her school knapsack. She left a note under the chauffeur’s seat when he was using the bathroom; she couldn’t see his many stomachs and chins one last time without bursting into tears. She knocked for the first time on her uncle’s study door, and without waiting for him to speak, she went in. He looked up over the top of his glasses. A wedge of light from the window fell on the papers on his desk.

“Thank you for the shelter you’ve given me these past few years,” she said.

“You’re leaving?” he said, in French. He took his glasses off and sat back, looking at her. “Where are you going?”

“A friend’s,” she said.

“Liar,” he said.

“Correct,” she said. “I have no friends. Call him a protector.”

He smiled. “An efficacious solution to all of your problems,” he said. “If, however, a more carnal one than I’d hoped. But I shouldn’t be surprised. You grew up with my mother, after all.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and turned toward the door.

“Frankly,” he said, and she stopped, her hand on the doorknob. “I had thought better of you, Aurélie. I had believed you’d work for a few years, head off to Oxford or something. I had thought you would fight harder. That you were more like me. I must admit that I find myself disappointed.”

She said nothing.

“Know that if you have nothing else, you can find food and a bed here. And do visit, from time to time. I am curious to see how you change. I predict either something ferocious or something thoroughly bourgeois. You will be a world-eater or a mother of eight.”

“I won’t be a mother of eight,” she said. She wouldn’t visit, either. There was nothing of her uncle’s that she wanted. She took a last look at him, the lovely winglike ears and round cheeks that made a liar of his face, and one side of her mouth curled up, and she bid a silent good-bye to the house as she went through, the secret masterpiece under the stairwell that she yearned to see again and the long dark hallways with locked doors and the huge oak front door. Then she was in the air. She began to run down the packed dirt lane in its blaze of white sun, her legs swinging good-bye, good-bye, to the ruminants in the Mennonite fields, the June breeze, the wild blue phlox on the bank. This sweat she worked up was a glorious one.