Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

—

THE LONG SUMMER of her nineteenth year. The things one can do with a tongue, a breath. The taste of latex, smell of oiled leather. Box seats at Tanglewood. Her blood thrilled. His voice warm in her ear before a Jackson Pollock spatter, and suddenly, she saw the brilliance. Sultry heat, pisco sours on the terrace, an ice cube’s painful slow melt on her nipples as he watched from the door. He taught her. This is how you cut your food, order your wine. This is how you make people believe you agree with their opinions without saying anything at all.

Something softened around his eyes, but she pretended not to see it. “Business,” she said to herself, her knees burning on the tile in the shower. He put his hands in her hair. He brought her presents: bracelets, videos that made her face hot, underwear no more than three strings and a patch of lace.

And then college. It went far faster than she thought it would. Classes like flashes of light, blips of dark weekends, light again. She drank her classes in. She did not make friends; Ariel took up so much time, and the rest was taken by studying, and she knew that if she made one friend, she’d be too hungry to stop. On soft spring days, forsythia sunbursts in the corners of her eyes, her heart was rebellious; she would easily have fucked the first boy who walked by, but she had so much more to lose than the thrill she’d gain. She watched, longingly, chewing her fingernails to blood, as the others hugged, laughed, passed inside jokes. On Friday afternoons, on the trains down the dusk-sparked Hudson, she hollowed herself out. When she modeled, she pretended to be the kind of girl who felt insouciant in bikinis, who was glad to show her new lace brassiere to the gaping world. Her best shots were those where she thought of doing physical violence to the photographers. In the apartment: rug burn, lips bitten. He ran a hand down her back, cleaved her buttocks: Business, she thought. The train back to college, each mile an expansion. One year, two. Summers in the apartment and the gallery, like a fish in an aquarium. She learned. Three years, four.

Senior spring. Her whole life ahead of her. Almost too much brightness to look at directly. Something in Ariel had grown frantic. He took her to four-hour dinners, told her to meet him in the bathroom. She woke Sunday mornings to find him watching her. “Come work for me,” he said, thickly, once when she, on his cocaine, unspooled a full essay out of her brain about the genius of Rothko. “Work for me at the gallery and I’ll train you and we can take over New York.” “Maybe,” she said agreeably, thinking, Never. Thinking, Business. Soon, she promised herself. Soon she would be free at last.

SHE WAS ALONE for an afternoon. She came downstairs to find that God had chewed the kitchen rug, had left a mess of urine on the floor, was looking at her with a bellicose light in her eye. Mathilde showered, put on a white dress, let her hair drip the fabric wet. She put the dog into her crate, her toys and food in a plastic bag, put it all in the car. The dog screamed in the back, then settled.

She stood outside the general store in town until she saw a family she vaguely knew. The father was the man they’d hired to plow their driveway in winter, with a steer rustler’s face, maybe a little slow. The mother was the dental receptionist, a big woman with small ivory teeth. The children had gorgeous fawn eyes. Mathilde knelt to their level, and said, “I want to give you my dog.”

The boy sucked three fingers, looked at God, nodded. The girl whispered, “I can see your boobies.”

“Mrs. Satterwhite?” the mother said. Her eyes flicked over Mathilde; and by this, Mathilde knew she was dressed inappropriately. Ivory dress, designer. She hadn’t been thinking. Mathilde put the dog in the husband’s arms. “Her name is God,” she said. The woman gasped, then said, “Mrs. Satterwhite!” but Mathilde was walking to her car. “Hush, Donna,” she heard the man say. “Let the poor lady be.” She drove home. The house echoed, empty. Mathilde had been liberated. She had nothing to worry about now.

—

SO LONG AGO, it was. That day the light had fallen from the sky as if through green blown glass.

Her hair had been long then, sun-shot blond. Skinny legs crossed, reading The Moonstone . She bit her cuticle to blood and thought of her boyfriend, a love one week tender, and the world was made bright with him. Lotto, said the train as it came: Lotto-Lotto-Lotto.

The short, greasy boy watching her from the bench was invisible to her because she had her book; she had her joy. To be fair, she hadn’t met Chollie yet. Since Mathilde and Lotto had found each other, Lotto had spent every spare moment with her; had ceded his dorm room to his childhood friend, who was illegally auditing classes, not an actual student at the school. Lotto had time for nothing but Mathilde, rowing, and classes.

But Chollie knew of her. He was there at the party when Lotto looked up and saw Mathilde and she saw him; when Lotto crushed a crowd of people to get to her. It had been only a week. It couldn’t be serious yet, Chollie had believed. She was pretty, if you were into stick figures, but he figured Lotto would never tie himself to one pussy at twenty-two, with his whole life of glorious fuckery ahead of him. Chollie was sure that if Lotto had been perfectly handsome he would never have the success he did. His bad skin, his big forehead, the slightly bulbous nose moderated what was an almost girlishly pretty face into something sexy.

And then, just the day before, he’d caught sight of Lotto and Mathilde together under the confetti of an overblown cherry tree, and he felt the air knocked out of his chest. Look at them together. The height of them, the shine on them. Her pale and wounded face, a face that had watched and never smiled now never stopped smiling. It was as if she’d lived all her life in the chilly shadows and someone had led her out into the sun. And look at him. All his restless energy focused tightly on her. She sharpened something that threatened to go diffuse in him. He watched her lips as she spoke, and took her chin gently between his fingers and kissed her with his long lashes closed, even while she was speaking, so that her mouth moved and she laughed into his kiss. Chollie knew immediately that it was correct, that they were in very deep. Whatever was between them was explosive, made even the professors gape as they passed by. The threat of Mathilde, Chollie had understood then, was real. He, striver, knew another striver when he saw one. He who’d had no home had found a home in Lotto; and she had usurped even this.

[The Saturday after this one in the train station, Chollie would be napping in Lotto’s bed, hidden under a heap of clothes, and Lotto would come in, smiling so broadly that Chollie would stay silent when he could have spoken and made his presence known. Lotto, ecstatic, would pick up the phone and call his fat hog of a mother in Florida, who had once threatened to castrate Chollie years ago. There would be banter. Weird relationship, that one. And then Lotto would tell his mother he was married. Married! But they were babies. Chollie was shocked cold, missing much of the conversation, until Lotto left again. It couldn’t be true. He knew it was true. After some time had passed, he had wept bitterly, poor Chollie, under his heap of clothes.]

But on this day, before they were married, there was still time to save his Lotto from this girl. So here he was. He climbed onto the train behind Mathilde, sat behind her. A lock of her hair escaped the crevasse between seat backs, and he sniffed it. Rosemary.

She got off at Penn Station and he followed. Up from the underground stink to heat and light. She went toward a black town car, and the chauffeur opened the door and she was swallowed up. Midday in crowded Midtown, Chollie kept up on foot, though he was quickly sweating and his breastlets were heaving with effort. When the car paused before an Art Deco building, she got out and went in.