Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

The doorman was a silverback gorilla in a costume, some kind of Staten Island accent: bluntness would be key. Chollie said, “Who was that blond?” The doorman shrugged. Chollie took out a ten and gave it to him. The doorman said, “Girlfriend of 4-B.” Chollie looked at him but the doorman put out his hand and Chollie gave him all he had, which was a joint. The man grinned and said, “She been coming for too many years for a girl so young, you dig me? He’s some kind of art dealer. Name’s Ariel English.” Chollie waited, but the man said mildly, “That’s all you get for a little bud, little bud.”

Later, Chollie sat waiting in the window of the diner across the street. He watched. His sweaty shirt dried, and the waitress grew tired of asking if he wanted to order and just slopped coffee into his mug and went away.

When the shadows engulfed the building across the street, he almost gave up, headed back to his squat in academia. There were options. He’d look in the phone book for galleries. He’d research. But then the doorman straightened and opened the door crisply, and out came a chimera, a man with a jowly face and a body like a wisp of smoke poured into a suit. Wealth in the way he moved, his sleek grooming. Behind him, there was an animated mannequin. It took Chollie a moment to recognize Mathilde. Her heels were tall, her schoolgirl’s skirt cut nearly to the crotch, her hair swept high, far too much makeup. [She had refused to extend the terms of the arrangement beyond four years; in pique, Ariel had dressed her, knowing her, knowing how to cut.] Her face was bare of that constant low-level smile that she wore, both shield and magnet. Blank, it was something like an abandoned building. She walked as if unaware of the world around her, that her nipples were visible under her gauzy shirt.

They crossed the street, and there was dread in Chollie when he saw that they were coming into the diner toward him.

They sat in a corner booth. The man ordered for both — egg-white Greek omelet, him, chocolate milkshake, her. He watched their upside-down bodies in the chrome napkin dispenser. She ate nothing, gazed at air. Chollie saw the man whispering in her ear, saw his hand disappear in the darkness between her legs. She let it, passive. [On the surface; beneath, the controlled burn.]

Chollie was overwhelmed. He felt a swift spinning in him. Fury for Lotto; fear of losing what he, Chollie, had worked so hard to keep. He stood in agitation and went back on the train drawn through the dusk and pressed his burning face against the cool glass and, at last home at Vassar, collapsed for a brief nap into Lotto’s bed to plan how to tell him about his new girl, who she secretly was. A whore. But he fell asleep. He woke to laughter in the common room, the sound of a television. Past midnight on the flashing clock.

He came out and almost fell down with astonishment. The only explanation: Mathilde must have a twin. He’d followed the wrong girl to the city. There was a girl in Lotto’s lap in sweatpants and a messy ponytail, laughing at something he was whispering in her ear. She was so different from what he’d seen that he knew he was wrong in having seen it. A dream? A half-eaten popover with apple butter was on the table, and Chollie almost lurched for it, he was so hungry.

“Hey,” Lotto bellowed. “Chollie! You haven’t met my”—he laughed—“my Mathilde. My girl I’m madly in love with. Mathilde, this is Chollie, my oldest friend.”

“Oh!” she said, and leapt up and moved toward Chollie, towering over him. “I’m so happy to meet you,” she said. “I’ve heard all the stories.” She paused then hugged him, and she smelled of plain Ivory soap and, aha, rosemary shampoo.

Many years later, when the gardener would try to grow rosemary on the patio of the penthouse, Chollie would toss the plants thirty stories to the sidewalk below and watch them explode in mushroom clouds of dirt.

“You,” he said. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Hard to miss. Six feet of perfect, legs to the moon,” Lotto said.

“No,” Chollie said. “Today. On a train to the city. I’m sure it was you.”

The slightest of hesitations, then Lotto said, “Must’ve been some other stunner. She was writing her French final in the computer room all day. Right, M.?”

How narrow Mathilde’s eyes had gone when she laughed. Chollie felt their coldness on him. “All morning, yeah,” she said. “But I was done fast. It was only a ten-pager. When you were at your rowing lunch, I went off to the city to the Met. We have to do an ekphrastic poem for my writing class and I didn’t want to do the same dumb Monet water lily from the campus museum that everyone else is doing. I just got back, actually. Thank you for reminding me!” she said to Chollie. “I bought Lotto something at the gift shop.”

She went to her overlarge purse and pulled out a book. It had a Chagall painting on the cover, Chollie would see later, when he stole it. Mathilde had also stolen it, just as she left Ariel’s apartment for the very last time. She’d gotten her last check. Now she was free to sleep with Lotto.

“ Winged Cupid Painted Blind ,” Lotto read. “ Art Inspired by Shakespeare . Oh,” he said, kissing her chin. “It’s perfect.”

She looked at Chollie. Another glimmer through the dark. This time, perhaps not so benign.

Fine, Chollie thought. You’ll see how well I can wait. When you’re least expecting it, I will explode your life. [Only fair; she had exploded his.] A plan began to itch at the back of his brain. He smiled at her and saw himself reflected in the darkened window. He liked how he looked so different in reflection: so much thinner, paler, so much more blurred than he was in life.

HER HUSBAND HADN’T WOKEN HER with a mug of coffee. Every day they had lived under the same roof, he had woken her with a cup of milky coffee. Something was wrong. She opened her eyes to full morning. Inside her, an abyss. She couldn’t see all the way to its black bottom.

She dawdled. Washed her face. Talked to the dog, who ran from Mathilde to the door frantically. Opened the curtains to find the world deep in midwinter gloom. Stared down the stairwell for a long time.

Barrel of a gun, she thought.

He’s left me, she thought. I knew from the moment I saw him that this day would come.

She came down the dim steps and he wasn’t in the kitchen. She whispered to calm herself as she climbed up to his study in the attic. A crumble of relief when she came in the door and saw him sitting at his desk. His head was down. He must have worked all night and fallen asleep. She looked at him, the leonine hair with the gray temples, the magnificent forehead, the soft full lips.

But when she touched him, his skin was lukewarm. His eyes were open, empty as mirrors. He was not resting there, not at all.

She slid behind him in the chair and pressed herself to him, tailbone to nape. She put her hands up his shirt, feeling the thin rubber of his belly flab. Her finger went into his navel to the second knuckle. She put her hands down his pajama pants and his boxer briefs, where it was still warm. The wool of pubic hair. The satin head of him, humble in her palm.

For a long time, she held him. She felt the heat of him leave. She stood only when she could no longer recognize his body, like a word repeated until it has lost all meaning.

MATHILDE WAS AMBUSHED in the pool by Chollie. She had been six months and one week without her husband.

Chollie left his car a mile up the road and hoofed it so she couldn’t hear him and flee to the pool house and hide.

She had eschewed a bikini that morning for a full-body browning. Who was she going to scandalize, the crows? Her sere, unloved body of a widow. But here Chollie was at the edge of the pool, groaning. She peered at him through her sunglasses and wiped her cheeks with her palms.