Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

They poured into the quad and endured the long speeches and some comedian she couldn’t listen to because Lotto was in the row ahead of her and she stared at the pink curl of his ear, wanting to put it in her mouth and suck. She walked across the stage to polite applause. He walked across the stage to a roar. “Terrible to be so popular,” she said, later, after the confetti of caps and they found each other, kissed.

The quickie in his dorm room, before he packed up. Her tailbone on the hard oak desk, the shushing laughter when there was a knock on the door. “Just about to take a shower!” he called out. “Be out in a sex.”

“What?” It was his baby sister, Rachel, her voice at knob level in the hall.

“Oh, shoot,” he whispered. “Just a second,” he shouted, blushing, and Mathilde bit his shoulder to keep from laughing.

When Rachel came in, Lotto was whooping at the cold water in the shower, and Mathilde was on her knees, packing his shoes into a cardboard box. “Hello!” she said to the little girl, who was, poor thing, nothing close to as stunning as her brother. Long skinny nose, tiny jaw, close eyes, dun-colored hair, taut as a guitar string. How old? Nine or so. She stood in her pretty, frilly dress, goggling, and said with a gasp, “Oh! You’re so pretty.”

“I like you already,” Mathilde said, and she stood and walked over and bent and gave the girl a kiss on the cheek. And then Rachel saw her brother coming out of the bathroom, steam rolling off his shoulders, in a towel, and ran over to hug him around the waist, and he hooted, and said, “Rachel! Rachey-ray!”

Behind Rachel came Aunt Sallie, ferret-faced, of the same gene pool as the little girl. “Oh, my,” Sallie said, stopping short on beholding Mathilde. A blush rose out of her high lace neckline. “You must be my nephew’s girl. We were wondering who’d be special enough to pin him down, and now I see. Nice to meet you, you can call me Sallie.”

Lotto was looking at the door, his face darkening. “Is Muvva in the restroom?” he said. “She still making her way up the steps?” Clear as a windowpane: get his mother and wife in the same room, and they’d fall in love, he was thinking. Oh, sweet boy.

Mathilde shored her shoulders, jutted her chin, waiting for Antoinette to enter, the glance exchanged, the situating. She had gotten a note that morning in her campus mailbox. Don’t think, it said, that I don’t see you. Unsigned, but smelling of Antoinette’s roses. Mathilde had saved it in a shoe box that, one day, would be full of such notes.

But Sallie said, “Nope. Sorry, baby boy. She sent her regards. She gave me this to give you,” and she handed over an envelope, the check in it visible against the light of the window, the handwriting Sallie’s, not his mother’s.

“Oh,” Lotto said.

“She loves you,” Sallie said.

“Sure,” Lotto said, and turned away.

What Lotto couldn’t pack into his station wagon, he put out for the scavengers to pluck. He owned so little; Mathilde would always love his indifference to things. After he’d carried everything up to her apartment to keep there the last week of her lease, they went off to an early dinner with Sallie and Rachel.

Mathilde sipped her wine to hide her emotion. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat as a part of a family, let alone in such a peaceful and decorous place as this quiet, fern-lined room, with its white cloths and brass chandeliers, the happy graduates and their boozing parents. On their side of the table, Lotto and Sallie were outstorytelling each other, cackling.

“You thought I didn’t know what you were up to with that caretaker’s whelp in the old henhouse when you were little?” she was saying, and his face was pink and shining with pleasure. “All that poking and prodding and guilty sweaty pumpkin heads when you came out? Oh, sweetmeat, you forget I can see clear through walls.” Then she made a face as if remembering Rachel, but Rachel was paying her no mind. She was staring at Mathilde, blinking so rapidly Mathilde worried for her eyelids.

“I like your necklace,” the girl whispered.

Mathilde put her hand up to her neck, touched it. It was gold, with a large emerald, which Ariel had given her last Christmas. The green was meant to go with her eyes; but her eyes were changeable. She took it off her neck and put it on Rachel’s. “It’s yours,” she said.

Later, she would think of this gift, so impulsive, the ten-thousand-dollar necklace to a little girl, and feel warmed by it, even during their decade in the underground apartment in Greenwich Village, even when Mathilde didn’t eat lunch so they could pay for phone service. It was cheap to buy a lifetime of friendship.

The little girl’s eyes went wide, and she took the emerald in her fist and nestled her head into Mathilde’s side.

When Mathilde looked up, she went still. At the next table sat Ariel. He was looking at her over his untouched salad, his mouth smiling but his eyes as cold as scales.

She wouldn’t look away. She let her face go slack and stared back until Ariel motioned to the waiter. He murmured something and the waiter hurried off.

“You’ve got goose bumps,” Rachel said, touching Mathilde’s arm; and then the waiter was standing too close to Mathilde and opening up a bottle of extremely nice champagne, to which Sallie snapped, “I didn’t order this,” and the waiter said placatingly, “I know, I know. It’s a gift from an admirer. May I?”

“How nice! Please do. Lotto has a ton of admirers,” Mathilde said. “His Hamlet made him a celebrity in these parts. He’s brilliant.”

“Oh, I know,” said Sallie. And Lotto beamed with pleasure, preening, eyes darting around to see which kind soul in the room could have sent along the champagne, the force of his delight such that wherever his eyes landed, the recipients of the gaze would look up out of their food and conversation, and a startled expression would come over their face, a flush, and nearly everyone began grinning back, so that, on this spangled early evening with the sun shining through the windows in gold streams and the treetops rustling in the wind and the streets full of congregating relieved people, Lotto sparked upwellings of inexplicable glee in dozens of chests, lightening the already buoyant mood of the room in one swift wave. Animal magnetism is real; it spreads through bodily convection. Even Ariel smiled back. The stunned grins stayed on the faces of some of the people, an expression of speculation growing, hoping he would look at them again or wondering who he was, because on this day and in this world, he was Someone.

“While we have champagne,” Mathilde said, watching the tiny bubbles flea-jump out the top of her glass, “Lotto and I have an announcement to make.”

Lotto looked across the table at Mathilde, blinked, then grinned and turned to his aunt and his sister. “I’m sorry Muvva isn’t here to witness this. But I guess we can’t hold it in any longer. We’re married,” he said. And he kissed Mathilde’s hand. She looked at him. Waves of heat built in her, one atop another. She would do anything in the world for this man.

In the ensuing flutter and exclamations, the tables closest breaking out into applause, eavesdroppers all, Rachel bursting into happy tears, Sallie fluttering her hands near her face though it was evident she’d already known the news, Mathilde looked for a long moment at Ariel. But he had stood and left the dining room, his slim navy back winking out the door. She was shed of him. For good, she thought. There was a relief like a cold wind blowing through her. She downed her glass and sneezed.

—

A WEEK AFTER GRADUATION, Mathilde was looking up through the casement windows into the courtyard garden where the Japanese maple waggled its leaves in the wind like tiny hands.