Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Already she knew it. This apartment would be her first real harbor in so many years adrift. She was twenty-two. She was so terribly tired. Here, at last, she could rest.

She could feel Lotto to her right behind her shoulder, emanating Lottoness. In a moment, she knew, he’d turn and crack a joke and the realtor would laugh and a warmth would come into her voice for the first time; despite herself, despite knowing better than to invest in such young and penniless people, she would take an interest in them. She would deliver a quiche on the day they moved in; she would stop by when she was in the neighborhood and bring them gifts of candy. Oh, Lotto, Mathilde thought with loving despair. Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back.

Mathilde smelled the beeswax on the floor. She heard the neighbor’s cat mewling in the hallway. The soft scrape of leaf against sky. It filled her, the kindness of this place.

She had to push down the tiny loud thing in her that willed her to say no, to walk away. She deserved none of this. She could still explode it all by shaking her head sadly, saying they should continue to look. But then the problem of Lotto would remain. He had become, after all, her home.

On cue: the joke, the laugh. Mathilde turned. Her husband — god, my god, hers, for life — was smiling. He lifted his hands and cupped her jaw and traced her eyebrows with his thumbs. “I think she likes it,” he said, and Mathilde nodded, unable to speak.

They could have lived on happiness alone, in their glamorous poverty, in their apartment. They were as slender as fauns with lack; their apartment was spacious with it. Rachel’s gift — the girl’s saved-up allowance — was gone in three parties and as many months’ rent and groceries. Happiness feeds but doesn’t nourish. She tried bartending, canvassing for the Sierra Club, failing at both. The lights went out; they lit candles she’d stolen from a restaurant’s alfresco tables and went to bed at eight PM. They held potlucks with their friends so they could eat as much as they wanted, and nobody minded if they kept the leftovers. In October, they had thirty-four cents in their checking account and Mathilde walked into Ariel’s gallery.

He was looking at a vast green painting on the wall at the end of the room. He looked at her when she said, “Ariel,” but he didn’t move.

The receptionist was new, skinny, brunette, bored. Harvard, for sure. That gleam of entitlement, the length and gloss of hair. This would end up being Luanne. “Have an appointment?” she said.

“No,” Mathilde said.

Ariel folded his arms, waiting.

“I need a job,” she called to him across the expanse.

“There are no openings,” the receptionist said. “Sorry!”

For a long moment, Mathilde looked at Ariel, until the receptionist said very sharply, “Excuse me. This is a private business. You need to leave. Excuse me.”

“You are excused,” Mathilde said.

“Luanne, please go get three cappuccini,” Ariel said.

Mathilde sighed: cappuccini . The girl slammed the door when she went out.

“Come here,” Ariel said. Mathilde’s fight with herself was not visible as she neared. “Mathilde,” he said softly, “in what world could I possibly owe you a job?”

“You owe me nothing at all,” she said. “I agree.”

“How can you ask me for anything after your behavior?”

“Behavior?” she said.

“Ingratitude, then,” he said.

“Ariel, I was never ungrateful. I’d fulfilled the contract. As you always say, it was business.”

“Business,” he said. His face had grown red. His eyebrows were spiked high. “You married this Lancelot person two weeks before you graduated. I can only assume a conjugal relation. That’s not fulfilling the contract.”

“I met you in April of my senior year in high school,” she said. “If you’re counting, I extended the contract by two weeks.”

They smiled at each other. He closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them, they were moist. “I know it was business. But you hurt my feelings very much,” he said. “I was not unkind to you. To walk away without keeping in touch, that surprised me, Mathilde.”

“Business,” she said again.

He looked her up and down. He’d bought these beautiful shoes she was wearing, worn at the toe. He’d bought the black suit. Her hair had not been cut since summer. He narrowed his eyes, cocked his head to the side. “You’re skinny. You need the money. I understand. All you have to do is beg,” he said softly.

“I don’t beg,” she said.

He laughed and the sullen receptionist clanged back in with a tray of cappuccinos in her hand and Ariel said, sotto voce, “You are lucky I feel fondness for you, Mathilde.” Louder, he said, “Luanne, meet Mathilde. She’ll be joining us here tomorrow morning.”

“Oh. Goody,” Luanne said, and fell back into her seat. She watched them carefully, sensing something.

“The gallery’s employee,” Mathilde said, as they walked slowly up to the front. “Not yours. I’m off-limits.”

Ariel looked at her, and she, who’d been with him so long, could see him thinking, We’ll see.

“Touch me,” she said, “I walk. That’s a promise.”

—

LATER, WHEN SHE WAS SIXTY and Ariel seventy-three, she’d hear he was sick. From where the news came, she couldn’t say. The sky would speak it in her ear, maybe. The air itself. She’d know only that he had pancreatic cancer. Swift and ferocious. For two weeks she perseverated, and at last she went to see him.

He was on a hospital bed on the deck outside his apartment. All copper and topiary and view. She held her eyes wide open and breathed. He was a droop of flesh with bones in it.

“I like,” he rasped, “to see the birds.” She looked up. No birds.

“Hold my hand,” he said. She considered the hand but did not. He moved his head toward her. The flesh slid on the jaw.

She waited. She smiled at him. Buildings were sun-shocked in the corners of her eyes.

“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She won’t be forced.”

“Correct,” she said. But she thought, Oh, you murderous girl, hello. I haven’t seen you for so long.

“Please,” he said. “Mathilde. Take the cold hand of a dying man.”

And then she took his hand and pressed it to her chest with both of hers and held it there. What didn’t need to be said stayed unspoken. He fell asleep and the nurse came out on angry tiptoes. Mathilde went into the apartment, sterile and tasteful, and didn’t linger at the pictures she once knew too well for the ferocity with which she stared at them, counting the minutes until she could leave. Later, she walked through the cold shadows and blaze of concentrated afternoon light that poured between the buildings, and she couldn’t stop; she could barely breathe; it felt too good to be on those coltish terrified legs once more, not to know, once more, where she was going.

THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR her attorney had hired was not what Mathilde had expected. Not the weary hard-boiled whiskey-barrel type. Not the soft-haired British-grandmother type. Reading had infected Mathilde, she saw of herself, amused. Too much Miss Marple and Philip Marlowe. This girl was young, nose like a hatchet, shaggy peroxided hair. An ample display of bosoms, with a dolphin over the top curve of a breast, as if it were leaping into her décolletage. Huge earrings. She was all abubble on the surface with a watchfulness beneath.

“Ugh,” Mathilde had said out loud, when they shook hands. She hadn’t meant to. She’d been left too long alone, had neglected the upkeep of niceties. It was two days after Chollie ambushed her naked in the pool. They were meeting in the courtyard of a Brooklyn coffee roastery and the wind was in the trees overhead.