Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“Forgive me,” Bette said. “It must be said that from my viewpoint, at least, a child wouldn’t be the worst thing. You have a husband who adores you, a job, a place to live. You seem to be almost thirty, old enough. A child in this house wouldn’t be the worst thing. I should like to watch over a baby once in a while, teach it the nursery rhymes of my Scottish granny. Eenity feenity, fickety feg . Or, no, As eh gaed up a field o neeps , eh? Spoil it rotten with biscuits. When it could eat biscuits, of course. Not the worst thing.”

“It would be the worst thing,” Mathilde said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the world. Or to the child. Also, I’m only twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six!” Bette said. “Your womb is practically antique. Your eggs are getting all wonky up in there. And what, you think you’d bear a monster? A Hitler? Please. Look at you. You’ve won the genetic lottery.”

“You laugh,” Mathilde said. “But my children would come out with fangs and claws.”

Bette looked at her. “I hide mine well,” Mathilde said.

“I am not one to judge,” Bette said.

“You’re not,” Mathilde said.

“I’ll help,” Bette said. “Don’t get your hackles up. I will help you. You won’t be alone in this.”

—

“SHOOT, THAT TOOK A BILLION YEARS,” Lotto said, when she entered with the pizza. He was too hungry to see her until he’d eaten four slices. By then she had recomposed herself.

In the night, she dreamt of things that lived in the dark. Writhing blind worms with a pearly gleam, flurries of blue-veined parchment. Slick and drip.

She’d always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they.

Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts. Much later, at the grocery store, Mathilde would watch a woman swollen to bursting, reaching up for the popsicles on the high shelf, and she’d imagine what it was like to have a person inside one that one hadn’t swallowed whole. One that wasn’t doomed from the start. The woman looked irritably over at Mathilde, who was gigantic, tall enough to reach; then her face changed back to the thing that Mathilde most disliked about pregnant ladies, the reflexive saintliness. “Can I help you?” the woman said, all treacle. Mathilde turned abruptly away.

Now she rose from the bed where Lotto lay breathing sweetly in his sleep, and took a bottle of rum up to Bette’s apartment. She stood outside the door, not knocking, but still Bette opened it in a slattern’s nightgown, her hair a gray swirl.

“In you go,” she said. She put Mathilde on the couch, covered her with a woolen blanket, plunked the cat onto her lap. By Mathilde’s right hand, hot chocolate with a glory of rum. On the television, Marilyn Monroe in black-and-white. Bette lay back on the ottoman and snored. Mathilde tiptoed home before Lotto woke, and got dressed as if going in to work and then called in sick. Bette, face up against the steering wheel, sitting on pillows from her sofa, drove her to the clinic.

—

[MATHILDE’S PRAYER: Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.]

—

FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD, Mathilde was clammy on the inside. A grayish clay crumbling on its surface. It wasn’t that she regretted a thing; it was that the call had been so close. Lotto was distant from her, on the peak of some hill she was too tired to climb. She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them.

But there were tiny miracles to rouse her. A rosewater macaroon in the brass mailbox, in a waxed paper envelope. One blue hydrangea like a head of cabbage on the doorstep. Cold, wrinkled hands pressed to her cheeks, passing on the stairs. Bette’s small gifts. Bright lights in the dark.

“A difficult thing,” Bette had said in the waiting room. “But right. What you’re feeling will slowly lessen.” It would.

When Mathilde was twenty-eight, her husband left for Los Angeles for a week for a small speaking role in a cop drama, and she scheduled the sterilization.

“Are you sure?” the doctor said. “You’re young enough that you might change your mind. You never know when the clock will start ticking.”

“My clock is broken,” she said. And he looked at her, high boots to blond crown, the eyeliner she wore those days curved on the outside to make cat’s eyes. He thought he saw her, and he believed her vain. He nodded, turned curtly away. He planted the tiny coils in her tubes; she ate Jell-O and watched cartoons and let the nurses change her catheter. It was a very pleasant afternoon, in fact.

She would do it again if she had to. To save the horror. To save herself. She would do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, if she had to.

MATHILDE DIDN’T RECOGNIZE the private investigator on the steps of the Met. She was looking for the girl from the coffee roastery in Brooklyn from two weeks earlier, either incarnation, frizzled and dolphined or sleek and sharp. There was a family of heavyset tourists, a cashmere-skinned young man whom Mathilde looked at carefully, and a scowling blond schoolgirl in a kilt and blazer with an overflowing backpack. She chose to sit next to the schoolgirl, and the girl turned to wink at her.

“Holy god,” Mathilde said. “Body language and all. Gangly legs and attitude. I thought I was looking at my own doppelgänger from thirty years ago.”

“I had a stakeout earlier,” the investigator said. “I love my job.”

“You were that little girl with a costume box, huh,” Mathilde said.

The investigator smiled and there was a sadness there. She looked her age briefly. “Well, I was an actress,” she said. “A younger Meryl Streep, that’s what I wanted to be.”

Mathilde said nothing and the investigator said, “And yes. Of course, I knew of your husband. Knew him, in fact. I was in one of his plays in my youth. The workshop for Grimoire at ACT in San Francisco. Everyone was in love with him. I always thought of him in terms of a duck, you know? Lancelot Satterwhite is to adoration as a duck is to water. He only wanted to be swimming around in a great pool of it, but it never soaked in to touch him, just always rolled off.”

“Sounds about right,” Mathilde said. “I see that you did know him.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” the girl said. “But I don’t see the harm, now that he’s gone. You of all people knew the way he was. But the cast and crew had a sort of bet. Whenever anybody flubbed something in rehearsal, they had to put a quarter in the pot, and whoever was able to seduce Lancelot first got to keep the cash. Guys and girls both. All twelve of us.”

“Who won?” Mathilde said. There was a twitch at the corner of her lip.

“Don’t fret,” the girl said. “Nobody. Opening night, we gave the cash to our stage manager because he had a new baby at home.” She took a file from her backpack and handed it to Mathilde. “I’m still working the personal angle. There’s definitely something there, but I just have to find it. In the meantime, I’ve bought us an informant at Charles Watson. Senior VP. Sees himself as a noble whistle-blower, but only after he amassed a fortune, a house in the Hamptons, ad nauseam. This file right here is the skim off the surface. And boy, does it go deep.”

Mathilde read, and by the time she looked up, the street had gone bright with sun. “Holy of holies,” she said.

“There’s more,” the investigator said. “It’s pretty dire. There’s going to be lots of pissed-off rich people. Whatever the motivation, we’re doing the world a good thing.”