Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“Down on your hands and knees,” he said, smiling with all his teeth. “Crawl.”

“Don’t use your hands,” he said. “Pick it up with your teeth.”

“Now lick up the mess you made,” he said.

The parquet pressing into her palms and knees. She hated the part of her, small and hot, that enflamed itself being here, on hands and knees. Dirty girl. She burned. She made a vow: she would never crawl for another man. [The gods love to fuck with us, Mathilde would say later; she became a wife.]

“Another?” Ariel said. He dipped it, put it at the end of the hallway, twenty yards away. “Crawl,” he said. He laughed.

—

THE WORD wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip .

Weip means to turn, twist, or wrap .

In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh .

Ghwibh means pudenda . Or shame .

THE INVESTIGATOR SHOWED UP at the grocery store. Mathilde put the groceries in the trunk and slid into the front seat, and there the girl was waiting with a document box on her knees. Her makeup was all smoky eyes and red lips, sexy.

“God!” Mathilde said, startling. “I said not to be creepy.”

The girl laughed. “I guess it’s my signature.” She motioned toward the box. “Ta-da. I’ve got it all. This dude will never get out of federal prison. When are you blowing this sucker up? I want to be there with popcorn when it’s all over cable news.”

“Phase one is the private photos. That starts in a few days,” Mathilde said. “There’s a party I have to go to. I’m going to make him suffer a little before phase two.” She started up the car and drove the investigator to the house.

It was neither as strange as Mathilde had expected nor as sexy. She felt sad, staring at the chandelier and feeling the familiar warmth building in her; one would expect a lesbian to have expertise, but really, Lotto had been better. Oh, Christ, he’d been better at everything than anyone. He’d ruined her for sex. What, really, was the point of this? There could be no second act in this little bed play of theirs, just a reprisal of act one, with the characters reversed, no thrilling, messy denouement, and frankly, she wasn’t at all sure what she felt about sticking her face in some other lady’s bits. She let the orgasm spark in her forehead and smiled at the private investigator when she came up out of the sheets.

“That was,” Mathilde began, but the investigator said, “No, I get it. Loud and clear. You’re not into chicks.”

“I wasn’t not into it,” Mathilde said.

“Liar,” the girl said. She shook out her dark hair and it puffed out like a mushroom. “But it’s better. Now we can be friends.”

Mathilde sat up, looking at the girl, who was putting her bra back on. “Other than my sister-in-law, I don’t think I’ve ever had a real female friend,” she said.

“Your friends are all guys?” the girl said.

It took a very long time before Mathilde could say, “No.” The girl looked at her for a moment and leaned forward and gave her a long motherly kiss on the forehead.

—

LOTTO’S AGENT CALLED HER. It was time, he intimated with a quaver in his voice, that she begin to take over business matters again. A few times he had been the recipient of her soft venom.

She paused for so long that he said, “Hello? Hello?”

There was a large part of her that wanted to put the plays behind her. To face forward into the unknown.

But she held the phone to her ear. She looked around. Lotto wasn’t in this house, not on his side of the bed, not in his study in the attic. Not in the clothes in the closets. Not in their first little underground apartment, where, a few weeks ago, she’d found herself looking through the casement windows, seeing only a stranger’s purple couch and a pug dog leaping at the doorknob. Her husband wasn’t about to pull up the drive, though she was always on alert, listening. There were no children; his face wouldn’t shine up out of a smaller one. There was no heaven, no hell; she wouldn’t find him on a cloud or in a pit of fire or in a meadow of asphodel after her body quit her. The only place that Lotto could be seen anymore was in his work. A miracle, the ability to take a soul and implant it, whole, in another person for even a few hours at a time. All those plays were fragments of Lotto that, together, formed a kind of whole.

So she told the agent to send her what needed to be done. Nobody would forget Lancelot Satterwhite. Not his plays. Not the tiny fragments of him in his work.

—

EIGHT MONTHS AFTER she’d been made a widow, almost to the day, Mathilde was still feeling the shocks in the ground where she stepped. She climbed out of the cab into the dark city street. In her silvery dress, in her new boniness, in the hair she’d bleached white in its boy’s cut, she was Amazonian. She wore bells on her wrists. She wanted them to hear her coming.

“Oh my god,” Danica cried out when Mathilde opened the door and walked into the apartment, handing her coat to a servant girl. “Widowhood sure as shit becomes you. Christ, look at you.”

Danica had never been pretty, but she hid it now with skin orange and pumped with botulism, sinewy yoga muscles underneath. Her flesh was so thin one could see the delicate ribs where they met in the center of her chest. The necklace she wore cost a middle manager’s yearly salary. Mathilde always hated rubies. Dried corpuscles polished to a gloss, she thought.

“Oh,” said Mathilde. “Thanks.” She let the other woman air-kiss her.

Danica said, “God. If there was a guarantee that I’d look like you when I’m a widow, I’d let Chollie eat bacon for every meal.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Mathilde said. And Danica said, her black eyes moistening, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I was trying to make a joke. God, I’m the worst. Always putting a foot in it. I’ve had too many martinis, haven’t eaten a thing, trying to fit into this dress. Mathilde, I’m sorry. I’m a jerk. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Mathilde said, and went over and took the glass from Chollie’s hand and drank the gin down. On the piano, she put Danica’s present, the Hermès scarf that Antoinette — well, really, it was Sallie — had sent her a few birthdays ago, still in its ostentatious orange box. “Oh, so generous!” said Danica, and she kissed Mathilde on the cheek.

Danica went to the door to greet other friends, a former candidate for mayor and his shellacked wife.

“Forgive her. She’s drunk,” Chollie said. He had slid up unnoticed. As usual.

“Yes, well, when is she not?” Mathilde said.

“Touché. She deserves that,” he said. “Life is hard for her. She feels so insignificant, trying to keep up with all those purebred socialites. Do you want to head to the powder room to compose yourself?”

“I am never not composed,” Mathilde said.

“True,” Chollie said. “But your face, it looks. I don’t know, strange.”

“Oh. That’s because I’ve stopped smiling,” Mathilde said. “For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don’t know why I didn’t stop earlier. It’s enormously relaxing.”

He looked pained. He held his own hands and flushed, and said, darting a look at her face, “I was surprised you RSVP’d, Mathilde. It shows maturity after our talk. After what I revealed. Forgiveness. Kindness. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“You know, Chollie, I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted to garrote you with my shoelaces. I almost killed you with that ice cream spoon. But then I realized that you were full of shit. Lotto would never have left me. I know this as deep as my bones. No matter what you did, you couldn’t have hurt us. What we had was so far beyond anything you could ever do to ruin it. You’re just a little mosquito, Chollie. All itch, no poison. You are less than nothing.”