Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Chollie was about to say something, but only looked weary and sighed.

“Anyway. Despite it all, we are old friends,” she said, squeezing his forearm. “One doesn’t get many old friends in life. I missed you. Both of you. Even Danica.”

He stood still for a long time, looking at her. At last, he said, “You always were too kind, Mathilde. We are all undeserving of you.” He was sweating. He turned away, either annoyed or moved. For some time, she flipped through a lavish book on the coffee table called Winged Cupid Painted Blind that seemed strangely familiar to her, but the panels all blended together and she saw nothing at all.

Later, as everyone was moving through the living room on the way into dinner, Mathilde stayed a few seconds behind, ostensibly looking at the small Rembrandt that Chollie had just bought. If a Rembrandt could be boring, this was. Classical composition, three bodies in a dark room, one pouring some unguent from a vase, one sitting, one speaking. Well, nobody had ever accused Chollie of having taste. She went back toward the piano. She pulled a second gift out of her handbag, this one in light blue paper. It was thin. The size of an envelope, wrapped. There was no card on this one, but she was sure it was the best gift of the bunch. Almost artistic, strobe-lit naked Chollie among all that stranger flesh.

At noon the next day after Danica’s birthday party, Mathilde was waiting. She sat reading the paper in the breakfast room, luxuriating in her pajamas. She picked up the phone on the first ring, already grinning.

“She left me,” Chollie spat. “You hell-dog monster bitch-face cunt.”

Mathilde took off her reading glasses and propped them on her head. She fed God a rind of her pancake. “Would you look at that. My dick’s on the table,” she said. “Seems my game’s longer than yours. Just wait until you see what’s coming for you next.”

“I’ll kill you,” he said.

“Can’t. I died eight months ago,” she said. She gently hung up.

—

SHE SAT IN THE KITCHEN, SAVORING. The dog on her bed, the moon in the window. In the beautiful blue bowl, the tomatoes from her summer garden had gone wrinkled and were emitting a powerful earthy sweetness, just before rot. For two months, she had left the letter from Land there, for what she imagined was in it. What? Gratitude? Sexy words? An invitation for her to visit him in the city? She’d liked him immensely. Something in him was balm to her. She would have gone, spent the night in his surely overpriced exposed-brick loft in a trendy riverfront area, and would have driven home at dawn feeling ridiculous. Also, she would have felt smooth and fine, loudly singing to thirty-year-old pop. Sexy. Young again.

She had just come back from her penultimate meeting with the FBI detective. He had salivated for what she told him she had. The filthy photographs of Chollie had done their magic. [In three months, Danica would be a divorcée rich beyond measure.] The box of files that, tomorrow, she would give to the sweaty small agent with the sideburns was her footrest in the kitchen tonight. She kept looking down through the dark where the box was as lunar pale as a toadstool.

On her laptop there was a French movie. In her hand, a globe of malbec. There was something satiated in her; something calmed. She was imagining Chollie’s headlong fall. She pictured his fat face on the television as he was squeezed into the cop car; how childlike he would look, how at a loss.

The doorbell rang. She opened the door to Rachel and Sallie. On the porch, doubled, her husband briefly shining out.

Mathilde let herself lean for a few breaths into the buttress of their arms, felt the weight of her own body relieved for the first time in so long.

She opened cold champagne for them. [Why the hell not.]

“Celebrating?” Rachel said.

“You tell me,” Mathilde said. She’d noted Sallie’s collar askew, the ring twisted wrong around Rachel’s finger. Nerves. Something was up. But they didn’t tell her, not yet. They sat drinking. With her long and bony face, Rachel in the twilight looked molded of resin; Sallie polished in a silk jacket, chic haircut. Mathilde thought of Sallie on her world tour, imagined lushness, fruit in the shape of swans, lovers in damp sheets. The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?

Rachel put the glass down and leaned forward. The emerald tapped three slowing swings against her clavicle, dully gleamed when it came to rest in the air.

Mathilde closed her eyes, said, “Say it.”

From her pocketbook, Sallie pulled a thick kraft file and put it on Mathilde’s knees, and Mathilde lifted a corner with her index finger and opened it. From most recent to least, a gallery of vice. Most were not even hers. From freshest to oldest; all before Lotto died. Grainy photo of Mathilde in a bikini on a beach in Thailand, the failed separation. Mathilde kissing Arnie’s cheek on a street corner. [Ludicrous, even if she were canted toward infidelity, he was too slimy.] Mathilde, drawn, a skeleton, young, walking into the abortion clinic. Her uncle, strange shiny pages smuggled from some sort of secret file delineating his purported offenses as of 1991—she would read it like a novel much later. Finally, her Paris grandmother and her rap sheet in French, smiling wickedly at the camera, prostituée like flyspecks across the page.

Great gaps here: a lacework of her life’s tissue. Thank god that the worst of it remained holes. Ariel. The sterilization, the baseless hope for children she’d let live in Lotto. What Aurélie had done all those years ago. All the deficits of goodness that added up to a shadow Mathilde.

Mathilde reminded herself to breathe, looked up. “You researched me?”

“No. Antoinette did,” Sallie said, clicking her teeth against her glass. “From the first.”

“All this time?” Mathilde said. “She was committed.” A pang. All this time, and Mathilde had been vibrantly alive in Antoinette’s head.

“Muvva was a patient woman,” Rachel said.

Mathilde closed the file and tapped the papers neatly back. She poured the rest of the champagne equally into the glasses. When she looked up, Sallie and Rachel were both making grotesque puffed-up faces that startled her. Together, they began laughing.

“Mathilde thinks we’re about to hurt her,” Sallie said.

“Sweet M.,” Rachel said. “We wouldn’t.”

Sallie sighed, wiped her face. “Don’t fret. We kept you from harm. Twice Antoinette tried to send packets to Lotto, once with your uncle and then the abortion, and again when you left him. She overlooked that I was the one to walk mail down to the box at the end of the drive and back.”

Rachel laughed. “The will she sent me to have notarized was lost. Donating Lotto’s share of the trust to a chimp rescue. Poor needy monkeys are going to go without their bananas,” she said. She shrugged. “It was Muvva’s fault. She never expected gross perfidy from the meek and mild.”

Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees.

She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women. Such kindness. Their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her and they loved her even still.

“There’s one more thing,” Rachel said, so quickly Mathilde had to concentrate to understand. “You don’t know this. We didn’t until my mother died. I mean, it was a total shock. We had to process it before we did anything. And then we were going to tell Lotto after we put things in order. But he.” She left the sentence unfinished. Mathilde watched as her face, as if in slow motion, collapsed. She handed over a photo album in inexpensive cordovan. Mathilde opened it.