Fates and Furies (10 page)

“I can imagine. Bottle of peppermint schnapps.
The Breakfast Club
on the VCR. Someone would be crying in the bathroom all night long. Midnight streaking across the quad. A game of all-girls’ spin the bottle. My Rachel reading a book in the corner in her lobster-print pajamas, judging them all like a mini-queen,” Lotto said. “The review in her journal would be devastating.”

Rachel said, “Disappointing, trite, and vapid. Two thumbs down.” They chuckled, the knot of desperation in the room gently loosed. This gentling would be Rachel’s effect, not a flashy gift, but good.

In the silence afterward, Luanne said, “Of course, there were professional ethics that should have precluded you taking the canvas, Mathilde.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Mathilde said. “It’d have been all right had someone else dug it from the dumpster? You? What is it, Luanne? You’re jealous?”

Luanne made a face. Of course she was jealous. It must have been so hard for Luanne, Lotto thought, back when Mathilde worked at the gallery. Mathilde was always the second in charge. Knowledgeable, clever, gracious. Surely Ariel had favored Mathilde. Everyone favored Mathilde.

“Ha,” Luanne said. “That’s hilarious. Jealous of
you
?”

“Please stop,” said Chollie. “If it had been a Picasso, everyone
would have praised Mathilde for her foresight. You’re being a total vagina.”

“You’re calling me a vagina? I don’t even know who you are,” Luanne said.

“We’ve met a million times. You say that every time,” Chollie said.

Danica was watching the argument as if it were a game of Ping-Pong. She’d lost even more weight; her arms and cheeks were downy with strange fur. She was laughing.

“Please stop fighting,” Rachel said quietly.

“I don’t know why I come to your stupid freaking parties anyway,” Luanne said, standing. She started to cry with anger. “You’re a total fake, Mathilde, and you know what I’m talking about.” She turned toward Lotto, and said, venomously, “Not you, Lotto, you’re just a freaking Bambi. Anybody but you would understand by this point you don’t have enough talent for the stage. But nobody wants to hurt you by saying it. Least of all your wife, who thrives on making you a freaking infant in your own life.”

Lotto was out of his chair so fast the blood fled from his head. “Shut your pig face, Luanne. My wife is the best human being on the planet and you know it.”

Rachel said, “Lotto!” and Mathilde said, low, “Lotto, stop,” and Natalie and Susannah said, “Hey!”

Only Chollie burst into high-pitched laughter. Olga, whom they had all forgotten, whipped around and socked him hard on the shoulder, then stood and clattered across the floor in her high heels, threw open the apartment door, shouted, “You are monsters!” and stormed up to the street. The frigid wind blew down the stairs from the front door and spangled them with snowflakes.

For a long moment, nothing. Then Mathilde said, “Go after her, Chollie.”

“Nah,” he said. “She won’t get far without her jacket.”

“It’s ten below, you fuck,” said Danica, and threw Olga’s synthetic
fur at Chollie’s face. He got up grumbling and went out, slamming both doors. Mathilde rose and lifted the painting off the wall, over the shining pate of the brass Buddha, and handed it to Luanne.

Luanne looked at the painting in her hands. She said, “I can’t take this.” The others in the room had the sense of a ferocious battle being fought in the silence.

Mathilde sat, folded her arms, closed her eyes. Luanne put the painting against Mathilde’s knees. She went out and the door closed on her forever. In her absence, the room seemed brighter, even the overhead lights mellowed.

The friends left, one by one. Rachel shut herself into the bathroom, and they could hear the bath running.

When they were alone, Mathilde knelt in front of Lotto and took off her glasses and buried her face in his chest. He held her helplessly, making soothing sounds. Conflict nauseated him. He couldn’t bear it. His wife’s thin shoulders shook. But when at last she lifted her head, he was startled; her face was flushed and swollen, but she was laughing. Laughing? Lotto kissed the plum presses under her eyes, the freckles on her pale skin. He felt a vertiginous awe.

“You called Luanne a pig face,” she said. “You! Mr. Genial. Leaping in to save the day. Ha!”

Marvelous girl. He saw, with a warm rush, that she would come through this period of stringiness and woe so terrible she couldn’t share it with him. She would return. She would love him again. She wouldn’t leave. And in every place where they lived from then on, that painting would blue the air. It would be a testament. Their marriage picked itself up off the ground, stretched, looked at them with its hands on its hips. Mathilde was coming back to Lotto. Hallelujah.

—

“H
ALLELUJAH
,” Chollie said, knocking back an eggnog, mostly brandy. It was eleven o’clock. “Christ is born.” He and Lotto were
silently competing to see who could be drunker. Lotto hid it better, seemed normal, but the room spun if he didn’t blink it straight.

Outside, a thickness of night. Streetlights were lollipops of bright snow.

Aunt Sallie hadn’t stopped talking for hours, and now she was saying, “. . . course, I don’t know nothing, being not sophisticated as all y’all bachelor artists, and I sure as heck can’t tell you what to do, Lotto my boy, but if it was me, which it isn’t, I know, but if it was, I’d say I done gave it my all, be mighty proud of the three-four plays I done these past years and say, well, not everybody can be Richard Burton, and maybe I got something else I can do with my life. Like maybe, oh, take over the trust or something. Get back in Antoinette’s graces. Get undisinherited. You know she’s faring poorly, that sick heart of hers. Rachel and you both stand to gain a lot when she passes, god forbid it be soon.” She looked at Lotto cannily over her canary’s beak.

The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece. Around him, a lushness of poinsettias. Below, a fire Lotto had dared to make out of sticks collected from the park. Later, there would be a chimney fire, a sound of wind like a rushing freight train, and the trucks arriving in the night.

“I’m struggling,” Lotto said. “Maybe. But come on, I was born wealthy, white, and male. I’d have nothing to work with if I don’t have a little struggle. I’m doing what I love. That’s not nothing.” It sounded mechanical even to his own ears. Bad acting, Lotto. [But acting has slipped away from him a little, hasn’t it.] His heart wasn’t in the fight anymore.

“What’s success, anyway?” said Rachel. “I say it’s being able to work as much as you want at whatever lights you up. Lotto’s had steady work all these years.”

“I love you,” Lotto said to his sister. She was in high school, as skinny as Sallie. She took after the Satterwhite side, dark and hairy
and ill-favored; her friends couldn’t believe that Lotto and she were related. Only Lotto thought her stunning, planar. Her thin face reminded him of Giacometti sculptures. She never smiled anymore. He pulled her close and kissed her, feeling how tightly she was coiled inside.

“Success is money,” Chollie said. “Duh.”

“Success,” Sallie said, “is finding your greatness, hushpuppies. Lotto, you were born with it. I saw it the moment you came screaming out of Antoinette. Middle of a hurricane. You’re simply not
listening
to what your greatness is. Gawain told me he always thought you’d be the president of the USA or an astronaut. Something bigger than big. It’s in your stars.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Lotto said. “And my stars.”

“Well. You also disappointed our dead father,” Rachel said, laughing.

“To our disappointed dead father,” Lotto said. He raised his glass at his sister and swallowed the bitterness. It wasn’t her fault; she’d never known Gawain, didn’t know what pain she’d summoned.

Mathilde came back in the door, carrying a tray. Glorious in her silver dress, her hair platinum, in a Hitchcock twist: she’d gotten fancy since she’d been promoted six months earlier. Lotto wanted to take her into the bedroom and engage in some vigorous frustration abatement.

Save me, he mouthed, but his wife wasn’t paying attention.

“I’m worried.” Mathilde put the tray down on the counter in the kitchen, turned to them. “I left this up there for Bette this morning, and it’s eleven, and she hasn’t touched it. Has anyone seen her the last few days?”

Silence, the clicking of the heirloom clock Sallie had brought as a carry-on in her duffel. They all looked ceilingward, as if to see beyond the layers of plaster and floorboard and carpet into the cold,
dark apartment [silent save for the refrigerator hum, a large cold lump on the bed, the only thing breathing the hungry tabby rubbing against the window].

“M.,” Lotto said. “It’s Christmas. She probably left yesterday for some relative’s place, forgot to tell us. Nobody’s alone on Christmas.”

“Muvva is,” Rachel said. “Muvva’s alone in her dank little beach house, watching the whales with her binocs.”

“Bullhonkey. Your mother had her choice and she chose her agoraphobia over spending Christ’s birthday with her children. Believe me, I know it’s a disease. I live with it every dang day. I don’t know why every year I buy her a ticket. This year she even packed. Put on her jacket, her perfume. Then just sat on the couch. She said she’d rather organize the photo boxes in the spare bathroom. She made her own choice, and she’s a grown woman. We can’t feel bad,” Aunt Sallie said, but her pinched lips belied her words. Lotto felt a rush of relief. Her scratching at him tonight, her picking and prodding, arose from her own guilt.

“I don’t feel bad,” said Rachel, but her face was also drawn.

“I do,” Lotto said quietly. “I haven’t seen my mother for a long time. I feel very bad.”

Chollie heaved a sarcastic sigh. Sallie glared at him. “Well, it’s not like you kids can’t go see her,” Sallie said. “I know she cut you off, but all you have to do is spend five minutes with her and she’ll love you both. And that’s a promise. I can make it happen.”

Lotto opened his mouth, but there was too much to say, and it was all sour toward his mother, un-Christmassy, and so he shut it and swallowed the words back.

Mathilde put a bottle of red wine down hard. “Listen. Antoinette’s never been inside this apartment. She has never met me. She chose to be angry and stay angry. We can’t be sorry for her choices.” Lotto saw her hands trembling; rage, he realized. He loved the rare times she showed how thin her calm surface was; how, beneath, she boiled. A
perverse part of Lotto, it’s true, wanted to lock Mathilde and his mother in a room and let them claw it all out. But he wouldn’t do it to Mathilde; she was far too sweet to spend even a minute in his mother’s company without coming out maimed. She turned off the chandelier so the Christmas tree with its lights and glass icicles overcame the room, and he pulled her onto his lap.

“Breathe,” Lotto said softly into his wife’s hair. Rachel blinked in the tree’s gleam.

Sallie had been speaking hard truths, he knew. It had become evident over the past year that he could no longer count on his charm, which had faded; he tested it again and again on coffee baristas and audition gauntlets and people reading in the subway, but beyond the leeway given to any moderately attractive young man, he didn’t have it anymore. People could look away from him these days. For so long, he had thought it was just a switch he could flick. But he had lost it, his mojo, his juju, his radiance. Gone, the easy words. He could not remember a night when he didn’t fall asleep drunk.

And so he opened his mouth and began to sing. “Jingle Bells,” a song he hated, and he was never the world’s best tenor anyway. But what else was there to do but sing in the face of dismay, the image of his fat mother sitting up alone by a potted majestic palm strung in colored bulbs? The others now were joining in, miraculous, all of them save Mathilde, still rigid with anger, though even she was softening, a smile cracking her lips. At last, even she sang.

Sallie watched Lotto, cleaving. Her boy. Heart of her heart. She was clear-eyed, knew that Rachel, being of finer moral stock, kinder, humbler, deserved her affection more than Lotto. But it was for Lotto that Sallie woke praying. These years of distance were hard on her. [
. . . in a one-horse open sleigh
 . . . ] It came back to her now, the Christmas before he’d finished college, before Mathilde, when he had met Sallie and Rachel in Boston, where they stayed at a redoubtable ancient hotel and were snowed in under three feet of powder, like being
stuck in a dream. Lotto had maneuvered a rendezvous with a girl at another table at dinner, his smoothness so like his mother’s when she was young and lovely that it took Sallie’s breath away. Antoinette, undulating, had for a moment been superimposed on her son. Later, Sallie waited in ambush until midnight, standing at the diamond window at the end of the hallway where their rooms were, the endless snow falling into the Common at her back. [. . .
o’er the fields we go . . .
] At the other end, in minuscule, three housemaids with their trolleys were laughing, shushing one another. At last, her boy’s door opened and he emerged, bare but for a pair of running shorts. Such a beautiful long back he had, his mother’s, at least when she was thin. There was a towel around his neck; he was going up to the pool. The sin he intended to enact so painfully obvious that Sallie’s cheeks burned in imagining the girl’s buttocks gridded with tile marks, Lotto’s knees scabby in the morning. Where did he learn such confidence, she thought, as he became smaller, going toward the housemaids. He said something and all three pealed, and one gave him a little flick with a cloth, and another sent a slow glitter, chocolates, at his chest. [ . . .
laughing all the way, ha ha ha!
] He caught them. His laugh rumbled back to Sallie. How ordinary he was becoming, she’d thought. He was turning banal. If he wasn’t careful, some sweet girl would glue herself to him, Sallie saw, and Lotto would drift into marriage, a job as some high-paid menial, a family, Christmas cards, a beach house, middle-aged flab, grandchildren, too much money, boredom, death. He’d be faithful and conservative in old age, blind to his privilege. When Sallie stopped crying, she found herself alone, the cold draft of the window at her neck, and on both sides the rows of doors went on and on, diminishing to nothing at the end. [ . . .
what fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight, oh!
] But glories! Mathilde came; and though she appeared to be the selfsame sweet girl Sallie had been afraid of, she was not. Sallie saw the flint in her. Mathilde could save
Lotto from his own laziness, Sallie had thought, but here they were, years later, and he was still ordinary. The chorus caught in her throat.