Fates and Furies (27 page)

She’d wake soon with a startle. His wife, who never cried, would cry. Masked with her own fingers, she’d wait in the dark for Lotto to return.

—

M
OON
A
NAVEL
, light on the water a trail of fine hair leading straight to Lotto.

Coming toward him on it, all the girls he’d had before Mathilde. So many. Naked. Shining. Chollie’s sister, Gwennie, his first at fifteen, hair wild. Glossy private-school girls, dean’s daughter, townies, college girls: breasts of bread
boules
and fists and squash balls in athletic socks and bull’s-eyes and buckeyes and teacups and mouse snouts and tick bites, bellies and rumps, glorious, all beautiful to Lotto. A few slender boys, his theater teacher. [Look away.] So many bodies! Hundreds! He would bury himself in them. Twenty-three years faithful to Mathilde. Without compunction, he could roll his body on the sea of theirs like a dog rolls on fresh new grass.

It would serve his wife right. It would make them equal. He could return to her afterward, avenged.

But he couldn’t. He shut his eyes and put his fingers in his ears. The sand pressed against his tailbone. He felt them passing by, fingers flicking like feathers over his skin. He counted a slow thousand after the last and looked to see the trail from the moon extruded out of the stopped water, the sand torn up in one long line.

—

T
HE
WATER
WAS
THE
ONLY
WAY
, he decided, to return to Mathilde. He would swim back into time.

He took off his boxer briefs and walked into the ocean. His feet, touching the water, set off bolts of electricity like lightning. He watched, thrilled, as the light branched into the deep and slowly faded. Saltatory conduction. Each time it was gone, he made it shoot outward again. He took a breath and plunged into the water and began to swim, loving the phosphorescence as his arms struck the surface. The moon drew him along. It was not difficult, swimming in stilled water,
though he had to climb the crests of the waves as if they were bumps on the land. Lobes of warmth, of cold, always the dazzle. He thrashed away, feeling a good tiredness come over him. He swam until his arms burned and his lungs were salted, and he swam some more.

He imagined passing schools of unmoving fish. He thought of galleons below, foundered in mud spangled with bullion. Stone trenches as deep as the Grand Canyon, which he flew over as if he were an eagle in a sky of water. At the bottom of these canyons were rivers of mud, creatures all goop and sudden gleam of teeth. He imagined a vast sea creature below, unfurling its arms to grasp him, but he was slippery and strong and escaped.

He’d been swimming for hours, if not days. If not weeks.

He couldn’t anymore. He stopped. He turned onto his back and went down. He saw the soft cotton of dawn wipe over the face of the night. He opened his mouth as if to eat the day. He was drowning, and in his drowning there came a glorious, vivid vision.

He was tiny, polyp of his mother, still attached by milk and warmth. Beach vacation. A window was open, waves sizzling beyond. [Antoinette, forever connected to the ocean, grasping what it reached, pulling it in, spitting up shells and bones.] She hummed. The slatted shades were down, casting streaks of light onto her. Hair glorious to her hips. She’d been a mermaid only recently, still a mermaid in her soft, pale, damp skin. She took one strap down slowly. Over a shoulder, the arm. The other. Now over her breasts, pop, out they came, soft pink like chicken cutlets, over her pale stomach with its breading of sand. Over her pubis with its luxuriant curls, down the white columns of her legs. She’d been so thin. Beautiful. From his nest of towels, Lotto, tiny, watched his gold-banded mother and had an inkling. She was over there; he was here. They were not, in fact, connected. They were two, which meant that they were not one. Before this moment, there had been a long warm sleep, first in darkness
and then in gradual light. Now he had awoken. It came out of him in a squawk, this awful separateness. She startled out of her daydream.
Hush, my little,
she said, coming over, putting him against her chilly skin.

She, at some point, had stopped loving him. [He couldn’t know.] It was a sorrow of his life. But perhaps, right then she did.

He floated down until he shipwrecked on the bottom of the ocean. Poofs of sand. He opened his eyes. His nose was barely below the surface, where the last of the moon rode the tip of a stilled wave. He put his feet down and pushed, and his body rose out of the water to his thighs.

Like a dog that had followed him, the shore was ten feet behind.

—

T
HE
DAY
DAWNED
FIRST
ON
THE
CLOUDS
. Golden cattle of sun. At least he’d have this comfort. The beach stretched perfect, the dunes black with foliage. Untouched by man. History, during the night, had been peeled to the beginning.

He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.

[It was clear now, what this was. His family inheritance. The final blinding salvo in the brain.]

He longed to go home. To Mathilde. He wanted to tell her he’d forgive her anything. Who cared anymore what she’d done, with whom? But all that was gone. He, too, would be gone soon.

He wished he could have known her old. He thought of how magnificent she would be then.

No sun but a dim gold. Tide tight to shore. His mother’s pink house. Three black birds huddled on the roof. He’d always loved the
ocean’s scent of fresh sex. He climbed out of the water and went naked up the beach, the boardwalk, into the house of his mother, outside onto the balcony.

For years, it seemed, he stood in the dawn.

—

[T
HE
THREAD
OF
SONG
has been measured to its bare spool, Lotto. We’ll sing the last of it to you.]

Look, now. In the distance, a person.

Closer, it’s two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair. Blond, green bikini; tall, shining. They kiss, handsy things happening under his trunks, her top. Who wouldn’t envy such youth, who wouldn’t grieve what has been lost, in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath, while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by dunes. She pushes down his trunks; he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh, yes, you’d return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the Eastern Seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You’re unworthy of her. [Yes. [No.]] Even as you think of flight, you’re transfixed by the lovers, wouldn’t dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other and it’s hard to tell where one begins and one ends: hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand, her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it; there is an overlap; you have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing, the sex reaching its culmination [come!]. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turned skyward: is this drizzle? [It is.] Sound of small shears closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty, and here it is. The separation.

FURIES

  
  
1

O
NE
DAY
,
WHEN
M
ATHILDE
was walking in the village where they’d been so happy, she heard a carful of boys drive up behind her. They were yelling lewd things. Anatomy they suggested she suck. What they’d like to do to her ass.

The shock became a flush of warmth, as if she’d drunk a tumbler of whiskey down.

It’s true, she thought. I still have a perfect ass.

But when the car drew level to her face, the boys went dumb. She saw them, pale, in passing. They gunned the engine and were gone.

This moment returned to her a month later when she crossed a Boston street and heard someone calling her name. A small woman darted up. Mathilde couldn’t place her. She had damp eyes and reddish hair hanging around her ears. Soft at the midsection, a breeder. From the looks of things, four little girls in matching Lilly Pulitzer were at home with the au pair.

The woman stopped five feet from Mathilde with a little cry. Mathilde brought her hands to her cheeks. “I know,” she said. “I’ve looked so old ever since my husband—”

She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“No,” the woman said. “You’re still elegant. It’s just. You look so
angry
, Mathilde.”

Later, Mathilde would remember the woman: Bridget, from her class in college. With the recollection came some small pang of guilt. Time, however, had obscured why.

For a breath, she studied the sidewalk waltz of chickadee and sun through windblown leaves. When she looked up again, the other woman took a step back. Then another.

Slowly, Mathilde said: “Angry. Sure. Well, what’s the point in hiding it anymore?”

And then she lowered her head, pressed on.

—

I
T
WOULD
COME
to her decades later, when she was old, in a porcelain bathtub held aloft on lion claws and her own body mercifully submerged, that her life could be drawn in the shape of an X. Her feet duck-splayed and reflected in the water.

From a terrifying expanse in childhood, life had focused to a single red-hot point in middle age. From there it had exploded outward again.

She slid her heels apart so they were no longer touching. The reflection moved with them.

Now her life showed itself to have been in a different shape, equal and opposite to the first. [Complex, our Mathilde; she can bear contradictions.]

Now the shape of her life appeared to be: greater than, white space, less than.

—

W
HEN
THEY
WERE
BOTH
forty-six years old, Mathilde’s husband, the famous playwright Lancelot Satterwhite, left her.

He went away in an ambulance without sirens. Well, not him. The cold meat of him.

She called his sister, Rachel. Rachel screamed and screamed, and when she stopped, she said, ferociously, “Mathilde, we’re coming. Hang tight, we’re coming.” His aunt Sallie was traveling and hadn’t left a number, so she called Sallie’s lawyer. Within a minute after
Mathilde hung up, Sallie called from Burma. “Mathilde,” she said. “You wait, darling, I’m coming.”

She called her husband’s best friend. “I’m taking the helicopter,” Chollie said. “I’m coming.”

They were soon to descend upon her. For now, she was alone. She stood on a boulder in the meadow, wearing one of her husband’s shirts, and watched the dawn hit the frost, prismatic. There was an ache in her feet from the cold stone. For a month or so, something had been eating at her husband. He’d gloomed around the house and hardly looked at her. It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back. A beating came near, and the wind started up, and she didn’t turn to watch the helicopter land, but she leaned against the freezing force of the wind. When the blades slowed, she heard Chollie’s voice at her elbow.

She looked down at him. Grotesque Chollie, gone bad with money, overrich like a pear ripened to ooze. He wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants. She’d woken him, she saw. He had to fold his hand into a visor to peer up at her.

“Insane,” he said. “He exercised every day. It should have been fat-ass me to go first.”

“Yes,” she said. He moved as if to hug her. She thought of the last warmth of her husband that she’d soaked into her skin, and said, “Don’t.”

“I won’t,” he said.

The meadow sharpened. “When we landed, I saw you standing there,” he said. “You looked the same age as when I first met you. You were so brittle. So full of light back then.”

“I feel ancient now,” she said. She was only forty-six.

“I know,” he said.

“You can’t,” she said. “You loved him, too. But you weren’t his wife.”

“I wasn’t. But I had a twin sister who died. Gwennie.” He looked
away, then said with cold in his voice, “She killed herself when she was seventeen.”

Chollie’s mouth was twisting in and out. Mathilde touched his shoulder.

“Not you,” he said quickly, and by this she understood him to mean that her fresh sorrow outblazed his own, that she should be the one to be comforted now. She could feel the grief coming on fast, shaking the ground like a hurtling train, but she hadn’t been hit by it yet. She had a little time still. She could soothe; it was what she was best at, after all. Being a wife.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Lotto never told me that Gwennie had killed herself.”

“He never knew. He thought it was an accident,” Chollie said, and this didn’t sound strange to her in the meadow full of winter light. It wouldn’t ring strange for some months, because here the horror was, plowing through her, and she could feel nothing for a very long time but its wild and whistling force.

—

It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said this. He, too, had found himself crashed into the desert when, just moments before, all had been open blue sky.

Where are the people?
said Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince.
It’s a little lonely in the desert . . .