Fates and Furies (32 page)

When he’d talked of Leo, there was a pulse under his words, a
thrill. And suddenly, she could taste his infatuation. It left a bitterness on the back of her tongue.

Mathilde dreamt of Leo Sen. She knew he was a young man, from the few bios that existed online. And though Lotto was thoroughly straight—the daily greedy need of his hands told her this—her husband’s desire had always been more to chase and capture the gleam of the person inside the body than the body itself. And there was a part of her husband that had always been so hungry for beauty. It was out of the question that Leo Sen’s body could steal her husband; it was not out of the question that with his genius Leo could take her place in Lotto’s affections. This was worse. In the dream, they were sitting at a table, Mathilde and Leo, and there was a giant pink cake, and though Mathilde was hungry, Leo was eating the cake, delicate bite by delicate bite, and she had to watch him eat it, smiling shyly until it was gone.

—

S
HE
SAT
FOR
A
LONG
,
LONG
TIME
at the kitchen table, and every moment she sat, the anger took on mass, then darkness, then scales.

“I’ll show him,” she said aloud to God. God wagged her tail sadly. The dog missed Lotto, too.

It took ten minutes to make the arrangements, another twenty to pack herself and the dog. She drove off through the cherry trees, resolutely not looking at the little white house in the rearview mirror. God had shivered when she handed her over at the kennel. Mathilde had shivered all the way to the airport, on the plane, had taken two Ambien, and stopped shivering to sleep all the way to Thailand, waking with a bleary head and a blossoming urinary tract infection from holding her bladder while she slept.

When she walked out of the airport into the humidity, the human roil, the tropical stink and wind, her legs went weak.

Bangkok flashed by, pink and gold, swarms of bodies beneath the streetlights. Strands of holiday lights snaked up the trees, a kindness
to the tourists. Mathilde’s skin was thirsty for the moist wind, now blowing rotten with marsh reeds and mud, now blowing eucalyptus. She was too agitated for sleep, the hotel too hygienic, so she wandered back out into the dark. A bent woman swept a sidewalk with a bundle of sticks, a rat perched atop a wall. Mathilde wanted the bitterness of a gin and tonic on her tongue, and followed music blindly under a portico into a nightclub, empty so early in the night. Inside was tiered, balconied, the stage being set up for a band. The bartender patted Mathilde’s hand when she delivered the drink, flash of warmth on the skin, then the cold of the glass, and Mathilde wanted to touch the lushness of the woman’s black eyelashes. Someone sat beside her, an American man bursting out of his T-shirt, his head fuzzy like a ripe peach. Beside him a plump and laughing Thai woman. His voice oozed with intimacy; he’d already taken possession. Mathilde wanted to seize his words, roll them up in her fist, shove them down his throat. Instead, she left, found the hotel, lay sleepless in bed until dawn.

In the morning, she found herself on a boat to the Phi Phi Islands, salt on her lips from the wind. She had her own bungalow. She’d paid for a month, imagining Lotto coming home to an empty house, no dog, searching all the rooms for her, finding nothing, the terror hatching in his heart. Had someone kidnapped her? Had she run away with the circus? She was so agreeably flexible when it came to Lotto that she could have been a contortionist. Her hotel room was white and full of carved wood; they’d put polished strange fruits in a red bowl on the table and a towel folded in the shape of an elephant on the bed.

She opened the French door to the shushing sea, the call of children down the beach, and stripped the bed of its comforter because she wanted other people’s germs nowhere near her skin, and lay back and closed her eyes and felt the old devastation rasp itself away.

When she woke, it was dinnertime, and the devastation was back, sharp-toothed, and it had gnawed a hole inside her.

She cried in the mirror, putting on her dress, her lipstick, cried too
much for eye makeup. She sat at her own table alone, among the flowers and shining cutlery, and kind people served her kindly and positioned her facing the sea so she could cry in peace. She ate a bite of her food and drank a whole bottle of wine and walked home to her bungalow in bare feet over the sand.

The only day she had in the sun she wore her white bikini that bagged on her because she’d lost so much weight. The waiters saw the tears sliding out from under her sunglasses and brought her cold glasses of fruit juice without being asked. She burned and stayed in the sun until the skin on her shoulders was blistered.

The next morning, she awoke to an elephant in the window, slowly carrying a little girl up the beach, led by the halter by a slender young woman in a sarong. In the night, the anger had struck at the sadness and chased it off. Mathilde’s body ached with yesterday’s sun. She sat up and saw her face in the mirror opposite the bed, red and lightning sharp and already resolved.

Here was the Mathilde she’d grown so accustomed to, the one who had never
not
fought. Hers was a quiet, subtle warfare, but she had always been a warrior. That poetess was imaginary, she had to tell herself; that skinny musician named Leo had nothing on her because he was a boy, and he was powerless. Of course she’d prevail. How dare she walk away.

Two days after she arrived, her plane lifted off the ground and she was in the air again. She had spent six days molten on the inside. They handed God to her at the kennel, and the dog was so happy to see her she tried to nose her way into Mathilde’s torso. Mathilde came home to the frigid house, stinking of the garbage she hadn’t bothered to take out before she left. She put her suitcase in the closet upstairs to deal with later and sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea to strategize. The problem wasn’t what she would do to go fetch Lotto back to her. It was what she wouldn’t do. There were too many choices, there was too much possibility.

In a few moments, she heard a car on the drive. On the gravel came a step with a hitch in it.

Her husband came in the door. She let him wait.

Then she looked at him across the great distance. He was thinner, finer than when he left. As if whittled. On his face there was something she dropped her eyes to keep from seeing.

He sniffed the air, and to prevent him from speaking about the smell of garbage and the coldness of the house, which would have broken something, would have made it impossible to return to him, she crossed the kitchen and locked his mouth to hers. The taste, after so long, was strange, the texture rubbery. A shock of unfamiliarity. There was a slight shifting in him, a sense of bending. He was about to speak, but she pushed her hand hard against his mouth. She would have shoved her hand inside him if she could to keep the words from coming out. He understood. He smiled, dropped his bag, walked her backward into the wall. His great body on hers. The dog whimpering at his feet. She took her husband ferociously by the hips and pulled him ahead of her through the hall and up the stairs.

She pushed him with all she had and he landed very hard on the bed, hissing at residual pain in his bad left side. He looked up at her, a puzzlement moving on his face, and again he tried to talk, but she now cupped his mouth and shook her head and took off her shoes and pants, unbuttoned his shirt, his pants. Oh, those boxer briefs with the hole along the elastic, they broke her heart. His ribs were visible in his pale chest. His was a body having undergone terrific strain. She took four of his ties from the closet, remnants of his prep school boyhood, rarely worn now in his life. He laughed when she tied his wrists to the bed frame, though she felt sickly inside. Deadly. She knotted another tie into a blindfold. He made a strange noise, but she tied the fourth as a gag, and pulled it unnecessarily tight, the blue of the silk digging into his cheeks.

For a long time, she crouched above him, feeling powerful. She
left her shirt on to hide her sunburn, the peeling skin; her face she’d explain by a long bike ride. She brushed the tip of him with her pelvis, gently, and at random. He started with every touch. He’d been reduced to this long body, so expectant, the eyes removed, the tongue removed. When he was panting behind his gag, she dropped onto him hard, not caring if it hurt him. She thought of—what? Scissors in fabric. It had been so long. It was so unfamiliar. The taut belly below her like the crisp top of crème brûlée. His face was red under the restraint; he was mouthing his fish mouth as if to free it, and she dug her fingernails into his waist, bringing up crescents of blood. His back arched off the mattress. The veins in his neck raised, blue.

He came before she did, and so she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. She’d groped toward something in the dark and had somehow seized it back to her. She thought of the words she’d kept him from speaking, building up, mounting in him until there was unbearable pressure. And though she took the blindfold off, she left the gag, kissing his purple wrists. The way he looked at her now, with the silk darkened in an egg shape by spit, was quizzical. She leaned over and kissed him between the eyebrows. He held her loosely by the waist, and she waited until she knew he wasn’t going to say anything about what he had gone through and then untied the last tie on his mouth. He sat up and kissed the pulse under her chin. His warmth, she had missed it so. His body’s palette of stinks. He respected the silence. He rose and went to the bathroom to take a shower, and she went downstairs to boil some pasta. Puttanesca. She couldn’t resist the dig.

When he came down, he showed her the cuts she’d raised on his sides. “Wildcat woman,” he said, and there was a little sadness in the way he watched her now.

This should have been the end; this was not the end. She kept a Google search on Leo Sen. When, the week before Christmas, the terrible news of the boy’s drowning in the cold ocean rose on the screen, she’d felt startled. And then victory, hot and terrible, rose in
her chest. She looked away from her own face in the reflection of the computer screen.

When Lotto was upstairs, buried in his new play, she went to Stewart’s and bought a newspaper. She saved it until the morning of Christmas Eve and put it at the mirror near the front door, where, she knew, Lotto would wait for Rachel and her wife and the children. He loved the holidays, as they matched the hot and jolly center of himself; he would be staring out the window to the country road impatiently and wouldn’t fail to see the paper. He would know then what it was that she knew. She heard him whistling and came out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs to watch. He smiled at himself in the mirror, checked his profile, and his hand fell on the paper. He looked more closely and began to read. He went pale, clutched the table beneath him as if he would faint. Rachel and Elizabeth were bickering when the back door opened and they came into the kitchen, and the children were shrieking with excitement, and the dog was screaming with happiness at the prospect of them. She’d saved the paper for right now, because with company he wouldn’t argue, he wouldn’t make things worse by saying them aloud, and if he didn’t say them immediately, he wouldn’t say them at all. Lotto looked up into the mirror and saw Mathilde on the stairs behind him.

She looked at him looking at her. A new understanding came into his face and then vanished; he was frightened by this glimpse of what was in her and wouldn’t watch it unfurl.

She took a step down the stairs. “Merry Christmas!” she called out. She was clean. Pine-scented. She descended. She was a child; she was as light as air.

—

W
ELCH
D
UNKEL
HIER
! sings Florestan in Beethoven’s
Fidelio
, an opera about a marriage.

Most operas, it is true, are about marriage. Few marriages could be called operatic.

What darkness here!
is what Florestan sings.

—

N
EW
Y
EAR
’
S
D
AY
was the only day in her life she believed in a god. [Ha.] Rachel and Elizabeth and the children still asleep upstairs in the guest room. Mathilde made scones, a frittata. Her life a long and endless round of entertaining.

She turned on the television. Turmoil in black and gold, a fire in the night. A shot of bodies under sheets, neat as tents on a plain; a building with arched windows, blackened and unroofed. Someone’s cell phone video just before the conflagration, a band on a stage shouting a countdown to the new year, sparklers spitting out fire, laughing faces. Now, outside, and people being helped to ambulances, lying on the ground. Devastated skin, charred and pink. The thought of meat inescapable. Mathilde felt a slow sickness overcome her. This place she recognized, she had been there just nights before. The press of bodies at the locked doors, the choking smoke, the screams. That juicy girl next to that big American man on the barstool. The bartender with the lush eyelashes, the shock of her cold hand on Mathilde’s skin. When she heard Rachel’s step on the top stair, she turned off the television, went quickly out into the backyard with God to compose herself in the cold. 

That evening over dinner, Rachel and Elizabeth announced that Elizabeth was pregnant.

In bed, when Mathilde wept and wept, in gratitude and guilt and horror for all that she had escaped, Lotto thought it was because his sister was so rich with children and they were so terribly, unfairly poor. Later, he cried, too, into her hair. And the distance between them was bridged, and they were again united.

  
  
8

T
HE
AIRPORT
DEAFENED
. Aurélie, eleven, alone, understood nothing. At last she saw the man holding the sign with her name on it and knew with a rush of relief that this must be her uncle, the much older brother of her mother. The child, the grandmother always said, of her wicked youth; though her old age was wicked as well. The man was jolly, round, red, full of sympathy. Already, she liked him.