Fates and Furies (37 page)

Senior spring. Her whole life ahead of her. Almost too much brightness to look at directly. Something in Ariel had grown frantic. He took her to four-hour dinners, told her to meet him in the bathroom. She woke Sunday mornings to find him watching her. “Come work for me,” he said, thickly, once when she, on his cocaine, unspooled a full essay out of her brain about the genius of Rothko. “Work for me at the gallery and I’ll train you and we can take over New York.” “Maybe,” she said agreeably, thinking, Never. Thinking, Business. Soon, she promised herself. Soon she would be free at last.

  
  
11

S
HE
WAS
ALONE
for an afternoon. She came downstairs to find that God had chewed the kitchen rug, had left a mess of urine on the floor, was looking at her with a bellicose light in her eye. Mathilde showered, put on a white dress, let her hair drip the fabric wet. She put the dog into her crate, her toys and food in a plastic bag, put it all in the car. The dog screamed in the back, then settled.

She stood outside the general store in town until she saw a family she vaguely knew. The father was the man they’d hired to plow their driveway in winter, with a steer rustler’s face, maybe a little slow. The mother was the dental receptionist, a big woman with small ivory teeth. The children had gorgeous fawn eyes. Mathilde knelt to their level, and said, “I want to give you my dog.”

The boy sucked three fingers, looked at God, nodded. The girl whispered, “I can see your boobies.”

“Mrs. Satterwhite?” the mother said. Her eyes flicked over Mathilde; and by this, Mathilde knew she was dressed inappropriately. Ivory dress, designer. She hadn’t been thinking. Mathilde put the dog in the husband’s arms. “Her name is God,” she said. The woman gasped, then said, “Mrs. Satterwhite!” but Mathilde was walking to her car. “Hush, Donna,” she heard the man say. “Let the poor lady be.” She drove home. The house echoed, empty. Mathilde had been liberated. She had nothing to worry about now.

—

S
O
LONG
AGO
, it was. That day the light had fallen from the sky as if through green blown glass.

Her hair had been long then, sun-shot blond. Skinny legs crossed, reading
The Moonstone
. She bit her cuticle to blood and thought of her boyfriend, a love one week tender, and the world was made bright with him. Lotto, said the train as it came:
Lotto-Lotto-Lotto.

The short, greasy boy watching her from the bench was invisible to her because she had her book; she had her joy. To be fair, she hadn’t met Chollie yet. Since Mathilde and Lotto had found each other, Lotto had spent every spare moment with her; had ceded his dorm room to his childhood friend, who was illegally auditing classes, not an actual student at the school. Lotto had time for nothing but Mathilde, rowing, and classes.

But Chollie knew of her. He was there at the party when Lotto looked up and saw Mathilde and she saw him; when Lotto crushed a crowd of people to get to her. It had been only a week. It couldn’t be serious yet, Chollie had believed. She was pretty, if you were into stick figures, but he figured Lotto would never tie himself to one pussy at twenty-two, with his whole life of glorious fuckery ahead of him. Chollie was sure that if Lotto had been perfectly handsome he would never have the success he did. His bad skin, his big forehead, the slightly bulbous nose moderated what was an almost girlishly pretty face into something sexy.

And then, just the day before, he’d caught sight of Lotto and Mathilde together under the confetti of an overblown cherry tree, and he felt the air knocked out of his chest. Look at them together. The height of them, the shine on them. Her pale and wounded face, a face that had watched and never smiled now never stopped smiling. It was as if she’d lived all her life in the chilly shadows and someone had led her out into the sun. And look at him. All his restless energy
focused tightly on her. She sharpened something that threatened to go diffuse in him. He watched her lips as she spoke, and took her chin gently between his fingers and kissed her with his long lashes closed, even while she was speaking, so that her mouth moved and she laughed into his kiss. Chollie knew immediately that it was correct, that they were in very deep. Whatever was between them was explosive, made even the professors gape as they passed by. The threat of Mathilde, Chollie had understood then, was real. He, striver, knew another striver when he saw one. He who’d had no home had found a home in Lotto; and she had usurped even this.

[The Saturday after this one in the train station, Chollie would be napping in Lotto’s bed, hidden under a heap of clothes, and Lotto would come in, smiling so broadly that Chollie would stay silent when he could have spoken and made his presence known. Lotto, ecstatic, would pick up the phone and call his fat hog of a mother in Florida, who had once threatened to castrate Chollie years ago. There would be banter. Weird relationship, that one. And then Lotto would tell his mother he was married. Married! But they were babies. Chollie was shocked cold, missing much of the conversation, until Lotto left again. It couldn’t be true. He knew it was true. After some time had passed, he had wept bitterly, poor Chollie, under his heap of clothes.]

But on this day, before they were married, there was still time to save his Lotto from this girl. So here he was. He climbed onto the train behind Mathilde, sat behind her. A lock of her hair escaped the crevasse between seat backs, and he sniffed it. Rosemary.

She got off at Penn Station and he followed. Up from the underground stink to heat and light. She went toward a black town car, and the chauffeur opened the door and she was swallowed up. Midday in crowded Midtown, Chollie kept up on foot, though he was quickly sweating and his breastlets were heaving with effort. When the car paused before an Art Deco building, she got out and went in.

The doorman was a silverback gorilla in a costume, some kind of
Staten Island accent: bluntness would be key. Chollie said, “Who was that blond?” The doorman shrugged. Chollie took out a ten and gave it to him. The doorman said, “Girlfriend of 4-B.” Chollie looked at him but the doorman put out his hand and Chollie gave him all he had, which was a joint. The man grinned and said, “She been coming for too many years for a girl so young, you dig me? He’s some kind of art dealer. Name’s Ariel English.” Chollie waited, but the man said mildly, “That’s all you get for a little bud, little bud.”

Later, Chollie sat waiting in the window of the diner across the street. He watched. His sweaty shirt dried, and the waitress grew tired of asking if he wanted to order and just slopped coffee into his mug and went away.

When the shadows engulfed the building across the street, he almost gave up, headed back to his squat in academia. There were options. He’d look in the phone book for galleries. He’d research. But then the doorman straightened and opened the door crisply, and out came a chimera, a man with a jowly face and a body like a wisp of smoke poured into a suit. Wealth in the way he moved, his sleek grooming. Behind him, there was an animated mannequin. It took Chollie a moment to recognize Mathilde. Her heels were tall, her schoolgirl’s skirt cut nearly to the crotch, her hair swept high, far too much makeup. [She had refused to extend the terms of the arrangement beyond four years; in pique, Ariel had dressed her, knowing her, knowing how to cut.] Her face was bare of that constant low-level smile that she wore, both shield and magnet. Blank, it was something like an abandoned building. She walked as if unaware of the world around her, that her nipples were visible under her gauzy shirt.

They crossed the street, and there was dread in Chollie when he saw that they were coming into the diner toward him.

They sat in a corner booth. The man ordered for both—egg-white Greek omelet, him, chocolate milkshake, her. He watched their upside-down bodies in the chrome napkin dispenser. She ate nothing,
gazed at air. Chollie saw the man whispering in her ear, saw his hand disappear in the darkness between her legs. She let it, passive. [On the surface; beneath, the controlled burn.]

Chollie was overwhelmed. He felt a swift spinning in him. Fury for Lotto; fear of losing what he, Chollie, had worked so hard to keep. He stood in agitation and went back on the train drawn through the dusk and pressed his burning face against the cool glass and, at last home at Vassar, collapsed for a brief nap into Lotto’s bed to plan how to tell him about his new girl, who she secretly was. A whore. But he fell asleep. He woke to laughter in the common room, the sound of a television. Past midnight on the flashing clock.

He came out and almost fell down with astonishment. The only explanation: Mathilde must have a twin. He’d followed the wrong girl to the city. There was a girl in Lotto’s lap in sweatpants and a messy ponytail, laughing at something he was whispering in her ear. She was so different from what he’d seen that he knew he was wrong in having seen it. A dream? A half-eaten popover with apple butter was on the table, and Chollie almost lurched for it, he was so hungry.

“Hey,” Lotto bellowed. “Chollie! You haven’t met my”—he laughed—“my Mathilde. My girl I’m madly in love with. Mathilde, this is Chollie, my oldest friend.”

“Oh!” she said, and leapt up and moved toward Chollie, towering over him. “I’m so happy to meet you,” she said. “I’ve heard all the stories.” She paused then hugged him, and she smelled of plain Ivory soap and, aha, rosemary shampoo.

Many years later, when the gardener would try to grow rosemary on the patio of the penthouse, Chollie would toss the plants thirty stories to the sidewalk below and watch them explode in mushroom clouds of dirt.

“You,” he said. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Hard to miss. Six feet of perfect, legs to the moon,” Lotto said.

“No,” Chollie said. “Today. On a train to the city. I’m sure it was you.”

The slightest of hesitations, then Lotto said, “Must’ve been some other stunner. She was writing her French final in the computer room all day. Right, M.?”

How narrow Mathilde’s eyes had gone when she laughed. Chollie felt their coldness on him. “All morning, yeah,” she said. “But I was done fast. It was only a ten-pager. When you were at your rowing lunch, I went off to the city to the Met. We have to do an ekphrastic poem for my writing class and I didn’t want to do the same dumb Monet water lily from the campus museum that everyone else is doing. I just got back, actually. Thank you for reminding me!” she said to Chollie. “I bought Lotto something at the gift shop.”

She went to her overlarge purse and pulled out a book. It had a Chagall painting on the cover, Chollie would see later, when he stole it. Mathilde had also stolen it, just as she left Ariel’s apartment for the very last time. She’d gotten her last check. Now she was free to sleep with Lotto.

“
Winged Cupid Painted Blind
,” Lotto read. “
Art Inspired by Shakespeare
. Oh,” he said, kissing her chin. “It’s perfect.”

She looked at Chollie. Another glimmer through the dark. This time, perhaps not so benign.

Fine, Chollie thought. You’ll see how well I can wait. When you’re least expecting it, I will explode your life. [Only fair; she had exploded his.] A plan began to itch at the back of his brain. He smiled at her and saw himself reflected in the darkened window. He liked how he looked so different in reflection: so much thinner, paler, so much more blurred than he was in life.

  
  
12

H
ER
HUSBAND
HADN
’
T
WOKEN
HER
with a mug of coffee. Every day they had lived under the same roof, he had woken her with a cup of milky coffee. Something was wrong. She opened her eyes to full morning. Inside her, an abyss. She couldn’t see all the way to its black bottom.

She dawdled. Washed her face. Talked to the dog, who ran from Mathilde to the door frantically. Opened the curtains to find the world deep in midwinter gloom. Stared down the stairwell for a long time.

Barrel of a gun, she thought.

He’s left me, she thought. I knew from the moment I saw him that this day would come.

She came down the dim steps and he wasn’t in the kitchen. She whispered to calm herself as she climbed up to his study in the attic. A crumble of relief when she came in the door and saw him sitting at his desk. His head was down. He must have worked all night and fallen asleep. She looked at him, the leonine hair with the gray temples, the magnificent forehead, the soft full lips.

But when she touched him, his skin was lukewarm. His eyes were open, empty as mirrors. He was not resting there, not at all.

She slid behind him in the chair and pressed herself to him, tailbone to nape. She put her hands up his shirt, feeling the thin rubber of his belly flab. Her finger went into his navel to the second knuckle. She put her hands down his pajama pants and his boxer briefs, where
it was still warm. The wool of pubic hair. The satin head of him, humble in her palm.

For a long time, she held him. She felt the heat of him leave. She stood only when she could no longer recognize his body, like a word repeated until it has lost all meaning.

  
  
13

M
ATHILDE
WAS
AMBUSHED
in the pool by Chollie. She had been six months and one week without her husband.

Chollie left his car a mile up the road and hoofed it so she couldn’t hear him and flee to the pool house and hide.

She had eschewed a bikini that morning for a full-body browning. Who was she going to scandalize, the crows? Her sere, unloved body of a widow. But here Chollie was at the edge of the pool, groaning. She peered at him through her sunglasses and wiped her cheeks with her palms.