Fates and Furies (42 page)

She, who never drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true; there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous boulder blocking their future had rolled itself away.

“They’ll still be here when we’re gone,” he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he’d be sozzled. “The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches. They will be the kings of the earth.” He was amused by her; he, who was so often drunk. His poor liver. She pictured it inside him, a singed rat, pink and scarred.

“They deserve this place more than we do,” she said. “We’ve been reckless with our gifts.”

He smiled and looked up. There were no stars; there was too much smog for them. “Did you know,” he said, “they found out just a little while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.” He did his best Carl Sagan: “Billions and billions!”

She felt a sting behind her eyes, but couldn’t say why this thought touched her.

He saw clear through and understood. [He knew her; the things he didn’t know about her would sink an ocean liner; he knew her.] “We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.”

—

I
N
THE
HAZY
SPACE
after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the Internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands
at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

—

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
, after the glorious first night, when everything was good and the light was sweet and possible, she went out for the paper and a whole box of patisserie,
pains au chocolat
and
chaussons aux pommes
and croissants, and ate a brilliant almond
viennoiserie
in four bites as she walked back. Once home in their cozy gold-ceilinged burrow, she poured a glass of water while Lotto rifled through the paper with his hair a bed-head wilderness, and when she turned back around, his great lovely face had blanched. He made a curious grimace, drawing down his lower lip until he showed his bottom teeth, for once, perhaps the first time ever, wordless.

“Uh-oh,” she said, and came swiftly to him and read over his shoulder.

When she was finished, she said, “That critic can eat a bowl of dicks.”

“Language, love,” he said, but it came out automatically.

“No, seriously,” Mathilde said. “Whatsername, Phoebe Delmar. She hates everything. She hated Stoppard’s last play. She called it self-indulgent. She actually said that Suzan-Lori Parks was failing at being Chekhovian, which is insane because of course Suzan-Lori Parks isn’t trying to be Chekhov, duh. It’s hard enough to be Suzan-Lori Parks. That’s like the simplest criterion for being a critic, right, evaluating a work on its own terms. She’s like a bitch-face failed poet who knows nothing and is trying to make a name for herself by tearing people down. She only does pans. Don’t even pay any attention at all.”

“Yeah,” he said, but too softly. He stood and turned around haplessly for a moment like a great tall dog about to sink down into the grass for a nap, then went to the bedroom and crawled under his covers and stayed there, unresponsive, even though Mathilde crept naked into the room on her hands and knees, and dug the sheet out from under the mattress and slithered up the length of his body from the toes up, her head popping out of the duvet at his neck; but his body was lax and his eyes were closed and he wouldn’t respond, and even when she placed both of his hands on her bum, they slid off bonelessly in his misery.

Nuclear option it was, then. She laughed to herself; oh, she loved this hapless man. Mathilde went into the garden, overgrown now that poor Bette had passed away, and made a few phone calls, and at four in the afternoon, Chollie rang the doorbell with Danica on his arm—“Kiss kiss,” Danica shouted in each of Mathilde’s ears, and then, “Fuck you, I hate you, you’re so pretty”—and Rachel and Elizabeth came in, hand in hand, sporting matching tattoos of turnips on their wrists, the meaning of which they gigglingly refused to divulge, and Arnie came and made sloe gin fizzes, and Samuel came in wearing his baby on his chest. When Mathilde succeeded in putting Lotto in a nice blue button-up and khakis, and dragged him out to his friends, and with every hug, every person who came up and told him earnestly how wonderful the play was, she saw an inch of spine returning to him; she saw the color coming back to his face. The man swallowed praise the way runners swallow electrolytes.

By the time the pizza came, Mathilde opened the door, and though she was in leggings and a semitransparent top, the delivery man’s eyes were sucked to Lotto in the middle of the room, turning his arms into monster arms and bugging his eyes, telling a story of when he was mugged in the subway, pistol-whipped on the back of the head. He was emitting his usual light. He mimed a stagger then
fell to his knees, and the pizza man leaned in to watch, ignoring the cash Mathilde was trying to hand him.

When she closed the door, Chollie was standing at her side. “Pig to man in a single hour,” he said. “You’re a reverse Circe.”

She laughed silently; he’d pronounced it
Chir-chee
, as if Circe had been a modern Italian. “Oh, you dirty autodidact,” she said. “It’s pronounced
Ser-see
.”

He looked wounded, but shrugged and said, “I never thought I’d say it, but you’re good for him. Well, hell!” he said, now in a vicious Florida accent. “Empty-head friendless blond model gold digger actually turning out good. Who’d a thunk? At first, I done figgered you was going to take the money and run. But no. Lotto got hisself lucky.” In his normal voice, Chollie said, “If he turns out to do something big with himself, it’ll be because of you.”

Despite the hot pizzas in her hands, the room felt cold. Mathilde held Chollie’s eye. “He would have been great without me,” she said. The others still on the couch, laughing up at Lotto, though Rachel was looking at Mathilde from the counter in the kitchen, clutching her own elbows.

“Even you couldn’t have magicked that into being, witch,” Chollie said, and he took a pizza box from her, opened it, folded three slices together, and put the box back on the stack to eat the mass in his hands, grinning at her through a mouthful of grease.

—

D
URING
THE
YEARS
when Lotto felt as if he were getting to be good enough and secure enough, even when he was working constantly, his plays all being published, productions all over the country steadily increasing so that they alone provided a comfortable living, even then he was gadflied by this Phoebe Delmar.

When
Telegony
appeared, Lotto was forty-four, and the acclaim
was instant and near universal. Mathilde had seeded the idea in his head; it had been seeded in hers by Chollie years earlier with his Circe comment. It was the story of Circe and Odysseus’s son Telegonus, who, after Odysseus had abandoned them, was raised by his mother in a mansion in the deep woods on Aeaea, protected by the enchanted tigers and pigs. When he left home, as all heroes must, Telegonus’s witch mother gave him a poisoned stingray spear; he floated to Ithaca on his little ship, started stealing Odysseus’s cattle and ended up in a terrible battle with the man he didn’t know was his father, finally killing him.

[Telegonus married Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife; Penelope’s own son with Odysseus, Telemachus, ended up marrying Circe; half brothers became stepfathers. As Mathilde always read the myth, it was a roar in support of the sexiness of older women.]

Lotto’s play was also a sly nod to the nineteenth-century idea of the term
telegony
: that offspring could inherit the genetic traits of their mother’s previous lovers. Telegonus, in Lotto’s version, bore the pig’s snout, the wolf’s ears, and the tiger’s stripes of the lovers Circe had turned into animals. This character was always played in a terrifying mask, the fixity of which made the soft-spoken character all the more powerful. As a joke, Telemachus was also played in a mask in the round, with twenty different eyes and ten different mouths and noses for all of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was off on his little meander over the Mediterranean.

The whole thing was set in Telluride in the modern day. It was an indictment of a democratic society that somehow was able to contain billionaires.

“Didn’t Lancelot Satterwhite come from money? Isn’t this hypocritical of him?” a man could be heard wondering at intermission in the foyer. “Oh, no, he was disinherited for getting married to his wife. It’s such a tragic story, actually,” a woman said, in passing. From
mouth to mouth it spread, viral. The story of Mathilde and Lotto, the epic romance; he was unfamilied, cast out, not allowed to go home to Florida again. All for Mathilde. For his love for Mathilde.

Oh, god, thought Mathilde. The piety! It was enough to make her sick. But, for him, she let the story stand.

And then, perhaps a week after the opening, when the advance orders for the tickets were extended out to two months and Lotto was drowning in all of the congratulatory e-mails and calls, he came to bed in the middle of the night, and she woke instantly, and said, “Are you crying?”

“Crying!” he said. “Never. I’m a manly man. I splashed bourbon in my eyes.”

“Lotto,” she said.

“I mean, I was cutting onions in the kitchen. Who doesn’t love to chop Vidalias in the dark?”

She sat up. “Tell me.”

“Phoebe Delmar,” he said, and handed over the laptop. In its dim gleam, his face was stricken.

Mathilde read and let out a whistle. “That woman better watch her back,” she said darkly.

“She’s entitled to her opinion.”

“Her? Nope. This is the only hatchet job you got for
Telegony.
She’s insane.”

“Calm down,” he said, but he seemed comforted by her anger. “Maybe she has a point. Maybe I am overrated.”

Poor Lotto. He couldn’t stand a dissenter.

“I know every part of you,” Mathilde said. “I know every full stop and ellipsis in your work, and I was there when you wrote them. I can tell you better than anyone in the world, much more than this bombastic self-petard-hoisting leech of a critic, that you are not overrated. You are not overrated one single whit. She is overrated. They should cut off her fingers to keep her from writing anything more.”

“Thank you for not cursing,” Lotto said.

“
And
she can fuck herself lingeringly with a white-hot pitchfork. In her dark shit-star of an asshole,” Mathilde said.

“Aha,” he said. “Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce.”

“Try to sleep,” Mathilde said. She kissed him. “Just write another one. Write a better one. Your success is like wormwood to her. It galls.”

“She’s the only one in the world,” he said sadly, “who hates me.”

What was this mania for universal adoration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone. She stifled a sigh. “Write another play, and she’ll come around,” she said, as she always did. And he wrote another one, as he always did.

  
  
19

M
ATHILDE
BEGAN
GOING
for much longer runs in the hills. Two hours, three hours.

Sometimes, when Lotto was alive and he was in full steam up in his study in the attic and she could hear even in the garden outside as he cracked himself up, doing his characters’ lines in their own voices, she had to put on her running shoes and set off down the road to prevent herself from going up the stairs and warming herself against his happiness; she had to run and run as a reminder that having her own strong body was a privilege in itself.

But after Lotto left, her grief had begun to radiate into her body, and there was a run after she had been several months a widow when Mathilde had to stop a dozen miles from the house and sit on a bank for a very long time because, it appeared, her body had stopped working the way it should. When she stood, she could only hobble like an old woman. It began to rain and her clothes were soaked, her hair stuck to her forehead and ears. She came slowly home.

But the private investigator was in Mathilde’s kitchen, the light on over the sink. The dim brown dusk of October was falling outside.

“I let myself in,” the investigator said. “About a minute ago.” She was wearing a tight black dress, makeup. Like so, she looked German, elegant without being pretty. She wore figure eights in her ears, infinity swinging every time she moved her head.

“Huh,” said Mathilde. She took off her running shoes, her socks,
her wet shirt, and dried her hair with God’s towel. “I wasn’t aware that you knew where I lived,” Mathilde said.

The investigator waved that away, said, “I’m good at what I do. Hope you don’t mind that I’ve poured us a glass of wine. You’re going to want it when you see what I found about your old friend Chollie Watson.” She laughed at her own pleasure.

Mathilde took the manila envelope she held out, and they went out to the stone veranda where the watery sun was going down over the cold blue hills. They stood watching it in silence until Mathilde began to shiver.

“You’re upset with me,” the investigator said.

Mathilde said, very gently, “This is my space. I don’t let anyone in. Finding you here felt like an assault.”