Fates and Furies (43 page)

“I’m sorry,” the investigator said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought we had chemistry. I sometimes come on too strong.”

“You? Really?” Mathilde said, relenting, taking a sip of her wine.

The investigator smiled, and her teeth gleamed. “You’ll be less mad at me in a few minutes. I found some interesting stuff. Let’s just say your buddy’s got lots of friends. All at the same time.” She gestured at the envelope she’d given Mathilde and turned her face away.

Mathilde pulled out the photographs inside. How strange to see someone she had known for so long entangled like that. After she’d seen four pictures, she was shuddering, and it wasn’t from the cold. She went through all of them, resolute. “Excellent work,” she said. “This is repulsive.”

“Also expensive,” the investigator said. “I took you at your word when you said money was no object.”

“It isn’t,” Mathilde said.

The investigator came closer, touching Mathilde. “You know, your house surprised me. It’s perfect. Every detail. But so tiny for someone who has so much. It’s all light and planes and white walls. Shaker, almost.”

“I live monastically,” Mathilde said, meaning, of course, more. Her arms were crossed, wine in one hand, photographs in the other, but it didn’t stop the investigator, who leaned over the arm of the chair to kiss Mathilde. Her mouth was soft, searching, and when Mathilde smiled but didn’t kiss back, the woman went back down in her seat, and said, “Oh, okay. Sorry. Worth a shot.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Mathilde said, squeezing the other woman’s forearm. “Just don’t be a creep.”

—

Y
OU
COULD
STRING
TOGETHER
the parties Lotto and Mathilde had been to like a necklace, and you would have their marriage in miniature. She smiled at her husband down on the beach where the men were racing model cars. He was a redwood among pines, the light in his thinning hair, his laugh carrying past the waves, the music emanating mysteriously from the ceiling, the conversations among the women on the shaded veranda, drinking mojitos and watching the men. It was winter, freezing; they were all wearing fleeces. They pretended not to mind.

This party was near the end, though neither Mathilde nor Lotto knew it.

Just a lunch to celebrate Chollie and Danica’s upgrade in the Hamptons. Ten thousand square feet, live-in housekeeper, chef, and gardener. Stupid, Mathilde thought, their friends were idiots. With Antoinette gone, Lotto and she could buy this place many times over. Except that later, in the car, Lotto and she would laugh at their friends for this kind of idiotic waste, the kind he was raised within before his father kicked the bucket, the kind they both knew meant nothing but loud pride. Mathilde still cleaned both the country house and the apartment, she took out the garbage, she fixed the toilet, she squeegeed the windows, she paid the bills. She still cooked and washed up from the cooking and ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

These women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.

But there was one woman there whom Mathilde didn’t know, and this woman was blessedly normal. She was brunette and freckled but wasn’t wearing makeup. Her dress was nice, but not fine. She had a wry expression on her face. Mathilde angled herself toward her.

Mathilde said, sotto voce, “One more word about Pilates, I’ll pop.”

The woman laughed silently, and said, “We’re all doing planks while the great American ship goes down.”

They talked about books, the bondage manual disguised as a novel for teenagers, the novel painstakingly pieced out of photos of street graffiti. The woman agreed that the new vegetarian restaurant in Tribeca that was all the rage was interesting, but said that a whole meal that revolved around the sunchoke had a certain sameness, plate to plate.

“They may want to consider other chokes. For instance, the arti,” Mathilde said.

“I think they’ve put too much consideration into the arty,” the woman said.

They kept taking tiny steps away from the others until they were alone by the steps. “I’m sorry,” Mathilde said. “I’m not sure I know your name.”

The woman sucked in her breath. She sighed. She shook Mathilde’s hand. “Phoebe Delmar,” she said.

“Phoebe Delmar,” Mathilde repeated. “Hoo boy. The critic.”

“The same,” she said.

“I’m Mathilde Satterwhite. My husband is Lancelot Satterwhite. The playwright. Right there. That big lunk with the superloud laugh whose plays you have eviscerated over the past fifteen years.”

“I was aware. Occupational hazard,” Phoebe Delmar said. “I tend to pop up at parties like a scolding aunt. My boyfriend brought me. I didn’t know you’d be here. I would never have ruined your fun with my presence.” She seemed sad.

“I always thought I’d deck you if I met you,” Mathilde said.

“Thank you for not doing so,” Phoebe said.

“Well. I haven’t decided definitively against it,” Mathilde said.

Phoebe put her hand on Mathilde’s shoulder. “I never mean to cause pain. It’s my job. I take your husband seriously. I want him to be better than he is.” Her voice was earnest, sweet.

“Oh, please. You say that as if he’s sick,” Mathilde said.

“He is. Great American Artistitis,” Phoebe Delmar said. “Ever bigger. Ever louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country? Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that get the prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.”

She looked at Mathilde’s face and took a step back, and said, “Whoa.”

“Lunch!” Danica called, ringing a great brass bell on the porch. The men picked up the model cars, ground out the cigars, came trudging up the dune, their khakis rolled to their knees and their skin pink with cold wind. They sat at a long table with their plates heaped from the buffet. Space heaters disguised as shrubbery exhaled warmth. Mathilde sat between Lotto and Samuel’s wife, who was showing her photos of their new baby—Samuel’s fifth child—on her cell phone. “Lost a tooth on the playground, that monkey,” she said. “She’s only three.”

Down at the end of the table, Phoebe Delmar was listening wordlessly to some man whose voice was so loud, bits of his conversation were audible all the way to Mathilde. “Problem with Broadway these days is that it’s for
tourists
 . . . only great playwright America has produced is August Wilson . . . don’t go to theater. It’s only for snobs or people from Boise, Idaho.” Phoebe caught her eye, and Mathilde laughed at her salmon steak. God, she wished she didn’t like the woman. It would make things so much easier.

“Who’s that lady you were talking to?” Lotto said in the car.

She smiled at him, kissed his knuckles. “I never caught her name,” she said.

When
Eschatology
was performed for the first time, Phoebe Delmar loved it.

In six weeks, Lotto would be dead.

—

I
HAD
OFTEN
SAID
that I would write, The Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. . . . In short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.
Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Stein being, apparently, the genius: Alice apparently the wife.

—

“I
AM
NOTHING
,” Alice said, after Gertrude died, “but a memory of her.”

—

A
FTER
M
ATHILDE
flipped the Mercedes, the policeman came. She opened her lips and let the blood run out, for the sake of drama.

The flashing blues and reds made him look ill, then well, then ill again. She saw herself as if his face were a mirror. She was pale and skinny with a shorn head, with a chin full of blood, blood down her neck, blood on her hands and down her arms.

She held up her palms, which she’d cut on the barbed-wire fence, climbing over it to the road.

“Stigmata,” she said as tonguelessly as possible, and laughed.

  
  
20

S
HE
HAD
ALMOST
DONE
the right thing. At first, that bright April morning after
Hamlet
at Vassar, after the full and heady flight into Lotto, the love in her blood already humming like a beehive.

She’d woken to the flick of dark when the path lights out the window extinguished themselves. Her clothes still on, no telltale soreness below. Her promise to Ariel kept, then; she hadn’t had sex with Lotto. She’d broken no commitments. She’d only slept beside this charming boy. She looked below the sheet. He was naked. And how.

Lotto’s fists were balled up beneath his chin, and even in sleep, absent that waking wit, he was plain. The scarred skin on the cheeks. The hair still thick and swirling around his ears, the lashes, that carved jaw. She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.

She should be resentful. But she could not find resentment toward
him anywhere inside her. She wanted to press herself against him until his beautiful innocence had stamped itself on her.

In her ear, the voice she tried to block out all these years told her sternly to go. To not inflict herself on him. She had never been made to be obedient, but she thought of him waking to find her there, how irreparable the damage would be, and she obeyed; she dressed and fled.

She pulled the collar of her jacket over her cheeks so nobody would see her distress even though it was still dark outside.

There was a diner in town, deep into the grayer, less gleaming streets, a place most Vassar students would never go near. This is why she loved it. Also: the grease and smell and the homicidal cook who smashed the hash browns like he hated them and the waitress who seemed to be neurologically lopsided, her ponytail pulled unintentionally toward an ear, an eye floating off toward the ceiling as she took the order. On one hand, her nails were long; on the other, they were short and polished red.

Mathilde took her usual booth and hid her face behind the menu and let her smile fall off her face, and the waitress didn’t say a word, just put the black coffee and rye toast and a small linen handkerchief with blue embroidery before Mathilde, as if she knew that tears would come. Well. Perhaps they would, though Mathilde hadn’t cried since she was Aurélie. One side of the waitress’s face winked and she went back to the radio that was fuzzily playing some shock jock, all brimstone and perdition.

Mathilde knew how her life would go if she let it. Already, she knew that she and Lotto would be married if she seeded the thought in his brain. The question was if she could let him off the hook. Practically anyone would be better for him than she would be.

She watched the waitress swaying behind the homicidal cook to grab a mug from the rack under the counter. She saw how she put her hands on his hips, how he bumped back against her with his rear, a little slapstick in-joke, kiss of hips.

Mathilde let the coffee and the toast go cold. She paid, tipped far too much. And then she stood and walked into town, and stopped at the Caffè Aurora for cannoli and coffee, and was at Lotto’s room with two aspirin and a glass of water and the food when his eyelashes gave a little flutter and he looked up from whatever dream—unicorns, leprechauns, merry forest bacchanals—to see her sitting beside him.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you couldn’t be real. I thought you were the best dream I ever had.”

“No dream,” she said. “I’m real. I’m here.”

He put her hand on his cheek and rested there against her. “I think I’m dying,” he whispered.

“You’re severely hungover. And we’re born dying,” she said, and he laughed, and she held his warm, rough cheek, having committed to him in perpetuity.

She shouldn’t have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she’d had for so very, very long. She was weary of facing the world alone. He had presented himself at the exact right time, her lifeline, although it would be better for him if he had married the kind of soft, godly woman she’d know soon enough his own mother wanted for him. That Bridget girl would have made everyone happy. Mathilde was neither soft nor godly. But she made a promise that he would never know the scope of her darkness, that she would never show him the evil that lived in her, that he would know of her only a great love and light. And she wanted to believe that their whole life together he did.

—

“M
AYBE
,
AFTER
GRADUATION
, we could go visit Florida,” Lotto said, into the back of her neck.

This was just after they were married. Days, maybe. She thought of Lotto’s mother on the telephone, the bribe Antoinette had dangled. A million dollars. Please. For a moment, she considered telling him
all about the call, then thought of how he’d be wounded, and knew she couldn’t. She’d protect him. Better for him to believe his mother punitive than just plain cruel. Mathilde’s apartment above the mission-style antique shop was bizarrely elongated in the streetlight filtering up. “I haven’t been home since I was fifteen. I want to show you off. I want to show you all the places I juvenile delinquented,” he said, his voice deepening.