Fates and Furies (44 page)

“That’s not a word,” she murmured. And she kissed him so long, she made him forget.

Then: “Baby,” he said, cleaning up with his bare foot and a paper towel a glass of water he’d spilled on the oak floor in their new, sub-rosa apartment in Greenwich Village, gleaming as it was, still sans furniture. “I was thinking that maybe we could take a weekend and visit Sallie and my mom on the beach. I’d love to see your bod kicking it with tan lines.”

“Definitely,” Mathilde said. “But let’s wait until you get your first big role. You want to come back the conquering hero. Besides, thanks to your mother, we don’t have any money.” When he looked doubtful, she stepped closer, slid her hand down the waistband of his jeans, and whispered, “If you come back with a role under your belt, you can return the cock of the walk.” He looked down at her. He crowed.

Then: “I think I have seasonal affective disorder,” he groused, watching sleet turn the street pewter, shivering from the draft coming from the windows that touched the sidewalk. “Let’s go home for Christmas and get a little sun.”

“Oh, Lotto,” Mathilde said. “With what? I just bought our weekly groceries with thirty-three dollars and a handful of quarters.” Her eyes went damp with frustration.

He shrugged. “Sallie will pay. Three seconds on the phone, and it’s done.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “But we are too proud to take handouts from
anyone. Right?” She neglected to say she’d called Sallie just last week; that Sallie had paid two months’ rent, plus the phone bill.

He shivered. “Right,” he said sadly. Staring at his darkening face in the window. “We are very proud, too proud, aren’t we?”

Then: “I can’t believe,” Lotto said, coming out of the bedroom, still carrying the telephone on which he’d had his weekly update from his mother and Sallie, “that we’ve been married for two years and you’ve never met my mother. That’s insane.”

“Completely,” Mathilde said. She was still smarting from a note Antoinette had sent to the gallery. No words this time. Only a painting ripped from a glossy magazine, Andrea Celesti’s
Queen Jezebel Being Punished by Jehu
, the lady defenestrated and being gobbled by dogs. Mathilde had opened the envelope and laughed in surprise; Ariel, peering over her shoulder, had said, “That. Oh. Not our kind of thing.” She thought of this note and touched the handkerchief she wore on her hair, cut recently in a wedge, dyed a strange bright orange. She was repositioning a painting on the wall that she’d salvaged from the dumpster at the gallery; a moving blue that she’d hold on to for the rest of her life, long past the loves, the bodily hungers. She looked at Lotto, and said, “But I’m not so sure she’d want to meet me, love. She’s still so mad you married me that she hasn’t come to visit us once.”

He picked her up and leaned her against the door. She put her legs around his waist. “She’ll relent. Give it time.” So transparent, her husband, how he believed that if only he could show his mother how right his choice was to marry Mathilde, everything would be all right. God, they needed the money.

“I’ve never had a mom,” she said. “It breaks my heart, too, that she doesn’t want to know me, her new daughter. When was the last time you saw her? Sophomore year of college? Why can’t she come visit you? Xenophobia is a bitch.”

“Agoraphobia,” he said. “It’s a real disease, Mathilde.”

“That’s what I meant,” she said. [She, who always said what she meant.]

Then: “My mom said that she’d be glad to send us tickets for Fourth of July this year if we want to go celebrate.”

“Oh, Lotto, I wish,” Mathilde said, putting her paintbrush down, frowning at the wall, which was a strange greenish navy. “But remember, there’s that huge show we’re doing at the gallery that’s going to be taking up all the time I have. But you can go. Go ahead! Don’t worry about me.”

“Without you?” he said. “But the whole purpose is to make her love you.”

“Next time,” she said. She picked up the brush, and dabbed his nose gently with the paint, and laughed when he smushed his face up against her bare belly, leaving fading stamps against the white.

And so it went. There was never the money, and when there was the money, he had a gig, and when he didn’t have a gig, she had to work really hard on this huge project, and no, his sister’s coming to stay that weekend, and they had that party they’ve already committed to going to, and, well, maybe it would be easier if Antoinette came to visit them? I mean, she’s loaded and doesn’t have a job, and if she wants to see them so desperately, she can just hop a plane, can’t she? They are so busy, every moment jam-packed, and weekends are
their
time, the precious little time that they get to spend remembering why they got married! And it’s not like the woman ever made the slightest effort, seriously, she didn’t even come to Lotto’s college graduation. Any of his performances; any of the first-runs of his own plays. That. He. Wrote. Himself. For fuck’s sake. Not to mention that she never saw their wee first apartment down in that basement in Greenwich Village, that she never came to see even this slightly better walk-up, that she never in her life has come to the country house among the cherries, Mathilde’s joy, which she crafted from a wreck with her own
hands. Yes, of course, agoraphobia is a terrible thing, but Antoinette’s also the woman who has never once wanted to talk to Mathilde on the phone. Whose gifts every birthday and Christmas clearly come from Sallie. Does Lotto not know how much that hurts? Mathilde, motherless, familyless, to be discarded so; how painful it is to her to know that the love of her life has a mother who rejects her.

Lotto could have gone by himself. Absolutely. But she was the one who always ordered their lives; he’d never once bought a plane ticket, rented a car. Of course, there was also the worse reason, a darker one that he turned from quickly every time he brushed up against it, a tarry fury that he ignored so long that, by now, it had become too enormous to contemplate.

The urgency abated when they bought Antoinette a computer and the Sunday chats migrated to video. Antoinette didn’t have to leave her house to send her white face floating in the darkened room like a balloon. For a decade, every Sunday, Lotto’s voice transitioned into the bright, overarticulate child he must have been. Mathilde had to leave the house when the call came in.

One time, he left the video chat to fetch something, a review, an article, to share with his mother, and unsuspecting Mathilde came in from a run shining with sweat in her sports bra, shoving her wet hair back from her cheeks, and she pulled out the foam roller, and lay on her side with her back to the computer, and levered herself back and forth across it until her IT band had loosened. It was only when she turned over for the other side that she saw Antoinette watching from the screen, so close to the camera that her forehead was enormous, her chin arrowed to a point, red slash of lipstick, hands in her hair, gazing with such intensity that Mathilde could not move. A tractor drew up their dirt road and went away with a lower tone. Only when she heard Lotto’s steps coming down the stairs could she get up, get away. From the hall she heard him say, “Muvva. Lipstick! You’ve made yourself
pretty for me,” and she said in a sweet, soft voice, “Ah, you’re implying that I’m not always pretty,” and Lotto laughed, and Mathilde fled outside, into the garden, feeling loose around the knees.

Then: Oh, honey, don’t cry, absolutely, they should visit Antoinette, as sick as she is these days, at least four hundred pounds now, diabetic, too heavy to do more than totter from bed to couch. They must. They absolutely must. They will. [This time Mathilde meant it.]

Before she could make plans, though, Antoinette, ailing, called Mathilde at the house in the middle of the night, her voice almost too soft to hear.

She said, “Please. Let me see my son. Let Lancelot fly down to me.”

Capitulation. Mathilde waited, savoring. Antoinette sighed, and in the sigh there was irritation, superiority, and Mathilde hung up without speaking. Lotto called down from his study upstairs, where he was working, “Who was that?” And Mathilde called up the stairs, “Wrong number.”

“At this hour of the night?” he said. “People are the worst.”

Wrong number. She served herself a bourbon. She drank it in the bathroom mirror, watching the flush fade from her face, her eyes sizzling, all pupil.

But then a curious feeling came over her, as if a hand had reached in and seized her lungs. Squeezed. “What am I doing?” she said aloud. Tomorrow. She would call Antoinette and say, Well, of course Lotto could come down. He was Antoinette’s only son, after all. It was too late now; first thing in the morning, she’d call. First thing, well, after her eighty-mile bike ride. He wouldn’t even be awake until she got back. She slept well and went out in the night bluing into dawn. Morning fog, swift swim up the glorious hills, the cooling drizzle, the sun burning off the damp. She’d forgotten her water; she returned after only twenty miles. The glide down the country road to her little white house.

When she clipped back into the house, Lotto was in the doorway, his head in his hands. He looked up at her, pale and distraught. “My mother’s dead,” he said. He wouldn’t be able to cry for another hour or so.

“Oh, no,” Mathilde said. She hadn’t thought death possible when it came to Antoinette. [So immense, what was between them, immortal.] She walked over to her husband, and he put his face against her sweaty side, and she held his head there in her hands. And then her own grief rose, a surprising sharp bolt in the temples. Now who did she have to fight? This was not the way it was supposed to go.

—

I
N
COLLEGE
, Mathilde went once with Ariel to Milwaukee.

He had business there and she was his on the weekend, to do with what he liked. She spent most of her time shivering at the bay window of her room in the bed-and-breakfast. Downstairs: polished brass, plates of scones, walls thick with oils painted by Victorian spinsters, a woman whose flared nostrils told her what she thought of Mathilde.

Outside, snow had fallen thigh-deep in the night. The plows had swept the street snow into mountains bordering the sidewalk. Something was deeply soothing about so much untouched white.

Mathilde watched as down the street came a little girl in a red snowsuit with purple racing stripes. Mittens, a cap too big for her head. Disoriented, the girl turned around and around and around. She began to climb the snow mountain that blocked her from the street. But she was so weak. Halfway up, she’d slip back down. She’d try again, digging her feet deeper into the drift. Mathilde held her breath each time, let it out when the girl fell. She thought of a cockroach in a wineglass, trying to climb up the smooth sides.

When Mathilde looked across the street at a long brick apartment complex taking up the whole block, ornate in its 1920s style, she
saw, in scattered windows, three women watching the little girl’s struggles.

Mathilde watched the women as they watched the girl. One was laughing over her bare shoulder at someone in the room, flushed with sex. One was elderly, drinking her tea. The third, sallow and pinched, had crossed her skinny arms and was pursing her lips.

At last, the girl, exhausted, slid down and rested, her face against the snow. Mathilde was sure she was crying.

When Mathilde looked up again, the woman with crossed arms was staring angrily through all the glass and cold and snow directly at her. Mathilde startled, sure she’d been invisible. The woman disappeared. She reappeared on the sidewalk in inside clothes, tweedy and thin. She chucked her body into the snowdrift in front of the apartment building, crossed the street, grabbed the girl by the mittens and swung her over the mountain. Carried her across the street and did it again. Both mother and daughter were powdered with white when they went inside.

Long after they were gone, Mathilde thought of the woman. What she was imagining when she saw her little girl fall and fall and fall. She wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone.

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.

A light went on in the mother and daughter’s window. In it the
girl sat down with a notebook. Her small head bent. After some time, the mother put a steaming cup beside the girl, and the girl picked it up and cradled it in both hands. In Mathilde’s mouth came the forgotten sweet-salty taste of hot milk.

Perhaps, Mathilde thought, watching flakes fall into dark and the empty street, I’ve been wrong. Perhaps the mother had watched her daughter fail and fail and didn’t move to help out of something unfathomable, something Mathilde struggled to understand, a thing that was like an immense kind of love.

—

A
T
MIDNIGHT
ON
THE
DAY
Mathilde shoved the dog away from her into a new life with the little family, she woke to find herself outside in the overcast night, no glim of moon, the pool a tar pit. Still wearing the floor-length ivory sheath, she found herself screaming for the dog.

“God!” she was shouting. “God!” But the dog was not skittering back to her. There was no noise, all still and lightless and watchful. Her heart began to pound. She went in, calling, “God? God?” She looked in all the closets, under all the beds; she looked in the kitchen, and it wasn’t until she saw the crate missing that she remembered what she’d done.

Handed the creature to strangers, as if the dog weren’t a piece of her.

She barely made it to dawn. Day was one orange scratch against the dark when she knocked on the door of the split-level out in the fields. The husband answered, pressing his finger to his lips, and came out in his bare feet. He leaned inside, whistled once, and God bounded out the door, a purple ribbon around her neck, squealing and moaning and scrabbling at Mathilde’s feet. She crouched to press the dog against her face for a long while, then looked up at the man.