Fates and Furies (6 page)

“The world is ending,” he bellowed. “Why not hump?”

A cheer from the dancers at his feet.

He raised his arms. [The fatal look up.]

In the doorway, suddenly, her.

Tall, in silhouette, wet hair casting the hall light into a halo, stream of bodies on the stairs behind her. She was looking at him, though he couldn’t see her face.

She moved her head and there was half of it, strong and bright. High cheekbones, plush lips. Tiny ears. She was dripping from
walking through the rain. He loved her first for the stun of her across this thump and dance.

He had seen her before, he knew who she was. Mathilde, whatsername. Beauty like hers cast glimmers on the walls even across campus, phosphorescence on the things she touched. She’d been so far above Lotto—so far above every person at the school—she had become mythological. Friendless. Icy. She went weekends to the city; she was a model, hence the fancy clothes. She never partied. Olympian, elegant on her mount. Yes—Mathilde Yoder. But his victory had made him ready for her tonight. Here she was for him.

Behind him in the crashing storm, or maybe within him, a sizzle. He leapt into the grind of bodies, kneeing Samuel in the eye, crushing some poor small girl to the ground.

Lotto swam up out of the crowd and crossed the floor to Mathilde. She was six feet tall in bobby socks. In heels, her eyes were at his lip line. She looked up at him coolly. Already he loved the laugh she held in her, which nobody else would see.

He felt the drama of the scene. Also, how many people were watching them, how beautiful he and Mathilde looked together.

In a moment, he’d been made new. His past was gone. He fell to his knees and took Mathilde’s hands to press them on his heart. He shouted up at her, “Marry me!”

She threw back her head, baring her white snaky neck, and laughed and said something, her voice drowned. Lotto read those gorgeous lips as saying, “Yes.” He’d tell this story dozens of times, invoking the black light, the instant love. All the friends over all the years, leaning in, secret romantics, grinning. Mathilde watching him from across the table, unreadable. Every time he told the story, he would say that she’d said, “Sure.”

Sure. Yes. One door closed behind him. Another, better, flung open.

  
  
3

A
QUESTION
OF
VISION
. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit.

Lotto poured cream into coffee and woke his wife. A song played on the tape deck, eggs were fried, dishes washed, floors swept. Beer and ice carried in, snacks prepared. By midafternoon, all was shining, ready.

“Nobody’s here yet. We could—” Lotto said into Mathilde’s ear. He pulled her long hair away from her nape, kissed the knob of bone there. The neck was his, belonging to the wife who was his, shining, under his hands.

Love that had begun so powerfully in the body had spread luxuriantly into everything. They had been together for five weeks. The first, there had been no sex, Mathilde a tease. Then came the weekend camping trip and the besotted first time and the morning piss where he found his junk bloodied stem to stern and he knew she’d been a virgin, that she hadn’t wanted to sleep with him because of it. He turned to her in the new light, dipping her face in the frigid stream to wash it, coming up cheeks flushed and glazed with water, and he knew her to be the purest person he’d ever met, he, who had been primed for purity. He knew then they would elope, they would
graduate, they would go to live in the city and be happy together there. And they were happy, if still strange to each other. Yesterday, he’d found she was allergic to sushi. This morning, when he was talking to his aunt on the telephone, he’d watched Mathilde toweling off out of the shower and it struck him hard that she had no family at all. The little she spoke of childhood was shadowed with abuse. He’d imagined it vividly: poverty, beat-up trailer, spiteful—she implied worse—uncle. Her most vivid memories of her childhood were of the television that was never turned off. Salvation of school, scholarship, modeling for spare change. They had begun to accrete stories between them. How, when she was small, isolated in the country, she’d been so lonely that she let a leech live on her inner thigh for a week. How she’d been discovered for modeling by a gargoyle of a man on a train. It must have taken an immense force of will for Mathilde to turn her past, so sad and dark, blank behind her. Now she had only him. It moved him to know that for her he was everything. He wouldn’t ask for more than she’d willingly give.

Outside, a New York June day steamed. Soon there’d be the party, dozens of college friends descending on them for the housewarming, though the house was already sizzling with summer. For now they were safe, inside.

“It’s six. We invited them for five-thirty. We can’t,” Mathilde said. But he wasn’t listening, he put his hands up her peacock skirt and under the band of her cotton panties, sweated through at the crotch. They were married. He was entitled. She tilted her hips back into him and put her palms on either side of the cheap long mirror that was, with the mattress and a ziggurat of suitcases where they kept their clothes, all their bedroom held. A tiger of light from the transoms prowled the clean pine floor.

He slid her underwear to her knees and said, “We’ll be quick.” Point: mooted. He watched in the mirror as she closed her eyes and
the flush crept over her cheeks, lips, the hollow of her neck. The backs of her legs were humid and trembling against his knees.

Lotto felt lush. With what? Everything. The apartment in the West Village with its perfect garden, tended by that British harridan from upstairs, whose fat thighs, even now, were among the tiger lilies in the window. One-bedroom but enormous, underground but rent-controlled. From the kitchen or bathroom, one saw pedestrian feet passing, bunions and ankle tattoos; but it was safe down here, buried against calamity, insulated from hurricanes and bombs by earth and layers of street. After being so long a nomad, he was rooted in this place, rooted in this wife, with her fine features and sad, cattish eyes and freckles and gangly tall body with its tang of the forbidden. Such terrible things his mother had said when he’d called to tell her he was married. Horrible things. It made him misty to remember them. But today even the city was laid out like a tasting menu; it was the newly shining nineties; girls wore glitter on their cheekbones; clothes were shot with silver thread; everything held a promise of sex, of wealth. Lotto would gobble it all up. All was beauty, all abundance. He was Lancelot Satterwhite. He had a sun blazing in him. This splendid
everything
was what he was screwing now.

His own face looked back at him behind Mathilde’s flushed and gasping one. His wife, a caught rabbit. The pulse and throb of her. Her arms buckled, her face went pale, and she fell into the mirror, and it gave a snap, and a crack crazed their heads in uneven halves.

The doorbell gave a long slow trill.

“Minute!” Lotto shouted.

In the hallway, Chollie shifted the enormous brass Buddha he’d found in a dumpster on the way over, and said, “Bet you a hundred bucks they’re fucking.”

“Pig,” Danica said. Since graduation, she’d lost sandbags of weight. She was a bundle of sticks wrapped in gauze. She was planning to tell
Lotto and Mathilde as soon as they opened the door—if they ever goddamned did—that Chollie and she hadn’t come together, that they’d met on the sidewalk outside the building, that she would
literally
never be caught dead alone in the same place as Chollie, this little troll man. His glasses taped at the bridge. His nasty mouth, like a crow’s beak, cawing its constant bitter song. She’d hated him when he visited Lotto at school and the visits extended for months until people assumed he was a Vassar student, though he wasn’t, barely a high school grad, whom Lotto had known as a kid. She hated him more now. Fattish pretender. “You smell like garbage,” she said.

“Dumpster diving,” he said, and hefted the Buddha in victory. “I’d be sexing it up all the time if I were them. Mathilde’s weird-looking, but I’d do her. And Lotto’s fucked around enough. He’s got to be an expert by now.”

“Right? He’s the sluttiest,” Danica said. “He gets away with it because of the way he looks at you. Like, if he were actually good-looking, he’d never be as deadly, but five minutes in a room with him, all you want to do is get naked. Also the fact that he’s a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she’s, like, diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it a million places and everyone just thinks he’s doing what boys do.” Danica pushed the doorbell rapidly, over and over. She lowered her voice. “Anyway, I give this marriage a year. I mean, who gets married at twenty-two? Like coal miners. Like farmers. Not
us
. Lotto will be screwing the scary lady upstairs in about eight months. And some angry menopausal director who will make him Lear. And anyone else who catches his eye. And Mathilde will get a quickie divorce and marry some prince of Transylvania or something.”

They laughed. Danica rang the doorbell in Morse code: SOS. “I’d take that bet,” Chollie said. “Lotto won’t cheat. I’ve known him since he was fourteen. He’s arrogant as shit but loyal.”

“A million bucks,” Danica said. Chollie put the Buddha down and they shook.

The door swung open and there was glossy Lotto with sweat beads at his temples. Through the empty living room, they could see a slice of Mathilde as she shut the bathroom door on herself, a blue morpho folding its wings. Danica had to restrain herself from licking Lotto’s cheek when she kissed him. Salty, oh my god, delicious, like a hot soft pretzel. She always went a little weak around him.

“A hundred thousand welcomes. I could weep and I could laugh, I am light and heavy. Welcome,” Lotto said. Oh dear. They had so little. Bookshelves made of cinder blocks and plywood, couch from the college common room, rickety table and chairs meant for a patio. Still, how happy the place felt. In Danica, a pulse of envy.

“Spartan,” Chollie said, and hefted the giant Buddha to the mantelpiece, where it beamed over the white room. Chollie rubbed the statue’s belly, then went into the kitchen and had a bird bath of dish soap and handfuls of water to wash all the dumpster stink off his person. From there, he watched the arriving flood of the poseurs, phonies, and jolly prepsters with whom he’d had to contend since Lotto had been sent off to boarding school, then college; his friend had taken him in when Chollie had no one else. That awful Samuel kid who pretended he was Lotto’s best friend. False. No matter how much Chollie insulted him, Samuel was unperturbed: Chollie knew he was too low, too much of a slug, for Samuel to care about. Lotto was taller than all, shooting off laser beams of joy and warmth, and everyone coming in blinked, dazzled by his grin. They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

In twenty years, Chollie announced silently, I will own you all. He snorted. Smoldered.

Mathilde was standing at the refrigerator, frowning at the puddle around Chollie’s feet, the water stains on his khaki shorts. On her chin there was a raspberry abrasion shining through her cover-up.

“Hey, there, Sourpuss,” he said.

“Hi, Sour Pussy,” she said.

“You kiss my friend with that dirty mouth of yours?” he said, but she only opened the fridge and took out a bowl of hummus and two beers and gave him one. He could smell her, the rosemary of her silky blond hair, the Ivory soap, the unmistakable starch of sex. Ah, so. He’d been right.

“Mingle,” she said, moving off. “And don’t make anyone punch you, Chollie.”

“Risk destroying this perfection?” he said, and gestured at his face. “Never.”

Like fish in an aquarium, bodies moved through the hot space. In the bedroom, a ring of girls was forming. They were looking at the bank of irises in the window above their heads.

“How can they afford this?” Natalie murmured. She’d been so nervous to come—Lotto and Mathilde so glamorous—that she’d had a few shots before leaving her house. She was actually pretty drunk now.

“Rent-controlled,” a girl in a leather miniskirt said, looking around for somebody to save her. The others had melted away when Natalie joined them; she was one of those people it was nice to see when you’re tipsy at some college party, but now they were in the real world, all she did was complain about money. It was exhausting. They were all poor, they were
supposed
to be poor out of college, get over it. Miniskirt snagged a freckled girl passing by. All three had at one time slept with Lotto. Each of them secretly believed he liked her best.

“Yeah,” Natalie said. “But Mathilde doesn’t even have a job. I’d get how they could pay if she was still modeling, but she already caught a husband, so she stopped, yadda yadda who knows.
I
wouldn’t stop modeling if anyone wanted me. And Lotto’s an
actor
, and though we
all think he’s amazing, it’s not like he’s going to star in the next Tom Cruise movie or anything. I mean, that awful skin of his. No offense! I mean, he’s totally
brilliant
, but it’d be hard to make ends meet even as an Equity actor, and he’s not even that.”

The other two looked at Natalie as if from a great distance, saw the bulging eyes, the unplucked moustache, sighed. “You don’t know?” Miniskirt said. “Lotto’s an heir to a fucking fortune. Water bottling. You know Hamlin Springs water? That’s them. His mom, like, owns all of Florida. She’s a bazillionaire. They could have bought a three-bedroom with a doorman on the Upper East Side with the change in their pockets.”