Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

Oh, Lotto, Mathilde thought with loving despair. Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him.

Mathilde smelled the beeswax on the floor. She heard the neighbor’s cat mewling in the hallway. The soft scrape of leaf against sky. It filled her, the kindness of this place.

He looked her up and down. He’d bought these beautiful shoes she was wearing, worn at the toe. He’d bought the black suit. Her hair had not been cut since summer. He narrowed his eyes, cocked his head to the side. “You’re skinny. You need the money. I understand. All you have to do is beg,” he said softly. “I don’t beg,” she said. He laughed and the sullen receptionist clanged back in with a tray of cappuccinos in her hand and Ariel said, sotto voce, “You are lucky I feel fondness for you, Mathilde.” Louder, he said, “Luanne, meet Mathilde. She’ll be joining us here tomorrow morning.” “Oh. Goody,” Luanne said, and fell back into her seat. She watched them carefully, sensing something. “The gallery’s employee,” Mathilde said, as they walked slowly up to the front. “Not yours. I’m off-limits.” Ariel looked at her, and she, who’d been with him so long, could see him thinking, We’ll see. “Touch me,” she said, “I walk. That’s a promise.”

“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She won’t be forced.” “Correct,” she said. But she thought, Oh, you murderous girl, hello. I haven’t seen you for so long. “Please,” he said. “Mathilde. Take the cold hand of a dying man.”

Later, she walked through the cold shadows and blaze of concentrated afternoon light that poured between the buildings, and she couldn’t stop; she could barely breathe; it felt too good to be on those coltish terrified legs once more, not to know, once more, where she was going.

Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She—steely, controlling—is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.

frottage.

Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts.

[MATHILDE’S PRAYER: Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.]

Lotto was distant from her, on the peak of some hill she was too tired to climb. She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them. But there were tiny miracles to rouse her. A rosewater macaroon in the brass mailbox, in a waxed paper envelope. One blue hydrangea like a head of cabbage on the doorstep.

Mathilde looked at her strong bare legs, the narrow hips, her watchful face buried under all that blond. She smiled, felt the rusty mechanism of flirting begin to move. She’d never been with a woman. It would probably be softer, less muscular, like sexual yoga. It’d at least be novel.

” he said, twinkling. She walked slowly back to her hotel over the cobblestones steaming from the swift summer storm that had passed lightly over the city while she ate. Her shadow paced beside her. She was able to make it to the bathroom, sitting calmly on the yellow travertine tub before she leaned over and vomited. She flew home to the little white house in the cherry orchard. The purchase of the house in France took months. On the day the sale was finalized—for a fraction of what Mathilde would have paid, but, apparently, a

exigent.”

Only the slightest hesitation. She adored this discreet man. “As you wish,” he said. In the photographs he sent a week later, there was sky where there had been chimney, a clear view to the orchard where the four-hundred-year-old stone walls had been. The ground was a smoothly spread cloak of dirt.

It was less, she thought, like looking at a corpse than like looking at the place where a corpse had been buried. Her heart cracked open and leaked. This one had been for her.

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,

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

punitive

defenestrated

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.

Xenophobia

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AT 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.

watched, burning her hands on the pan. She looked in the mirror at God’s foxy face in the backseat, the almondine eyes. “Everyone leaves me. Don’t you dare,” she said. The dog yawned, showing her sharp teeth, her wet tongue.

The world opening to her, almost painful in its possibility. She was so young still.

She had an idea of her life after college, after Ariel. She would live in one high-ceilinged room painted a soft ivory, the floors a pale wash. She would wear all black and have a job with people and come to make friends. She had never, really, had friends. She didn’t know what friends could possibly have to talk about. She would go out to dinner every night. She would spend all weekend alone in the bathtub with a book and a bottle of wine. She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.

She burned. She made a vow: she would never crawl for another man. [The gods love to fuck with us, Mathilde would say later; she became a wife.]

THE WORD wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip. Weip means to turn, twist, or wrap. In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh. Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.

The only place that Lotto could be seen anymore was in his work. A miracle, the ability to take a soul and implant it, whole, in another person for even a few hours at a time. All those plays were fragments of Lotto that, together, formed a kind of whole.

A birth certificate. Satterwhite, Roland, born July 9, 1984. Mother: Watson, Gwendolyn, aged 17. Father: Satterwhite, Lancelot, aged 15.

MATHILDE HAD ALWAYS BEEN a fist, in truth. Only with Lotto had she been an open hand.

Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]

Weeks passed. Her body worked independently of her brain, which was elsewhere, in another hemisphere. There was something dragging at her, an anchor snagged on something invisible below. It took great effort to move.

Her parents were gentle. They let her skip school, took her to a therapist. It didn’t matter. She lay in bed. “Gwennie,” her brother said, “you need to get help.” There was no point. Her brother, without looking at her, took her hand. So gently, so tenderly, that she wasn’t embarrassed. Weeks passed since she’d showered. She was too tired to eat. “You stink,” Chollie said angrily. You always stink, she thought but didn’t say.