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Between his skin and hers, there was the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for this slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in.
It unnerved her, the gap between who he appeared to be and the person he held inside him.
Luxuriating in the horror, he was. In the unhappiness of being broken. There was not not a kind of wallowing joy in this.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.”
Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.
They weren’t serious, but they surfaced more and more frequently until he felt carbonated with dark ideas. He was sinking again.
His wife carried their picnic basket to the edge of the lake under a willow so old it no longer wept, just sort of bore its fate with thickened equanimity.
One chink in the armor and death seeps in.
Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age.
One can’t be good if one can’t see the sun. And what does it mean to be human if you can’t end your life better than how it began.
And he’d sighed and said, “I hope you and your tiny heart have a great life together, Muvva,” and hung up. The wedge had been driven all the way in.
Antoinette put down the receiver. No, she thought. He hadn’t chosen that wife over his mother again. Not when Antoinette had given him everything. Without her, he would never have become what he was; he never would have written her into immortality the way she’d groomed him to do. Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they’ll always share the warm, dark swim.
Lord give her strength, but she was sick of these dark, small, fearful people. Surely it was natural she’d love them less than she loved her son, who was big and golden like her. Mice are nice but lions roar.
Wrinkled at the corners, exhausted, swollen. Well, no wonder. Such a force of effort it cost her to keep her son safe. The world more perilous by the moment, liable to disintegrate if she wasn’t constantly vigilant. The things she had done for Lancelot, the sacrifices she’d made!
Sallie would hand him the envelope with the letter in which Antoinette had explained it all, everything she had done for him. He would turn away, choking, open it, read. “No!” he’d shout. And when his wife would touch his shoulder tentatively, he’d shake her off, bury his face in his hands, mourning all the years he neglected to be grateful to his mother.
[The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.]
“You assume so much about me. You don’t get to speak for me. I don’t belong to you,” she said.
Good effort, man. You’ve always been so almost funny.
Home, moonlight planing the surface of the desk, bone fingers of winter trees plucking stars from the sky.
For the past month he had been standing on a thin wire between staying with her and leaving her. It had been exhausting to clench his feet, to wonder where he’d fall.
Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren’t around.”
Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”
He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.
She had damp eyes and reddish hair hanging around her ears. Soft at the midsection, a breeder. From the looks of things, four little girls in matching Lilly Pulitzer were at home with the au pair.
She could feel the grief coming on fast, shaking the ground like a hurtling train, but she hadn’t been hit by it yet.
Where are the people? said Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. It’s a little lonely in the desert . . . It’s lonely when you’re among people, too, said the snake.
She could do nothing. Her whole body had turned inward. Mathilde had become a fist.
For the previous month, she’d been frightened at the gulf the future opened before her. She who had been in one cage or another since birth was free to fly soon, but she was petrified at the thought of all that air.
There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.
In her half sleep, she had fiery nightmares of Lotto telling her he no longer needed her, he was leaving, he loved another woman. In her fever, she imagined some poetess, frail and young, with heifer hips molded for birthing, a girl who was respected in her own rights as an artist, which Mathilde would never be. He would divorce Mathilde, and he and his new whispery paramour would live in the apartment in the city in a glut of sex and parties and babies, endless babies, all with his face in miniature. She imagined the poetess almost into existence. She was so lonely she could choke on it.
It was out of the question that Leo Sen’s body could steal her husband; it was not out of the question that with his genius Leo could take her place in Lotto’s affections. This was worse.
She’d paid for a month, imagining Lotto coming home to an empty house, no dog, searching all the rooms for her, finding nothing, the terror hatching in his heart. Had someone kidnapped her? Had she run away with the circus? She was so agreeably flexible when it came to Lotto that she could have been a contortionist.
[Strange how things are associated with their particular pains: Caesar salad forever a suffocating sadness.]
Never. Never for me. I’d die first. Never’s a liar. She had nothing better, and time was running out.
[Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.]
It was cheap to buy a lifetime of friendship.
She’d been left too long alone, had neglected the upkeep of niceties.
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.
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.
“You may cry here, cabbage. Cry as much as you wish. It is no hardship to watch a pretty woman cry.”
“YOU’RE A PATHOLOGICAL TRUTH-TELLER,” Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn’t sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying. Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
The man swallowed praise the way runners swallow electrolytes.
“Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce.”
Your success is like wormwood to her. It galls.”
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
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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.
[The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark. Brains are miraculous; humans storytelling creatures. The shards draw themselves together and make something whole.]
Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.
These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.
