Fates and Furies (35 page)

Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.

“All right, Roland,” Mathilde said, suppressing a sigh. “Sing your song.”

Land told her what she already knew: actor. Had a recurring role on this soap opera, minor, but it paid the bills. “
The Starrs in Your Eyes?
” he said. “Heard of it?” He looked at her hopefully then grimaced. “I see,” he said. “Soaps aren’t your thing. Mine, either. It’s hackwork. But I got the job as soon as I got to the city. Fifteen years ago, literally the first audition I walked into. And it’s good money. And I can do plays in the summer when we don’t film.” He shrugged. “I’m not a superstar, but I work all the time. That’s a kind of success, I guess.”

“You don’t need to argue for the benefits of a steady gig,” she said. She felt reckless, disloyal. “Lotto never got one when he was an actor. It would have been an immense relief to have some pay coming in all
those years. I worked my ass off and he made, maximum, seven thousand dollars a year until he started writing.”

“Thank god he started writing,” Land said. He told her that every birthday he took the day off to drive out to the beach and read
The Springs.
Lancelot never got his fair shakes as the genius he was.

“He would have agreed,” Mathilde said drily.

“But I love that about him. That arrogance,” Land said.

“I did, too,” Mathilde said.

The clouds like blackberry jam in the sky, faint double-boiler thunder from the north. All the things she could do, other than sit here, were gathering in the cool shadows of the house behind her, watching through the window. She was nailed to the chair.

She liked this boy, liked him enormously, more than anyone she’d met since Lotto died. She could just open her mouth and eat him he was so sweet; there was something easy about him, a gentleness she’d always loved in manly men.

“To tell you the truth, I wanted to meet you almost as much as I wanted to meet him,” Land said.

“Why?” she said. She was blushing. Flirting? It wasn’t impossible.

“You’re the untold story,” he said. “The mystery.”

“What mystery?” she said.

“The woman he chose to spend his life with,” Land said. “He’s easy to know. There are billions of interviews, and his plays come from him and give you a little window in. But you’re back in the shadows, hiding there. You’re the interesting one.”

It took a very long moment as they sat there on the porch, sweating in silence, for Mathilde to say to the boy, “I am not the interesting one.”

She knew she was the interesting one.

“You’re a bad liar,” he said.

She looked at him and imagined him in bed, those lovely fingers with the buffed nail beds, the neck with the visible cords, the strong
jaw, that good body clear under his clothes, that sensitive face, and knew he’d be very good at fucking.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, and stood.

He blinked, startled. Then he stood and opened the door for her, following her in.

He was attentive, soft where he should be, strong under her arms. But there was something off. It wasn’t that she was so much older than he was; she estimated ten years. Fifteen, max. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know him, really. She hadn’t really known anybody she’d taken to bed with her the past six months. The absence of story was what she liked about them. But they were in the bathroom and she was watching his high-boned face behind her, his hand gripping her short hair, the other on her shoulder, and though it felt marvelous, she couldn’t focus.

“I can’t hold out any longer,” he said. He was shining with sweat.

“Don’t,” she said, and he was a gentleman and pulled out and groaned, and there was a heat on her back just above the coccyx.

“Nice,” she said. “Supersexy porn move.”

He laughed and dabbed her off with a warm washcloth. In the window, the bushes by the river were being flattened by wind and the hard, sparse rain that had begun to fall. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t want to, you know. Get you in the family way.”

She stood and stretched her arms above her head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m old.”

“You are not,” he said.

“Well. I’m barren,” she said. She didn’t say
by choice
. He nodded and went a little inward, then said, suddenly, “Is that why you didn’t have any kids?” Then he blushed and crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “I’m so sorry. That was rude. I was just wondering why you and he didn’t. Have kids, I mean.”

“That’s why,” she said.

“Something medical?” he said. “I’m prying. Don’t answer if it’s annoying.”

“I was sterilized when I was younger.” His silence was pointed, and she said, “He didn’t know. He thought I was just plain barren. It made him feel noble to suffer in silence.”

Why was she telling this boy all of this? Because there were no stakes. Lotto was gone. The secret would hurt nobody. Plus, she liked the boy, wanted to give him something; the previous pilgrims had carried off almost everything else. She suspected he had ulterior motives. An article, a book, an exposé at some point. If he wrote about the sex, the rainstorm, she would come off as desperate or sad or desperately sad. It was all accurate. So be it.

“But why wouldn’t you tell him?” he said. Oh, the puppy, he sounded wounded on her husband’s behalf.

“Because nobody needs my genes in the world,” she said.

Land said, “But his genes. I mean, the kid might have been a genius, too.”

Mathilde pulled on the bathrobe and swept her hand through her short hair. She looked at herself in the mirror and admired the rosy flush. The rain pounded harder on the roof; she liked the sound, the sense of coziness of the gray and falling day outside.

“Lotto would have been a terrific father,” she said. “But the kids of geniuses are never geniuses.”

“True,” Land said.

She touched his face and he flinched, then leaned forward to rest his cheek in her hand. Little pet, she thought. “I want to make you dinner,” she said.

“I’d love dinner,” he said.

“And then I want you to fuck me again,” she said.

“I’d love to fuck you again,” he said, laughing.

At dawn, when she woke, the house had gone quiet and she knew that Land had left.

A shame. I could have kept him around for a little while, she thought. Used him as a pool boy. As human cardio machine. God grumbled at the door, having been banished. When Mathilde went out, the dog came in and flounced herself down on the bed.

In the kitchen, there was a fruit salad macerating in its juices. He’d made a pot of coffee, which was lukewarm now. In the blue bowl with the slowly ripening green tomatoes from the garden, the sweet boy had left a note in an envelope. Mathilde would leave it there for weeks before she opened it. Seeing it there, the white in the red in the blue, made her feel for the first time since her husband left her as if she had kind and gentle company in the house with her. Something hot in her began to cool and, in cooling, began to anneal.

—

M
AKE
ME
HAPPY
, Frankenstein’s monster pleaded with its maker,
and I shall again be virtuous
.

  
  
10

M
ATHILDE
WAS
SIXTEEN
. She woke to find her uncle swaying over her; she had learned to sleep in a bed. He was saying, “Aurélie, this is important. Do not go downstairs,” and in the hollow after his words, she could hear men’s voices below, shouting, music. His face was expressionless but the color in his cheeks was high. Without anyone’s saying a thing, she’d begun to understand that her uncle was some kind of manager in a bad organization. He was often in Philadelphia. He hissed orders into a huge, clunky early version of a mobile phone, was inexplicably gone for weeks, and came back if not tan, then tanner. [Still apparent in him, the tiny boy, mewling in cold and hunger. It’s less delicious, this badness bred from survival.] He left, and she lay frozen for some time. The shouting now did not seem so joyous. She heard anger, fear. When she could move, she pulled the couch out from where it rested against the wall and brought the duvet and pillow behind it and in that place, the exact shape of her body, she fell asleep swiftly, as if held there. Nobody, as far as she knew, had come to her room in the night. Still, the air felt disturbed, as if she’d narrowly avoided something.

She crept like a mouse through her teenaged years. Flute and swimming and books, all the wordless arts. She made herself so small her uncle would forget her.

—

H
ER
SENIOR
YEAR
, she opened the letter telling her she’d been accepted to the one school she’d applied to, early, for no other reason than that she’d loved the oddball essay questions in the application. How such small things can decide one’s fate. But the whistling conflagration of joy had ebbed to embers days later, when she understood she couldn’t pay. If she couldn’t pay, she couldn’t go. Simple as that.

She took a train to the city. Her life, she would later understand, would be scarred with them.

A Saturday express. Her heart sang with desperation in her rib cage. A newspaper spun slowly on the platform in the wind.

She wore the red dress her uncle had bought for her fourteenth birthday and the high heels that pinched savagely. She made a crown of her blond braids. In the mirror, she’d seen no beauty in her angles and strange lashes, in her grossly fat lips, but hoped others might. She would burn, later, with what she didn’t know. That she should have worn her bra, trimmed her pubic hair back to prepubescence, brought photographs. That such things as headshots even existed in the world.

A man had watched her climb into the car from his seat in the rear. He smiled at the way she moved her body as if it were new out of the box, at the dangerous jut to her chin. After some time, he came up the corridor and sat across from her, though the car was otherwise empty. She felt him looking at her and ignored him as long as she could, and when she looked up, he was there.

He laughed. He had an ugly mastiff’s face, all bulging eyes and jowl. He had the eyebrows of a jokester, peaked high, giving him an air of intimate mischief, as if he were about to whisper a punch line in her ear. Despite herself, she leaned forward. This would be his effect, a pleasant mirroring, a swiftly established accord. He was the quiet hit of every party; he never said a word, but everyone believed he was simpatico.

He looked at her, and she pretended to read her book, her head on
fire. He leaned forward. He put his hands on her knees, the thumbs gentle on the skin of her inside thighs. He smelled delicious, like verbena and cordovan.

She looked up. “I’m only eighteen,” she said.

“All the better,” he said.

She stood and went shakily to the bathroom and sat there through the pulses of the train, holding herself with her arms, until the conductor said Penn Station. When she got off, she felt liberated—she was in the city!—and she wanted to run and laugh. But as she walked swiftly toward what she knew was her future, she looked up into the mirrored glass by a doughnut store and saw the man from the train ten feet behind her. He was unhurried. She felt the back of her heel go hot then blister and, on the street, a warm wash of relief when the blister burst, then the sting. She was too proud to stop.

She didn’t pause until she reached the building where the agency was. The guards, used to pretty, wobbly, underage girls, parted to let her in.

She was inside for hours. For hours, he sat in the café opposite, with a hardcover book and a lemonade, waiting.

When she came out, she felt deboned, her bottom lids red. Her braids had frizzed in the unseasonable heat. He followed her down the street, a plastic bag and the book in his hand, until her stride became a limp and he stepped in front of her and offered a coffee. She’d eaten nothing since dinner the night before. She put her hands on her hips, staring, then right-faced into a sandwich shop and ordered a cappuccino and a mozzarella panini.
“Porca madonna,”
he said. “
Panino.
It’s singular.”

She turned to the girl at the counter and said, “I’d like two.
Panini.
Two
cappuccini
.”

He chuckled and paid. She ate the sandwiches slowly, chewing thirty times with each bite. She looked everywhere but at him. She’d never had caffeine before and it filled her fingers with a kind of
elation. She decided to drive the man off with her exigency and ordered an éclair and another cappuccino, but he paid without comment and watched her eat.

“You don’t eat?” she said.

“Not much,” he said. “I used to be a fat boy.”

Now she could see the sad, fat child in the mismatched jowls and thin shoulders, and felt something heavy in her shifting toward him.

“They said I needed to lose ten pounds,” she said.

“You’re perfect,” he said. “They can jump off a bridge. They said no?”

“They said I need to lose ten pounds and send them pictures and they’d start me out with catalog work. Build my way up.”

He considered her with a straw in the corner of his mouth. “But you were unhappy with that. Because you’re not a girl who starts small,” he said. “You are a young queen.”

“No,” she said. She fought the emotion rising to her face and mastered it. It had begun to rain outside, hard, thick spatters on the hot pavement. A low miasma rose from the ground, and the air shifted toward coolness.

She listened to the pounding of the rain as he leaned forward and took her foot in his hand and took off the shoe. He looked at the bleeding, jagged blister. He dabbed it with a paper napkin dipped in ice water and took from his plastic bag from the drugstore, which he’d visited while she was at the agency, a big box of bandages and a tube of ointment. When he was finished administering to her feet, he took out a pair of plastic shower sandals with massaging nubs.