Fates and Furies (40 page)

She heard Lotto come in and ran her eyes under cold water. “Hey, baby,” she called out. “How was your day?” He clattered around, talking about an audition, some mean little bit in a commercial, he didn’t even want it, it was humiliating, but he saw that boy from that television show in the late seventies, the one with the cowlick and weird ears, remember? She dried her face, finger-brushed her hair, practiced her smile until it wasn’t so ferocious. She came out, still in her coat, and said, “I’m just off to pick up a pizza,” and he said, “Mediterranean?” And she said, “Yup,” and he said, “I adore you with all the marrow in my bones.” “Me, too,” she said, with her back turned.

She closed their front door and sank down on the steps that led to the lady upstairs, lay back, her arms crossed above her eyes because what was she going to do, what was she going to do?

Mathilde became aware of a strong smell of feet. She saw on the steps beside her face a pair of battered embroidered slippers held together with string.

Bette, the upstairs neighbor, gloomed down at Mathilde. “Come along,” she said, in her prim British way.

Numb, Mathilde followed the old woman up the stairs. A cat pounced at her like a tiny clown. Apartment painstakingly clean, midcentury modern, Mathilde saw with surprise. Walls a high-gloss white. Bouquet of magnolia leaves on a table, deep green shine with a luscious brown underneath. On the mantel, three burgundy chrysanthemums burned. None of this was expected.

“Sit,” Bette said. Mathilde sat. Bette shuffled away.

Presently, the old lady came back. A cup of hot chamomile, a LU Petit Écolier Chocolat Noir. Mathilde tasted it, returning to a schoolyard, light through leaves on the dust, snap of a new cartouche in her pen.

“I can’t blame you. I never wanted a child, either,” the old woman said, looking at Mathilde down her long nose. There were crumbs on her lips.

Mathilde blinked.

“In my day, we didn’t know anything. Didn’t live in a time when there was any choice. I douched with Lysol, you see. Such ignorance. When it was my time, there was a lady over the stationery store with a thin-bladed knife. Terrible. I wanted to die. Could have, easy. Instead, I got the gift of barrenness.”

“Christ,” Mathilde said. “Have I been speaking aloud to myself?”

“No,” Bette said.

“But how did you know?” Mathilde said. “I barely know myself.”

“It’s my superpower,” Bette said. “I see it in the way a woman carries herself. Many times I have gotten myself in trouble by mentioning it when it was an unpleasant surprise. Been clear to me in your case for about two weeks.”

They sat there in the long afternoon. Mathilde watched the chrysanthemums and remembered to drink her tea only when it was lukewarm.

“Forgive me,” Bette said. “It must be said that from my viewpoint, at least, a child wouldn’t be the worst thing. You have a husband who adores you, a job, a place to live. You seem to be almost thirty, old enough. A child in this house wouldn’t be the worst thing. I should like to watch over a baby once in a while, teach it the nursery rhymes of my Scottish granny.
Eenity feenity, fickety feg
. Or, no,
As eh gaed up a field o neeps
, eh? Spoil it rotten with biscuits. When it could eat biscuits, of course. Not the worst thing.”

“It
would
be the worst thing,” Mathilde said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the world. Or to the child. Also, I’m only twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six!” Bette said. “Your womb is practically antique. Your eggs are getting all wonky up in there. And what, you think you’d bear a monster? A Hitler? Please. Look at you. You’ve won the genetic lottery.”

“You laugh,” Mathilde said. “But my children would come out with fangs and claws.”

Bette looked at her. “I hide mine well,” Mathilde said.

“I am not one to judge,” Bette said.

“You’re not,” Mathilde said.

“I’ll help,” Bette said. “Don’t get your hackles up. I will help you. You won’t be alone in this.”

—

“S
HOOT
,
THAT
TOOK
A
BILLION
YEARS
,” Lotto said, when she entered with the pizza. He was too hungry to see her until he’d eaten four slices. By then she had recomposed herself.

In the night, she dreamt of things that lived in the dark. Writhing blind worms with a pearly gleam, flurries of blue-veined parchment. Slick and drip.

She’d always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they.

Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts. Much later, at the grocery store, Mathilde would watch a woman swollen to bursting, reaching up for the popsicles on the high shelf, and she’d imagine what it was like to have a person inside one that one hadn’t swallowed whole. One that wasn’t doomed from the start. The woman looked irritably over at Mathilde, who was gigantic, tall enough to reach; then her face changed back to the thing that Mathilde most
disliked about pregnant ladies, the reflexive saintliness. “Can I help you?” the woman said, all treacle. Mathilde turned abruptly away.

Now she rose from the bed where Lotto lay breathing sweetly in his sleep, and took a bottle of rum up to Bette’s apartment. She stood outside the door, not knocking, but still Bette opened it in a slattern’s nightgown, her hair a gray swirl.

“In you go,” she said. She put Mathilde on the couch, covered her with a woolen blanket, plunked the cat onto her lap. By Mathilde’s right hand, hot chocolate with a glory of rum. On the television, Marilyn Monroe in black-and-white. Bette lay back on the ottoman and snored. Mathilde tiptoed home before Lotto woke, and got dressed as if going in to work and then called in sick. Bette, face up against the steering wheel, sitting on pillows from her sofa, drove her to the clinic.

—

[M
ATHILDE
’
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.]

—

F
OR
A
LONG
TIME
AFTERWARD
, Mathilde was clammy on the inside. A grayish clay crumbling on its surface. It wasn’t that she regretted a thing; it was that the call had been so close. 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. Cold, wrinkled hands pressed to her cheeks, passing on the stairs. Bette’s small gifts. Bright lights in the dark.

“A difficult thing,” Bette had said in the waiting room. “But right. What you’re feeling will slowly lessen.” It would.

When Mathilde was twenty-eight, her husband left for Los Angeles for a week for a small speaking role in a cop drama, and she scheduled the sterilization.

“Are you sure?” the doctor said. “You’re young enough that you might change your mind. You never know when the clock will start ticking.”

“My clock is broken,” she said. And he looked at her, high boots to blond crown, the eyeliner she wore those days curved on the outside to make cat’s eyes. He thought he saw her, and he believed her vain. He nodded, turned curtly away. He planted the tiny coils in her tubes; she ate Jell-O and watched cartoons and let the nurses change her catheter. It was a very pleasant afternoon, in fact.

She would do it again if she had to. To save the horror. To save herself. She would do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, if she had to.

  
  
17

M
ATHILDE
DIDN
’
T
RECOGNIZE
the private investigator on the steps of the Met. She was looking for the girl from the coffee roastery in Brooklyn from two weeks earlier, either incarnation, frizzled and dolphined or sleek and sharp. There was a family of heavyset tourists, a cashmere-skinned young man whom Mathilde looked at carefully, and a scowling blond schoolgirl in a kilt and blazer with an overflowing backpack. She chose to sit next to the schoolgirl, and the girl turned to wink at her.

“Holy god,” Mathilde said. “Body language and all. Gangly legs and attitude. I thought I was looking at my own doppelgänger from thirty years ago.”

“I had a stakeout earlier,” the investigator said. “I love my job.”

“You were that little girl with a costume box, huh,” Mathilde said.

The investigator smiled and there was a sadness there. She looked her age briefly. “Well, I was an actress,” she said. “A younger Meryl Streep, that’s what I wanted to be.”

Mathilde said nothing and the investigator said, “And yes. Of course, I knew of your husband. Knew him, in fact. I was in one of his plays in my youth. The workshop for
Grimoire
at ACT in San Francisco. Everyone was in love with him. I always thought of him in terms of a duck, you know? Lancelot Satterwhite is to adoration as a duck is to water. He only wanted to be swimming around in a great pool of it, but it never soaked in to touch him, just always rolled off.”

“Sounds about right,” Mathilde said. “I see that you did know him.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” the girl said. “But I don’t see the harm, now that he’s gone. You of all people knew the way he was. But the cast and crew had a sort of bet. Whenever anybody flubbed something in rehearsal, they had to put a quarter in the pot, and whoever was able to seduce Lancelot first got to keep the cash. Guys and girls both. All twelve of us.”

“Who won?” Mathilde said. There was a twitch at the corner of her lip.

“Don’t fret,” the girl said. “Nobody. Opening night, we gave the cash to our stage manager because he had a new baby at home.” She took a file from her backpack and handed it to Mathilde. “I’m still working the personal angle. There’s definitely something there, but I just have to find it. In the meantime, I’ve bought us an informant at Charles Watson. Senior VP. Sees himself as a noble whistle-blower, but only after he amassed a fortune, a house in the Hamptons, ad nauseam. This file right here is the skim off the surface. And boy, does it go deep.”

Mathilde read, and by the time she looked up, the street had gone bright with sun. “Holy of holies,” she said.

“There’s more,” the investigator said. “It’s pretty dire. There’s going to be lots of pissed-off rich people. Whatever the motivation, we’re doing the world a good thing.”

“Ah, well. I’ve always been suspicious of self-congratulation,” Mathilde said. “We’ll celebrate properly when you hand me the personal stuff.”

“Celebrate? You and me and champagne and a suite at the St. Regis?” the investigator said, standing.

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. She said, “Maybe so. Depends on what you give me.”

The investigator gave a low whistle, and said, “Off to work I go.”

—

F
OUR
YEARS
AFTER
L
OTTO
DIED
, when Mathilde was fifty, she bought a ticket to Paris.

Everything was so bright off the plane that she had to wear sunglasses. Even then, the brightness got in, bounced around her brain like a Spaldeen. Also, she wanted nobody to see how the smell of the place she was returning to ravaged her, made her eyes leak.

She had become tiny again here. In this language, she was again unable to be seen. She gathered herself at a café outside the gate. When the waiter in the airport brought her the espresso and
pain au chocolat
in a plastic pouch, he spoke to her in crisp French even though he turned and spoke uninflected English to the sophisticates at the table beside her. When it came time to pay, she didn’t understand this euro business. She searched her purse for francs.

In the grainy gray day, Paris overwhelmed her with the scents. Exhaust and piss and bread and pigeon shit and dust and shedding plane trees and wind.

The cabdriver, his nose besponged by pores, looked at her for a long while in the rearview mirror and asked her if she was all right. When she didn’t answer, he said soothingly, “You may cry here, cabbage. Cry as much as you wish. It is no hardship to watch a pretty woman cry.”

She showered and changed in the hotel, then rented a white Mercedes and drove out of the city. The roaring river of traffic comforted the American in her.

The roundabouts became tighter. The roads smaller. Eventually, they were dirt. There were cows, tractors, semi-abandoned villages of a sooty gray stone.

What had been so huge in her mind was, in fact, terribly small. The house’s stucco had been refreshed, painted white under the climbing ivy. The stones on the driveway were new, creamy, soft-edged gravel. The yews had grown, were neatly shaved across their tops like boys on the first day of school. The wine grapes in the back twined green as far as she could see, deep into her grandmother’s old cow fields.

A man a little younger than Mathilde was fixing a motorcycle’s wheel in the drive. He had a cycling jacket on and a swoop of gelled bangs cresting over his forehead. Mathilde recognized her own long fingers in his. Her own long neck. The same folded tip of the left ear.

“Papa,” she said aloud, but no, this man was far too young.

Into the bay window came a woman. Stout, bleary-eyed, elderly, though her hair was dyed a squid-ink black. She was wearing a thickness of eyeliner below her lower lids. She peered at Mathilde in the car and her puckered mouth moved, as if she were chewing something. The hand clutching the curtain was red, ragged, as if it had spent a lifetime among the cold guts of fish.