Fates and Furies Read online

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.”

  “It’s actually kind of humble that they live like this,” Freckles said. “He’s the best.”

  “She, on the other hand,” Natalie said, lowering her voice. The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt. “Mathilde’s a conundrum wrapped in a mystery wrapped in bacon. She didn’t even have any friends in college. I mean, everybody has friends in college. Where did she come from? Nobody has any idea.”

  “I know,” Miniskirt said. “She’s so calm and quiet. Ice queen. And Lotto’s the loudest. Warm, sexy. Opposites.”

  “I don’t get it, honestly,” Freckles said.

  “Eh. First marriage,” Miniskirt said.

  “And guess who’ll be there with casseroles when it all comes apart!” Freckles said. They laughed.

  Well, Natalie thought. It was clear now. The apartment, the way Lotto and Mathild
e floated on their own current. The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism. Natalie had once wanted to be a sculptor and was pretty damn good at it. She’d welded a nine-foot stainless-steel DNA helix that sat in the science wing of her high school. She’d dreamt of building gigantic moving structures like gyroscopes and pinwheels, spun only by the wind. But her parents were right about getting a job. She studied economics and Spanish at Vassar, which was only logical, and yet she had to rent someone’s mothball-smelling closet in Queens until her internship ended. She had a hole in her one pair of high-heeled shoes, which she had to fix every night with superglue. Grinding, this life. Not what she had been promised. It was explicit in the brochures she’d looked at like porn in her suburban bed when she was applying: you get to Vassar, those laughing, beautiful kids promised, you live a gilded life. Instead, this dingy apartment with its bad beer was as high a life as she was going to live anytime soon.

  Through the door to the living room, she saw Lotto laughing down at some joke made by Samuel Harris, son of the shadiest senator in D.C. The senator was the kind of man who, having expended all his empathetic capital on marrying someone surprising, wanted to make sure no other people had the ability to make their own choices for themselves. He was anti-immigration, antiwoman, antigay, and that was just for starters. To his credit, Samuel started up the Campus Liberals, but Lotto and Samuel had both picked up the aristocrat’s inbred sense of condescension from Samuel’s snotty mom. She’d made Natalie feel like shit once for blowing her nose in her dinner napkin when she and Samuel briefly dated. Lotto, at least, had enough charm to make you feel that you were interesting. Samuel just made you feel inferior. Natalie had an urge to put her Doc Marten through both of their stupid richy-rich faces. She heaved a sigh. “Bottled water is terrible for the environment,” she said, but the others had vanished, comforting that chick Bridget who was crying in the corner, still in love with Lotto. She was just embarrassing to look at next to Mathilde’s tall bony blond. Natalie frowned at herself in the cracked mirror, seeing only a fractured girl with a bitter mouth.

  Lotto was floating. Someone had put En Vogue on the CD player, ironically, for sure, but he loved those girls’ voices. The apartment was hot as hell, the late-afternoon sun shining in like a voyeur. Nothing mattered: all his college friends were together again. He took a moment to watch, standing with a beer in the doorway.

  Natalie was doing a keg stand, held up by the ankles by the guys from the coffee shop down the block, her shirt lapping over her mealy belly. Samuel, blue bags under his eyes, was talking loudly about having worked ninety hours at his investment bank last week. Beautiful Susannah was putting her face in the freezer to cool it off, radiant with the shampoo commercial she’d landed. He swallowed his envy. The girl couldn’t act, but she was dewy, doelike. They’d hooked up once junior year. She’d tasted like fresh cream. His co-captain on the crew team, Arnie, flush from mixology school, was shaking up Pink Squirrels, his skin streaked apricot from tanning lotion.

  Behind him, a voice Lotto didn’t know said, “What’s the one forbidden word in a riddle about chess?”

  And some other person paused, then said, “Chess?”

  And the first person said, “You remember our freshman Borges seminar!” and Lotto laughed out loud with love for these pretentious sperm wads.

  They would have this party year after year, he decided. It would be their annual June fête, the friends gathering, building until they had to rent out an airplane hangar to hold everyone, to drink and shout and dance into the night. Paper lanterns, shrimp boil, someone’s kid’s bluegrass band. When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family. This crowded and sweaty lurch was all he wanted of life; this was the summit. Jeez, he was happy.

  What’s this? A spray of wet coming through the open garden windows, the old lady screaming down at them with the hose trained into the roil, her voice barely audible over the music and shouting. The girls shrieked, their summer dresses clinging to their beautiful skin. Tender. Moist. He could eat them all. He had a vision of himself in a pile of limbs and breasts, a red mouth open, sliding over his—but oh, that’s right, he couldn’t. He was married. He grinned at his wife, who was hurrying across the floor to the fat woman screaming down through the window, “Savages! Control yourselves! Keep the noise down! Savages!”

  Mathilde spoke mollifyingly, and the cranks were turned and the garden windows shut, and those to the street thrust open, which was cooler anyway, being in the shade. Already, the lip-locks, the grinding, though the sun still shined in. They turned the noise up a notch, the voices louder.

  “. . . cusp of a revolution. East and West Germany reunifying, there’s going to be a huge backlash to capitalism.”

  “Hélène Cixous is sexy. Simone de Beauvoir. Susan Sontag.”

  “Feminazis, ipso facto, cannot be sexy.”

  “. . . like, the fundamental human condition to be lonely.”

  “Cynic! Only you would say that in the middle of an orgy.”

  Lotto’s heart kicked froglike in his chest; sweeping toward him in her brilliant blue skirt, Mathilde. His azure lion rampant. Her long hair plaited down her left breast, she, the nexus of all the good of this world. He was reaching toward her when she shifted him over to the front door. It was open. A very small person stood there. Surprise! His baby sister Rachel in pigtails and overalls, gazing at the scene of drink and grind and cigarette with baby Baptist horror, shaking with nerves. She was only eight years old. She had an unaccompanied-minor tag hanging around her neck. There was a middle-aged couple with matching hiking boots frowning into the room behind her.

  “Rachel!” he shouted, and picked her up by the loop of her backpack and carried her in. The friends shuffled away. Kissing ceased, in this room at least; there was no telling what was happening in the bedroom. Mathilde unhooked Rachel. They had met only once before, when Lotto’s aunt had brought the girl up for graduation a few weeks earlier. Rachel now touched the emerald necklace that Mathilde had impulsively given her from her own neck at that dinner. “What are you doing here?” Lotto and Mathilde shouted over the noise.

  Rachel shied a little away from Mathilde, who had a reek to her. Antiperspirant, Mathilde said, gave you Alzheimer’s; perfume gave her hives. There were tears in Rachel’s eyes when she said, “Lotto? You invited me?”

  She said nothing about waiting in the airport for three hours or the kind but stern hikers who’d seen her weeping and offered her a ride. And Lotto remembered at last that she was supposed to come, and the day dimmed because he’d forgotten his baby sister was visiting for the weekend, forgotten it as soon as he’d agreed to it on the phone with his aunt Sallie, hadn’t even made it to the other room to tell Mathilde before it slipped his mind. A wave of shame rose in his chest and he imagined his sister’s fear, her distress, as she waited alone for him at baggage claim. Oh, jeepers. What if some bad man had gotten hold of her. What if she’d trusted someone terrible, not these homely people by the keg with their bandannas and carabiners, laughing because they remembered the wild parties of their youth. What if she’d trusted a perv. Flashes of white slavery, Rachel scrubbing a kitchen floor on her knees, kept in a box under someone’s bed. She looked as if she’d been crying, her little eyes red. It must have been terrifying to ride all the way from the airport with strangers. He hoped she wouldn’t tell Muvva, that his mother wouldn’t be even more disappointed in him than she already was. The things she’d said to him just after they’d eloped were molten in him still. He was such a codpiece.

  But Rachel was hugging him fiercely around the waist. The storm on Mathilde’s face had also cleared. He didn’t deserve these women who surrounded him, who made things right. [Perhaps not.] A whispered conference, and it was decided: the party could go on in their absence but they’d take Rachel out to the diner on the corner for dinner. They’d get her to bed and lock the bedroom door by nine
and turn the music down; they’d make their breach up to her all weekend. Brunch, a movie and popcorn, a trip to FAO Schwarz to dance on the floor piano.

  Rachel put her things in the closet with the camping stuff and raincoats in it. When she turned, she was immediately accosted by a short dark man—Samuel?—who looked profoundly tired, who was talking about his extremely important job in a bank or something. As if it’s so hard to cash checks and make change. Rachel could do it herself, and she was only in third grade.

  She stole away and slipped an envelope with her housewarming gift in it into her brother’s back pocket. She savored the thought of his face when he opened it: six months of her allowance saved up, nearly two thousand dollars. It was an insane allowance for an eight-year-old. What did she have to spend it on? Muvva would freak, but Rachel had burned for poor Lotto and Mathilde, she couldn’t believe they’d been cut off when they were married. As if money would ever have stopped them: Mathilde and Lotto had been born to nestle into each other like spoons in a drawer. Also, they needed the cash. Look at this tiny dark hole with no furniture to speak of. She’d never seen a place so bare. They didn’t even have a television, they didn’t even have a kettle or a rug. They were impoverished. She stole back again between Mathilde and her big brother, her nose against Lotto because he smelled like warm lotion and, well, Mathilde smelled like the high school wrestling room where her Girl Scout troop met. Hard to breathe. At last, the fear that had overwhelmed Rachel in the airport fell away, overpowered by a wash of love. The people here were so sexy, so drunk. She was shocked at all the fucks and shits falling out of their mouths: Antoinette had seared into her children that cusses were for the verbally moronic. Lotto would never swear; he and Mathilde were the right kind of adult. She would be like them, living morally, cleanly, living in love. She looked out at the swirl of bodies in the late sun, in the June stifle of the apartment, the booze and music. All she wanted in life was this: beauty, friendship, happiness.