Fates and Furies Page 6

  —

  THE SUN SHIFTED TO RECLINING. It was eight at night.

  Calm. Mild. End of autumn. Chill in the air like a premonition.

  Susannah came through the door that led up into the garden. The apartment with its new jute rug was still. She found Mathilde alone, tossing vinaigrette into Bibb lettuce in the galley kitchen.

  “Did you hear?” Susannah murmured, but was struck silent when Mathilde turned her face toward her. Earlier, Susannah had thought that walking into the apartment with its new coat of bright yellow paint had been like walking into the sun, blinding. But now the color played with the cinnamon freckles on Mathilde’s face. She’d gotten an asymmetrical haircut, her blond lopped at the right jawbone, at the left collar, and it set off her high cheekbones. Susannah felt a pulse of attraction. Odd. All this time, Mathilde had seemed plain, shadowed by her husband’s light, but now the pairing clicked. Mathilde was, in fact, ravishing.

  “Did I hear what?” Mathilde said.

  “Oh, Mathilde. Your hair,” Susannah said. “It’s wonderful.”

  Mathilde put a hand up to it, and said, “Thanks. What did I hear?”

  “Right,” Susannah said, and picked up the two bottles of wine Mathilde indicated with her chin. She said, as she followed Mathilde out the entryway, up the back stairs, “You know Kristina from our class? In that a cappella group the Zaftones? Inky hair and, well, zaftig. I think Lotto and she—” Susannah made a face to herself, Oh, you dummy, and Mathilde paused on the step, then waved a hand as if to say, Oh, yes, Lotto and everybody screwed like bonobos, which Susannah had to admit was true, and they came up into the garden. They stopped, autumn-struck. Lotto and Mathilde had spread out thrift-store sheets on the grass and the friends had arranged the potluck in the middle, and everyone was lounging quietly, eyes closed in the last morsel of chill fall sun, drinking the cold white wine and Belgian beer, waiting for the first person to reach in and take food.

  Mathilde put her salad bowl down, and said, “Eat, kiddos.” Lotto smiled up at her and took a mini-spanakopita from a warm pile. The rest of them, a dozen or so, huddled into the food and began talking again.

  Susannah stood on her toes and whispered up into Mathilde’s ear, “Kristina. She killed herself. Hanged herself in the bathroom. Out of the blue, only yesterday. Nobody knew she was miserable. She had a boyfriend and everything and a job with the Sierra Club and an apartment in the nice part of Harlem. Makes no sense.”

  Mathilde had gone very still and had lost her constant small smile. Susannah knelt and served herself watermelon, cutting the big pieces into slivers: she wasn’t eating real food anymore because she had a new TV role she was too embarrassed to talk about in front of Lotto. For one thing, it wasn’t Hamlet, in which he’d shined so brilliantly their last semester in college. It was just a job as a teenager on a soap opera, she knew she was selling out. And yet it was more than anything Lotto had gotten since they graduated. He’d been the understudy in a few off-off-Broadway things; he’d had a tiny role at the Actors Theatre in Louisville. That was it for a year and a half. Lotto returned to her again as he’d looked at the end of Hamlet, bowing, having sweated through his costume, and she’d felt awe, had shouted “Bravo!” from the audience, having lost the role of Ophelia to a girl with huge boobs bared naked in the pond scene. Ho-bag slut. Susannah bit into her watermelon and swallowed a pulse of victory. She loved Lotto more, in pitying.

  Above the scrum, Mathilde shivered and pulled her cardigan closer. A burgundy leaf fell from the Japanese maple and landed upright in a spinach-artichoke dip. It was chilly in the shadow under the tree. Soon, there would be the long winter, cold and white. An erasure of this night, the garden. She plugged in the strand of Christmas lights that they had twined through the branches above, and the tree sparked into a dendrite. She sat behind her husband because she wanted to hide, and his back was so beautiful, broad and muscled, that she rested her face there and felt comforted. She listened to his voice muffled through his chest, the smooth edge of his Southern accent.

  “. . . two old men sitting on a porch, shooting the sea breeze,” Lotto was saying; so, a joke. “This old hound dog comes out and circles around in the dust and sits down and starts licking at his junk. Slurping and gulping and loving the heck out of his pink little stump. A tube of lipstick all the way extended. So one of the old guys winks at his friend and says, Man, I sure wish I could do that. And the other old guy says, Pshaw! That dog would BITE you.”

  They all laughed, not so much at the joke, but at the way Lotto delivered it, the pleasure he took. Mathilde knew it had been his father’s favorite, that it had made Gawain guffaw into his hand and turn red every time Lotto told it. The warmth of her husband through his emerald polo shirt began to break up the clod of dread in Mathilde. Kristina had lived on her freshman floor. Mathilde had walked in on her once crying in the coed showers, had recognized her beautiful alto voice, and had walked out again, choosing to give the gift of privacy over that of comfort. Only in retrospect was that the worse choice. Mathilde felt a slow welling of anger at Kristina in her gut and breathed into Lotto to quell it.

  Lotto reached behind him for Mathilde and scooped her sideways into his lap with his paw. His stomach rumbled but he couldn’t eat more than a bite or two: he’d been waiting for a callback for a week now, unwilling to leave the apartment for fear of missing it. Mathilde had proposed the potluck to get his mind off it all. The role was for Claudio in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare in the Park next summer. He could see himself in a doublet in front of thousands. Bats darting. Dusk shooting pink flares overhead. Since graduation, he had worked steadily, if in small roles. He had gotten Equity. This was the next step skyward.

  He looked through the window inside the apartment, where the phone persisted unringing on the mantel. Behind it stood the painting Mathilde had brought home a few months earlier from the gallery where she’d worked for the past year. After its artist had stormed out, flinging the canvas against the wall and breaking the stretcher, the gallery owner, Ariel, told her to toss it in the dumpster. Instead, Mathilde took the broken painting, restretched it, framed it, hung it behind the brass Buddha. It was a blue abstract and reminded Lotto of the moment every morning before dawn, a misty dim world between worlds. What’s the word? Eldritch. Like Mathilde, herself. He would come home some days after auditions to find her sitting in the dark, staring up at the painting with a glass of red wine cradled between both hands, a vague look on her face.

  “Should I be worried?” he’d said once, after an audition for a show he didn’t even want, when he came home to find her sitting there in the darkening room. He kissed her behind the ear.

  “No. I’m just so happy,” she had said.

  He didn’t say that it had been a long day, that he’d had to wait in the drizzle on the street for two hours, that after he finally went in and read his lines and went out the door, he’d heard the director say, “Stellar. Too bad he’s a giant.” That his agent wasn’t returning his calls. That he would have relished a nice dinner for once. Because, in truth, he didn’t mind. If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him; and it had become painfully apparent over their short marriage that he was not worth the salt she sweated. The woman was a saint. She saved, fretted, somehow paid their bills when he brought in nothing. He had sat beside her until it was fully dark, and she turned with a rustling of silk and kissed him suddenly, and he carried her to bed without eating.

  Now Mathilde lifted a piece of salmon burger to Lotto’s lips, and though he didn’t want it, she was looking at him and the gold specks in her eyes glittered, and he took the bite off the fork. He kissed her on the freckled bridge of her nose.

  “Disgusting,” Arnie called from his distant sheet. His arm was around some tattooed chick he was dating from his bar. “You’ve been married for a year. Honeymoon’s over.”

  “Never,” Mathilde and Lotto said, at once. T
hey did jinx pinkies, kissed again.

  “What’s it like?” Natalie said quietly. “Marriage, I mean.”

  Lotto said, “A never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full.”

  Mathilde said, “Kipling called it a very long conversation.”

  Lotto looked at his wife, touched her cheek. “Yes,” he said.

  Chollie leaned toward Danica, who leaned away. He whispered, “You owe me a million bucks.”

  “What?” she snapped. She was dying for a chicken leg, but had to plow through a heap of salad before she allowed herself anything fatty.

  “Last year, at their housewarming,” Chollie said. “We bet a million bucks they’d be divorced by now. You lose.”

  They looked at Lotto and Mathilde, so handsome, the still axis of the garden, of the spinning world. “I don’t know. How much of it’s an act?” Danica said. “There’s some sort of darkness there. Probably that he’s pretending to be faithful and she’s pretending not to care.”

  “You’re mean,” Chollie said with admiration. “What’s your beef with Lotto? Were you one of his vanquished millions? They all still love him. I ran into that girl Bridget who was calling herself his girlfriend in college, and she burst into tears when she asked about him. He was the love of her life.”

  Danica’s eyes and mouth tightened. Chollie laughed, revealing a roil of lasagna. “Naw, it’s the opposite,” he said. “He never went for you.”

  “If you don’t shut up, you’re getting salad in the kisser,” she said.

  They sat for a long moment, eating, pretending to eat. Then Danica said, “Fine. Double or nothing. But I get longer. Six years. Until 1998. And they’ll be divorced and you’ll pay me two million bucks and I’ll get an apartment in Paris. Enfin.”

  Chollie blinked, bulged. “You’re assuming that I’ll be able to pay.”

  “Of course you will. You’re the kind of slimy little man who makes a hundred million dollars by your thirties,” Danica said.

  Chollie said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said about me.”

  When the shadows thickened just enough for the gesture to be hidden, Susannah gave Natalie a pinch on the rear. They laughed into their cups. It had been tacitly agreed upon: another night they would end up at Susannah’s. Only Natalie knew about Susannah’s new role as the bratty daughter of a soap opera villain; only Natalie knew about the new rising sea of feeling between them. “My career would die before it was born if everyone knew I was a big fat lesbo,” Susannah had said. Something sat wrong with Natalie, but she kept it in, let Susannah blaze inside her all day while she stood at her sad, gray desk trading commodities, her bank account spinning richer second by second.

  Natalie was looking better, Lotto thought, watching her brush her hand over the last mint. She had bleached the moustache, lost weight, was dressing with flair. She had found the beauty he’d known was there all along. He smiled at her, and she blushed, smiled back.

  Their eating slowed. The group fell silent. Caramel brownies went around. Some of the friends watched the creamy unfurl of a contrail in the darkling sky, and there was a poignancy in the way it disappeared, and this made most of them think about the dead black-haired girl, that they’d never again feel her arms around their necks in a hug. She had smelled like oranges.

  “I found a boy who’d hung himself in prep school,” Lotto said suddenly. “Hanged himself.” They looked at his face with interest. He was pale, grim. They waited for the story because there was always a story with Lotto, but he didn’t say anything more. Mathilde took his hand.

  “You never said,” she whispered.

  “Tell you later,” he said. Poor pustuled Jelly Roll dangled ghostly in the garden for a breath; and Lotto passed his hand over his face, and the boy was gone.

  Someone said, “Look! The moon!” and there it was, hove up like a ship in the navy edge of sky, and it filled them all with longing.

  Rachel sat down beside her brother, leaned into his warmth. She was up for fall break, had pierced her ears all the way around, and wore her hair long in front, shaved in the rear. Radical for a ten-year-old, but she needed to do something, otherwise she looked a slight six with jittery hands, and from her studies of her cohort, she understood that it was better to be weird than twee. [Smart girl. Yes.] She had just gone in and put the envelope with her last year’s allowance in Mathilde’s underwear drawer, dabbling her hands among the silks; it had not escaped Rachel that her brother’s cabinets were bare, that Mathilde had called Sallie last month, that Sallie had sent cash. Now she was watching the window on the first floor where she had seen a fluttering edge of curtain, half a fist, one eye. Rachel pictured an interior with wallpapered ceilings. Cats with infirmities, Cyclops cats and cats with nubs for tails and gouty, swollen-pawed cats. Stink of joint rub. Bowl of minestrone heated in the microwave. Sad old woman inside. Muvva was heading fast toward that same future; the tiny pink beach house a tomb of figurines and chintz. Muvva loved the sound of the sea, she told Rachel, but Rachel had never even seen her go out into the sand. She just stayed in her little pink aquarium of a house like a sucker fish, gobblemouthing the glass. Poor Muvva.

  I will never be old, Rachel promised herself. I will never be sad. I’d scarf a cyanide capsule first, kill myself like that friend of Lotto’s everyone is crying about. Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.

  Under the dying angel’s trumpet plant, the old lady’s tabby watched. Confusing, these people lounging around their food like enormous cats sated from the kill. She longed to pad in and investigate, but there were too many of them, and they were so sudden, so unpredictable. Just so: at once the people rose, shrieking, gathering things up in their arms, rushing about. The cat was startled that they were startled, because she had smelled the rain long before she heard it. A spoon fell from a bowl of tabbouleh and spun into the dirt and was abandoned, spattered by the mud kicked up by the first raindrops. The people were gone. A hand came out of a ground-level window and unplugged the tree lights. In the plunge of darkness, the yellow cord writhed into the window like a snake and the cat hungered to chase it, but it disappeared and the window closed. The cat dabbed her paw delicately at one fat drop on the edge of a leaf, then galloped across the yard and came inside.

  —

  THE DOOR TO THE APARTMENT OPENED; in leapt the goblin. It was nine at night, unseasonably cold. Behind the goblin came Miss Piggy, a skeleton, a ghost. Albert Einstein, moonwalking. Samuel came in wearing a lampshade for a hat, a cardboard box painted to resemble a bedside table, with a magazine and two condom wrappers glued on top.

  Lotto in a toga, crowned by gilded bay leaves, put his beer down on Samuel’s tabletop and said, “Hello! You’re a nightstand. A one-night stand. Ha ha.”

  A murdered prom queen froufroued by, muttering, “Wishful thinking.” Samuel said, “I think that was my ex-girlfriend,” grinned, went to the fridge for a beer.

  “Since when does it snow on Halloween? Global warming, schmobal schwarming,” Luanne said, stomping her boots on the rattan mat. She was Mathilde’s friend from the gallery where they worked and was painted up cleverly as Picasso’s Dora Maar, the one with the bitten apple for a cheek. She kissed Lotto lingeringly, saying, “Oh, hail yes, Caesar.” He laughed too loudly, pulling away. Luanne was trouble. Mathilde came home most days with stories about how she tried to seduce their boss, some gross bulgy-eyed man with vaudeville eyebrows named Ariel. “Why?” said Lotto. “She’s pretty. She’s young. She could do way better.” And Mathilde shot him a look, and said, “Babe. He’s rich,” and, of course, that explained it. Together Lotto and Luanne went toward Mathilde, who was resplendent in full Cleopatra, eating a cupcake beside the huge brass Buddha o
n the mantel adorned with sunglasses and lei. Lotto dipped his wife and licked the crumbs from her lips as she laughed.

  “Yuck,” Luanne said. “You guys can’t be freaking real.” She went to the kitchen, took a Zima from the fridge, moodily sipped, made a face. She’d gauged the low state of Lotto’s mind by the size of his belly and how crowded the apartment was with used books; in his low moments, reading was all Lotto could do. Funny, because he seemed like such a huge goofball, and then he opened his mouth and quoted paragraphs of Wittgenstein or something. It unnerved her, the gap between who he appeared to be and the person he held inside him.

  Someone put on a Nirvana CD and girls got up from the leather couch Lotto had rescued from the sidewalk. They attempted to dance but gave up, put Thriller on again.

  Chollie, green goblin, sidled up to Lotto and Mathilde, slurringly drunk. “I never noticed how close-set your eyes are, Mathilde, and how wide yours are, Lotto.” He made a stabbing motion with two fingers at Mathilde and said, “Predator,” then stabbed at Lotto and said, “Prey.”

  “I’m the prey and Mathilde’s the predator?” Lotto said. “Please. I’m her predator. Her sexual predator,” he said, and everyone groaned.

  Luanne was gazing at Arnie across the room. She made an impatient motion with her hand. “Shut up, you guys,” she said. “I’m ogling.”

  Mathilde sighed, backed away.

  “Wait. Who? Oh, Arnie,” Chollie said, spiteful. Disappointed? “Please. He’s so stupid.”

  “Dumb as a dead bulb,” Luanne said. “Exactly my point.”

  “Arnie?” said Lotto. “Arnie was a neuroscience major in college. He’s no dumbo. Just because he didn’t go to Harvard like you doesn’t make him dumb.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s pickled his brains with booze,” Luanne said. “At your last party I overheard him say that Sting is his spirit animal.”

  Lotto gave a whistle across the room; Arnie-as-the-Hulk looked up from the sea of girls for whom he was making chocolate martinis. He made his way over to Lotto, clapping him on the shoulder. Chollie and Arnie were both painted green. Side by side, Arnie was the pneumatic before and Chollie the punctured after.