Fates and Furies Page 7

  Lotto told Arnie, “Luanne said she’d jump your bones if you can define ‘hermeneutics’ in a satisfactory manner,” and he steered the two into the bedroom, closed the door.

  “God,” Chollie said. “I’d die.”

  “They haven’t come out of the room yet,” said Lotto. “Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”

  “Shakespeare again?” Chollie said.

  “Forever,” Lotto said.

  Chollie stalked away. Lotto was alone. When he looked up, he saw only himself reflected in the night-blackened windows, the belly that had developed during his blue summer this year, the shine at the temples where his hair was going. Three and a half years out of college, and Mathilde was still paying the bills. Lotto rubbed the Buddha’s head sadly and walked past a covey of witches huddled over someone’s Polaroid paper, faces summoned out of the murk.

  Mathilde’s back was turned, and she was speaking low to Susannah. Lotto crept forward and knew she was talking about him. “—better. Coffee commercial in September. Father and toddler out on a fishing boat at dawn. Apparently the kid fell in and Lotto fished him out with an oar and saved his life. Our hero!”

  They laughed together, and Susannah said, “I know! Folgers. I’ve seen it. Dawn, a cabin in the woods, the kid waking up on a rowboat. He’s so striking, Lotto. Especially with a beard.”

  “Tell all the directors you know, get him a job,” Mathilde said, and Susannah said, “For what?” and Mathilde said, “Anything at all,” and Susannah gave a half-mouthed smile and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Lotto, stung, hurried away without letting them see him.

  Mathilde was never unkind, but she wore her passive aggression like a second skin. If she didn’t like her food at a restaurant, she wouldn’t touch it, keeping her eyes low and saying nothing until Lotto was forced to tell the waiter the food was too salty or undercooked and could they please have something else, thanks so much, buddy. She once maneuvered an invitation to a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard by standing next to the bride all night, a big-time Broadway actress, smiling gently but not speaking a word until the bride impulsively asked them to come. They attended, danced; he charmed a producer and got a callback for a revival of My Fair Lady, though his voice was not great, and he didn’t get the role; they sent the actress a very nice set of antique silver grapefruit spoons they’d bought in a thrift store and polished to appear expensive.

  Up before Lotto rose a vision of himself as if attached to a hundred shining strings by his fingers, eyelids, toes, the muscles of his mouth. All the strings led to Mathilde’s pointer finger, and she moved it with the subtlest of twitches and made him dance.

  The Chollie goblin came to a stop next to Mathilde, and together they watched Lotto across the room in a ring of boys: a bottle of bourbon hung between the hook of two fingers, the gold circlet of leaves flapped off the back of his head.

  “What’s eating your ass?” Chollie said. “You seem off.”

  Mathilde sighed, said, “There’s something wrong with him.”

  “I think he’s fine,” Chollie said. “We only have to worry if he’s way up or way down. He’s coming out of the dip from the summer.” He paused, watched Lotto. “At least he’s losing his potbelly.”

  “Thank god,” she said. “All summer I thought he was about to jump in front of a train. He needs to get a role. Some days he never leaves the apartment.” She shook herself resolutely. “Anyway. How’s the used-car business?”

  “Quit,” Chollie said. “I’m in real estate now. In fifteen years, I’ll own half of Manhattan.”

  “Right,” Mathilde said. Then, suddenly, “I’m leaving the gallery.” They both looked startled.

  “Okay,” Chollie said. “Who’ll support the genius?”

  “I’ll work. I got a job in some Internet start-up. A dating site. Begin in a week. I haven’t told anyone yet, not Luanne or Ariel or Lotto. It’s just. I needed a change. I thought my future would be in art. It’s not.”

  “Is it in the Internet?”

  “All of our futures,” she said, “exist in the Internet.” They smiled together into their drinks.

  “Why are you telling me?” said Chollie, after some time. “I mean, I’m a weird choice of a confidant. You know?”

  “Don’t know,” Mathilde said. “I can’t tell if you’re benign or malignant. But I feel like I could tell you all my secrets right now and you’d keep them to yourself, waiting for when best to deploy them.”

  Chollie went very still, watchful. “Tell me all your secrets,” he said.

  “Fat chance,” she said. She left Chollie and went across to her husband and whispered in his ear. Lotto’s eyes widened, and he bit down on a grin and didn’t watch his wife as she went around the party and out the apartment’s front door, turning down the dimmer switch on her way so that the only illumination in the room was from the flicker of the jack-o’-lanterns.

  In a minute, Lotto went out the door with ostentatious nonchalance.

  He went up a flight of stairs, found Mathilde outside the old lady’s door. His party churned below; from within he hadn’t been aware it was so loud. He wondered why the old lady hadn’t called the cops yet, as she usually did. Still before ten, perhaps. There was a flush of cold as the front door opened and a clump of clowns clattered down the stairs to their apartment, and Lotto’s exposed buttocks prickled with goose bumps. But the front door closed; the door to their apartment opened and swallowed the clowns. He loosed Mathilde’s left breast from her bustier, his mouth on the curve of her throat.

  He turned her around to press her cheek against the door, but she struggled back, her eyes flashing, and he submitted to the standing missionary. Not as exciting, perhaps, but still a prayer to the gods of love.

  Inside the second-floor apartment, Bette was eating a runny egg sandwich alone in the dark, kept up by the festivities below. Now, unmistakable, a creak on the stairway, and Bette thrilled to the thought of a burglar, the tiny gun she kept in the fern stand. She put the sandwich down and pressed her ear to the door. But here was another creaking, a murmur. Some preparatory thumps. Indeed! This was happening. It had been so very long since her Hugh; but what had passed between them still felt fresh to her, a peach bitten into. Felt like yesterday, all that bodily joy. Begun so young they didn’t even know what they were doing and they wouldn’t give it up, so when they were old enough, they married. Not the worst thing to build a marriage around, such juice. The first years had been delirious, the latter ones merely happy.

  The girl on the landing moaned in her chest. The boy was muttering but not so distinctly that Bette could understand the words, and the girl’s moans became louder, then were muffled as if she were biting something—his shoulder? The rattling of the door was strenuous. Bette pushed herself against the heaving wood [so long since anyone had touched her; she offered up her change on her palm at the grocery store so that the clerk would brush her hand with his fingers]. Such athletes. Put Bette in mind of the monkey house on a Sunday visit to the zoo, the capuchins’ gleeful whoring.

  A mingled half shout and Bette whispered to her tabby figure-eighting her ankles, “Trick or treat, old girl. Indeed.”

  Out on the landing was hoarse breathing and rustling and those silly creatures. Oh, she knew who it was, the strange-looking giant from downstairs and his tall, plain wife, though she would pretend that she didn’t to save embarrassment when they met in the foyer. Then the footsteps down, away, the music intensifying, quieting as their door closed, and Bette was alone again. Now for a stiff scotch and a toddle off to bed, dovey, like the good girl you’ve become.

  —

  TEN O’CLOCK and Mathilde was on her knees picking up the pieces of their millionth shattered wineglass since they moved into this dismal apartment five years ago. After all this time, still Goodwill crap. Someday, when Lotto got a gig, they’d afford
better. Oh, she was tired. She hadn’t even bothered to put in her contacts tonight, and her glasses lenses were smeared with fingerprints. She longed for everyone to go home.

  She heard Lotto say from the couch, “An attempt to shake things up. At least it’s not as bright as a mouthful of Lemonheads anymore.”

  Rachel stroked the freshly painted wall. She muttered, “What’s this color? Suicide at Dusk? Church on a Winter Afternoon? It’s the darkest blue I’ve ever seen.” She seemed even more nervy than normal; a car had just backfired on the street, and she’d dropped the glass. “Please let me do that,” she said sheepishly to Mathilde. “I’m such a klutz,” she said.

  “I’ve got it. And I can hear you about the new paint, you know. I love it,” Mathilde called out, letting the pieces of glass rain into the garbage. But a drop of blood fell onto the mess—she had sliced her index without feeling it. “Fuck,” she whispered.

  “I love it, too,” Luanne said. She had plumpened in the past year like dough before the second punch-down. “I mean, at least as a background for that stolen painting it’s nice.”

  “Stop saying that,” Mathilde said. “Pitney smashed it, Ariel told me to throw it out. And I did. If I picked it up out of the dumpster later, it was fair game.”

  Luanne shrugged, but her smile was tight.

  “With all due respect,” Chollie said. “This is the worst party in the history of parties. We’re talking about walls. Susannah and Natalie are making out, and Danica’s asleep on the rug. What possessed you to have a wine-tasting party? What twentysomething knows balls about wine? We went to better parties in high school.”

  Lotto smiled, an effect like dawn. The others perked up. “We were wild,” Lotto said. He turned to the others, and said, “I only lived in Crescent Beach for a few months before Chollie debauched me and my mom sent me away to prep school. But it was the best. We stayed up all night pretty much every night. I can’t even tell you how many drugs we did. Choll, remember that party up in the old abandoned house by the marsh? I was screwing a girl on the roof when I realized the house was on fire and hurried things up and rolled off her and fell two stories into a bush, and when I crawled out, my peen was out of my fly. The firemen gave me a round of applause.” The others laughed, and Lotto said, “That was the very last night I ever spent in Florida. My mom shipped me off the next day. She’d promised an enormous gift to the school, screw admissions criteria. Haven’t been back home since.”

  Chollie gave a choked noise. They looked at him. “My twin sister,” he said. “It was. You were screwing.”

  “Shoot,” Lotto said. “I’m so sorry, Choll. I’m such a jerk.”

  Chollie took a deep breath, let it out. “That was the night I broke my leg in a spiral fracture when we were prepartying on the beach. I was in surgery when all the other stuff happened.”

  Long silence.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” Lotto said.

  “Don’t worry,” Chollie said. “She’d already fucked the whole soccer team by then.” Chollie’s date made a stricken sound. She was a downy model from some USSR country whose beauty, Lotto had to admit, cast even Mathilde’s into the shade. [Not difficult, these days.] Lotto looked across to his wife standing in the kitchen. How bedraggled she was, her hair unwashed, in her glasses and sweatshirt. He shouldn’t have insisted on the get-together. But he had been worried about her; for weeks she had been quiet, remote. Something was wrong. Nothing he said was right, none of the jokes. Was it her job? he’d finally asked. If she was so unhappy, she should quit and they should start a family. If he gave Antoinette a grandbaby, they’d be reinstated for sure. They’d have plenty of money then, jeez, enough for Mathilde to relax a little, figure out what it was she really wanted to do with her life. She struck him as an artist who’d never found her medium, restlessly testing this and that but unable to find a way to articulate her urgency. Maybe she’d find it in children. But, Oh my god, Lotto, stop, please, stop talking, stop your endless talking, stop about having babies, she’d hissed; and it was true they were still too young, too few of their friends had spawned, at least intentionally, and so he’d tabled the discussion and distracted her with videos and booze. He’d had the idea that a wine-tasting party would cheer her, but it was clear that all she wanted to do was go to their new mattress, the bedroom with the embroidered curtains, the antique etchings of nests, and bury herself there. He had forced tonight on her.

  The panic deepened. What if she was getting ready to leave him, what if her dark span wasn’t about her, but rather about him? He knew he’d disappointed her; what if she knew she could do better? He opened his arms to her, more to console himself, but she only brought over a paper towel so he could fashion a bow around her bleeding finger.

  “I don’t know. I think this is fun,” said Rachel. Loyal Rachel with the sharp little face, hungry eyes. She was down in the city from her prep school for the weekend. Barely fourteen years old, but she looked weary. Her nails were bitten beyond the quick, Lotto noticed. He’d have to ask Sallie if there was anything going on with her that he should know about. “I’m learning a lot. Beats Friday night’s all-dorm slumber party for sure.”

  “I can imagine. Bottle of peppermint schnapps. The Breakfast Club on the VCR. Someone would be crying in the bathroom all night long. Midnight streaking across the quad. A game of all-girls’ spin the bottle. My Rachel reading a book in the corner in her lobster-print pajamas, judging them all like a mini-queen,” Lotto said. “The review in her journal would be devastating.”

  Rachel said, “Disappointing, trite, and vapid. Two thumbs down.” They chuckled, the knot of desperation in the room gently loosed. This gentling would be Rachel’s effect, not a flashy gift, but good.

  In the silence afterward, Luanne said, “Of course, there were professional ethics that should have precluded you taking the canvas, Mathilde.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Mathilde said. “It’d have been all right had someone else dug it from the dumpster? You? What is it, Luanne? You’re jealous?”

  Luanne made a face. Of course she was jealous. It must have been so hard for Luanne, Lotto thought, back when Mathilde worked at the gallery. Mathilde was always the second in charge. Knowledgeable, clever, gracious. Surely Ariel had favored Mathilde. Everyone favored Mathilde.

  “Ha,” Luanne said. “That’s hilarious. Jealous of you?”

  “Please stop,” said Chollie. “If it had been a Picasso, everyone would have praised Mathilde for her foresight. You’re being a total vagina.”

  “You’re calling me a vagina? I don’t even know who you are,” Luanne said.

  “We’ve met a million times. You say that every time,” Chollie said.

  Danica was watching the argument as if it were a game of Ping-Pong. She’d lost even more weight; her arms and cheeks were downy with strange fur. She was laughing.

  “Please stop fighting,” Rachel said quietly.

  “I don’t know why I come to your stupid freaking parties anyway,” Luanne said, standing. She started to cry with anger. “You’re a total fake, Mathilde, and you know what I’m talking about.” She turned toward Lotto, and said, venomously, “Not you, Lotto, you’re just a freaking Bambi. Anybody but you would understand by this point you don’t have enough talent for the stage. But nobody wants to hurt you by saying it. Least of all your wife, who thrives on making you a freaking infant in your own life.”

  Lotto was out of his chair so fast the blood fled from his head. “Shut your pig face, Luanne. My wife is the best human being on the planet and you know it.”

  Rachel said, “Lotto!” and Mathilde said, low, “Lotto, stop,” and Natalie and Susannah said, “Hey!”

  Only Chollie burst into high-pitched laughter. Olga, whom they had all forgotten, whipped around and socked him hard on the shoulder, then stood and clattered across the floor in her high heels, threw open the apartment door, shouted, “You
are monsters!” and stormed up to the street. The frigid wind blew down the stairs from the front door and spangled them with snowflakes.

  For a long moment, nothing. Then Mathilde said, “Go after her, Chollie.”

  “Nah,” he said. “She won’t get far without her jacket.”

  “It’s ten below, you fuck,” said Danica, and threw Olga’s synthetic fur at Chollie’s face. He got up grumbling and went out, slamming both doors. Mathilde rose and lifted the painting off the wall, over the shining pate of the brass Buddha, and handed it to Luanne.

  Luanne looked at the painting in her hands. She said, “I can’t take this.” The others in the room had the sense of a ferocious battle being fought in the silence.

  Mathilde sat, folded her arms, closed her eyes. Luanne put the painting against Mathilde’s knees. She went out and the door closed on her forever. In her absence, the room seemed brighter, even the overhead lights mellowed.

  The friends left, one by one. Rachel shut herself into the bathroom, and they could hear the bath running.

  When they were alone, Mathilde knelt in front of Lotto and took off her glasses and buried her face in his chest. He held her helplessly, making soothing sounds. Conflict nauseated him. He couldn’t bear it. His wife’s thin shoulders shook. But when at last she lifted her head, he was startled; her face was flushed and swollen, but she was laughing. Laughing? Lotto kissed the plum presses under her eyes, the freckles on her pale skin. He felt a vertiginous awe.

  “You called Luanne a pig face,” she said. “You! Mr. Genial. Leaping in to save the day. Ha!”

  Marvelous girl. He saw, with a warm rush, that she would come through this period of stringiness and woe so terrible she couldn’t share it with him. She would return. She would love him again. She wouldn’t leave. And in every place where they lived from then on, that painting would blue the air. It would be a testament. Their marriage picked itself up off the ground, stretched, looked at them with its hands on its hips. Mathilde was coming back to Lotto. Hallelujah.