Fates and Furies (11 page)

A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already sleeping in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver that he’d run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys in puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.

—

A
LMOST
MIDNIGHT
and Rachel couldn’t get over the ceiling. What chutzpah had made Mathilde gild it! Their bodies echoed, globs in the brightness above. It did transform the room, shining elegantly against the dark walls. On this frigid last day of the year, it seemed a hand had peeled back the roof like the lid of a sardine can and they were standing beneath an August sun.

It was unbelievable that this was the same empty white space that she had walked into on the day of their housewarming party more than seven years earlier, with its wild roil of bodies and beer stink, the glorious sweaty heat and the garden radiant with early-summer light out the windows. Now there were icicles shining in the streetlights. There were orchids around the Buddha, overgrown money plants in the corners, Louis XIV chairs covered in French flour sacking. It was elegant, overstuffed, too beautiful. A gilded cage, Rachel
thought. Mathilde had been short with Lotto all evening. She no longer smiled when she looked at him. Well, she barely looked at him. Rachel was afraid that Mathilde, whom Rachel loved as dearly as anyone, was about to bust out of it all in a commotion of wings. Poor Lotto. Poor all of them if Mathilde left him.

Rachel’s new girlfriend, Elizabeth, a girl so pale of hair and skin she seemed made of paper, felt Rachel’s nerves ratcheting up and squeezed her shoulder. The tension went out of Rachel. She took a wobbly breath and kissed Elizabeth shyly on the neck.

Outside, the swift passing of a cat body on the sidewalk. It couldn’t be the tabby owned by the old lady from upstairs. That cat had been ancient when Lotto and Mathilde had moved in; last Christmas it starved for three days, until Lotto and Mathilde got ahold of the landlord vacationing in the British Virgin Islands and had someone investigate. Poor rotted dead Bette. Lotto had to take a hysterical Mathilde to Samuel’s apartment for a week just to get her to calm down while the fumigators were in. Strange to witness composed Mathilde lose it; it made Rachel see her as the thin, big-eyed little girl she must have been, made Rachel love her even more. Now there was a couple with a new baby up there, which was why this New Year’s Eve party tonight was so small. Newborns, apparently, dislike noise.

“Breeders,” said Mathilde, out of nowhere, Mathilde, who could read minds. She laughed at the astonished face Rachel made, then returned to the kitchen, pouring champagne into glasses on the silver tray. Lotto thought of the baby upstairs, then the way Mathilde would look when pregnant, svelte as a girl from behind, but in silhouette as if she’d swallowed a calabash. He laughed at the thought. Her strap down, breast lolling out, fat enough for even his hungry mouth. Days expanding outward from clean, warm skin and milk; that was what he wanted, exactly that.

Chollie and Danica and Susannah and Samuel sat quietly, pale, serious-ish. They had come alone to the party, this year bad for
breakups. Samuel was skinny, his skin cracked around his mouth. This was the first he’d been out since having surgery for testicular cancer. He seemed, for the first time, diminished. “Speaking of breeders, last week I saw that girl you dated in college, Lotto. What was her name? Bridget,” Susannah said. “Pediatric oncology fellow. Hugely pregnant. Swollen like a tick. She seems happy.”

“I didn’t date in college,” Lotto said. “Except for Mathilde. For two weeks. Then we eloped.”

“Didn’t date. Just fucked every girl in the Hudson Valley.” Samuel laughed. Chemo had suddenly balded him; without his curls he looked newly ferretlike. “Sorry, Rachel, but your brother was a slut.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard,” Rachel said. “I think that Bridget girl used to come to your parties when you first moved in here. She was so boring. You always packed about a million people in this room. I miss those days.”

Up there rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand that they were ecstatic.

Whatever happened to all of those friends of ours? Lotto wondered. The ones who had seemed so essential had faded away. Nerd princes with their twins in strollers, Park Slope and craft beers. Arnie, who owned a bar empire, still doing girls with plates in their ears and jailhouse tattoos. Natalie now a CFO of some Internet start-up in San Francisco, a hundred others faded off. The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow.

“I don’t know,” Susannah was saying softly. “I guess I like living alone.” She was still a teenager in the soap opera. She’d be a teenager until they killed her off and then she’d play mothers and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.

“I get so sad sleeping alone,” Danica said. “I want to buy a sex doll just to wake up next to someone in the morning.”

“Date a model. Same thing,” Chollie said.

“I hate your face, Chollie,” Danica said, trying not to laugh.

“Yadda yadda,” Chollie said. “Keep singing that same old song. We both know the truth.”

“Less than a minute until the ball drops,” called Mathilde, carrying in the tray of champagne.

Everyone looked at Samuel, who shrugged. Even cancer couldn’t dent him.

“Poor One Ball Samuel,” Lotto said. He’d gotten into the bourbon after dinner and hadn’t recovered yet.

“Old Single Dingle?” Chollie suggested, but not unkindly, for once.

“Half-sack Sam,” Mathilde said, and kicked lightly at Lotto, who was stretched out on the couch. He sat up, yawned. He’d unbuttoned his pants. Thirty, at the end of his youth. He felt the darkness settle on him again, and said, “This is it, you guys. The last year of humanity. Next New Year’s, it’ll be Y2K and all the planes will fall out of the sky and the computers will explode and the nuclear power plants will go off-line and we’ll all see a flash and then the great blank whiteness will come over all of us. Done. Finito, the human experiment. So live it up! It’s the last year we get!”

He was joking; he believed what he was saying. He thought of how the world without humans would be more brilliant, greener, teeming with strange life, rats with opposable thumbs, monkeys in spectacles, mutant fish building palaces below the sea. How, in the grand scheme of things, it would be better without human witness anyway. He thought of his mother’s young face flickering in candlelight, in revelation. “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration,” Lotto whispered, and his friends looked at him, saw something terrible, looked away.

He broke Rachel’s fucking heart. Her whole family broke her fucking heart. Muvva burying herself in solitude, in unhappiness. Doglike Sallie slaving away. Lotto, whose pride she couldn’t
understand; only a child could stay so angry so long, only a child wouldn’t forgive in order to make things right. Mathilde saw Rachel’s eyes fill with pity and shook her head slightly: No. He’ll see it.

“Thirty seconds,” Mathilde said. Prince was playing from the computer, of course.

Chollie leaned toward Danica, angling for the midnight kiss. Horrible little man. Such a mistake to let him feel her up in the taxi one night coming back from the Hamptons this past summer. What was she thinking? She’d been between boyfriends, but still. “Not a fucking chance,” she said, but he was speaking.

“. . . owe me two million dollars,” he said.

“What?” she said.

He grinned, said, “Twenty-something seconds until 1999. You bet me they’d be divorced by 1998.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Fuck you, welsher,” he said.

“We have until the end of the year,” she said.

“Twenty seconds,” Mathilde said. “Good-bye, 1998, you slow and muddy year.”

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” Lotto said drunkenly.

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing,” Mathilde said. Lotto recoiled, opened his mouth, closed it.

“See?” Danica muttered. “They’re fighting. If one of them storms out, I’m calling it a win.”

Mathilde snatched a glass from the tray, and said, “Ten.” She licked at the champagne she spilled on her hand.

“I’ll absolve your debt if you go on a date with me,” Chollie said, his hot breath in Danica’s ear.

“What?” Danica said.

“I’m rich. You’re mean,” Chollie said. “Why the hell not.”

“Eight,” Mathilde said.

“Because I loathe you,” Danica said.

“Six. Five. Four,” the others said. Chollie raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, fine,” Danica sighed.

“One! Happy New Year!” they shouted, and someone gave three stomps from the apartment above, and the baby wailed, and outside they could hear the very faint noise of voices shouting all the way over the crystalline night from Times Square, then a blast of fireworks in the street.

“Happy 1999, my love,” Lotto said to Mathilde; and it had been so very long since they had kissed like this. A month at least. He had forgotten about the freckles on her pretty nose. How had he forgotten such a thing? Nothing like having a wife who worked herself to death to stifle the mood for love. Nothing like dying dreams, he thought, and disappointment.

Mathilde’s irises shifted smaller when she pulled her head back. “This will be your breakthrough year,” she said. “You’ll be Hamlet on Broadway. You’ll find your groove.”

“I love your optimism,” he said, but felt sick. Elizabeth and Rachel were both kissing Susannah’s cheeks because she looked so lonely. Samuel kissed her also, blushing, but she laughed him off.

“I’m trashed,” Danica said, pulling away from her kiss with Chollie. She looked startled.

They left, two by two, and Mathilde turned off the lights, yawned, piled the food and glasses on the counters to clean them up in the morning. Lotto watched as she shimmied off her dress in the bedroom and climbed under the duvet in her thong.

“You remember when we used to have sex before we even went to bed on New Year’s Day? A bodily blessing for the new year,” he called to her through the doorway. He considered saying more; that this year, maybe, they could have a kid. Lotto could be the stay-at-home parent. For sure, if he was the one who had the relevant anatomy, a mistake would already have been made with the birth control and
a little Lotto would be even now kicking its heels in his gut. It was unfair that women could have such primordial joy and men could not.

“Baby, we used to have sex on garbage day and grocery-shopping day, too,” she said.

“What changed?” he said.

“We’re old,” she said. “We still do it more than most of our married friends. Twice a week’s not bad.”

“Not enough,” he muttered.

“I heard that,” she said. “As if I’ve ever made myself unavailable to you.”

He heaved a sigh, prepared to stand.

“Fine,” she said. “If you come to bed now, I’ll let you do me. But don’t be mad if I fall asleep.”

“Glory. How tempting,” Lotto said, and sat back down with his bottle in the dark.

He listened to his wife’s breath even into snores and wondered how he had arrived here. Drunk, lonely, stewing in his failure. Triumph had been assured. Somehow, he’d frittered his potential away. A sin. Thirty and still a nothing. Kills you slowly, failure. As Sallie would have said, he done been bled out.

[Perhaps we love him more like this; humbled.]

Tonight, he understood his mother, burying herself alive in her beach house. No more risking the hurt that came from contact with others. He listened to the dark beat under his thoughts, which he had had forever, since his father had died. Release. A fuselage could fall from a plane and pin him into the earth. One flick of a switch in his brain would power him down. Blessed relief at last, it would be. Aneurysms ran in the family. His father’s had been so sudden, forty-six, too young; and all Lotto wanted was to close his eyes and find his father there, to put his head on his father’s chest and smell him and hear the warm thumpings of his heart. Was that so much to ask? He’d had one parent who’d loved him. Mathilde had given him enough but
he’d ground her down. Her hot faith had cooled. She’d averted her face. She was disappointed in him. Oh, man, he was losing her, and if he lost her, if she left him—the leather valise in her hand, her thin back unturning—he might as well be dead.

Lotto was weeping; he could tell from the cold on his face. He tried to keep quiet. Mathilde needed sleep. She had been working sixteen-hour days, six days a week, kept them fed and housed. He brought nothing to their marriage, only disappointment and dirty laundry. He fished out the laptop he’d stored under the couch when Mathilde had ordered him to clean up before everyone had come over tonight. He just wanted the Internet, the other sad souls of the world, but instead, he opened a blank document, shut his eyes, thought of what he’d lost. Home state, mother, that light he’d once lit in strangers, in his wife. His father. Everyone had underestimated Gawain because he was quiet and unlettered, but only he had understood the value of the water under the scrubby family land, had captured and sold it. Lotto thought of the photos of his mother when she was young, once a mermaid, the tail rolled like a stocking over her legs, undulating in the cold springs. He remembered his own small hand immersed in the source, the bones freezing past the point of numbness, how he’d loved that pain.

Pain! Swords of morning light in his eyes.