Fates and Furies (23 page)

After some time, Antoinette stood, and with the movement, she caught sight of her own face in the vanity mirror. Wrinkled at the corners, exhausted, swollen. Well, no wonder. Such a force of effort it cost her to keep her son safe. The world more perilous by the moment, liable to disintegrate if she wasn’t constantly vigilant. The things she had done for Lancelot, the sacrifices she’d made! She thought of the grand reveal when she was dead, the strings he’d never know she’d pulled until she was gone, the horrors she’d endured for his sake. Did she choose to plant herself here in this shabby pink house? She did not. With the money Gawain left, she could have been bathing in luxury. Top floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, room service and steel bands summoned at whim. Marble bathrooms the size of this shack. Sunlight like diamonds on the water below. But she wouldn’t touch more of Gawain’s money than she must to survive. It was all for her children, their shocked faces when they knew the extent of what she’d done. She brought the old comforting image before her again, so real that it was like a scene she’d watched in rerun on television: her son in a black suit—she hadn’t seen him in decades; in her mind he was still the gawky, pustuled child she’d let the North swallow up—his shirt threadbare, his wife all drab in cheap black, tartishly made up. Blue eye shadow, brown lip liner, feathered hair, she imagined. Sallie would hand him the envelope with the letter in which Antoinette had explained it all, everything she had done for him. He would turn away, choking, open it, read. “No!” he’d shout. And when his wife would touch his shoulder tentatively, he’d shake her off, bury his face in his hands, mourning all the years he neglected to be grateful to his mother.

Rachel came down the hallway and saw Antoinette standing in her room. When Antoinette looked up into the mirror, she saw her
daughter and slipped her smiling face over the stern one like a mask. Her teeth were still beautiful. “I believe Sallie made cookies for the little ones, Rachel,” Antoinette said. She moved her huge body through the door and down the hallway with painful slowness and sank into her chair. “I don’t think it will do much harm for me to taste one or two,” she said, smiling coquettishly. And Rachel found herself bowing with a plate of cookies in the same old subservient position. Only her brother could wind their mother up like so. God, Lotto! Now Rachel would have to spend the rest of the break appeasing the old beast; and the ancient resentment toward her brother came swiftly up out of the deep. [The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.] The urge to utter a few destructive words that would have let pandemonium into Lotto’s world was quelled, locked in. She heard her children coming loudly up the stairs, took a breath, bent lower. “Take a few more, Muvva,” she said, and her mother said, “Well, thank you, darling, don’t mind if I do.”

It took Lancelot twenty minutes of standing in the shade under a bus stop, listening to the nervous young people chittering around him, to calm down after his call with his mother. Only when the bus sighed and knelt the passengers off like a carnival elephant did he remember that, without money, he couldn’t even catch the BART. He imagined Mathilde, feeling sickly. His words redoubled to him, sounding venomous now. If he’d said a woman’s creative genius went into her babies, what did it mean about Mathilde, a woman who had none? That she was lesser? Lesser than other women who did? Lesser than he was, who created? But he didn’t think so, not at all! He knew she was better than everyone. He didn’t deserve her. She had made it back to the Nob Hill hotel, was packing, was stepping into a yellow taxi, was boarding a plane to fly away from him. The day had at last come. She was leaving him, and he would be left with nothing, bereft.

How would he live without her? He had cooked but had never scrubbed a toilet; he had never paid a bill. How would he write without her? [The buried awareness of how completely her hands reached into his work; don’t look, Lotto. It’d be like looking at the sun.]

The sweat had dried on his shirt. He had to do
something
; he had to expend his energy somehow. It couldn’t be more than thirty miles to the city. There was only one way there, straight north. It was a beautiful day. He had long legs and great endurance: he could walk fast, five miles an hour. He’d get to the hotel at about midnight. Perhaps she wouldn’t have left yet. Maybe she wasn’t so angry anymore; maybe she had just gone to the spa for a massage and facial and would order room service and watch a naughty movie and take her vengeance this way. Passive-aggressively. Her style.

He set off, keeping the sun at his left, and drank water at a succession of dog parks. Not enough. He was thirsty. In the twilight, he passed the airport and smelled the salt marsh on the wind. The traffic was terrible and he was nearly hit by a peloton of cyclists, three semitrailers, and a man driving a Segway in the dark.

As he walked, he chewed over what had happened at the panel. He saw it over and over and over again. After a few hours, it became a story, as if he were telling it at a bar to a band of friends. A few times through, and the imaginary friends at the bar had become tipsy and laughed at the story. With repetition, what had happened lost its power to wound him. It had become comical, no longer shameful. He was no misogynist. He could summon hundreds of women from the time before Mathilde to attest to his lack of misogyny. He was simply misunderstood! His fears of Mathilde’s leaving him dulled under the friction of the story. An overreaction, and she would be ashamed of herself. She would be the one to apologize to him. She had proved her point; he’d give that to her. He didn’t blame her. She loved him. He was an optimist at heart. All would be well.

He came into the city and nearly wept with gratitude for the tighter blocks, for the sidewalks, for the streetlights gently leading him one to the next.

His feet were bleeding, he could feel it. He was sunburnt, mouth dry, stomach knotted with hunger. He stank as if he’d taken a dip in a pond of sweat. He made a very halting way up the hill to the hotel and went in, and the desk clerk, who’d blessedly checked them in the day before, went, “Oop! Mr. Satterwhite, what happened?” And Lotto rasped, “I was mugged,” because in a way he was, the audience robbing him of his dignity; and the man summoned the bellhop who brought the hotel’s wheelchair and Lotto was escorted up to his room in the elevator, and the key was produced, and he was pushed inside, and Mathilde sat up in bed, naked under the sheet, and smiled at him.

“Oh, there you are, love,” she said. Such magnificent self-possession. Really, she was a wonder of the world.

The bellhop bowed his way out, murmuring something about complimentary room service in a moment.

“Water,” Lotto croaked. “Please.”

Mathilde stood, put on her robe, and went to the bathroom and poured out a glass and brought it with extreme slowness to him. He drank it down in a single draught. “Thank you. More, please,” he said.

“I’m happy to serve,” she said, smiling broadly. She didn’t move.

“M.,” he said.

“Yes, my creative genius?” she said.

“No more punishment. I’m a dope unfit for human society. I wear my privilege like an invisible cloak and imagine it gives me superpowers. I deserve at least a day in the stocks and probably some rotten eggs heaved at my head. I’m sorry.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him calmly. “That would have been nicer if it had been sincere. You’re arrogant.”

“I know,” he said.

“Your words have more weight than most people’s. You swing them wildly and you can hurt a lot of people,” she said.

“I only care that I hurt you,” he said.

“You assume so much about me. You don’t get to speak for me. I don’t belong to you,” she said.

“I’ll stop doing anything that displeases you. Would you please, please, please bring me more water?”

She sighed and brought him more, and there was a knock at the door, and she opened it, and there was the bellhop with a rolling table, and on the table there was a bucket of champagne and a plate of salmon and asparagus and a basket of soft hot rolls and a chocolate cake for dessert, compliments of the hotel, with apologies for the mugging. San Francisco was a genial town, mostly, and this rarely happened. Should he need medical attention, they had a doctor on retainer, et cetera. Please tell us if there is anything more we can do.

Lotto fell to and she watched. He could manage only a few bites before queasiness set in; then he stood, although his feet felt as if they had been lopped off by an ax, and he tottered to the bathroom and put his clothes and shoes directly in the trashcan and took a long hot bath, watching the tendrils of blood eke out of his wounds. He’d lost or was in the process of losing all ten toenails. He put cold water on his face and arms, which were blistered with sun. He stood up, feeling new in his body, and with his wife’s tweezers, he plucked the long fine hairs on his earlobes and massaged his wife’s expensive lotion deep into the skin of his forehead, willing the lines away.

When he came out, Mathilde was still awake, staring at the book in her hands. She put it down, tucked her glasses atop her head, frowned at him.

“If it helps, I won’t be able to walk tomorrow,” he said.

“Then you get to spend the day in bed with me,” she said. “So you win. No matter what, you win. It all works out for you in the end.
Always. Someone or something’s looking out for you. It’s maddening.”

“Were you hoping it wouldn’t work out for me? That I’d get hit by a truck?” he said, crawling under the sheets and resting his head on her stomach. It gurgled gently. The rest of the cake was gone from the tray.

She sighed. “No, idiot. I just wanted to scare you for a few hours. The moderator stayed in his office all night because we were sure someone would bring you to him. Which is what a sane person would have done, Lotto. Not walk all the way back to San Francisco, you crazed maniac. I just called him to tell him you’d showed up. He was still there. He’d freaked his shit completely. He thought you’d been abducted by a band of wild feminists for a videotaped scapegoating. He’d been going over castration scenarios in his head.” Lancelot imagined a machete swinging, shuddered.

“Eh,” she said. “It all fizzed out by the time the lunch rolled around. Apparently, last year’s Nobel laureate was found today to have plagiarized half of his speech, and there was a huge free-for-all on social media. I looked up and saw full tables gaping at their smart phones. You, my love, were today’s small-fry.”

He felt cheated; he should have been even more inflammatory. [Glutton!]

He stewed until he slept, and she watched him for a while, turning things over in her head, and when she fell asleep, she did so without switching off the light.

  
  
8

ICE IN THE BONES, 2013

Dean of students’ office of an all boys’ boarding school. On the wall a poster of a waterfall at sunset with
ENDURANCE
, sans serif, underneath.

DEAN OF STUDENTS:
man with eyebrows that take up half his face

OLLIE:
skinny boy, recently fatherless, exiled from home for juvenile delinquency. Southern accent he tries to swallow; face full of pustules. Still, sharp-eyed, notices everything

FROM ACT I

DEAN:
It has been reported that you, Oliver, do not seem to be fitting in. You have no friends. Your nickname [
Peers at an index card, blinks.
] is Bumblefuck Pie?

OLLIE:
Apparently, sir.

DEAN:
Oliver, you’re making a difficult transition.

OLLIE:
Yes, sir.

DEAN:
Your grades couldn’t be better, but you don’t speak in class. Don’t call me sir. Our boys here are intellectually curious, vital citizens of the world. Are you an intellectually curious, vital citizen of the world?

OLLIE:
Nope.

DEAN:
Why not?

OLLIE:
I’m unhappy.

DEAN:
Who could be unhappy here? That’s nuts.

OLLIE:
I’m cold.

DEAN:
Physically? Or spiritually?

OLLIE:
Both, sir.

DEAN:
Why are you crying?

OLLIE:
[
Struggles. Says nothing.
]

DEAN:
[
Opens his drawer. Under a spill of papers is something that Ollie sees, and he sits up as if goosed. The dean shuts the drawer, lifting out a rubber band, tenting it back with his thumb. He aims it at Ollie’s nose and lets fly. Ollie blinks. The dean sits back in his chair.
]

DEAN:
An undepressed person would have avoided that.

OLLIE:
Probably.

DEAN:
You, my friend, are a whiner.

OLLIE:
[
 . . .
]

DEAN:
Ha! You look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed La-di-da.

OLLIE:
[
 . . .
]

DEAN:
Ha ha!

OLLIE:
Dean. If I may ask a question. Why do you have a gun in your desk?

DEAN:
Gun? No gun. That’s crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [
Sits back, puts his arms behind his head.
] Anyway, listen to me, Oliver. I’ve been doing this for a billion years. I was a boy like you once at this school. Even I was picked on, believe it or not. And I don’t see why you’re being shat on. You seem to have everything. Wealthy, tall, you’d be good-looking if you washed your face once or twice, Christ. Little acne cream and you’d be strapping. You seem nice. Smart. You don’t stink, not like one of those hopeless loser kids. You know Jelly Roll? Just irredeemable.
He smells bad and cries all the time. Foul to look at. Even his little friends, all the Dungeons & Dragons kids, even they only barely tolerate Jelly Roll to make up their bridge parties or something. You? You could be the king of this school. But you’re not, because, one, you’re new, which will burn off in time.
Numero dos
, you’re scared, which you have to change. Fast! Because kids who go to schools like this one are sharks, my friend. They’re baby sharks bred out of a long line of sharks, every one of ’em. And sharks can smell the blood in the water from miles away, and the blood in the water to these particular sharks? Fear. They smell that blood in the water, they’re going to hunt the bleeder down. Not their fault. They can’t help it! What kind of shark is a shark that doesn’t attack? A dolphin. Who needs dolphins? Dolphins are delicious. They make great snacks. So, you listen carefully to what I’m about to say. You need to learn to be a shark. Punch someone in the schnozz, just don’t break it, don’t want to be sued by these kids’ daddies. Play a prank. Cellophane the toilet so when they piss, the piss bounces on their jeans. Ha! If someone throws a hard-boiled egg in your face, throw a steak in his. Because this is like prison. Only the strong survive. You gotta earn your respect. Gotta do what you gotta do. You hearing me?
Capiche?