Fates and Furies (36 page)

“You see,” he said, lowering her feet to the ground. She could weep for the relief. “I take care of things,” he said. He took a wet wipe from his pockets and fastidiously cleaned his hands.

“I see,” she said.

“We can be friends, you and I. I’m unmarried,” he said. “I’m kind to girls. I don’t hurt anybody. I’ll make sure you’re looked after. And I’m clean.”

Of course he was clean; his nails were pearly; his skin had the sheen of a soap bubble. Later, she’d hear of AIDS and understand.

She closed her eyes and pulled the long-ago Mathilde, the one from the Parisian schoolyard, tighter to her body. She opened her eyes and put on her lipstick by feel. She blotted her lips on a napkin, crossed her legs, and said, “So.”

He said, in a low voice, “So. Come to my apartment. I’ll make you dinner. We can”—and his eyebrows shot skyward—“talk.”

“Not dinner, no,” she said. He looked at her, calculating.

“We can make a deal, then. Negotiate. Stay the night,” he said. “If you can convince your parents. Say you met a school friend in town. I can do a passable imitation of a schoolgirl’s father.”

“Parents aren’t an obstacle,” she said. “I only have an uncle. He doesn’t care.”

“Then what is the obstacle?” he said.

“I’m not cheap,” she said.

“All right.” He leaned back. She wanted to crush the latent joke he never quite delivered, flatten it under her knuckles. “Tell me. What is it that you most want in the world, young queen.”

She took a deep breath and pressed her knees together to stop them from shaking. “College tuition,” she said. “For all four years.”

He put both hands flat on the table and gave a sharp laugh. “I was thinking a handbag. But you were thinking indentured servitude?” he said.

She thought: Oh. [So young! So capable of surprise.] Then she thought: Oh, no, he had laughed at her. Her face was on fire, she felt, striding out. He was behind her at the door; he put his suit coat over her head and gestured for a cab from the awning. Maybe he was made of spun sugar, would melt in the wet.

She slid in, and he stood bent in the door, but she wouldn’t move over to let him in. “We can talk about this,” he said. “I’m sorry. You astonished me. That’s all.”

“Forget it,” she said.

“How can I?” he said. He touched her gently under the chin and she had to fight the urge to close her eyes and rest her head in his palm.

“Call me on Wednesday,” he said, putting a card in her hand, and though she wanted to say no again, she didn’t, and she didn’t crumple it up. He tossed a bill over the seat to the driver and shut the door gently behind her. Later, in the window of the train, her face was pale and floating over a green spin of Pennsylvania. She was thinking so hard she noticed neither face nor landscape.

—

S
HE
CAME
INTO
THE
CITY
again the next Saturday. There had been a phone call, trial gently proposed. Same red dress, heels, hair. A trial? She thought of her grandmother in Paris, her rumpled elegance, the rat-gnawed cheese on the windowsill, the blaze of her crazed dignity. Mathilde had listened from her closet and thought: Never. Never for me. I’d die first.

Never’s a liar. She had nothing better, and time was running out. The man was waiting outside the train station, but he didn’t touch her as she sat on the leather seat of the town car. He ate a throat lozenge and the air smelled of it. Her eyes were dry, yet the world had gone misty. A lump in her throat bigger than the neck could contain.

She registered the doorman as hairy, squat, Mediterranean, though she didn’t look directly at him. All inside was smooth marble.

“What’s your name?” the silvery man said in the elevator.

“Mathilde,” she said. “Yours?”

“Ariel,” he said.

She looked at herself in the reflective brass doors, a smear of red and white and gold, and said in a very low voice, “I’m a virgin.”

He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his forehead. “I would never have expected less of you,” he said, and bowed elaborately as if for a joke and held the door for her as she went in.

He handed her a glass of cold sparkling water. The apartment was enormous, or at least appeared so, walled on two sides with glass. The other walls were white, with huge paintings that registered as shimmers of color. He took off his suit jacket and hung it up and sat down, and said, “Make yourself at home.”

She nodded and went to the window and looked out onto the city.

After some time, he said, “By make yourself at home, what I really meant was for you to please undress.”

She turned away from him. She took off the shoes and unzipped the dress and let it pool at her feet. Her underwear was black cotton, a little girl’s cut, which had made the people at the agency smile the week before. She didn’t wear a bra; she didn’t need one. She turned back, her arms behind her, and looked at him gravely.

“All of it,” he said, and she slowly took off her underwear. He made her wait while he looked at her. “Please turn around,” he said, and she did. Outside, the buildings were obscured in the fog and dim, so that when the lights in the buildings opposite came on they were squares floating in space.

She was shuddering by the time he stood and came toward her. He touched her between the legs and smiled at the moisture he found on his fingertips.

His body seemed too bony for his fleshy face and was almost hairless, save for brown coronas around his nipples and a darker arrow from navel to groin. He lay on the white couch and made her crouch above him until her thighs burned and shook. Then he seized her hips and pulled her suddenly down, smiling at the pain on her face.

“Easier to dive than wade in, my dear,” he said. “Lesson one.”

She didn’t know what kept her from standing, dressing, escaping. The pain felt like hate. She bore the pressure by counting, staring fixedly at a golden square of window in the dark. He took her face and forced it to his. “No,” he said, “please look at me.” She looked. There was a technological glow from the corner of the room, some digital
clock, which turned the side of his head slightly green in pulses. He seemed waiting for her to flinch, but she wouldn’t; she willed her features into stone, and there was a pressure that built and burst and the relief, removal, and she stood, feeling knots in her legs and an internal burn.

He cut a banana into slices and laid them on her body and slowly ate them off her, which was his dinner. “More than that,” he said, “I inflate.” For her, he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and fries from the diner across the street and watched her mouth closely as she ate every bite. “More ketchup,” he said. “Lick that cheese off your finger.”

In the morning, he washed her very carefully and instructed her how to trim herself and watched from a hot bath as she put her leg on a teak chair and did so.

And then he had her lie on her back in the huge white bed and point her knees upward. On the television embedded in the wall, he put on a tape with two women, redheaded and dark-haired, licking each other. “Nobody likes what I’m about to do to you at first,” he said. “You need to fantasize to make it work. Stay with it. A few times from now, you’ll understand.”

It was terrifying, his unlovely face there. The heat of his mouth and the scrape of the stubble. The way he watched her in her shame. It was the closest anyone had ever come to her. She’d never been kissed on the lips. She put a pillow on her face and breathed and thought of a young man without a face, just a muscular, shining body. She felt a long, slow wave building in her until it turned huge and dark and crashed down on her, and she shouted into the pillow.

He pulled away from her, sudden flood of white light. “You surprising little thing,” he said, laughing.

She didn’t know she hated Chinese food until he ordered it and asked her to eat it all on the rug, moo shu tofu to steamed shrimp and broccoli to the last grain of rice. He had nothing; he watched. “If
you need to go home, I’ll take you back to the station after you shower again.” There was a kindness in him despite his gargoyle’s face.

Mathilde nodded; she’d already bathed three times in his marble shower, always after eating. She had begun to understand him. “I just need to be back in time to go to school tomorrow,” she said.

“Do you wear a uniform?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, lying.

“Oh god,” he groaned. “Wear it next weekend.”

She put down the chopsticks. “You’ve decided.”

“Depends on where you’re going to college.”

She told him. “You’re smart,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“Maybe not,” she said, motioning at the apartment around her, her own naked body with a grain of rice on her breast. She smiled, then took the smile off her face. He didn’t get to know she had a sense of humor.

He stood and moved to the door. “All right. We have a deal,” he said. “Come to me from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. I’ll call you my goddaughter to avoid unnecessary questions. Four years. Starting now. Intern with me at the gallery during the summers. I am eager to see how well I can teach you what you’ll need to know. Do your catalog modeling if you think you need to explain your money. We’ll get you on birth control. While we’re together, to avoid diseases, among other horrors, please do not touch or look at another boy or girl. If I hear you even kissed someone else, our deal is off.”

“I won’t even think a lewd thought,” she said, deliberately thinking: black cock. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Buying you underwear and a bra. It’s disgraceful, your going around like that underneath. You shower and take a nap, and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

He went toward the door, then stopped. He turned around. “Mathilde,” he said kindly. “No matter what, you need to understand that this is only business. I can’t have you thinking that it’s more than that.”

She smiled broadly for the first time. “Business,” she said. “Not a single emotion will occur. We will be as robots.”

“Excellent,” he said, and closed the door.

Alone, she felt sick, dizzy. She looked at herself reflected in the window, the city slowly moving beyond. She touched her stomach, her chest, her neck. She looked at her hands and saw they were shaking. She was no more rotten than she’d been as the girl on the train, but still she turned away from the Mathilde in the glass.

—

T
WO
MONTHS
. High school finished and she moved into Ariel’s apartment. She had so little to take from her uncle’s house. A few books, the red dress, glasses, a dog-eared photograph of herself—fat-cheeked, pretty, French—before she went bad. It all fit into her school knapsack. She left a note under the chauffeur’s seat when he was using the bathroom; she couldn’t see his many stomachs and chins one last time without bursting into tears. She knocked for the first time on her uncle’s study door, and without waiting for him to speak, she went in. He looked up over the top of his glasses. A wedge of light from the window fell on the papers on his desk.

“Thank you for the shelter you’ve given me these past few years,” she said.

“You’re leaving?” he said, in French. He took his glasses off and sat back, looking at her. “Where are you going?”

“A friend’s,” she said.

“Liar,” he said.

“Correct,” she said. “I have no friends. Call him a protector.”

He smiled. “An efficacious solution to all of your problems,” he said. “If, however, a more carnal one than I’d hoped. But I shouldn’t be surprised. You grew up with my mother, after all.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and turned toward the door.

“Frankly,” he said, and she stopped, her hand on the doorknob. “I
had thought better of you, Aurélie. I had believed you’d work for a few years, head off to Oxford or something. I had thought you would fight harder. That you were more like me. I must admit that I find myself disappointed.”

She said nothing.

“Know that if you have nothing else, you can find food and a bed here. And do visit, from time to time. I am curious to see how you change. I predict either something ferocious or something thoroughly bourgeois. You will be a world-eater or a mother of eight.”

“I won’t be a mother of eight,” she said. She wouldn’t visit, either. There was nothing of her uncle’s that she wanted. She took a last look at him, the lovely winglike ears and round cheeks that made a liar of his face, and one side of her mouth curled up, and she bid a silent good-bye to the house as she went through, the secret masterpiece under the stairwell that she yearned to see again and the long dark hallways with locked doors and the huge oak front door. Then she was in the air. She began to run down the packed dirt lane in its blaze of white sun, her legs swinging good-bye, good-bye, to the ruminants in the Mennonite fields, the June breeze, the wild blue phlox on the bank. This sweat she worked up was a glorious one.

—

T
HE
LONG
SUMMER
of her nineteenth year. The things one can do with a tongue, a breath. The taste of latex, smell of oiled leather. Box seats at Tanglewood. Her blood thrilled. His voice warm in her ear before a Jackson Pollock spatter, and suddenly, she saw the brilliance. Sultry heat, pisco sours on the terrace, an ice cube’s painful slow melt on her nipples as he watched from the door. He taught her. This is how you cut your food, order your wine. This is how you make people believe you agree with their opinions without saying anything at all.

Something softened around his eyes, but she pretended not to see it. “Business,” she said to herself, her knees burning on the tile in the
shower. He put his hands in her hair. He brought her presents: bracelets, videos that made her face hot, underwear no more than three strings and a patch of lace.

And then college. It went far faster than she thought it would. Classes like flashes of light, blips of dark weekends, light again. She drank her classes in. She did not make friends; Ariel took up so much time, and the rest was taken by studying, and she knew that if she made one friend, she’d be too hungry to stop. On soft spring days, forsythia sunbursts in the corners of her eyes, her heart was rebellious; she would easily have fucked the first boy who walked by, but she had so much more to lose than the thrill she’d gain. She watched, longingly, chewing her fingernails to blood, as the others hugged, laughed, passed inside jokes. On Friday afternoons, on the trains down the dusk-sparked Hudson, she hollowed herself out. When she modeled, she pretended to be the kind of girl who felt insouciant in bikinis, who was glad to show her new lace brassiere to the gaping world. Her best shots were those where she thought of doing physical violence to the photographers. In the apartment: rug burn, lips bitten. He ran a hand down her back, cleaved her buttocks: Business, she thought. The train back to college, each mile an expansion. One year, two. Summers in the apartment and the gallery, like a fish in an aquarium. She learned. Three years, four.