Fates and Furies (49 page)

This was the bad version. This version was what later events told her had happened. It was as real as the other. They played simultaneously in a loop.

Yet Mathilde could never quite believe it. That twitch of a leg a later insertion, surely. She could not believe and yet something in her did believe, and this contradiction that she held within her became the source of everything.

All that remained were the facts. Before it all happened, she had been so beloved. Afterward, love had been withdrawn. And she had pushed or she hadn’t; the result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she’d been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this, how could she not have been forgiven?

  
  
25

I
T
WAS
MATHEMATICAL
, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.

This one man nervous in a suit a size too small for his long, lean self. This woman in a green lace dress cut to the upper thigh with a white rose behind her ear. Christ, so young.

The woman before them was a Unitarian minister and on her buzzed scalp the gray hairs shone in the swab of sun through the lace in the window. Outside, Poughkeepsie was waking. Behind them, a man in a custodian’s uniform cried softly beside a man in pajamas with a dachshund: their witnesses. A shine in everyone’s eye. One could taste the love on the air. Or maybe that was sex. Or maybe it was all the same then.

“I do,” she said. “I do,” he said. They did; they would.

Our children will be so fucking beautiful, he thought, looking at her.

Home, she thought, looking at him.

“You may kiss,” said the officiant. They did; would.

Now they thanked everyone and laughed, and papers were signed, and congratulations offered, and all stood for a moment unwilling to leave this genteel living room where there was such softness. The newlyweds thanked everyone again shyly and went out the door into the cool morning. They laughed, rosy. In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.

—

H
ER
LIFE
. In the window the parakeet. Scrap of blue midday in the London dusk. Ages away from what had been most deeply lived. Day on a rocky beach, creatures in the tide pool. All those ordinary afternoons, listening to footsteps in the beams of the house and knowing the feeling behind them.

Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life. The hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often that this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell, delineated the warmth she’d found in that house in the cherry orchard. Or this: every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her up with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black. Almost unremarked upon, this kindness. He would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she’d feel something in her rising through her body to meet him. These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.

Anyway, that part was finished. A pity. Her hands warming on tea looked like clumps of knitting a child had felted in grubby palms. Enough decades and a body slowly twists into one great cramp. But there was a time, once, when she had been sexy, and if not sexy, at least odd-looking enough to compel. Through this clear window, she could see how good it all had been. She had no regrets.

[That’s not true, Mathilde; the whisper in the ear.]

Oh. Christ. Yes, there was one. Solitary, gleaming. A regret.

It was that, all her life, she had said
no
. From the beginning, she had let so few people in. That first night, his young face glowing up at hers in the black light, bodies beating the air around them, and inside her there was the unexpected sharp recognition; oh,
this
, a
sudden peace arriving for her, she who hadn’t been at peace since she was so little. Out of nowhere. Out of this surprising night with its shatters of lightning in the stormy black campus outside, with the heat and song and sex and animal fear inside. He had seen her and made the leap and swum through the crowd and had taken her hand, this bright boy who was giving her a place to rest. He offered not only his whole laughing self, the past that built him and the warm beating body that moved her with its beauty and the future she felt compressed and waiting, but also the torch he carried before him in the dark, his understanding, dazzling, instant, that there was goodness at her core. With the gift came the bitter seed of regret, the unbridgeable gap between the Mathilde she was and the Mathilde he had seen her to be. A question, in the end, of vision.

She wished she’d been the kind Mathilde, the good one. His idea of her. She would have looked smiling down at him; she would have heard beyond
Marry me
to the world that spun behind the words. There would have been no pause, no hesitation. She would have laughed, touched his face for the first time. Felt his warmth in the palm of her hand.
Yes,
she would have said.
Sure
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude begins with Clay, whom I saw for the first time in 1997 when he exited the crew room at Amherst College with his long black ponytail, and I turned, stunned, to my friend and said I’d marry him, even though I didn’t believe in marriage. The book began its life on the page at the MacDowell Colony, with the help of the work of Anne Carson, Evan S. Connell, Jane Gardam, Thomas Mann, William Shakespeare, and too many others to list; it was made immeasurably better as it traveled through the hands of my agent, Bill Clegg, and brilliant friends Jami Attenberg, Kevin A. González, Elliott Holt, Dana Spiotta, Laura van den Berg, and Ashley Warlick. Riverhead provided it (and me) a warm new home, and I’m grateful to everyone there, especially Jynne Martin and Sarah McGrath, who awes me with her unflappable calm and astonishingly bull’s-eye edits. Bless the fact-checkers and copy editors of the world, all of them. Bless, too, the readers of this book. While we’re at it, bless the readers of all books. Beckett and Heath are my purest joys, my stays against despair, but so are the people who take care of them so I can work. And if this book begins with Clay, it also ends with him: the ponytail has been shaved off and we’re older and slower, and though I am still ambivalent about marriage, I can’t believe my luck in
ours.

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