Fates and Furies (7 page)

“It’s actually kind of humble that they live like this,” Freckles said. “He’s the best.”

“She, on the other hand,” Natalie said, lowering her voice. The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt. “Mathilde’s a conundrum wrapped in a mystery wrapped in bacon. She didn’t even have any friends in college. I mean,
everybody
has friends in college. Where did she come from? Nobody has any idea.”

“I know,” Miniskirt said. “She’s so calm and quiet. Ice queen. And Lotto’s the loudest. Warm, sexy. Opposites.”

“I don’t get it, honestly,” Freckles said.

“Eh. First marriage,” Miniskirt said.

“And guess who’ll be there with casseroles when it all comes apart!” Freckles said. They laughed.

Well, Natalie thought. It was clear now. The apartment, the way Lotto and Mathilde floated on their own current. The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism. Natalie had once wanted to be a sculptor and was pretty damn good at it. She’d welded a nine-foot stainless-steel DNA helix that sat in the science wing of her high school. She’d dreamt of building gigantic moving structures like gyroscopes and pinwheels, spun only by the wind. But her
parents were right about getting a job. She studied economics and Spanish at Vassar, which was only logical, and yet she had to rent someone’s mothball-smelling closet in Queens until her internship ended. She had a hole in her one pair of high-heeled shoes, which she had to fix every night with superglue. Grinding, this life. Not what she had been promised. It was explicit in the brochures she’d looked at like porn in her suburban bed when she was applying: you get to Vassar, those laughing, beautiful kids promised, you live a gilded life. Instead, this dingy apartment with its bad beer was as high a life as she was going to live anytime soon.

Through the door to the living room, she saw Lotto laughing down at some joke made by Samuel Harris, son of the shadiest senator in D.C. The senator was the kind of man who, having expended all his empathetic capital on marrying someone surprising, wanted to make sure no other people had the ability to make their own choices for themselves. He was anti-immigration, antiwoman, antigay, and that was just for starters. To his credit, Samuel started up the Campus Liberals, but Lotto and Samuel had both picked up the aristocrat’s inbred sense of condescension from Samuel’s snotty mom. She’d made Natalie feel like shit once for blowing her nose in her dinner napkin when she and Samuel briefly dated. Lotto, at least, had enough charm to make you feel that you were interesting. Samuel just made you feel inferior. Natalie had an urge to put her Doc Marten through both of their stupid richy-rich faces. She heaved a sigh. “Bottled water is terrible for the environment,” she said, but the others had vanished, comforting that chick Bridget who was crying in the corner, still in love with Lotto. She was just embarrassing to look at next to Mathilde’s tall bony blond. Natalie frowned at herself in the cracked mirror, seeing only a fractured girl with a bitter mouth.

Lotto was floating. Someone had put En Vogue on the CD player, ironically, for sure, but he
loved
those girls’ voices. The apartment was
hot as hell, the late-afternoon sun shining in like a voyeur. Nothing mattered: all his college friends were together again. He took a moment to watch, standing with a beer in the doorway.

Natalie was doing a keg stand, held up by the ankles by the guys from the coffee shop down the block, her shirt lapping over her mealy belly. Samuel, blue bags under his eyes, was talking loudly about having worked ninety hours at his investment bank last week. Beautiful Susannah was putting her face in the freezer to cool it off, radiant with the shampoo commercial she’d landed. He swallowed his envy. The girl couldn’t act, but she was dewy, doelike. They’d hooked up once junior year. She’d tasted like fresh cream. His co-captain on the crew team, Arnie, flush from mixology school, was shaking up Pink Squirrels, his skin streaked apricot from tanning lotion.

Behind him, a voice Lotto didn’t know said, “What’s the one forbidden word in a riddle about chess?”

And some other person paused, then said, “Chess?”

And the first person said, “You remember our freshman Borges seminar!” and Lotto laughed out loud with love for these pretentious sperm wads.

They would have this party year after year, he decided. It would be their annual June fête, the friends gathering, building until they had to rent out an airplane hangar to hold everyone, to drink and shout and dance into the night. Paper lanterns, shrimp boil, someone’s kid’s bluegrass band. When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family. This crowded and sweaty lurch was all he wanted of life; this was the summit. Jeez, he was happy.

What’s this? A spray of wet coming through the open garden windows, the old lady screaming down at them with the hose trained into the roil, her voice barely audible over the music and shouting. The girls shrieked, their summer dresses clinging to their beautiful skin. Tender. Moist. He could eat them all. He had a vision of himself in a
pile of limbs and breasts, a red mouth open, sliding over his—but oh, that’s right, he couldn’t. He was married. He grinned at his wife, who was hurrying across the floor to the fat woman screaming down through the window, “Savages! Control yourselves! Keep the noise down! Savages!”

Mathilde spoke mollifyingly, and the cranks were turned and the garden windows shut, and those to the street thrust open, which was cooler anyway, being in the shade. Already, the lip-locks, the grinding, though the sun still shined in. They turned the noise up a notch, the voices louder.

“. . . cusp of a revolution. East and West Germany reunifying, there’s going to be a huge backlash to capitalism.”

“Hélène Cixous is sexy. Simone de Beauvoir. Susan Sontag.”

“Feminazis, ipso facto, cannot be sexy.”

“. . . like, the fundamental human condition to be lonely.”

“Cynic! Only you would say that in the middle of an orgy.”

Lotto’s heart kicked froglike in his chest; sweeping toward him in her brilliant blue skirt, Mathilde. His azure lion rampant. Her long hair plaited down her left breast, she, the nexus of all the good of this world. He was reaching toward her when she shifted him over to the front door. It was open. A very small person stood there. Surprise! His baby sister Rachel in pigtails and overalls, gazing at the scene of drink and grind and cigarette with baby Baptist horror, shaking with nerves. She was only eight years old. She had an unaccompanied-minor tag hanging around her neck. There was a middle-aged couple with matching hiking boots frowning into the room behind her.

“Rachel!” he shouted, and picked her up by the loop of her backpack and carried her in. The friends shuffled away. Kissing ceased, in this room at least; there was no telling what was happening in the bedroom. Mathilde unhooked Rachel. They had met only once before, when Lotto’s aunt had brought the girl up for graduation a few weeks earlier. Rachel now touched the emerald necklace that Mathilde
had impulsively given her from her own neck at that dinner. “What are you doing here?” Lotto and Mathilde shouted over the noise.

Rachel shied a little away from Mathilde, who had a reek to her. Antiperspirant, Mathilde said, gave you Alzheimer’s; perfume gave her hives. There were tears in Rachel’s eyes when she said, “Lotto? You invited me?”

She said nothing about waiting in the airport for three hours or the kind but stern hikers who’d seen her weeping and offered her a ride. And Lotto remembered at last that she was supposed to come, and the day dimmed because he’d forgotten his baby sister was visiting for the weekend, forgotten it as soon as he’d agreed to it on the phone with his aunt Sallie, hadn’t even made it to the other room to tell Mathilde before it slipped his mind. A wave of shame rose in his chest and he imagined his sister’s fear, her distress, as she waited alone for him at baggage claim. Oh, jeepers. What if some bad man had gotten hold of her. What if she’d trusted someone terrible, not these homely people by the keg with their bandannas and carabiners, laughing because they remembered the wild parties of their youth. What if she’d trusted a perv. Flashes of white slavery, Rachel scrubbing a kitchen floor on her knees, kept in a box under someone’s bed. She looked as if she’d been crying, her little eyes red. It must have been terrifying to ride all the way from the airport with strangers. He hoped she wouldn’t tell Muvva, that his mother wouldn’t be even more disappointed in him than she already was. The things she’d said to him just after they’d eloped were molten in him still. He was such a codpiece.

But Rachel was hugging him fiercely around the waist. The storm on Mathilde’s face had also cleared. He didn’t deserve these women who surrounded him, who made things right. [Perhaps not.] A whispered conference, and it was decided: the party could go on in their absence but they’d take Rachel out to the diner on the corner for dinner. They’d get her to bed and lock the bedroom door by nine and turn the music down; they’d make their breach up to her all weekend.
Brunch, a movie and popcorn, a trip to FAO Schwarz to dance on the floor piano.

Rachel put her things in the closet with the camping stuff and raincoats in it. When she turned, she was immediately accosted by a short dark man—Samuel?—who looked profoundly tired, who was talking about his
extremely
important job in a bank or something. As if it’s
so
hard to cash checks and make change. Rachel could do it herself, and she was only in third grade.

She stole away and slipped an envelope with her housewarming gift in it into her brother’s back pocket. She savored the thought of his face when he opened it: six months of her allowance saved up, nearly two thousand dollars. It was an insane allowance for an eight-year-old. What did she have to spend it on? Muvva would freak, but Rachel had
burned
for poor Lotto and Mathilde, she couldn’t
believe
they’d been cut off when they were married. As if money would ever have stopped them: Mathilde and Lotto had been born to nestle into each other like spoons in a drawer. Also, they needed the cash. Look at this tiny dark hole with no furniture to speak of. She’d never seen a place so bare. They didn’t even have a television, they didn’t even have a kettle or a rug. They were
impoverished
. She stole back again between Mathilde and her big brother, her nose against Lotto because he smelled like warm lotion and, well, Mathilde smelled like the high school wrestling room where her Girl Scout troop met. Hard to breathe. At last, the fear that had overwhelmed Rachel in the airport fell away, overpowered by a wash of love. The people here were so sexy, so drunk. She was shocked at all the
fuck
s and
shit
s falling out of their mouths: Antoinette had seared into her children that cusses were for the verbally moronic. Lotto would never swear; he and Mathilde were the right kind of adult. She would be like them, living morally, cleanly, living in love. She looked out at the swirl of bodies in the late sun, in the June stifle of the apartment, the booze and music. All she wanted in life was this: beauty, friendship, happiness.

—

T
HE
SUN
SHIFTED
TO
RECLINING
. It was eight at night.

Calm. Mild. End of autumn. Chill in the air like a premonition.

Susannah came through the door that led up into the garden. The apartment with its new jute rug was still. She found Mathilde alone, tossing vinaigrette into Bibb lettuce in the galley kitchen.

“Did you hear?” Susannah murmured, but was struck silent when Mathilde turned her face toward her. Earlier, Susannah had thought that walking into the apartment with its new coat of bright yellow paint had been like walking into the sun, blinding. But now the color played with the cinnamon freckles on Mathilde’s face. She’d gotten an asymmetrical haircut, her blond lopped at the right jawbone, at the left collar, and it set off her high cheekbones. Susannah felt a pulse of attraction. Odd. All this time, Mathilde had seemed plain, shadowed by her husband’s light, but now the pairing clicked. Mathilde was, in fact, ravishing.

“Did I hear what?” Mathilde said.

“Oh, Mathilde. Your hair,” Susannah said. “It’s wonderful.”

Mathilde put a hand up to it, and said, “Thanks. What did I hear?”

“Right,” Susannah said, and picked up the two bottles of wine Mathilde indicated with her chin. She said, as she followed Mathilde out the entryway, up the back stairs, “You know Kristina from our class? In that a cappella group the Zaftones? Inky hair and, well, zaftig. I think Lotto and she—” Susannah made a face to herself, Oh, you dummy, and Mathilde paused on the step, then waved a hand as if to say, Oh, yes, Lotto and everybody screwed like bonobos, which Susannah had to admit was true, and they came up into the garden. They stopped, autumn-struck. Lotto and Mathilde had spread out thrift-store sheets on the grass and the friends had arranged the potluck in the middle, and everyone was lounging quietly, eyes closed in the last morsel of chill fall sun, drinking the cold white
wine and Belgian beer, waiting for the first person to reach in and take food.

Mathilde put her salad bowl down, and said, “Eat, kiddos.” Lotto smiled up at her and took a mini-spanakopita from a warm pile. The rest of them, a dozen or so, huddled into the food and began talking again.

Susannah stood on her toes and whispered up into Mathilde’s ear, “Kristina. She killed herself. Hanged herself in the bathroom. Out of the blue, only yesterday. Nobody knew she was miserable. She had a boyfriend and everything and a job with the Sierra Club and an apartment in the nice part of Harlem. Makes no sense.”

Mathilde had gone very still and had lost her constant small smile. Susannah knelt and served herself watermelon, cutting the big pieces into slivers: she wasn’t eating real food anymore because she had a new TV role she was too embarrassed to talk about in front of Lotto. For one thing, it wasn’t
Hamlet
, in which he’d shined so brilliantly their last semester in college. It was just a job as a teenager on a soap opera, she knew she was selling out. And yet it was more than anything Lotto had gotten since they graduated. He’d been the understudy in a few off-off-Broadway things; he’d had a tiny role at the Actors Theatre in Louisville. That was it for a year and a half. Lotto returned to her again as he’d looked at the end of
Hamlet
, bowing, having sweated through his costume, and she’d felt awe, had shouted “Bravo!” from the audience, having lost the role of Ophelia to a girl with huge boobs bared naked in the pond scene. Ho-bag slut. Susannah bit into her watermelon and swallowed a pulse of victory. She loved Lotto more, in pitying.