Fates and Furies

1

ONE DAY, WHEN MATHILDE was walking in the village where they’d been so happy, she heard a carful of boys drive up behind her. They were yelling lewd things. Anatomy they suggested she suck. What they’d like to do to her ass.

The shock became a flush of warmth, as if she’d drunk a tumbler of whiskey down.

It’s true, she thought. I still have a perfect ass.

But when the car drew level to her face, the boys went dumb. She saw them, pale, in passing. They gunned the engine and were gone.

This moment returned to her a month later when she crossed a Boston street and heard someone calling her name. A small woman darted up. Mathilde couldn’t place her. She had damp eyes and reddish hair hanging around her ears. Soft at the midsection, a breeder. From the looks of things, four little girls in matching Lilly Pulitzer were at home with the au pair.

The woman stopped five feet from Mathilde with a little cry. Mathilde brought her hands to her cheeks. “I know,” she said. “I’ve looked so old ever since my husband—”

She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“No,” the woman said. “You’re still elegant. It’s just. You look so angry, Mathilde.”

Later, Mathilde would remember the woman: Bridget, from her class in college. With the recollection came some small pang of guilt. Time, however, had obscured why.

For a breath, she studied the sidewalk waltz of chickadee and sun through windblown leaves. When she looked up again, the other woman took a step back. Then another.

Slowly, Mathilde said: “Angry. Sure. Well, what’s the point in hiding it anymore?”

And then she lowered her head, pressed on.

—

IT WOULD COME to her decades later, when she was old, in a porcelain bathtub held aloft on lion claws and her own body mercifully submerged, that her life could be drawn in the shape of an X. Her feet duck-splayed and reflected in the water.

From a terrifying expanse in childhood, life had focused to a single red-hot point in middle age. From there it had exploded outward again.

She slid her heels apart so they were no longer touching. The reflection moved with them.

Now her life showed itself to have been in a different shape, equal and opposite to the first. [Complex, our Mathilde; she can bear contradictions.]

Now the shape of her life appeared to be: greater than, white space, less than.

—

WHEN THEY WERE BOTH forty-six years old, Mathilde’s husband, the famous playwright Lancelot Satterwhite, left her.

He went away in an ambulance without sirens. Well, not him. The cold meat of him.

She called his sister, Rachel. Rachel screamed and screamed, and when she stopped, she said, ferociously, “Mathilde, we’re coming. Hang tight, we’re coming.” His aunt Sallie was traveling and hadn’t left a number, so she called Sallie’s lawyer. Within a minute after Mathilde hung up, Sallie called from Burma. “Mathilde,” she said. “You wait, darling, I’m coming.”

She called her husband’s best friend. “I’m taking the helicopter,” Chollie said. “I’m coming.”

They were soon to descend upon her. For now, she was alone. She stood on a boulder in the meadow, wearing one of her husband’s shirts, and watched the dawn hit the frost, prismatic. There was an ache in her feet from the cold stone. For a month or so, something had been eating at her husband. He’d gloomed around the house and hardly looked at her. It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back. A beating came near, and the wind started up, and she didn’t turn to watch the helicopter land, but she leaned against the freezing force of the wind. When the blades slowed, she heard Chollie’s voice at her elbow.

She looked down at him. Grotesque Chollie, gone bad with money, overrich like a pear ripened to ooze. He wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants. She’d woken him, she saw. He had to fold his hand into a visor to peer up at her.

“Insane,” he said. “He exercised every day. It should have been fat-ass me to go first.”

“Yes,” she said. He moved as if to hug her. She thought of the last warmth of her husband that she’d soaked into her skin, and said, “Don’t.”

“I won’t,” he said.

The meadow sharpened. “When we landed, I saw you standing there,” he said. “You looked the same age as when I first met you. You were so brittle. So full of light back then.”

“I feel ancient now,” she said. She was only forty-six.

“I know,” he said.

“You can’t,” she said. “You loved him, too. But you weren’t his wife.”

“I wasn’t. But I had a twin sister who died. Gwennie.” He looked away, then said with cold in his voice, “She killed herself when she was seventeen.”

Chollie’s mouth was twisting in and out. Mathilde touched his shoulder.

“Not you,” he said quickly, and by this she understood him to mean that her fresh sorrow outblazed his own, that she should be the one to be comforted now. She could feel the grief coming on fast, shaking the ground like a hurtling train, but she hadn’t been hit by it yet. She had a little time still. She could soothe; it was what she was best at, after all. Being a wife.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Lotto never told me that Gwennie had killed herself.”

“He never knew. He thought it was an accident,” Chollie said, and this didn’t sound strange to her in the meadow full of winter light. It wouldn’t ring strange for some months, because here the horror was, plowing through her, and she could feel nothing for a very long time but its wild and whistling force.

—

It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said this. He, too, had found himself crashed into the desert when, just moments before, all had been open blue sky.

Where are the people? said Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. It’s a little lonely in the desert…

It’s lonely when you’re among people, too, said the snake.

—

LIKE CARP, the loved ones surfaced, mouthing the air around her face before sinking deep again.

They put her in a chair, put a blanket on her. God the dog sat trembling beneath.

These loved ones all day were lowering their faces at her, moving away. Lotto’s nieces and nephew creeping up to put their cheeks on her knees. Food on her lap, taken away. The children sat there through the long afternoon. They understood at an animal level, new enough to the world to be uneasy in language. Sudden night in the window. She sat and sat. She thought of what her husband might have been thinking the moment he died. A flash of light, perhaps. The ocean. He had always loved the ocean. She hoped he’d seen her own younger face coming near his. Samuel put his shoulder under one arm, Lotto’s sister put hers under the other, they deposited her in the bed that still smelled like him. She put her face in his pillow. She lay.

She could do nothing. Her whole body had turned inward. Mathilde had become a fist.

2

MATHILDE WAS NOT UNFAMILIAR with grief. That old wolf had come sniffing around her house before.

She had one picture of herself from when she was tiny.

Her name had been Aurélie. Fat cheeks, gold hair. The only child in a large Breton family. Her bangs clipped from her face in a barrette, scarves on her neck, lacy socks to her ankles. Her grandparents fed her galettes, cider, caramels with sea salt. The kitchen had rounds of Camembert ripening in the cabinet. It could knock you down to open the door, unsuspecting.

Her mother was a fishwife at the market in Nantes. She’d rise in the blue night and drive to the city and come home midmorning with her hands chapped and glittering with scales, cold to the bone from contact with ice. Her face was delicate, but she had no education. Her husband had wooed her with his leather jacket, his pompadour, his motorcycle. Small things to trade for a life, but at the time they had seemed powerful. Aurélie’s father was a stonemason, and his family had lived in the same house in Notre-Dame-des-Landes for twelve generations. Aurélie was conceived during the revolution of May 1968; though her parents were far from radical, there was so much excitement in the air that they didn’t know how to express themselves except animally. When it was impossible for the girl’s mother to hide her pregnancy, they were married with orange blossoms in her hair, a slice of coconut cake in the freezer.

Aurélie’s father was quiet, loved few things. Putting stone on stone, the wine he made in his garage, his hunting dog he called Bibiche, his mother who’d survived World War II by black-marketing blood sausages, and his daughter. She was spoiled, a happy and singing girl.

But when Aurélie was three, the new baby came. He was a fretful and screaming creature. Still, he was cooed over, that wizened turnip in blankets. Aurélie watched from under a chair, burning.

Colic arrived in the baby, and the house went piebald with vomit. Aurélie’s mother walked around as if shattered. Four aunts, smelling of butter, came to help. They gossiped viciously and their brother showed them his grapes and the aunts chased Bibiche from the house with a broom.

When the baby at last began to crawl, he got into everything, and the father had to build a gate at the top of the stairs. Aurélie’s mother cried during the day in her bed when the children were supposed to be asleep. She was so tired. She smelled of fish.

The baby liked best to crawl into Aurélie’s bed and suck his thumb and twirl her hair, the snot in his nose catching so it sounded as if he were purring. During the night, she would slowly move both of their bodies toward the edge of the bed so that when he finally fell asleep and rolled onto his back he’d tumble out and wake shrieking from the floor. She’d open her eyes in time to watch her mother rush in and pick the baby up with her swollen red hands and, scolding in whispers, carry him back to his own crib.

—

WHEN THE GIRL was four years old and the baby brother one, the family went for supper to the grandmother’s house one afternoon. The house had been the grandmother’s ancestors’ for centuries, and she’d brought it to her marriage with the neighbor boy. The fields, still conjoined, were all hers. The house was far finer than the little girl’s family’s, the bedrooms larger, a stone creamery from the eighteenth century still attached to the main building. The manure had been spread that morning and could be tasted in the milk. The grandmother was like her son, square, strong-featured, taller than most men. Her mouth was carved down into a sharp n shape. She had a granite lap and a way of puncturing the jokes of others by sighing loudly at the punch line.

The baby was put down for a nap in the grandmother’s bed and everyone else was outside under the oak, eating. Aurélie was on the downstairs potty, trying to go. She was listening to her brother upstairs thumping around in the grandmother’s room, crowing to himself. She pulled up her panties and slowly went up the stairs, collecting a gray fur on her finger from the dust between banisters. She stood in the honey-bright hallway listening to him through the door: he was singing to himself, thumping his feet on the headboard. She thought of him inside the room and smiled. She opened the door to him, and he climbed off the bed and toddled into the grandmother’s hallway, grabbing at her, but she stepped backward, away from his sticky hands.

She sucked a finger and watched him move beyond her, toward the top of the stairs. He looked at her, beamish, teetering. He reached out his daisy of a hand, and she watched as her baby brother fell.

—

WHEN AURÉLIE’S PARENTS returned from the hospital, they were silent, gray-faced. The baby’s neck had broken. There was nothing they could have done.

Her mother wanted to take Aurélie home. It was late and the girl’s face was swollen with crying, but her father had said no. He couldn’t look at her, though she clung to his knees, smelling his jeans stiff with sweat and stone dust. After the baby fell, someone had dragged Aurélie down the stairs and her arm was black with a bruise. She showed it to them, but they didn’t look.

The parents were holding up something invisible but terribly heavy between them. There was no power in them to lift anything else, certainly not their daughter.

“We’ll leave her for tonight,” the mother said. The sad face with the apple cheeks, the glorious eyebrows, came near, kissed the girl, went away. Her father slammed the door to the hatchback three times. They drove off, Bibiche gazing out the back window. The taillights winked in the dark, were gone.

In the morning, Aurélie woke to her grandparents’ house, the grandmother downstairs making crêpes, and she washed herself neatly. All morning, her parents didn’t come. They didn’t come and they didn’t come.

The kiss on the forehead was the last she’d smell of her mother [Arpège by Lanvin, undermusk of cod]. The brush of her father’s stiff jeans on her hand when she held it out to touch him as he walked by, the last she’d feel of him.

After the fifth time she begged her grandparents for her mother and father, her grandmother stopped answering her.

That night, when she waited by the door and they still didn’t come, a terrible rage rose in Aurélie. To get it out of her, she kicked and screamed, broke the mirror in the bathroom, the glasses one by one in the kitchen; she punched the cat in the throat; she ran into the dark and tore her grandmother’s tomato plants out of the ground with her fists. The grandmother first tried to embrace her for hours to calm her, but lost patience and had to tie her to the bed with the curtain tassels, which, being ancient, snapped.

Three scratches beading blood on her grandmother’s cheek. Quelle conne. Diablesse, she hissed.

Hard to say how long this went on. Time, to a four-year-old, is flood or eddy. Months, perhaps. Years, it’s not impossible. The darkness in her circled, landed. In her mind’s eye, her parents’ faces turned to twin smears. Was there a moustache atop her father’s lip? Was her mother bright blond or dark? She forgot the smell of the farmhouse where she’d been born, the crunch of gravel under her shoes, the perpetual twilight in the kitchen even when the lights were on. The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.

3

THERE WERE THOUSANDS of people at Lotto’s funeral. She knew he’d been loved, and by strangers, too. But not this excess. All these people she didn’t know were lining the sidewalk, keening. O! great man. O! playwright of the bougie. She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of blackbirds. Her husband had moved people and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them. Was not hers. Was now theirs.

It felt unhygienic, this flood of snot and tears. Too much coffee breath in her face. All that assaultive perfume. She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.

After the interment, she drove to the country alone. There may have been a reception planned, she didn’t know. Or if she did know, she blocked the knowledge; she never would have gone. She’d had enough of people.

The house was hot. The pool winked sunlight. Her black clothes on the kitchen floor. The dog made herself tiny on her cushion, her eyes beading out from the corner, feral.

[God licking at Lotto’s bare bluing feet below his desk, licking and licking as if she could lick the life back into him, dumb thing.]

And then there was the strange separation of self from body so that she watched her own nakedness from very far away.

The light slid across the room and extinguished itself, and the night stole in. This impassive self watched the friends come to the back window, recoil at seeing her nude body at the kitchen table, turn their eyes away, and call through glass: “Let us in, Mathilde. Let us in.” The nude body outsat them until they eked on home.

Naked in the bed, she wrote Thank you, Thank you to all of the e-mails until she remembered control-C, control-V, and then she copied and pasted Thank you. She found hot tea in her hand and thanked naked Mathilde for her thoughtfulness and found herself in the pool under the moonlight and worried about naked Mathilde’s mental state. Naked Mathilde neglected to answer the doorbell, woke on the wrong side of the bed seeking heat that wasn’t there, let the food rot on the porch, let the flowers rot on the porch, watched the dog piddle in the middle of the kitchen, made scrambled eggs for the animal when she ran out of kibble, gave her the last of the vegetable chili that Lotto had made, and watched the dog lick her own bum, sore from the spices, until it was red. Naked Mathilde locked the doors and ignored the loved ones peering in, calling, “Mathilde, come on! Mathilde, let us in, Mathilde, I’m not going anywhere, I’m camping in the yard.” The last was her husband’s aunt Sallie, who actually did camp in the yard until naked Mathilde left the door open for her so she could come in. Aunt Sallie had lost the two loves of her life in a few short months, but she chose to peacock her grief, wearing Thai silk dresses in jewel colors, dyeing her hair blueblack. Naked Mathilde put the covers over her head when a tray appeared on the mattress, and shivered until she slept again. Tray, sleep, bathroom, tray, sleep, bad thoughts, terrible memories, God whining, tray, sleep; on and on it went, forever.

—

I REMAIN HERE, cold, a widow in your halls. Andromache, the perfect wife, railed while holding dead Hector’s head in her white arms. You have left me only bitterness and anguish. You didn’t die in bed, stretching your arms toward me. You didn’t give me one last sweet word that I might remember in all my sorrow.

Andromaque, je pense à vous!

—

ON AND ON IT WENT, forever, except that during the first week she was a widow, somewhere inside the tent of covers, in the bed that held her naked body, a lust rose so powerfully she felt choked by it. What she needed was a fuck. A series of fucks. She saw a parade of thrusting men all in silent black-and-white, like talkie movies. Jangling over it all, organ music. Organ music. Ha!

There had been a few times before when lust was just this powerful. The first year with Lotto. Also, her first year of sex, long before Lotto. He’d always believed he’d deflowered her, but she’d just gotten her period, that was all. She indulged his belief. She hadn’t been a virgin, but there had been only one man before him. This was a secret that Lotto would never know. He would never have understood; his egotism would not admit a precursor. She winced to remember herself at seventeen, in high school, how, after the first illuminating weekend, everything spoke sex to her. The way the light pulsed the leaves of the ragweed in the ditches, the way clothes teased her skin as she moved. The words leaving a person’s mouth, how they were tongued, rolled, lipped before they emerged. It was as if the man had suddenly reached into her and pulled out an earthquake and set it loose on her skin. She walked the last weeks of high school wanting to eat every one of these delicious boys. If she had only been allowed, she would have swallowed them whole. She smiled at them hugely; they scurried away. She’d laughed, but felt it was a shame.

None of this mattered. Since they were married, it had only ever been Lotto. She had been faithful. She was nearly certain he had been, too.

In her little house in the cherry orchard, the house of bleakest widowhood, Mathilde remembered and got up out of her dirty bed and showered. She dressed in the dark bathroom and crept past the room where Aunt Sallie was whistle-snoring. Past the next room, door open, where her husband’s sister Rachel looked at her passing from the pillow. In the dark, a face like a ferret’s: triangular, alert, quivering. Mathilde got into the Mercedes.

Her hair was in a wet bun, she was wearing no makeup, but it didn’t matter. Three towns north there was a yuppie bar, and in the yuppie bar was a sad-faced man in a Red Sox cap, and a mile away in a little copse of trees where the road split, where they would have been pinned like moths on a board by headlights had any passed, she stood on her right leg, the left around the sad-faced Red Sox’s jerky hips, and shouted, “Harder!” And the man’s face, which had been first set in concentration, began taking on a look of alarm, and he kept on valiantly for some time while she shouted at him, “Harder! Faster, you fucker!” until it was clear that he was spooked, and he faked an orgasm and pulled out and mumbled something about taking a whiz, and she heard his feet in the crunchy leaves as he hurried away.

Rachel’s face was still looking at Mathilde from the dark when she went back upstairs. The marital suite, the bed obscene in its empty enormity. In her absence, the sheets had been changed. When she climbed in again, they were cool and smelled like lavender and brushed her skin like accusations.

—

THERE HAD BEEN A TIME when she’d sat beside Lotto in the dark on the opening night of one of his wild earlier plays and was so overcome by what he’d done, the grandness of his vision being transmuted before her eyes, that she leaned across the space between them and licked his face from ear to lip. She couldn’t help it.

Just as, holding Rachel and Elizabeth’s newborn daughter, she so longed to have the baby’s innocence for herself that she put the tiny clenched fist in her mouth and held it there until the baby screamed.

This widow’s lust was the opposite of that.

—

WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.

4

SHE HAD BEEN OVERCOME by fear over the apple crisp in the dining hall; she had fled to the bathroom and had been sitting, frozen, on the paper ring atop the toilet for a very long time. This was during the final days of college. For the previous month, she’d been frightened at the gulf the future opened before her. She who had been in one cage or another since birth was free to fly soon, but she was petrified at the thought of all that air.

The door opened and two girls came in, talking about how rich Lancelot Satterwhite was. “Bottled Water Princeling, you know,” one said. “His mom’s, like, a billionaire.”

“Lotto? Really?” said the other. “Shit! I hooked up with him freshman year. If only I’d known.”

The girls laughed, and then the first said, “Yeah, right. He’s such a bro-ho. I think I’m the only girl in the Hudson Valley who hasn’t seen his junk. They say he never sleeps with a girl twice.”

“Except Bridget. Which I don’t get. She’s so blah. I heard her saying they’re dating, and I was, like, Really? I mean, she looks like a children’s librarian. Like one who is caught in a perpetual rainstorm or something.”

“Yeah, well, Bridget is to dating Lotto the way a remora is to dating a shark.”

The girls laughed, left.

Mathilde thought, Huh. She flushed, came out, washed her hands. She looked at herself critically in the mirror. She smiled. “Hallelujah,” she said aloud to the Mathilde in the mirror, and the Mathilde in the mirror said it back with her lovely lips, her pale and angular face.

She claimed finals and eschewed the weekend trip to the city. She dressed carefully. She saw her quarry onstage that night and was impressed: he was very good, a manic Hamlet, puppyish in his energy even if so very tall. From afar, the pits in his cheeks were not discernible, and he threw off a kind of golden light that cast even the audience in its glow. He made the shopworn monologue sexy and showed it to them anew. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” he said, with a pirate’s smile; and she imagined in seats all throughout the audience a tingly heat rising. Promising. By the aisle lights, she read his full name in the program, Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, and frowned. Lancelot. Well. She could make it work.

The cast party was in a Brutalist dorm where she’d never been. For four years, she had not allowed herself parties, friends. She couldn’t risk them. She went early and stood out of the rain under a portico, smoking a cigarette. She was watching for Bridget. When the girl and her three dour friends came trotting up under umbrellas, Mathilde followed them inside.

It was easy to separate Bridget from her friends. Mathilde only had to ask a question about serotonin reuptake inhibitors for their neurobiology class final in a few days, and the other girls faded away as Bridget earnestly explained. And then Mathilde refilled Bridget’s cup with mostly vodka and a splash of Kool-Aid.

Bridget was flattered to be talking to Mathilde, “I mean, my god!” she said. “You never, ever, ever go out! Everyone has heard about you but nobody ever talks to you. You’re like the white whale of Vassar.” Then she flushed, and said, “Like the skinniest, prettiest white whale ever,” and then said, “Aargh! You know what I mean.” She drank nervously. Mathilde refilled and Bridget drank, Mathilde refilled, Bridget drank, and then Bridget was throwing up on the common stairway and people who were trying to pass were saying, “Sick!” And, “Oh my god, Bridget.” And, “Nasty, ho-bag, take it outside.” The friends had been summoned. Mathilde was watching through the banister from a higher landing when they took her home.

Bridget went down the stairs and Lotto passed her coming up. He said, “Yikes!” and patted her on the shoulder, and leapt the last few steps and went into the party.

From her perch above, Mathilde had watched it all.

The first problem dispatched. What ease.

She stood outside in the chill rain, smoking two more cigarettes, listening to the party. She gave it ten songs. When Salt-N-Pepa was playing, she went back inside, up the stairs. She looked across the room.

There he was on the windowsill, drunk, bellowing, and it took her by surprise, how very muscular that body of his was. He was wearing some girl’s gel eye-mask as a loincloth. He had an empty water jug Ace-bandaged to his head. No dignity, but Christ there was beauty. His face was strange, as if it had once been handsome, and still was from afar; but she had seen him only clothed before now and would not have guessed at how perfect his body was. She had made so many calculations, but none involved her legs melting from under her with the instant desire to screw.

She willed him to look up, to see her.

He looked up. He saw her. His face went still. He stopped dancing. She felt the hair of her neck stand. He leapt into the crowd and crushed some poor tiny girl in falling and swam his way out and over to Mathilde. He was taller than she was. She measured six feet, six-three in these heels; men taller than she was were rare. She liked the unexpected feeling of being smaller, more delicate. He touched her hand. He went down on one knee and shouted up, “Marry me!” And she didn’t know what to do; she laughed and looked down at him, and said, “No!”

In the story he told of this — spun at so many parties, so many dinners, she listening with her smile, her head cocked, laughing slightly — she said, “Sure.” She never corrected him, not once. Why not let him live with his illusion? It made him happy. She loved making him happy. Sure! It wasn’t true, not for another two weeks when she would marry him, but it did no harm.

Lotto had made the story of their meeting a coup de foudre, but he was a born storyteller. He recast reality into a different kind of truth. It was, as she knew, actually a coup de foutre. Their marriage had always been about the sex. It had been about other things at first and would be about other things later, of course, but within days it was about the sex. She’d held out until she’d settled her previous commitments, and the wait had inflamed both. For a long time after, the genital had taken primacy over other concerns.

Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure. There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.

—

YET IT’S TRUE THERE WAS, for a brief spell, a happiness that was absolute, it was sure, it swallowed her whole. Dim day, rocky beach. She felt the joy even through the tiny irritations, the sand flies that bit and the cold that soaked to her bones and the sharp stones on the Maine beach that split her hallux open like a sliced grape and made her limp back to the house they’d borrowed for their wedding day. They were twenty-two. The world drenched with potential. As fine as they’d ever be. She kept her hands warm on her new husband’s back and felt the muscles moving under his skin. A shell dug into her spine. She felt herself engulf him. First consummation as husband and wife. She thought of a boa swallowing a fawn.

If he’d had flaws then, she couldn’t see them; and perhaps it was true, perhaps she had found the only faultless person in the world. Even if she had dreamt of him, she couldn’t have come up with him. Innocent, charming, funny, loyal. Rich. Lancelot Satterwhite; Lotto. They had been married that morning. She was grateful to the sand that eked its way into the naughty bits and stung; she couldn’t trust pleasure in its pure form.

But their first married consummation was over so fast. He laughed into her ear; she into his throat. It didn’t matter. Their separate selves had elided. She was no longer alone. She was crushed with gratitude. He helped her up and they bowed to gather their clothing and the ocean over the dune applauded. All weekend she rang with joy.

One weekend should have been enough. She was given so much more than she deserved. But she was greedy.

Brilliant May sun on the drive back from their stolen honeymoon. Lotto, who would always be labile as a preteen, drove and, hearing a sweet song, burst into tears. She did the only thing she could think of and put her head in his lap and disinterred Little Lotto to make Big Lotto stop. A semi, in passing, honked its approval.

Back in Poughkeepsie, in front of her apartment, she said, “I want to know everything about you. I want to meet your mother and aunt and sister immediately. Let’s fly to Florida after graduation. I want to eat your life.” She laughed, a little, at her own earnestness. Oh, to have a mother, a family! She’d been alone for so long. She’d let herself daydream of a kind mother-in-law who took her away for spa days, who had in-jokes, who sent small presents with notes saying, “Saw this, thought of you.”

But there was something wrong. After a moment, Lotto put her knuckles to his mouth and said, “M. My love. We’ll have the rest of our lives for that.”

A vein of cold shot through her. What was this? Hesitation? Perhaps he was already ashamed of her. Before her rose the Cranach diptych, Adam and Eve with the long thighs, tiny heads, huge feet cold at the knuckles. It’s true that even in Eden there were snakes.

“I have to write my sociology final,” he said apologetically. “I have six hours till it’s due, but I’ll bring us dinner tonight after I hand it in. I love you beyond love.”

“Me, too,” she said, closing the car door and trying to stifle the panic.

She came into her apartment, which had contracted, filled as it was with her small and gray previous life. She took a hot bath and climbed under her down comforter for a nap. She was deep in a dream when her phone rang. It had to be bad. Nothing but badness would be calling so insistently.

She braced herself. “Yes,” she said.

“Well. Hello,” said a soft, sweet voice. “Come to find out you’re my daughter and I don’t even know you from Cain.”

It took Mathilde a moment, and then she said, “Mrs. Satterwhite. It’s so lovely to finally speak with you.”

But the voice didn’t stop. “I must confess that I did what any doting mother would do and I made inquiries as to who you are and where you’re from. My inquiries ended up in some strange places. You are lovely, just as I was told. I’ve seen your photographs, those bra catalog ones particularly, even though your bosoms seem rather smallish and I wonder at the person who hired you to show them off. To speak honestly, if I may, I didn’t love the spread in the teenybopper’s magazine where you looked like a half-drowned rat terrier, bless your heart. Funny that people would pay you to look like that in public. But some of your photos are very fine. You’re a pretty girl. Good match for my Lancelot, at least in looks.”

“Thank you,” Mathilde said, wary.

“But you’re not a churchgoing girl and, frankly, that gives me pause. A heathen in the family,” she said. “Not sure I like it. Much worse is what I come to find out about your uncle, the people he’s mixed up with. Shady beyond all measure. You only really know about a person when you know about their kin. I must say I do not like what I have come to find out. Add this to my fear of the kind of person who seduces such a kindhearted boy as mine and marries him in such a short courtship. Only a very dangerous or a very calculating person could do such a thing. All these things put together make me believe that you and I would have a hard time seeing eye to eye. Not in this lifetime, at least.”

“Well,” Mathilde said. “Seems that ours will be your standard mother-in-law, daughter-in-law relationship, Antoinette.” They both laughed.

“You may call me Mrs. Satterwhite,” Lotto’s mother said.

“I may. Probably won’t,” Mathilde said. “How’s Mother sound to you?”

“You’re a tough little cookie, aren’t you,” said Antoinette. “Well, my Lancelot is so tenderhearted that the woman he marries has got to be a little hard. I am, however, afraid that someone won’t be you.”

“Already is,” Mathilde said. “How can I help you? What do you want?”

“The question, my girl, is what you want. I assume you know that Lancelot comes from money. Oh, of course you know! That’s why you married him. Going together for two weeks, no way you actually love the dear boy, lovable as he may be. Knowing my son as I do, he hasn’t told you yet how you aren’t going to see a penny of my money while I’ve got breath to breathe and he’s married to you. We discussed it all yesterday morning after you did the deed and he called me up to gloat. Impetuous, both of you. Acting like the children you still are. And now you’re penniless. I do wonder how you feel at this moment. I’m so sorry that all your plans are coming to naught.”

Despite herself, Mathilde caught her breath.

Antoinette continued: “Of course, that means you’d do far better for yourself to get it all annulled. Take a hundred thousand dollars and call it a day.”

“Ha!” Mathilde said.

“Darling, you name your price, I don’t mind. Not the time to be cheap, I suppose. Say the word and it’ll be done. Just ask what you require to start up your life after graduation and you’ll have it all wired this afternoon and you can sign some papers and just walk away. Leave my poor child in peace, let him sow his wild oats, eventually find himself some good, sweet girl and come home to Florida to me.”

“Interesting,” Mathilde said. “You’re possessive for a woman who couldn’t bother to visit her son for a whole year.”

“Well, darling, you grow a baby in your belly for near on a year, you see your husband and yourself in his face, of course you’ll be possessive. He’s my blood. I made him. You’ll see someday.”

“I won’t,” Mathilde said.

“Five hundred? No? Would a million do?” said Antoinette. “All you have to do is abandon ship. Take your money and run. You could do what you like with a million dollars. Travel, see foreign cultures. Open up your own business. Run your hustle on richer men. The world is your oyster, Mathilde Yoder. Consider this that first grain of sand to make your pearl.”

“You sure have the gift of the mixed metaphor,” Mathilde said. “I admire it, in a way.”

“I take it from your comment that we have come to an accord. Excellent choice. You’re not stupid. I shall call my attorney and some boy will bring the papers by in a few hours.”

“Oh, wow,” Mathilde said softly. “It is going to be so, so wonderful.”

“Yes, darling. Sensible of you to take the deal. Good chunk of change, it is.”

“No,” Mathilde said. “I meant that it will be so wonderful to think up all the ways to keep your son far away from you. It’ll be our little game. You’ll see. All the holidays, all the birthdays, all the times when you’re sick, something urgent will come up and your son will have to stay with me. He’ll be with me, not you. He will choose me, not you. Muvva — Lotto calls you Muvva, so I will, too — until you apologize, until you force yourself to be nice, you won’t lay your eyes on him again.”

She put the phone gently on the hook and unplugged it and went to take a second bath, her T-shirt having gone transparent with sweat. In a few days, she’d get the first of many notes that Antoinette would send her through the years, spiky with exclamation points. In return, Mathilde would send back photos of Lotto and Mathilde, smiling together; Lotto and Mathilde by the pool; Lotto and Mathilde in San Francisco; Mathilde in Lotto’s arms, stepping over every threshold of every new place they’d have. That evening when Lotto came back, she said nothing. They watched a sitcom. They took a shower together. Later, naked, they ate calzones.

5

TIME, AFTER LOTTO DIED, swallowed itself.

Sallie saw it was useless to try to get through; Mathilde was numb still. A force field of fury so thick nobody was going to get in. Sallie went back to Asia, to Japan this time. She’d return in a year, when Mathilde wasn’t so angry, she said.

“I’ll always be angry,” Mathilde said.

Sallie put her dry brown hand on Mathilde’s face and barely smiled.

Only Lotto’s sister returned again and again. Dear sweet Rachel, pure of heart. “Here’s an apple pie,” she’d say. “Here’s a loaf of bread. Here’s a handful of chrysanthemums. Here’s my daughter, hold her, salve your sorrow.” Everyone else gave her space. Gave her time.

“Christ, did you have any idea Mathilde could be such a bitch?” friends said, wounded, returning home. “Would you have guessed it when Lotto was alive? Can you believe what she said to us?”

“She’s possessed by some demon,” they said.

“Grief,” they all said knowingly, feeling profound. Tacitly agreed: they would return when she was her seemly, elegant, smiling self again. In their own place, they sent gifts. Samuel sent potted bromeliads. Chollie sent towers of Belgian chocolates. Danica sent her personal masseuse, whom Mathilde sent away by ignoring him. Arnie sent a case of wine. Ariel sent a long black dress in cashmere, which Mathilde curled for days within. Strange that this soft gift from an old boss would be the only perfect thing.

—

LATE ONE NIGHT Mathilde found herself on a long straight strip of road. The car a top-of-the-line Mercedes that Lotto had bought just before croaking. His mother had died half a year before her son, and they’d come into an inheritance so vast it was foolish they were driving their fifteen-year-old Honda Civic with the iffy airbags. He’d only ever cared about money when it came to his own comfort; otherwise, he left it for others to worry about.

She put the pedal to the floor. Responsive as fuck. The car shot to eighty, to ninety-five, to one-ten.

She flipped off the lights and the darkness rose to her like a daydream.

Moonless night. The car slack like a fish brushing along the walls of a cave. After one lifetime, she went stationary, suspended in darkness. Calm.

Her car hit the culvert, brushed up the embankment, vaulted a barbed-wire fence, somersaulted. It landed in a herd of sleeping Jerseys.

Mathilde’s mouth was bleeding. She’d bitten nearly through her tongue. No matter. She spoke to nobody these days. Otherwise, she was unhurt.

She climbed out of the car, swallowing the gushes of coppery heat. The heifers had moved off, were watching from the shelter of wind-block lindens. But one was still kneeling beside the car. When Mathilde walked around to it, there was a wall of blood where its neck had been.

She watched for a long time as it bled into the grass. There was nothing to be done.

There was nothing to be done and now what? Mathilde was forty-six. She was too young to be finished forever with love. Still in her prime. Fine-looking. Desirable. And uncoupled now, for good.

The story we are told of women is not this one.

The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it’s the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world. Hilarious ancient bodies at bath time, husband’s palsied hands soaping wife’s withered dugs, erection popping out of the bubbles like a pink periscope. I see you! There would be long, hobbledy walks under the plane trees, stories told by a single sideways glance, one word sufficing. Anthill, he’d say; Martini! she’d say; and the thick swim of the old joke would return to them. The laughter, the beautiful reverberations. Then the bleary toddling on to an early-bird dinner, snoozing through a movie hand in hand. Their bodies like knobby sticks wrapped in vellum. One laying the other on the deathbed, feeding the overdose, dying the day after, all heart gone out of the world with the beloved breath. Oh, companionship. Oh, romance. Oh, completion. Forgive her if she believed this would be the way it would go. She had been led to this conclusion by forces greater than she.

Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to!

Like corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they’d swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle.

The way the old story goes, woman needs an other to complete her circuits, to flick her to fullest blazing.

[The refutation would come. During those dusky years of her eighties, in the far-off beyond-the-horizon, she would sit solitary over tea in her London breakfast room and look up to see her own hand like an ancient map and then out the window where a blue budgerigar peered in, naturalized citizen of this unnatural subtropical world. Suddenly clear, in the small blue shape, she would see her life had not been, at its core, about love. There had been terrific love in it. Heat and magic. Lotto, her husband. Christ, there had been him. Yet — yes! — the sum of her life, she saw, was far greater than its sum of love.]

In the immediacy, though, in stingy moonlight over bruised metal, cow flesh, glass, there was only her bitten tongue and all that blood. The hot rust-tasting flood of it. And the great Now What stretching without end.

6

ONE DAY, the little girl she once was, small Aurélie, found herself with a blue suitcase in her hand and her hair scraped back from her face. She must have been five or six.

“You’re off to your Paris grandmother’s,” her tall Breton grandmother said. There had always been something off about the Paris grandmother, something embarrassing; her own mother had never spoken of her; they had rarely talked on the phone. Aurélie had never met her. There were never pretty parcels from that grandmother on her saint’s day.

They were standing in the aisle of a train. The grandmother’s frown stretched to her second chin. “Your mother’s mother was the only relative who would take you,” she said.

“I don’t care,” Aurélie said.

“Of course you don’t,” the grandmother said. She gave her a packet of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, a jar of warm milk, two chaussons aux pommes, and pinned a note to her coat. “Don’t you dare move from your seat,” she said, and gave the girl a bristly kiss on the cheek and wiped the red rims of her eyes with a starched handkerchief and left.

The train hooted. All Aurélie knew of the world slid out from under her feet. The village: black-and-white cows, chickens, huge Gothic church, bakery. She saw what she was searching for when the train picked up speed. There. A flash. White hatchback parked under a yew. Oh, her mother standing cross-armed, pale, in a navy dress, her hair [yes, white-blond] under a scarf, watching the train go. Her mouth a red slash in the pale. Dress, hair beginning to froth in the train’s wind. It was hard to tell what was happening on her face. Then her mother was gone.

Across from Aurélie was a man who stared at her. He had pale shining skin and puffy folds under his eyes. She squeezed hers shut to avoid him, but every time she looked, he was staring. A terrible certainty stole over her. She tried to block it, to squeeze her legs, but it was no use. She pressed both her hands against herself to hold the urine in.

The man leaned forward. “Little girl,” he said, “I will escort you to the lavatory.”

“No,” she said.

He reached forward to touch her and she gave a scream and the fat woman with the dog on her lap in the other corner opened her eyes and glared. “Silence,” she snarled.

“Come to the lavatory,” the man said. His teeth were many and tiny.

“No,” Aurélie said, and let go. The urine was deliciously hot on her thighs. The man said, “Ugh!” and left the carriage, and the pee gradually turned cold. For hours, as the train rocked eastward, the fat woman in the corner gelatined in her sleep, and her lapdog sniffed the air voluptuously, as if tasting it.

All at once, they were at the station.

The grandmother stood before her. She was a woman as pretty as Aurélie’s mother, apple cheeks and thick eyebrows, even if this version was wrinkled around the eyes. She was astonishing. Her clothes were both grand and tattered at the same time. The perfume she wore, her elegant hands like pencils in a soft suede case. The grandmother leaned over, took the packet, and looked in. “Ah! Good peasant food,” she said. She was missing a lower incisor, which gave her smile some dash. “We shall sup well tonight,” she said.

When Aurélie stood, she revealed the wetness of her lap. Over the grandmother’s face, like a roller blind flipping upward, the refusal to see.

“Come along,” she said airily, and Aurélie took her suitcase and came along. The pee dried as she walked, and chafed her thighs.

On the way home, they bought a single sausage from a butcher who appeared to be seething silently. The grandmother took the suitcase and made the girl hold the white paper package. By the time they reached the heavy blue door of the building, her hands were stained with clammy red grease.

Her grandmother’s flat was sparse, if neat. The floors were bare wood, scrubbed skinlike. There had once been pictures on the walls and they’d left dark shadows on the otherwise pale passion-flowered wallpaper. It was no warmer inside, simply less windy. The grandmother saw the girl shivering and said, “Heat costs money.” She made her jump fifty times to warm herself. “Jumping’s free!” she said. A broom handle from below made a ratatatat on the floor.

They ate. Aurélie was shown to her room: a closet with a quilt doubled for a bed on the ground, low-hanging canopy of the grandmother’s clothing, smelling powerfully of her skin. “Until I move you to the closet for the night, you will sleep in my bed,” the grandmother said. Aurélie said her prayers while the grandmother watched.

Aurélie pretended to sleep as the grandmother washed herself carefully, brushed her teeth with baking soda, put on more makeup and perfume. She left. Aurélie watched the lightbulb’s curves on the ceiling. When she woke, she was being carried to her closet. The door was closed. In the bedroom, a man’s voice, her grandmother’s, the bed squeaking. The next day it was decided that she should just stay in the closet the whole time and was given her mother’s old Tintin books and a flashlight. Over time, she would recognize three men’s voices: one rich, as if encased in fat like a pâté, one helium giggling, one with rocks in it.

The grandmother kept perishables on the windowsill, where the pigeons and rats sometimes got them. The men came and left. Aurélie dreamt of adventures in strange cartoonish lands, ignored the noises, eventually slept through them. She went off to school and delighted in neatness, the pens with their cartouches, graph paper, the cleanness of orthography. She loved the goûters that the school gave out, madeleines filled with chocolate, and milk in pouches. She loved the loudness of the other children, watched them with delight. And so it went for six years or so.

In the spring after her eleventh birthday, Aurélie came home and found her grandmother in déshabille on the bed. She was stiff, skin icy. Tongue protruding. There may have been marks on her neck or maybe they were kisses. [No.] Two of her nails had been ripped off and the fingers ended in blood.

Aurélie went slowly downstairs. The concierge was not in her apartment. Aurélie went down the street and shuddered in the greengrocer’s shop at the corner until he finished weighing asparagus for a lady in a fur hat. He was kind to Aurélie, gave her oranges in the winter. When they were alone, he leaned forward, smiling, and she whispered what she’d seen, and his face went stark. He took off running.

Later, she found herself on a plane over the Atlantic. Below, clouds feathered. Water pleated and smoothed itself. The stranger in the seat beside her had a pillowy biceps and a gentle hand, which passed over and over Aurélie’s hair until at last the girl slept. When she woke, she was in her new country.

—

HER FRENCH PROFESSORS at Vassar had marveled: “You have no accent at all,” they said.

“Oh, well,” she said lightly. “Maybe I was a little French girl in a previous life.”

In this one she was American, sounded American. Her mother tongue stayed under the surface. But the way roots push up paving stones from beneath, her French rippled her English. The way she said “forte,” as in “Making your life run on rails, Lotto. That’s my forte,” and in her mouth it was strength, feminine. Lotto looked at her curiously, said, “For-tay, you mean?” in the American way.

For-tay: a nonsense word. “Of course,” she said.

Or the faux amis. Actually for currently. Abuse for mislead. “I cannot breathe,” she said, in the lobby on opening night, the crowd rushing Lotto, “in this affluence.” She’d meant crowd, but, well, on second thought, the other worked just as well.

Despite her fluency, she would mishear, misinterpret. Her whole adult life she would believe one kept all one’s important things — wills, birth certificates, passports, a single photo of a little girl — in a place in the bank called the Safety Posit box. Security, a hypothetical, remaining to be proved.

7

HER TONGUE WAS STILL HEALING from when she flipped the car. Mathilde said very little. The tongue hurt, true, but silence became her. When she spoke, she showed her contempt.

She went out at night and picked men up. The doctor still in his scrubs, smelling of iodine and clove cigarettes. The boy who sold gas at Stewart’s, with his downy moustache and ability to pump for hours like a lonely derrick on the dry Texas plains. The mayor of the little village where Mathilde and Lotto had lived so happily; the owner of the bowling alley; a shy divorcé with shockingly floral taste in bed linens. A cowboy with four-hundred-dollar boots, he’d informed her with pride. A black jazz saxophonist in town for a wedding.

By then she’d made a name for herself without saying anything at all. School superintendent; owner of a hunting camp; CrossFit trainer with deltoids like hand grenades; a semi-famous poet she and her husband had known from the city, who’d come up to visit her on an impulsive hajj of Lotto grief. He’d put three fingers up her and she felt the cold of his wedding band.

She picked up a fat balding man who drove school buses. He only wanted to hold her and weep.

“Disgusting,” she said. She was in the middle of the motel room, still in her bra. She’d shorn her hair to velveteen that day in the pool. The locks had drifted atop the surface like drowned snakes. “Stop crying,” she said.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You are sorry,” she said.

“You’re just so pretty,” he said. “And I’m so lonely.”

She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. There was a jungle scene on the comforter.

“Can I put my head in your lap?” he said.

“If you have to,” she said. He lowered his cheek to her thighs. She braced herself against the weight of his head. His hair was soft and smelled of unscented soap, and from this vantage, his skin was very sweet, pink and smooth like a piglet’s.

“My wife passed away,” he said, his mouth tickling her leg. “Six months ago. Breast cancer.”

“My husband died four months ago,” she said. “Aneurysm.” Pause. “I win,” she said.

His eyelashes brushed her skin while he thought about this. “So you know?” he said.

“I do,” she said.

The flick of the traffic light across the street from the motel filled the room with red and dark and red and dark. “How do you live?” she said.

“Ladies with casseroles. My kids call me every day. I’ve taken up kite building. It’s all so stupid,” he said.

“I don’t have kids,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not me. Best decision I ever made,” she said.

“How do you live?” he said.

“By fucking the brains out of disgusting men.”

“Hey!” he said, then laughed. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Awful.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Slowly, she said: “My husband was the second man I’d had sex with. I was faithful for twenty-four years. I want to know what I was missing.”

“What were you missing?” he said.

“Nothing. Men are all absolutely terrible at sex. Except for my husband.”

She thought: Well, there had been one or two surprises, but mostly that was true.

He picked his moon face up off her lap. Pink dent on her thigh, moisture. He looked at her hopefully. “I’ve been told I’m an excellent lover,” he said.

She pulled her dress on over her head and zipped her boots to her knees. “Missed your window there, buddy,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’ll be quick.”

“Christ almighty,” she said, and put her hand on the doorknob.

His voice went bitter when he said, “Have a good time being a whore.”

“You poor sad little man,” she said, and went out without turning around.

—

THERE WAS NOTHING Mathilde could do. Flickering images hurt her head; books left her hollow. She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.

She drank a great deal of wine and fell asleep, and when she woke, it was in the middle of the night to a cold bed empty of her husband. That was when she knew, with existential bitterness, that her husband had understood nothing of her.

Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then. There was also this: for a number of his plays, at least half, she would silently steal in at night and refine what he had written. [Not rewrite; edit, burnish, make glow.] And she ran the business side of his work; she had horrified visions of all the money he would have let evaporate in his goodwill and indolence.

Once, during the previews of The House in the Grove, when, it felt, they were on the brink of a flop, she had been in the office of the theater. Deep afternoon, rain and coffee. She had been reaming out a script supervisor with such softly vicious skill that the poor boy’s knees went out from under him and he had to sit on a crimson ottoman to gather himself. When she finished, she said, “You are dismissed.”

The boy stood and fled.

She hadn’t seen Lotto in the shadows of the hallway, glooming there.

“So,” he said. “When directors ask members of the cast to come see you, I gather it’s not for a pep talk. I had always thought it was for a pep talk. Magic cookie bars and café au lait, a nice little cry on your bosom.”

“Some people just need a different kind of motivation,” she said. She stood and stretched her neck, one side, the other.

“If I hadn’t seen it,” he said, “I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“Would you like me to stop?” she said. She wouldn’t. They’d be in the poorhouse. But she could keep it quieter, make sure he wouldn’t know.

He stepped in and locked the door behind him. “In truth, it turned me on,” he said. He came close and said, “I see her indeed in the image of a Valkyrie maiden, riding her steed into the circle, amid thunder and lightning, and out again, bearing the body of some dead hero across her saddle.” He picked her up and wrapped her legs around his hips, and turned, and pressed her back against the door.

Was he quoting? She didn’t care. His voice was full of admiration. She closed her eyes. “Giddyap, steed,” she said. He nickered in her ear.

She had a self she didn’t devote to him. For one thing, she wrote, and not just invisibly in his manuscripts, which he must have thought magically tidied themselves up in the night. She wrote her own things that she kept to herself: surreptitious, sharp objects part story, part poetry. Published under a pseudonym. She’d begun in despair when she was almost forty and he’d fallen and broken himself, and in the break, she felt him moving away from her.

There was the other thing, the far worse thing. During the same time she began to write, she left him. He was wrapped up in his work. She came back and he never knew she was gone.

—

SHE’D SEEN THE ARTISTS’ COLONY when she dropped Lotto off: they brought you lunch in wicker baskets and gave you your own stone cottage, with these long laughing conversations at night over candlelight. It had seemed a version of heaven. She’d held his face as she moved over him on the small and squeaky bed, but he’d turned her over, and when he shivered and gasped and put his head on her back to catch his breath, she felt a chill. She laughed off the premonition and drove away. For a few weeks, she’d be left alone in the tiny country house with God.

At first, she was sanguine. Her poor husband had had such a bad summer. There had been that spill down the airplane stairs, half of his body broken. He’d drunk too much, worked too little on his new play, been so very sad not to be at his high pitch of activity for so many months with all of the workshops and productions and business. And though she had been happy to have him to attend to in the house with her, to love him with her cupcakes and iced tea and bathing and many tiny kindnesses, she was glad when she took him for his birthday to the Podunk little opera house among the cow fields and watched his face as he sat forward, as he drank it all up. The tears shimmering in his eyes. She watched the contrails at intermission as a woman slunk up to greet him, blushing under the heat of his celebrity. Lotto, body broken, his expression so light, so ecstatic. It had been so long since all his faculties had been engaged.

So she had been fine to drop him off that gray November, to take a few weeks off from the constant care of him. He would be working with a young composer on an opera. Leo Sen.

But even the first week without Lotto, her life, her house, had been so empty. She forgot meals, ate dinners of tuna still in the can, spent too much time streaming films in bed. Time clicked by. The days grew colder, darker. Some days she never turned on the light, waking at eight when the sun rose weakly, sleeping at four-thirty when it bled itself out. She felt ursine. Norwegian. Her husband’s calls trickled down from once a day to every few days. In her half sleep, she had fiery nightmares of Lotto telling her he no longer needed her, he was leaving, he loved another woman. In her fever, she imagined some poetess, frail and young, with heifer hips molded for birthing, a girl who was respected in her own rights as an artist, which Mathilde would never be. He would divorce Mathilde, and he and his new whispery paramour would live in the apartment in the city in a glut of sex and parties and babies, endless babies, all with his face in miniature. She imagined the poetess almost into existence. She was so lonely she could choke on it. She called and called, and he never answered the telephone. His calls decreased even more; he called once the last week. He didn’t try to get kinky with her, which was so strange for Lotto that he could have been neutered.

He skipped Thanksgiving, though they’d had plans with friends and family in the house in the country; she’d had to cancel, ate the custard out of the pumpkin pie she’d made the day before and tossed the crust out the window for the raccoons. On the phone, Mathilde’s voice had wobbled. Lotto’s voice went distant. He said he was extending the stay into mid-December. She said something cutting and hung up. He called three times and she didn’t pick up. The fourth time, she would, she decided. But though she waited by the phone, he didn’t call back.

When he’d talked of Leo, there was a pulse under his words, a thrill. And suddenly, she could taste his infatuation. It left a bitterness on the back of her tongue.

Mathilde dreamt of Leo Sen. She knew he was a young man, from the few bios that existed online. And though Lotto was thoroughly straight — the daily greedy need of his hands told her this — her husband’s desire had always been more to chase and capture the gleam of the person inside the body than the body itself. And there was a part of her husband that had always been so hungry for beauty. It was out of the question that Leo Sen’s body could steal her husband; it was not out of the question that with his genius Leo could take her place in Lotto’s affections. This was worse. In the dream, they were sitting at a table, Mathilde and Leo, and there was a giant pink cake, and though Mathilde was hungry, Leo was eating the cake, delicate bite by delicate bite, and she had to watch him eat it, smiling shyly until it was gone.

—

SHE SAT FOR A LONG, LONG TIME at the kitchen table, and every moment she sat, the anger took on mass, then darkness, then scales.

“I’ll show him,” she said aloud to God. God wagged her tail sadly. The dog missed Lotto, too.

It took ten minutes to make the arrangements, another twenty to pack herself and the dog. She drove off through the cherry trees, resolutely not looking at the little white house in the rearview mirror. God had shivered when she handed her over at the kennel. Mathilde had shivered all the way to the airport, on the plane, had taken two Ambien, and stopped shivering to sleep all the way to Thailand, waking with a bleary head and a blossoming urinary tract infection from holding her bladder while she slept.

When she walked out of the airport into the humidity, the human roil, the tropical stink and wind, her legs went weak.

Bangkok flashed by, pink and gold, swarms of bodies beneath the streetlights. Strands of holiday lights snaked up the trees, a kindness to the tourists. Mathilde’s skin was thirsty for the moist wind, now blowing rotten with marsh reeds and mud, now blowing eucalyptus. She was too agitated for sleep, the hotel too hygienic, so she wandered back out into the dark. A bent woman swept a sidewalk with a bundle of sticks, a rat perched atop a wall. Mathilde wanted the bitterness of a gin and tonic on her tongue, and followed music blindly under a portico into a nightclub, empty so early in the night. Inside was tiered, balconied, the stage being set up for a band. The bartender patted Mathilde’s hand when she delivered the drink, flash of warmth on the skin, then the cold of the glass, and Mathilde wanted to touch the lushness of the woman’s black eyelashes. Someone sat beside her, an American man bursting out of his T-shirt, his head fuzzy like a ripe peach. Beside him a plump and laughing Thai woman. His voice oozed with intimacy; he’d already taken possession. Mathilde wanted to seize his words, roll them up in her fist, shove them down his throat. Instead, she left, found the hotel, lay sleepless in bed until dawn.

In the morning, she found herself on a boat to the Phi Phi Islands, salt on her lips from the wind. She had her own bungalow. She’d paid for a month, imagining Lotto coming home to an empty house, no dog, searching all the rooms for her, finding nothing, the terror hatching in his heart. Had someone kidnapped her? Had she run away with the circus? She was so agreeably flexible when it came to Lotto that she could have been a contortionist. Her hotel room was white and full of carved wood; they’d put polished strange fruits in a red bowl on the table and a towel folded in the shape of an elephant on the bed.

She opened the French door to the shushing sea, the call of children down the beach, and stripped the bed of its comforter because she wanted other people’s germs nowhere near her skin, and lay back and closed her eyes and felt the old devastation rasp itself away.

When she woke, it was dinnertime, and the devastation was back, sharp-toothed, and it had gnawed a hole inside her.

She cried in the mirror, putting on her dress, her lipstick, cried too much for eye makeup. She sat at her own table alone, among the flowers and shining cutlery, and kind people served her kindly and positioned her facing the sea so she could cry in peace. She ate a bite of her food and drank a whole bottle of wine and walked home to her bungalow in bare feet over the sand.

The only day she had in the sun she wore her white bikini that bagged on her because she’d lost so much weight. The waiters saw the tears sliding out from under her sunglasses and brought her cold glasses of fruit juice without being asked. She burned and stayed in the sun until the skin on her shoulders was blistered.

The next morning, she awoke to an elephant in the window, slowly carrying a little girl up the beach, led by the halter by a slender young woman in a sarong. In the night, the anger had struck at the sadness and chased it off. Mathilde’s body ached with yesterday’s sun. She sat up and saw her face in the mirror opposite the bed, red and lightning sharp and already resolved.

Here was the Mathilde she’d grown so accustomed to, the one who had never not fought. Hers was a quiet, subtle warfare, but she had always been a warrior. That poetess was imaginary, she had to tell herself; that skinny musician named Leo had nothing on her because he was a boy, and he was powerless. Of course she’d prevail. How dare she walk away.

Two days after she arrived, her plane lifted off the ground and she was in the air again. She had spent six days molten on the inside. They handed God to her at the kennel, and the dog was so happy to see her she tried to nose her way into Mathilde’s torso. Mathilde came home to the frigid house, stinking of the garbage she hadn’t bothered to take out before she left. She put her suitcase in the closet upstairs to deal with later and sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea to strategize. The problem wasn’t what she would do to go fetch Lotto back to her. It was what she wouldn’t do. There were too many choices, there was too much possibility.

In a few moments, she heard a car on the drive. On the gravel came a step with a hitch in it.

Her husband came in the door. She let him wait.

Then she looked at him across the great distance. He was thinner, finer than when he left. As if whittled. On his face there was something she dropped her eyes to keep from seeing.

He sniffed the air, and to prevent him from speaking about the smell of garbage and the coldness of the house, which would have broken something, would have made it impossible to return to him, she crossed the kitchen and locked his mouth to hers. The taste, after so long, was strange, the texture rubbery. A shock of unfamiliarity. There was a slight shifting in him, a sense of bending. He was about to speak, but she pushed her hand hard against his mouth. She would have shoved her hand inside him if she could to keep the words from coming out. He understood. He smiled, dropped his bag, walked her backward into the wall. His great body on hers. The dog whimpering at his feet. She took her husband ferociously by the hips and pulled him ahead of her through the hall and up the stairs.

She pushed him with all she had and he landed very hard on the bed, hissing at residual pain in his bad left side. He looked up at her, a puzzlement moving on his face, and again he tried to talk, but she now cupped his mouth and shook her head and took off her shoes and pants, unbuttoned his shirt, his pants. Oh, those boxer briefs with the hole along the elastic, they broke her heart. His ribs were visible in his pale chest. His was a body having undergone terrific strain. She took four of his ties from the closet, remnants of his prep school boyhood, rarely worn now in his life. He laughed when she tied his wrists to the bed frame, though she felt sickly inside. Deadly. She knotted another tie into a blindfold. He made a strange noise, but she tied the fourth as a gag, and pulled it unnecessarily tight, the blue of the silk digging into his cheeks.

For a long time, she crouched above him, feeling powerful. She left her shirt on to hide her sunburn, the peeling skin; her face she’d explain by a long bike ride. She brushed the tip of him with her pelvis, gently, and at random. He started with every touch. He’d been reduced to this long body, so expectant, the eyes removed, the tongue removed. When he was panting behind his gag, she dropped onto him hard, not caring if it hurt him. She thought of — what? Scissors in fabric. It had been so long. It was so unfamiliar. The taut belly below her like the crisp top of crème brûlée. His face was red under the restraint; he was mouthing his fish mouth as if to free it, and she dug her fingernails into his waist, bringing up crescents of blood. His back arched off the mattress. The veins in his neck raised, blue.

He came before she did, and so she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. She’d groped toward something in the dark and had somehow seized it back to her. She thought of the words she’d kept him from speaking, building up, mounting in him until there was unbearable pressure. And though she took the blindfold off, she left the gag, kissing his purple wrists. The way he looked at her now, with the silk darkened in an egg shape by spit, was quizzical. She leaned over and kissed him between the eyebrows. He held her loosely by the waist, and she waited until she knew he wasn’t going to say anything about what he had gone through and then untied the last tie on his mouth. He sat up and kissed the pulse under her chin. His warmth, she had missed it so. His body’s palette of stinks. He respected the silence. He rose and went to the bathroom to take a shower, and she went downstairs to boil some pasta. Puttanesca. She couldn’t resist the dig.

When he came down, he showed her the cuts she’d raised on his sides. “Wildcat woman,” he said, and there was a little sadness in the way he watched her now.

This should have been the end; this was not the end. She kept a Google search on Leo Sen. When, the week before Christmas, the terrible news of the boy’s drowning in the cold ocean rose on the screen, she’d felt startled. And then victory, hot and terrible, rose in her chest. She looked away from her own face in the reflection of the computer screen.

When Lotto was upstairs, buried in his new play, she went to Stewart’s and bought a newspaper. She saved it until the morning of Christmas Eve and put it at the mirror near the front door, where, she knew, Lotto would wait for Rachel and her wife and the children. He loved the holidays, as they matched the hot and jolly center of himself; he would be staring out the window to the country road impatiently and wouldn’t fail to see the paper. He would know then what it was that she knew. She heard him whistling and came out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs to watch. He smiled at himself in the mirror, checked his profile, and his hand fell on the paper. He looked more closely and began to read. He went pale, clutched the table beneath him as if he would faint. Rachel and Elizabeth were bickering when the back door opened and they came into the kitchen, and the children were shrieking with excitement, and the dog was screaming with happiness at the prospect of them. She’d saved the paper for right now, because with company he wouldn’t argue, he wouldn’t make things worse by saying them aloud, and if he didn’t say them immediately, he wouldn’t say them at all. Lotto looked up into the mirror and saw Mathilde on the stairs behind him.

She looked at him looking at her. A new understanding came into his face and then vanished; he was frightened by this glimpse of what was in her and wouldn’t watch it unfurl.

She took a step down the stairs. “Merry Christmas!” she called out. She was clean. Pine-scented. She descended. She was a child; she was as light as air.

—

WELCH DUNKEL HIER! sings Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio, an opera about a marriage.

Most operas, it is true, are about marriage. Few marriages could be called operatic.

What darkness here! is what Florestan sings.

—

NEW YEAR’S DAY was the only day in her life she believed in a god. [Ha.] Rachel and Elizabeth and the children still asleep upstairs in the guest room. Mathilde made scones, a frittata. Her life a long and endless round of entertaining.

She turned on the television. Turmoil in black and gold, a fire in the night. A shot of bodies under sheets, neat as tents on a plain; a building with arched windows, blackened and unroofed. Someone’s cell phone video just before the conflagration, a band on a stage shouting a countdown to the new year, sparklers spitting out fire, laughing faces. Now, outside, and people being helped to ambulances, lying on the ground. Devastated skin, charred and pink. The thought of meat inescapable. Mathilde felt a slow sickness overcome her. This place she recognized, she had been there just nights before. The press of bodies at the locked doors, the choking smoke, the screams. That juicy girl next to that big American man on the barstool. The bartender with the lush eyelashes, the shock of her cold hand on Mathilde’s skin. When she heard Rachel’s step on the top stair, she turned off the television, went quickly out into the backyard with God to compose herself in the cold.

That evening over dinner, Rachel and Elizabeth announced that Elizabeth was pregnant.

In bed, when Mathilde wept and wept, in gratitude and guilt and horror for all that she had escaped, Lotto thought it was because his sister was so rich with children and they were so terribly, unfairly poor. Later, he cried, too, into her hair. And the distance between them was bridged, and they were again united.

8

THE AIRPORT DEAFENED. Aurélie, eleven, alone, understood nothing. At last she saw the man holding the sign with her name on it and knew with a rush of relief that this must be her uncle, the much older brother of her mother. The child, the grandmother always said, of her wicked youth; though her old age was wicked as well. The man was jolly, round, red, full of sympathy. Already, she liked him.

“No, mamzelle,” he said. “Non oncle. The driver.”

She didn’t understand, so he pantomimed driving a car. She swallowed her disappointment.

“No parlez français,” the driver said. “Except voulez-vous coucher avec moi.”

She blinked hard, and he said, “No, no, no, no, no. No vous. Excusez-moi. No voulez coucher avec vous.” He flushed redder and chuckled all the way to the car.

He stopped off the highway to buy her a strawberry milkshake; it cloyed and made her stomach hurt but she drank it all because it was kind of him. She was frightened of spilling on the leather seats and held the cup carefully all the way to her uncle’s house.

They stopped on a gravel drive. The house was a modest place for a man with a driver. Stern old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse of impenetrable stone and ancient windows so bubbled they played tricks with the landscape beyond. The driver carried her bag up to her room, which alone was twice the size of her grandmother’s Paris apartment. In one wall was her own marble bathroom, with a green shower mat of such thickness it was like new spring grass in the park. She wanted to lie down on it immediately and sleep for days.

In the kitchen, the driver pulled out of the refrigerator a plate with a pale chicken cutlet, potato salad, beans, and a note her uncle had written in French about how he would meet her when he got home. Television, he counseled, was the best way to learn English. Do not leave the house. Make a list of the things she needed and the driver would see to it that she got them tomorrow.

It was hard for her to overlook how many mistakes he made with his spelling.

The driver showed her how to lock the door and put on the alarm. He wore a worried look on his flabby face, but he had to go.

She ate very close to the television, warming herself against its staticky screen, watching some incomprehensible show about leopards. She washed everything and put it all back where she thought it belonged, and tiptoed upstairs. She tried every door, but every one but hers was locked, then washed her hands and face and feet, brushed her teeth, and climbed into the bed, but it was too large and the room too full of shadows. She brought the duvet and a pillow into the empty closet and fell asleep on the carpet that smelled like dust.

In the thick of the night, she woke suddenly to find a thin man peering down at her from the doorway. Something about his large eyes and apple cheeks brought back her grandmother. He had ears like small, pale bat wings. His face brought her mother’s, through the smoke of years, to her.

“So,” he said in French. “The devil girl.” He seemed amused, though he wasn’t smiling.

She felt her breath twist. From the first, she understood he was very dangerous, despite his mild aspect. She would have to be careful. She would have to keep to herself.

“I’m not home often,” the uncle said. “The driver will take you to buy your necessaries and the groceries you may need. He will drive you to and from the bus stop, which will take you to school. You will hardly see me.”

She said a quiet thank-you, because silence would have been worse.

He looked at her for a long moment, and said, “My mother made me sleep in her closet as well. You must try to sleep in your bed.”

“I will,” she whispered. He closed the door, and she listened to him walking, unlocking, opening, shutting, relocking a series of doors. She kept listening to the silent house until the silence filled her and she slept again.

—

WITHIN THE FIRST HOUR of American school, the boy sitting in front of Aurélie turned around. He whispered, “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine!”

She didn’t understand. “You’re stupid,” he said.

Lunch an incomprehensible slab of bread and cheese. Milk that smelled rotten. She sat on the playground trying to be as small as possible, though she was very big for her age. The boy with the joke came by with three other boys.

“Orally, orally!” they cried, and stuck their tongues in one cheek, mimed a penis going in and out with their hands.

This she understood. She went to the teacher, a babylike worm with sparse white hair who had prided herself on talking to Aurélie all morning in her high school French patois.

Aurélie said as slowly as she could that though Aurélie was her given name, nobody called her that in Paris.

The city’s name made the teacher’s face light up. “Non?” she said. “Et qu’est-ce que c’est le nom que vous préférez?”

Aurélie thought. There was a girl in the form above her at school in Paris, a short, strong, and wry girl with flowing black hair. She was mysterious, cool, the one all the other girls courted with berlingots and bandes dessinées. When she was angry, words came whiplike to her lips. She used her power sparingly. Mathilde was her name.

“Mathilde,” Aurélie said.

“Mathilde,” the teacher said. “Bon.”

Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurélie’s skin. She felt the other girl’s stillness come over her, her cool eye, her quickness. When the boy in front of her turned around to mime a blow job, she darted her hand out and pinched his tongue hard through his cheek, and he yelped, and tears rose to his eyes, and the teacher turned to find Mathilde sitting calmly. The boy was punished for making noise. She watched as, over the course of the hour, twin purple grapes developed on his cheek. She wanted to suck them.

—

AT A PARTY ONCE, in the happy underground years in Greenwich Village, when Lotto and she had been so desperately poor [holes in her socks, lunches of sunshine and water], their Christmas lights making a chain of lemons on the walls, rotgut vodka mixed with juice, she was flipping through the CDs when she heard someone shout out Aurélie! and she was immediately eleven again, desperate, lonely, confused. She spun around. But it was her husband, full-bore: Didn’t know it was a suppository, so he took it orally! Friends hooted; girls danced by with cups in their hands. Mathilde went into the bedroom, feeling robotic, passed the three engrossed bodies on the bed without looking. She hoped when they were done they’d change the duvet cover. She went into the closet that stank of cedar blocks and the dust of her own skin. She nestled among her shoes. Fell asleep. Woke to Lotto hours later opening the door and laughing and picking her up tenderly and putting her into bed. She was glad of the mattress stripped of its sheets, she and her husband alone at last, his hot, avid hand on her neck, her upper thigh. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t want to, really, but it didn’t matter. The weight of his body was pressing her into the present. Mathilde was slowly coming back. [And Aurélie, that sad, lost girl, vanished again.]

—

AURÉLIE WAS MEEK AND MILD; Mathilde boiled underneath a placid skin.

Once, she was playing tetherball and a boy in her class was winning and she deliberately hit the ball so hard into his face that he was knocked down and his head bounced on the asphalt and he had a concussion. Once, she heard her name from a pocket of girls who then laughed. She waited. At lunch a week later, she sat next to the most popular of those girls and waited until she took a big bite of her sandwich and, underneath the table, stabbed her fork into the girl’s thigh. The girl spat out the bite before screaming, and Mathilde had had time to hide the fork under a table buttress. She blinked her huge eyes at the teacher and was believed.

The other children regarded her now with fear in their faces. Mathilde floated through her days coolly, as if she were in the clouds, watching dispassionately down. Her uncle’s in Pennsylvania was only a place to stay, chill and dim, not a home. She imagined for herself a separate life, a chaotic mess with six sisters, loud pop on the radio, nail polish stink and bobby pins on the vanity. Game nights with popcorn and screaming fights. Voice from the other bed in the night. The sole welcome in her uncle’s house was the warm buzz of the television. She mocked a soap opera, The Starrs in Your Eyes, in the characters’ own voices, until she lost her accent. Her uncle was never home. Did she burn to see what was behind those locked doors? She did. But she didn’t pick the locks. [Already, a miracle of self-possession.] On Sundays, the driver took her to the grocery store, and if she was fast and they still had time, he’d drive her to a little park near a river to feed sheets of white bread to the ducks.

Her loneliness was so huge it took the form of the upstairs hallway, dark and lined with locked doors.

Once, even, swimming in the river, a leech attached to her inner thigh, so close to what mattered that it thrilled her and she left it there, thought of it throughout her days, her invisible friend. When it fell off in the shower and she accidentally stepped on it, she wept.

To stay away from the house, she joined the time-intensive clubs at school that didn’t require her to speak. She swam and joined the chess team and learned the flute for the band, a thoroughly demeaning instrument, she felt, but easy to master.

In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She’d want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run somewhere safe with her.

Instead, her uncle adopted her when she was twelve. She wasn’t aware he was going to until the day before the court hearing. The driver told her.

He’d gained so much weight over the year that his stomach had grown a little stomach. When he was lifting her groceries to the trunk, she had the urge to bury her face in the many pillows of him.

“Adopted! Isn’t that nice?” the driver said. “Now you needn’t worry, mamzelle, about having to go somewhere else. You belong here now.”

When he saw her expression, he touched her — was it the first time he’d touched her? — on the crown of the head, and said, “Oh, girl pie. Don’t take it so hard.”

On the ride home, her silence was like the fields they were passing. Ice-wracked, weary with blackbirds.

Inside the car, the driver said, “I’m supposed to call you Miss Yoder now.”

“Yoder?” she said. “But that wasn’t my grandmother’s name.”

The driver’s eyes in the rearview grew merry. “They say your uncle changed his name to the first thing he saw when he got to Philly. Reading Terminal Market, it was. Yoder’s pies.”

Then a flash of alarm in his face, and he said, “You won’t tell I said so.”

“Who would I tell? I don’t talk to anybody but you,” she said.

“Sweet thing,” he said. “You break my heart. You do.”

The day Mathilde turned thirteen, she found one door downstairs unlocked and open a crack. Her uncle must have left it for her just so. For a moment, the hunger in her tipped over and she couldn’t suppress her curiosity. She entered. It was a library, with leather couches and Tiffany lights, and save for a glass cabinet that held what Mathilde would later find out to be antique Japanese erotica, she could reach all of the books in the room without stretching. They were strange things, ancient hardcovers that seemed, despite their similar deckled edges and cloth bindings, to be gathered randomly. In her sophisticated years, she’d understand that these were books sold by the yard, mostly for decorative purposes. But in those bad years, in her early teens, they were volleys from a kinder Victorian world. She read them all. She was so versed in Ian Maclaren and Anthony Hope, Booth Tarkington and Winston Churchill [the American], Mary Augusta Ward and Frances Hodgson Burnett, that the sentences in her English papers became ever more ornate and elaborate. American education being what it is, her teachers took her rococo sentences to be evidence of a prodigious facility with language that she didn’t actually have. She won all the English awards her last year in middle school. She won them all in high school, also. On her thirteenth birthday, she thought, closing the library door behind her, that at this rate she would know what was in every room of the house by the time she was thirty.

Except that, one month later, her uncle left a door unlocked unintentionally.

She wasn’t supposed to be home. She had walked back from school because of the half day called — there was a brutal snowstorm on the horizon — and the chauffeur couldn’t be reached on the office phone, and she missed the bus anyway. She walked in the freezing cold, her bare knees numbed after five minutes. She pushed the last two miles in a sideways wind with her fingers making blinders to keep the snow out.

When she came back to the stone house, she had to crouch on the doorstep with her hands under her bra to warm them enough to work the key. She heard voices inside, at the end of the hall where the library was. She took off her shoes, feet blocks of ice, and crept to the kitchen, where there were half-eaten sandwiches on the counter. A bag of chips splayed its barbecue guts. Someone’s cigarette burned in a teacup, quarter inch of ash. In the windows, the storm was almost black.

She tried to go toward the staircase noiselessly but stopped short: under the stairway there was a small room, and she’d never seen the door open until now. She heard footsteps and stepped inside, quietly shutting the door. The overhead light was on. She flicked it off. She crouched behind a strange statue of a horse head and breathed into her hand. The footsteps passed. There were loud male voices and more steps. In the dark, her warming skin was full of chewing ants.

The great front door slammed, and she waited and waited, but she could feel that the house was empty and that she was alone.

She turned the light on and saw what she’d only vaguely seen before. Along the wall there were canvases with their faces turned away and little pieces of statuary. She picked up a painted board. It was heavy, solid. She turned it around and almost dropped it. Never in her life had she seen a more perfect thing. At the bottom, in the foreground, there was a curvy white horse with a man in blue robes riding it, the fabric so lush she touched it to make sure it wasn’t real. Behind him were other men, other horses, a jagged rock face. Up against the blue sky was a soft, pale city so perfect it seemed made of bones.

She memorized it. At last she put it back down and took off her sweater to wipe up the snowmelt that had dripped onto the floor from her hair and clothes. She closed the door behind her and felt a keen loss when she heard the lock fall into place.

She went up the stairs and lay in the dark with her eyes closed to resee the panel. When the chauffeur came in, calling worriedly for her, she reached out her window, gathered two handfuls of snow, put both on her hair, and ran to the kitchen.

“Oh, girl,” he said, sitting heavily down. “I thought we lost you in that storm.” She didn’t mind that his concern had been for both of them, that if he had, indeed, lost her he would have been in danger himself.

“I got in a few minutes ago,” she said, still shivering, and he took her hand and felt how cold it was and made her sit and made cocoa from scratch, then chocolate chip cookies, too.

—

FOR HER FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Mathilde’s uncle took her out to dinner. In three years, they had never shared a meal. She’d opened her bedroom door to see the red dress he’d laid on her bed like a skinny girl thrown backward. Beside it was her first pair of high heels, three inches tall and black. She dressed slowly.

The restaurant was warm, a converted farmhouse not unlike her uncle’s, but with a fire burning in the hearth. Her uncle looked ill in the golden light, as if his skin were candle tallow, half melted. She steeled herself to look at him while he ordered for both of them. Caesar salad. Steak tartare with a quail’s egg atop, followed by filet mignon. Side of roasted potatoes and asparagus. Côtes du Rhône. Mathilde had been a vegetarian since she saw an exposé on television about industrial husbandry, cows hung on hooks and flayed alive, chickens squeezed into cages that broke their legs and living out their days caked in their own shit.

When the salads came, the uncle twirled a brown anchovy on his fork and congratulated her, in French, for being so poised and self-sufficient. He swallowed without chewing; like a shark, she knew from television.

“I have no choice. I’ve been left entirely alone,” Mathilde said. She hated herself for allowing her mouth to twitch and betray her.

He put his fork down and looked at her. “Oh, please, Aurélie. You weren’t beaten. You weren’t starved. You go to school and the dentist and the doctor. I had none of those things. You are being melodramatic. This isn’t Oliver Twist, you are not some child in a coal mine. I have been kind to you.”

“Blacking factory. Dickens worked in a blacking factory,” she said. She switched to English. “No, I wouldn’t say you have never been unkind.”

He sensed the insult better than he understood it. “No matter. I am all you ever would have had. Diablesse, they called you. I must say, I have seen no evidence of your devil, to my disappointment. Either it’s not there, or you have learned to dissimulate as all good devils do.”

“Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person,” she said. “Exorcism by terror.” She drank her water and poured wine to the top of the glass and drank it down.

“You have witnessed nothing you should fear,” he said. He leaned forward and smiled. “I could change that if you prefer.”

For a moment, she stopped breathing. Perhaps it was the wine that made her vision swim. “No, thank you,” she said.

“You are welcome,” he said. He finished the salad, wiped his mouth, and said, “Nobody has told you that your parents have new babies. New, well. Relatively. One is three and one is five. Little boys. Your brothers, I suppose. I’d show you the photo my sister sent, but I seem to have lost it.”

[Strange how things are associated with their particular pains: Caesar salad forever a suffocating sadness.]

She smiled at a spot above her uncle’s head, where the firelight reflected off an antique barometer. It also shined through his pointed ears. She said nothing.

He said, when the filet came, “You are very tall. Skinny. Odd-looking, which seems fashionable. You could be a model, perhaps. Even put yourself through college.”

She drank her water in slow and even sips.

“Ah,” he said. “You thought I was going to send you to college. But my obligation ends at eighteen.”

“You could afford it,” she said.

“I could,” he said. “But I’m interested in watching what you’ll do. Struggle forms character. No struggle, no character. Nobody gave me a thing in my life,” he said. “Not one thing. I earned it all.”

“And look at you now,” she said.

He smiled at her and the resemblance to her grandmother, her long-ago mother, absent all warmth, made her skin prickle. “Be careful,” he said.

The untouched meat on her plate became fuzzy and slowly cleared. “Why do you hate me?” she said.

“Oh, child. I have no feelings about you whatsoever,” he said; this was the kindest thing he would ever say to her.

He slurped down a panna cotta. There was cream in the folds of his mouth.

The check arrived and a man came up to her uncle and shook his hand, murmuring in his ear, and Mathilde gratefully turned away because, from the corner of her eye, she caught a slight movement in the doorway. A white cat had inserted its head into the room and was pulling its taut body on its forepaws, staring fixedly into the woodpile. Tiny tiger, hunting. For some time, she was lulled by the cat’s immobility, only the tiny twitch at the end of the tail to signal life; and then, without warning, the cat leapt. When it turned, a soft, boneless, gray thing hung in its mouth. A field mouse, Mathilde thought. The cat trotted off, its tail jaunty with pride. When she turned back to her uncle and his friend, they were looking at her, amused.

“Dmitri just said that you are the cat. The cat is you,” the uncle said.

No. She had always hated cats. They seemed so full of rage. She put her napkin on the table and smiled with all her teeth.

9

THE ONLY ONE WHO RETURNED and returned and returned was Rachel.

Rachel made soup and focaccia, which Mathilde fed to the dog.

Rachel returned alone, with Elizabeth, with the children, who ran in the fields with God until the dog collapsed, and then combed all the tufts and brambles out of her fur and left her lax and panting for hours afterward.

“I don’t want to see you,” Mathilde shouted at Rachel when she came alone one morning with cheese danishes and fresh juice. “Go away.”

“Abuse me all you want,” Rachel said. She put the pastries down on the mat and stood again, fierce in the dim morning light. That god-awful tattoo up her arm, all spiderweb and mermaid and a little turnip, some sort of bondage fantasia or, at the very least, a mixed metaphor. The family had a talent for figurative knots. Rachel said: “I won’t go away. I’ll come back again and again and again until you’re well.”

“I’m warning you,” Mathilde said, through the glass door. “I’m the worst person you know.”

“That is untrue,” Rachel said. “You are one of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever met. You’re my sister and I love you.”

“Ha. You don’t know me,” Mathilde said.

“But I do,” Rachel said. She laughed, and though all her life Mathilde had felt a sort of sorrow that Rachel was nothing like her brother, so great and shining, now she saw Lotto in his little sister’s face, the same semi-dimple in the cheek, the strong teeth. Mathilde shut her eyes and locked the door. Even still, with her endless nervous energy, Rachel came back and she came back and she came back.

—

SHE’D FALLEN ASLEEP in the pool house. Six months after Lotto died, grim heat of August. Their old friend Samuel had come that morning to remonstrate, nostrils flaring, and she’d waited him out in the pool house while he circled the house, bellowing her name.

Oh, little Samuel! she thought, listening. Kind son of a corrupt senator father. It had become a joke, unbelievable, the trials of Samuel, the DUIs, the divorces, the cancer, the house he’d burned down in his thirties. The racist a year ago who’d found Sam walking home at night from a movie and beat him to concussion. Not the smartest or the bravest, but he’d been born with preternatural confidence. Job was just a whiner compared with him.

Samuel was gone when she woke. Her skin was glazed in sweat. Her mouth was sandpaper and tar and she thought of the berries waiting on the countertop for her, the pie she could already taste. Butter, zest, essence of summer, salt. She heard another car turn onto the gravel. God was barking in the kitchen. She came across the too-bright grass and into the house and up the stairs to see from her bedroom who had arrived. Even the tiger lilies Mathilde had cut for herself seemed to be sweating.

A young person stepped out of an inexpensive little car: some kind of Hyundai or Kia. Rental. City boy. Boy, well. Thirty or thereabouts. Alone so long, Mathilde had taken to thinking of herself as wizened, ancient. To see herself in the mirror was to see the shock of unexpected youth.

There was something about this person’s loose-limbed walk across the drive that held her. He was medium-sized, dark-haired, handsome with his long eyelashes and defined jaw. Something whirred in her chest uncomfortably, which she had come to recognize in the past months as a strange chimera of rage and lust. Well! Only one way to exorcise it! She sniffed her armpits. They’d do.

She startled when she saw that the boy was looking up at her in the window as he came up to the door: she had taken to wearing Lotto’s white T-shirts and had sweated through this one so it was transparent, her nipples saying a double hello. She pulled on a tunic and descended and opened the door to the boy. God snuffled at his shoes, and he knelt and petted her. When he stood to shake Mathilde’s hand, his palm was covered with a fine layer of dog down and was clammy beneath. When he touched her, he burst into tears.

“Well,” she said. “Another of my husband’s mourners, I see.”

Her husband, patron saint of failed actors. Because it was clear now that this boy was an actor. He had that cocksure carriage, the observant brightness. So many of them had shown up to touch the great man’s hem, but there was no hem left, Mathilde having given away or burned nearly everything, save the books and manuscripts. Only Mathilde was left, his homelier husk. The old wifey-wife.

“I never knew him. But you can say I’m a mourner, I guess,” the boy said, turning away to wipe his face. When he turned back, he was red, embarrassed. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I’ve made iced tea,” Mathilde heard herself say. “Wait here in the rocker and I’ll bring some.”

By the time she came back, the boy had calmed. Sweat curled the hair at his temples. She put on the overhead porch fan and set the tray down on the little table, taking a lemon bar for herself. She’d survived on wine and sugar for months because, fuck it, she never really got a childhood, and what was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?

The boy-man picked up his tea and touched the tray, which she’d gotten in some rag-and-bone shop in London. He touched the herald and read aloud, “Non sanz droict.” He bolted up in his chair, spilling iced tea on his lap, and said, “Oh my god, that’s Shakespeare’s family—”

“Calm down,” she said. “It’s Victorian, a fake. He reacted exactly the way you did. He thought we had something that passed through old Willie’s hands and almost wet himself.”

“For so many years, I dreamt of driving up here,” the boy said. “Just to say hello. I dreamt that he’d invite me in and we’d have a nice dinner and talk and talk. I always knew we’d get along famously, he and I. Lancelot. And me.”

“His friends called him Lotto,” she said. “I’m Mathilde.”

“I know. The Dragon Wife,” he said. “I’m Land.”

With extreme slowness, she said, “Did you just call me the Dragon Wife?”

“Oh. Sorry. That’s what all the actors in the company called you when I was in Grimoire and One-Eyed King. Revival, not first-run. Of course, you’d know that. Because you protected him. You made sure he was paid on time, and kept people away, and you did it all while seeming so nice. I thought it was an honorific. Like, a joke you were in on.”

“No,” she said. “I was not in on this particular joke.”

“Whoops,” he said.

“It’s true,” Mathilde said, after some time. “I could breathe fire.”

She thought of how Lotto, in later years, had been called the Lion. With his dander up, he could roar. He looked leonine, too: his corona of white-shot gold, the fine, sharp cheekbones. He’d leap onstage, offended by some actor flubbing his precious lines, and there he’d pace, sleek and swift with his long lovely body, growling. He could be deadly. Fierce. The name was not inapt. But please, Mathilde knew lions. The male lolled beautifully, lazy in the sun. The female, less lovely by miles, was the one who brought back the kill.

The boy was sweating. His blue oxford shirt was hooped wetly under the arms. He was emitting a smell that was not unpleasant, exactly. It was a clean stink. Funny, she thought, looking over the banks of snapdragons to the river. Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband’s mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, although her stationery had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sallie was starch, cedar. Her dead grandmother, sandalwood. Her uncle, Swiss cheese. People told her that she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin.

She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought, would not return.

“Land,” Mathilde said. “Odd name for a guy like you.”

“Short for Roland,” the boy said.

Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.

“All right, Roland,” Mathilde said, suppressing a sigh. “Sing your song.”

Land told her what she already knew: actor. Had a recurring role on this soap opera, minor, but it paid the bills. “The Starrs in Your Eyes?” he said. “Heard of it?” He looked at her hopefully then grimaced. “I see,” he said. “Soaps aren’t your thing. Mine, either. It’s hackwork. But I got the job as soon as I got to the city. Fifteen years ago, literally the first audition I walked into. And it’s good money. And I can do plays in the summer when we don’t film.” He shrugged. “I’m not a superstar, but I work all the time. That’s a kind of success, I guess.”

“You don’t need to argue for the benefits of a steady gig,” she said. She felt reckless, disloyal. “Lotto never got one when he was an actor. It would have been an immense relief to have some pay coming in all those years. I worked my ass off and he made, maximum, seven thousand dollars a year until he started writing.”

“Thank god he started writing,” Land said. He told her that every birthday he took the day off to drive out to the beach and read The Springs. Lancelot never got his fair shakes as the genius he was.

“He would have agreed,” Mathilde said drily.

“But I love that about him. That arrogance,” Land said.

“I did, too,” Mathilde said.

The clouds like blackberry jam in the sky, faint double-boiler thunder from the north. All the things she could do, other than sit here, were gathering in the cool shadows of the house behind her, watching through the window. She was nailed to the chair.

She liked this boy, liked him enormously, more than anyone she’d met since Lotto died. She could just open her mouth and eat him he was so sweet; there was something easy about him, a gentleness she’d always loved in manly men.

“To tell you the truth, I wanted to meet you almost as much as I wanted to meet him,” Land said.

“Why?” she said. She was blushing. Flirting? It wasn’t impossible.

“You’re the untold story,” he said. “The mystery.”

“What mystery?” she said.

“The woman he chose to spend his life with,” Land said. “He’s easy to know. There are billions of interviews, and his plays come from him and give you a little window in. But you’re back in the shadows, hiding there. You’re the interesting one.”

It took a very long moment as they sat there on the porch, sweating in silence, for Mathilde to say to the boy, “I am not the interesting one.”

She knew she was the interesting one.

“You’re a bad liar,” he said.

She looked at him and imagined him in bed, those lovely fingers with the buffed nail beds, the neck with the visible cords, the strong jaw, that good body clear under his clothes, that sensitive face, and knew he’d be very good at fucking.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, and stood.

He blinked, startled. Then he stood and opened the door for her, following her in.

He was attentive, soft where he should be, strong under her arms. But there was something off. It wasn’t that she was so much older than he was; she estimated ten years. Fifteen, max. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know him, really. She hadn’t really known anybody she’d taken to bed with her the past six months. The absence of story was what she liked about them. But they were in the bathroom and she was watching his high-boned face behind her, his hand gripping her short hair, the other on her shoulder, and though it felt marvelous, she couldn’t focus.

“I can’t hold out any longer,” he said. He was shining with sweat.

“Don’t,” she said, and he was a gentleman and pulled out and groaned, and there was a heat on her back just above the coccyx.

“Nice,” she said. “Supersexy porn move.”

He laughed and dabbed her off with a warm washcloth. In the window, the bushes by the river were being flattened by wind and the hard, sparse rain that had begun to fall. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t want to, you know. Get you in the family way.”

She stood and stretched her arms above her head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m old.”

“You are not,” he said.

“Well. I’m barren,” she said. She didn’t say by choice. He nodded and went a little inward, then said, suddenly, “Is that why you didn’t have any kids?” Then he blushed and crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “I’m so sorry. That was rude. I was just wondering why you and he didn’t. Have kids, I mean.”

“That’s why,” she said.

“Something medical?” he said. “I’m prying. Don’t answer if it’s annoying.”

“I was sterilized when I was younger.” His silence was pointed, and she said, “He didn’t know. He thought I was just plain barren. It made him feel noble to suffer in silence.”

Why was she telling this boy all of this? Because there were no stakes. Lotto was gone. The secret would hurt nobody. Plus, she liked the boy, wanted to give him something; the previous pilgrims had carried off almost everything else. She suspected he had ulterior motives. An article, a book, an exposé at some point. If he wrote about the sex, the rainstorm, she would come off as desperate or sad or desperately sad. It was all accurate. So be it.

“But why wouldn’t you tell him?” he said. Oh, the puppy, he sounded wounded on her husband’s behalf.

“Because nobody needs my genes in the world,” she said.

Land said, “But his genes. I mean, the kid might have been a genius, too.”

Mathilde pulled on the bathrobe and swept her hand through her short hair. She looked at herself in the mirror and admired the rosy flush. The rain pounded harder on the roof; she liked the sound, the sense of coziness of the gray and falling day outside.

“Lotto would have been a terrific father,” she said. “But the kids of geniuses are never geniuses.”

“True,” Land said.

She touched his face and he flinched, then leaned forward to rest his cheek in her hand. Little pet, she thought. “I want to make you dinner,” she said.

“I’d love dinner,” he said.

“And then I want you to fuck me again,” she said.

“I’d love to fuck you again,” he said, laughing.

At dawn, when she woke, the house had gone quiet and she knew that Land had left.

A shame. I could have kept him around for a little while, she thought. Used him as a pool boy. As human cardio machine. God grumbled at the door, having been banished. When Mathilde went out, the dog came in and flounced herself down on the bed.

In the kitchen, there was a fruit salad macerating in its juices. He’d made a pot of coffee, which was lukewarm now. In the blue bowl with the slowly ripening green tomatoes from the garden, the sweet boy had left a note in an envelope. Mathilde would leave it there for weeks before she opened it. Seeing it there, the white in the red in the blue, made her feel for the first time since her husband left her as if she had kind and gentle company in the house with her. Something hot in her began to cool and, in cooling, began to anneal.

—

MAKE ME HAPPY, Frankenstein’s monster pleaded with its maker, and I shall again be virtuous.

10

MATHILDE WAS SIXTEEN. She woke to find her uncle swaying over her; she had learned to sleep in a bed. He was saying, “Aurélie, this is important. Do not go downstairs,” and in the hollow after his words, she could hear men’s voices below, shouting, music. His face was expressionless but the color in his cheeks was high. Without anyone’s saying a thing, she’d begun to understand that her uncle was some kind of manager in a bad organization. He was often in Philadelphia. He hissed orders into a huge, clunky early version of a mobile phone, was inexplicably gone for weeks, and came back if not tan, then tanner. [Still apparent in him, the tiny boy, mewling in cold and hunger. It’s less delicious, this badness bred from survival.] He left, and she lay frozen for some time. The shouting now did not seem so joyous. She heard anger, fear. When she could move, she pulled the couch out from where it rested against the wall and brought the duvet and pillow behind it and in that place, the exact shape of her body, she fell asleep swiftly, as if held there. Nobody, as far as she knew, had come to her room in the night. Still, the air felt disturbed, as if she’d narrowly avoided something.

She crept like a mouse through her teenaged years. Flute and swimming and books, all the wordless arts. She made herself so small her uncle would forget her.

—

HER SENIOR YEAR, she opened the letter telling her she’d been accepted to the one school she’d applied to, early, for no other reason than that she’d loved the oddball essay questions in the application. How such small things can decide one’s fate. But the whistling conflagration of joy had ebbed to embers days later, when she understood she couldn’t pay. If she couldn’t pay, she couldn’t go. Simple as that.

She took a train to the city. Her life, she would later understand, would be scarred with them.

A Saturday express. Her heart sang with desperation in her rib cage. A newspaper spun slowly on the platform in the wind.

She wore the red dress her uncle had bought for her fourteenth birthday and the high heels that pinched savagely. She made a crown of her blond braids. In the mirror, she’d seen no beauty in her angles and strange lashes, in her grossly fat lips, but hoped others might. She would burn, later, with what she didn’t know. That she should have worn her bra, trimmed her pubic hair back to prepubescence, brought photographs. That such things as headshots even existed in the world.

A man had watched her climb into the car from his seat in the rear. He smiled at the way she moved her body as if it were new out of the box, at the dangerous jut to her chin. After some time, he came up the corridor and sat across from her, though the car was otherwise empty. She felt him looking at her and ignored him as long as she could, and when she looked up, he was there.

He laughed. He had an ugly mastiff’s face, all bulging eyes and jowl. He had the eyebrows of a jokester, peaked high, giving him an air of intimate mischief, as if he were about to whisper a punch line in her ear. Despite herself, she leaned forward. This would be his effect, a pleasant mirroring, a swiftly established accord. He was the quiet hit of every party; he never said a word, but everyone believed he was simpatico.

He looked at her, and she pretended to read her book, her head on fire. He leaned forward. He put his hands on her knees, the thumbs gentle on the skin of her inside thighs. He smelled delicious, like verbena and cordovan.

She looked up. “I’m only eighteen,” she said.

“All the better,” he said.

She stood and went shakily to the bathroom and sat there through the pulses of the train, holding herself with her arms, until the conductor said Penn Station. When she got off, she felt liberated — she was in the city! — and she wanted to run and laugh. But as she walked swiftly toward what she knew was her future, she looked up into the mirrored glass by a doughnut store and saw the man from the train ten feet behind her. He was unhurried. She felt the back of her heel go hot then blister and, on the street, a warm wash of relief when the blister burst, then the sting. She was too proud to stop.

She didn’t pause until she reached the building where the agency was. The guards, used to pretty, wobbly, underage girls, parted to let her in.

She was inside for hours. For hours, he sat in the café opposite, with a hardcover book and a lemonade, waiting.

When she came out, she felt deboned, her bottom lids red. Her braids had frizzed in the unseasonable heat. He followed her down the street, a plastic bag and the book in his hand, until her stride became a limp and he stepped in front of her and offered a coffee. She’d eaten nothing since dinner the night before. She put her hands on her hips, staring, then right-faced into a sandwich shop and ordered a cappuccino and a mozzarella panini. “Porca madonna,” he said. “Panino. It’s singular.”

She turned to the girl at the counter and said, “I’d like two. Panini. Two cappuccini.”

He chuckled and paid. She ate the sandwiches slowly, chewing thirty times with each bite. She looked everywhere but at him. She’d never had caffeine before and it filled her fingers with a kind of elation. She decided to drive the man off with her exigency and ordered an éclair and another cappuccino, but he paid without comment and watched her eat.

“You don’t eat?” she said.

“Not much,” he said. “I used to be a fat boy.”

Now she could see the sad, fat child in the mismatched jowls and thin shoulders, and felt something heavy in her shifting toward him.

“They said I needed to lose ten pounds,” she said.

“You’re perfect,” he said. “They can jump off a bridge. They said no?”

“They said I need to lose ten pounds and send them pictures and they’d start me out with catalog work. Build my way up.”

He considered her with a straw in the corner of his mouth. “But you were unhappy with that. Because you’re not a girl who starts small,” he said. “You are a young queen.”

“No,” she said. She fought the emotion rising to her face and mastered it. It had begun to rain outside, hard, thick spatters on the hot pavement. A low miasma rose from the ground, and the air shifted toward coolness.

She listened to the pounding of the rain as he leaned forward and took her foot in his hand and took off the shoe. He looked at the bleeding, jagged blister. He dabbed it with a paper napkin dipped in ice water and took from his plastic bag from the drugstore, which he’d visited while she was at the agency, a big box of bandages and a tube of ointment. When he was finished administering to her feet, he took out a pair of plastic shower sandals with massaging nubs.

“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.

—

SHE 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.

—

TWO 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.

—

THE 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.

Senior spring. Her whole life ahead of her. Almost too much brightness to look at directly. Something in Ariel had grown frantic. He took her to four-hour dinners, told her to meet him in the bathroom. She woke Sunday mornings to find him watching her. “Come work for me,” he said, thickly, once when she, on his cocaine, unspooled a full essay out of her brain about the genius of Rothko. “Work for me at the gallery and I’ll train you and we can take over New York.” “Maybe,” she said agreeably, thinking, Never. Thinking, Business. Soon, she promised herself. Soon she would be free at last.

11

SHE WAS ALONE for an afternoon. She came downstairs to find that God had chewed the kitchen rug, had left a mess of urine on the floor, was looking at her with a bellicose light in her eye. Mathilde showered, put on a white dress, let her hair drip the fabric wet. She put the dog into her crate, her toys and food in a plastic bag, put it all in the car. The dog screamed in the back, then settled.

She stood outside the general store in town until she saw a family she vaguely knew. The father was the man they’d hired to plow their driveway in winter, with a steer rustler’s face, maybe a little slow. The mother was the dental receptionist, a big woman with small ivory teeth. The children had gorgeous fawn eyes. Mathilde knelt to their level, and said, “I want to give you my dog.”

The boy sucked three fingers, looked at God, nodded. The girl whispered, “I can see your boobies.”

“Mrs. Satterwhite?” the mother said. Her eyes flicked over Mathilde; and by this, Mathilde knew she was dressed inappropriately. Ivory dress, designer. She hadn’t been thinking. Mathilde put the dog in the husband’s arms. “Her name is God,” she said. The woman gasped, then said, “Mrs. Satterwhite!” but Mathilde was walking to her car. “Hush, Donna,” she heard the man say. “Let the poor lady be.” She drove home. The house echoed, empty. Mathilde had been liberated. She had nothing to worry about now.

—

SO LONG AGO, it was. That day the light had fallen from the sky as if through green blown glass.

Her hair had been long then, sun-shot blond. Skinny legs crossed, reading The Moonstone. She bit her cuticle to blood and thought of her boyfriend, a love one week tender, and the world was made bright with him. Lotto, said the train as it came: Lotto-Lotto-Lotto.

The short, greasy boy watching her from the bench was invisible to her because she had her book; she had her joy. To be fair, she hadn’t met Chollie yet. Since Mathilde and Lotto had found each other, Lotto had spent every spare moment with her; had ceded his dorm room to his childhood friend, who was illegally auditing classes, not an actual student at the school. Lotto had time for nothing but Mathilde, rowing, and classes.

But Chollie knew of her. He was there at the party when Lotto looked up and saw Mathilde and she saw him; when Lotto crushed a crowd of people to get to her. It had been only a week. It couldn’t be serious yet, Chollie had believed. She was pretty, if you were into stick figures, but he figured Lotto would never tie himself to one pussy at twenty-two, with his whole life of glorious fuckery ahead of him. Chollie was sure that if Lotto had been perfectly handsome he would never have the success he did. His bad skin, his big forehead, the slightly bulbous nose moderated what was an almost girlishly pretty face into something sexy.

And then, just the day before, he’d caught sight of Lotto and Mathilde together under the confetti of an overblown cherry tree, and he felt the air knocked out of his chest. Look at them together. The height of them, the shine on them. Her pale and wounded face, a face that had watched and never smiled now never stopped smiling. It was as if she’d lived all her life in the chilly shadows and someone had led her out into the sun. And look at him. All his restless energy focused tightly on her. She sharpened something that threatened to go diffuse in him. He watched her lips as she spoke, and took her chin gently between his fingers and kissed her with his long lashes closed, even while she was speaking, so that her mouth moved and she laughed into his kiss. Chollie knew immediately that it was correct, that they were in very deep. Whatever was between them was explosive, made even the professors gape as they passed by. The threat of Mathilde, Chollie had understood then, was real. He, striver, knew another striver when he saw one. He who’d had no home had found a home in Lotto; and she had usurped even this.

[The Saturday after this one in the train station, Chollie would be napping in Lotto’s bed, hidden under a heap of clothes, and Lotto would come in, smiling so broadly that Chollie would stay silent when he could have spoken and made his presence known. Lotto, ecstatic, would pick up the phone and call his fat hog of a mother in Florida, who had once threatened to castrate Chollie years ago. There would be banter. Weird relationship, that one. And then Lotto would tell his mother he was married. Married! But they were babies. Chollie was shocked cold, missing much of the conversation, until Lotto left again. It couldn’t be true. He knew it was true. After some time had passed, he had wept bitterly, poor Chollie, under his heap of clothes.]

But on this day, before they were married, there was still time to save his Lotto from this girl. So here he was. He climbed onto the train behind Mathilde, sat behind her. A lock of her hair escaped the crevasse between seat backs, and he sniffed it. Rosemary.

She got off at Penn Station and he followed. Up from the underground stink to heat and light. She went toward a black town car, and the chauffeur opened the door and she was swallowed up. Midday in crowded Midtown, Chollie kept up on foot, though he was quickly sweating and his breastlets were heaving with effort. When the car paused before an Art Deco building, she got out and went in.

The doorman was a silverback gorilla in a costume, some kind of Staten Island accent: bluntness would be key. Chollie said, “Who was that blond?” The doorman shrugged. Chollie took out a ten and gave it to him. The doorman said, “Girlfriend of 4-B.” Chollie looked at him but the doorman put out his hand and Chollie gave him all he had, which was a joint. The man grinned and said, “She been coming for too many years for a girl so young, you dig me? He’s some kind of art dealer. Name’s Ariel English.” Chollie waited, but the man said mildly, “That’s all you get for a little bud, little bud.”

Later, Chollie sat waiting in the window of the diner across the street. He watched. His sweaty shirt dried, and the waitress grew tired of asking if he wanted to order and just slopped coffee into his mug and went away.

When the shadows engulfed the building across the street, he almost gave up, headed back to his squat in academia. There were options. He’d look in the phone book for galleries. He’d research. But then the doorman straightened and opened the door crisply, and out came a chimera, a man with a jowly face and a body like a wisp of smoke poured into a suit. Wealth in the way he moved, his sleek grooming. Behind him, there was an animated mannequin. It took Chollie a moment to recognize Mathilde. Her heels were tall, her schoolgirl’s skirt cut nearly to the crotch, her hair swept high, far too much makeup. [She had refused to extend the terms of the arrangement beyond four years; in pique, Ariel had dressed her, knowing her, knowing how to cut.] Her face was bare of that constant low-level smile that she wore, both shield and magnet. Blank, it was something like an abandoned building. She walked as if unaware of the world around her, that her nipples were visible under her gauzy shirt.

They crossed the street, and there was dread in Chollie when he saw that they were coming into the diner toward him.

They sat in a corner booth. The man ordered for both — egg-white Greek omelet, him, chocolate milkshake, her. He watched their upside-down bodies in the chrome napkin dispenser. She ate nothing, gazed at air. Chollie saw the man whispering in her ear, saw his hand disappear in the darkness between her legs. She let it, passive. [On the surface; beneath, the controlled burn.]

Chollie was overwhelmed. He felt a swift spinning in him. Fury for Lotto; fear of losing what he, Chollie, had worked so hard to keep. He stood in agitation and went back on the train drawn through the dusk and pressed his burning face against the cool glass and, at last home at Vassar, collapsed for a brief nap into Lotto’s bed to plan how to tell him about his new girl, who she secretly was. A whore. But he fell asleep. He woke to laughter in the common room, the sound of a television. Past midnight on the flashing clock.

He came out and almost fell down with astonishment. The only explanation: Mathilde must have a twin. He’d followed the wrong girl to the city. There was a girl in Lotto’s lap in sweatpants and a messy ponytail, laughing at something he was whispering in her ear. She was so different from what he’d seen that he knew he was wrong in having seen it. A dream? A half-eaten popover with apple butter was on the table, and Chollie almost lurched for it, he was so hungry.

“Hey,” Lotto bellowed. “Chollie! You haven’t met my”—he laughed—“my Mathilde. My girl I’m madly in love with. Mathilde, this is Chollie, my oldest friend.”

“Oh!” she said, and leapt up and moved toward Chollie, towering over him. “I’m so happy to meet you,” she said. “I’ve heard all the stories.” She paused then hugged him, and she smelled of plain Ivory soap and, aha, rosemary shampoo.

Many years later, when the gardener would try to grow rosemary on the patio of the penthouse, Chollie would toss the plants thirty stories to the sidewalk below and watch them explode in mushroom clouds of dirt.

“You,” he said. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Hard to miss. Six feet of perfect, legs to the moon,” Lotto said.

“No,” Chollie said. “Today. On a train to the city. I’m sure it was you.”

The slightest of hesitations, then Lotto said, “Must’ve been some other stunner. She was writing her French final in the computer room all day. Right, M.?”

How narrow Mathilde’s eyes had gone when she laughed. Chollie felt their coldness on him. “All morning, yeah,” she said. “But I was done fast. It was only a ten-pager. When you were at your rowing lunch, I went off to the city to the Met. We have to do an ekphrastic poem for my writing class and I didn’t want to do the same dumb Monet water lily from the campus museum that everyone else is doing. I just got back, actually. Thank you for reminding me!” she said to Chollie. “I bought Lotto something at the gift shop.”

She went to her overlarge purse and pulled out a book. It had a Chagall painting on the cover, Chollie would see later, when he stole it. Mathilde had also stolen it, just as she left Ariel’s apartment for the very last time. She’d gotten her last check. Now she was free to sleep with Lotto.

“Winged Cupid Painted Blind,” Lotto read. “Art Inspired by Shakespeare. Oh,” he said, kissing her chin. “It’s perfect.”

She looked at Chollie. Another glimmer through the dark. This time, perhaps not so benign.

Fine, Chollie thought. You’ll see how well I can wait. When you’re least expecting it, I will explode your life. [Only fair; she had exploded his.] A plan began to itch at the back of his brain. He smiled at her and saw himself reflected in the darkened window. He liked how he looked so different in reflection: so much thinner, paler, so much more blurred than he was in life.

12

HER HUSBAND HADN’T WOKEN HER with a mug of coffee. Every day they had lived under the same roof, he had woken her with a cup of milky coffee. Something was wrong. She opened her eyes to full morning. Inside her, an abyss. She couldn’t see all the way to its black bottom.

She dawdled. Washed her face. Talked to the dog, who ran from Mathilde to the door frantically. Opened the curtains to find the world deep in midwinter gloom. Stared down the stairwell for a long time.

Barrel of a gun, she thought.

He’s left me, she thought. I knew from the moment I saw him that this day would come.

She came down the dim steps and he wasn’t in the kitchen. She whispered to calm herself as she climbed up to his study in the attic. A crumble of relief when she came in the door and saw him sitting at his desk. His head was down. He must have worked all night and fallen asleep. She looked at him, the leonine hair with the gray temples, the magnificent forehead, the soft full lips.

But when she touched him, his skin was lukewarm. His eyes were open, empty as mirrors. He was not resting there, not at all.

She slid behind him in the chair and pressed herself to him, tailbone to nape. She put her hands up his shirt, feeling the thin rubber of his belly flab. Her finger went into his navel to the second knuckle. She put her hands down his pajama pants and his boxer briefs, where it was still warm. The wool of pubic hair. The satin head of him, humble in her palm.

For a long time, she held him. She felt the heat of him leave. She stood only when she could no longer recognize his body, like a word repeated until it has lost all meaning.

13

MATHILDE WAS AMBUSHED in the pool by Chollie. She had been six months and one week without her husband.

Chollie left his car a mile up the road and hoofed it so she couldn’t hear him and flee to the pool house and hide.

She had eschewed a bikini that morning for a full-body browning. Who was she going to scandalize, the crows? Her sere, unloved body of a widow. But here Chollie was at the edge of the pool, groaning. She peered at him through her sunglasses and wiped her cheeks with her palms.

Little goblin-man. Once he’d tried to push her into a bathroom at a party and she’d had to knee him in the nads to get him away from her.

“Fuck, Chollie,” she said. She paddled to the side of the pool and climbed out. “I can’t have a little solitude? Hand me that towel,” she said. He did, if with excruciating slowness.

“There’s solitude and then there’s suicide,” he said. “You look like a chemo patient with that hair. Or lack thereof.”

“Why are you here?” she said.

“Everyone’s worried. I’ve gotten ten calls in the past week alone. Danica thinks you’re going to do yourself in.”

“Well, now you can go home and report that I’m alive,” she said.

“So I see,” he said, grinning. “Vividly. In the flesh. I’m too hungry to drive. Feed me.”

She sighed. “The only thing I have is ice cream,” she said. “And it’s pistachio.”

He followed her into the kitchen, and while she scooped the ice cream for him, he reached for the letter perched in its blue bowl of tomatoes. He was always grabby, looking at things that didn’t concern him. She once found him in her office, reading the strange, spiky pieces of fiction she wrote on scraps.

“Hands off,” she said now. “Not for you.”

They went out to sit on the warm stones of the veranda while Chollie ate.

“It appears that I have a long history of sneaking up on you,” Chollie said. He belched and drove the spoon into the ground.

She thought of his hands on her forearms at some long-ago party, the need in his face. The tongue he’d once shoved into her ear. “Yes. We all know you’re a pervert,” she said.

“No. I mean, yes, but no, I’m thinking of something else. Did you know I followed you once? Back at Vassar. I hadn’t met you yet. You and Lotto had just gotten together and I knew there was something sketchy about you. So I followed you to the city.”

Mathilde went still.

“Strange to see the new girlfriend of my best friend getting into some limo. Don’t know if you remember, but I was fit back then, and I kept up. You got out and went into an apartment. So I sat in a diner across the way. You remember that diner.”

“Couldn’t forget,” she said. “And you were fat back then. You’ve never been fit, Choll.”

“Ha. Anyway, you came out in this awful outfit. See-through shirt, miniskirt like a Band-Aid. And you’re with this weird flabby-faced man who put his hands up your skirt. And I think, Huh. My buddy Lotto is the best person on the planet. Loyal as shit and kind, and lets me crash with him and is more my family than my family, just brilliant, this real fucking genius, though I don’t really think anybody knew that back then, but there was something in him. Charisma. Gentleness, a kind of acceptance of people for who they are. That’s rare, you know? Someone who never, never judges. Most people have a nasty interior monologue going on at all times, not Lotto. He’d rather think kindly of you. Easier that way. And he was so good to me. My family was a bunch of sadistic assholes, and I quit high school halfway through senior year so I could get away, and the only person on the planet who showed me consistent kindness was Lotto. From the time I was seventeen, Lotto was my home. So, anyway, here’s this astounding person, best person I ever knew, and his girlfriend is sneaking off to New York to fuck some old dude? So I go home, all ready to tell my best friend his girl is sleeping around, because what kind of person would lead Lotto on like that? I mean, the kind of person who’d hang a puppy for fun. The kind of girl who’d marry him for the money. But somehow you beat me back to the dorm. Or I fell asleep. I don’t remember. But I came out, and then I saw the way you and he were together and I knew I couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Because I saw then that he was cooked. He was so deep into you that if I said anything it’d be me to get the boot, not you.”

She was squinting at a troop of ants on the hot gray stone.

He waited, but she wouldn’t say anything, so he said, “So I thought I’d sit back and wait my time and then drive the knife in when nobody was expecting it.”

“Twenty-four years. And he died before you could,” she said softly. “Too bad. Tragedy.”

“Wrong,” he said.

She looked at him, sweating, pink. The last month before Lotto died returned to her. His sullenness, his monosyllables. The way he looked flinchingly in her direction. She searched for the last time they had seen Chollie together before Lotto died. And suddenly she saw the night in Ariel’s gallery, where he’d dragged her for Natalie’s posthumous opening, huge metallic sculptures with screaming faces in them, the place turned into a fairy-tale forest, all shadowy and dark. Perhaps, she had told herself, it had been so long, perhaps there was no more danger in Ariel. But some pretty little waiter-boy spilled red wine all over her silk dress and she hurried off to blot it away, and when she came back, her husband had been replaced by a robot that looked like him, a man who didn’t smile when he looked at her, who spoke to her glancingly, who, later, seethed. Somewhere between the moment he kissed her gently on the forehead, before the wineglass tipped off the tray and, with terrible slowness, spilled on her skirt, and the moment she returned, Chollie had told him about her arrangement with Ariel. The world flickered before her.

He saw the understanding and laughed, and said, “My dick’s on the table, baby. I play a long game.”

“Why?” she said.

“You took him,” he said, and his voice came out too raspy, too quick. He shuffled his glasses on his nose, folded his hands. “He was the only person I had and you took him. But also you’re a bad person who never deserved him.”

“I meant,” she said, “why now? Why not ten years ago? Why not twenty years from now?”

“We both know how much our old friend loved vagina. Any and all. And frankly, dear, I always knew that someday yours would be getting pretty old. All flabby and loose. Menopause setting in soon. And poor Lotto had always longed for a kid of his own. With you out of the way, he could have had the kid he wanted. And we all wanted to give him what he wanted. Didn’t we.”

She did not trust herself not to kill him with the spoon. She stood and came inside and locked the door behind her.

For hours after she’d watched Chollie walk down the gravel drive, Mathilde sat in the kitchen. Night fell and she didn’t turn on the lights. For dinner, she opened a bottle of gift wine from some producer of Lotto’s play years ago, wildly expensive and smoky and lingering on her tongue. When the bottle was finished, she stood and went all the way up to her husband’s studio at the top of the house. His jade plant, so long neglected, had blackened. His books were splayed, wide-winged around the room, his papers were still spread on the desk.

She sat on the leather chair and sank into the divot made by long years under her husband’s weight. She rested her head on the wall behind her, where it was shiny from his head. She looked at the window where he’d dreamt for so many hours, lost in his imaginings, and was filled with a kind of dark tingle. She felt enormous, the size of the house, crowned with the moon, wind in her ears.

[Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.]

This one would be for Lotto. “This will be fun,” she said aloud to the empty house.

14

GRADUATION DAY. Hills purple, sun astringent. The processional went too fast, so everyone was out of breath and laughing. Swift glimpse of Chollie’s fat face squeezed among the bystanders, unsmiling. Mathilde hadn’t bothered to tell her uncle she was graduating. She would have liked to see the driver, but she didn’t know his real name. She hadn’t spoken to Ariel since the last trip to the city, just after her final rent check went through, the contract fulfilled. Nobody was here to see her. Well. She hadn’t expected anyone.

They poured into the quad and endured the long speeches and some comedian she couldn’t listen to because Lotto was in the row ahead of her and she stared at the pink curl of his ear, wanting to put it in her mouth and suck. She walked across the stage to polite applause. He walked across the stage to a roar. “Terrible to be so popular,” she said, later, after the confetti of caps and they found each other, kissed.

The quickie in his dorm room, before he packed up. Her tailbone on the hard oak desk, the shushing laughter when there was a knock on the door. “Just about to take a shower!” he called out. “Be out in a sex.”

“What?” It was his baby sister, Rachel, her voice at knob level in the hall.

“Oh, shoot,” he whispered. “Just a second,” he shouted, blushing, and Mathilde bit his shoulder to keep from laughing.

When Rachel came in, Lotto was whooping at the cold water in the shower, and Mathilde was on her knees, packing his shoes into a cardboard box. “Hello!” she said to the little girl, who was, poor thing, nothing close to as stunning as her brother. Long skinny nose, tiny jaw, close eyes, dun-colored hair, taut as a guitar string. How old? Nine or so. She stood in her pretty, frilly dress, goggling, and said with a gasp, “Oh! You’re so pretty.”

“I like you already,” Mathilde said, and she stood and walked over and bent and gave the girl a kiss on the cheek. And then Rachel saw her brother coming out of the bathroom, steam rolling off his shoulders, in a towel, and ran over to hug him around the waist, and he hooted, and said, “Rachel! Rachey-ray!”

Behind Rachel came Aunt Sallie, ferret-faced, of the same gene pool as the little girl. “Oh, my,” Sallie said, stopping short on beholding Mathilde. A blush rose out of her high lace neckline. “You must be my nephew’s girl. We were wondering who’d be special enough to pin him down, and now I see. Nice to meet you, you can call me Sallie.”

Lotto was looking at the door, his face darkening. “Is Muvva in the restroom?” he said. “She still making her way up the steps?” Clear as a windowpane: get his mother and wife in the same room, and they’d fall in love, he was thinking. Oh, sweet boy.

Mathilde shored her shoulders, jutted her chin, waiting for Antoinette to enter, the glance exchanged, the situating. She had gotten a note that morning in her campus mailbox. Don’t think, it said, that I don’t see you. Unsigned, but smelling of Antoinette’s roses. Mathilde had saved it in a shoe box that, one day, would be full of such notes.

But Sallie said, “Nope. Sorry, baby boy. She sent her regards. She gave me this to give you,” and she handed over an envelope, the check in it visible against the light of the window, the handwriting Sallie’s, not his mother’s.

“Oh,” Lotto said.

“She loves you,” Sallie said.

“Sure,” Lotto said, and turned away.

What Lotto couldn’t pack into his station wagon, he put out for the scavengers to pluck. He owned so little; Mathilde would always love his indifference to things. After he’d carried everything up to her apartment to keep there the last week of her lease, they went off to an early dinner with Sallie and Rachel.

Mathilde sipped her wine to hide her emotion. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat as a part of a family, let alone in such a peaceful and decorous place as this quiet, fern-lined room, with its white cloths and brass chandeliers, the happy graduates and their boozing parents. On their side of the table, Lotto and Sallie were outstorytelling each other, cackling.

“You thought I didn’t know what you were up to with that caretaker’s whelp in the old henhouse when you were little?” she was saying, and his face was pink and shining with pleasure. “All that poking and prodding and guilty sweaty pumpkin heads when you came out? Oh, sweetmeat, you forget I can see clear through walls.” Then she made a face as if remembering Rachel, but Rachel was paying her no mind. She was staring at Mathilde, blinking so rapidly Mathilde worried for her eyelids.

“I like your necklace,” the girl whispered.

Mathilde put her hand up to her neck, touched it. It was gold, with a large emerald, which Ariel had given her last Christmas. The green was meant to go with her eyes; but her eyes were changeable. She took it off her neck and put it on Rachel’s. “It’s yours,” she said.

Later, she would think of this gift, so impulsive, the ten-thousand-dollar necklace to a little girl, and feel warmed by it, even during their decade in the underground apartment in Greenwich Village, even when Mathilde didn’t eat lunch so they could pay for phone service. It was cheap to buy a lifetime of friendship.

The little girl’s eyes went wide, and she took the emerald in her fist and nestled her head into Mathilde’s side.

When Mathilde looked up, she went still. At the next table sat Ariel. He was looking at her over his untouched salad, his mouth smiling but his eyes as cold as scales.

She wouldn’t look away. She let her face go slack and stared back until Ariel motioned to the waiter. He murmured something and the waiter hurried off.

“You’ve got goose bumps,” Rachel said, touching Mathilde’s arm; and then the waiter was standing too close to Mathilde and opening up a bottle of extremely nice champagne, to which Sallie snapped, “I didn’t order this,” and the waiter said placatingly, “I know, I know. It’s a gift from an admirer. May I?”

“How nice! Please do. Lotto has a ton of admirers,” Mathilde said. “His Hamlet made him a celebrity in these parts. He’s brilliant.”

“Oh, I know,” said Sallie. And Lotto beamed with pleasure, preening, eyes darting around to see which kind soul in the room could have sent along the champagne, the force of his delight such that wherever his eyes landed, the recipients of the gaze would look up out of their food and conversation, and a startled expression would come over their face, a flush, and nearly everyone began grinning back, so that, on this spangled early evening with the sun shining through the windows in gold streams and the treetops rustling in the wind and the streets full of congregating relieved people, Lotto sparked upwellings of inexplicable glee in dozens of chests, lightening the already buoyant mood of the room in one swift wave. Animal magnetism is real; it spreads through bodily convection. Even Ariel smiled back. The stunned grins stayed on the faces of some of the people, an expression of speculation growing, hoping he would look at them again or wondering who he was, because on this day and in this world, he was Someone.

“While we have champagne,” Mathilde said, watching the tiny bubbles flea-jump out the top of her glass, “Lotto and I have an announcement to make.”

Lotto looked across the table at Mathilde, blinked, then grinned and turned to his aunt and his sister. “I’m sorry Muvva isn’t here to witness this. But I guess we can’t hold it in any longer. We’re married,” he said. And he kissed Mathilde’s hand. She looked at him. Waves of heat built in her, one atop another. She would do anything in the world for this man.

In the ensuing flutter and exclamations, the tables closest breaking out into applause, eavesdroppers all, Rachel bursting into happy tears, Sallie fluttering her hands near her face though it was evident she’d already known the news, Mathilde looked for a long moment at Ariel. But he had stood and left the dining room, his slim navy back winking out the door. She was shed of him. For good, she thought. There was a relief like a cold wind blowing through her. She downed her glass and sneezed.

—

A WEEK AFTER GRADUATION, Mathilde was looking up through the casement windows into the courtyard garden where the Japanese maple waggled its leaves in the wind like tiny hands.

Already she knew it. This apartment would be her first real harbor in so many years adrift. She was twenty-two. She was so terribly tired. Here, at last, she could rest.

She could feel Lotto to her right behind her shoulder, emanating Lottoness. In a moment, she knew, he’d turn and crack a joke and the realtor would laugh and a warmth would come into her voice for the first time; despite herself, despite knowing better than to invest in such young and penniless people, she would take an interest in them. She would deliver a quiche on the day they moved in; she would stop by when she was in the neighborhood and bring them gifts of candy. Oh, Lotto, Mathilde thought with loving despair. Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back.

Mathilde smelled the beeswax on the floor. She heard the neighbor’s cat mewling in the hallway. The soft scrape of leaf against sky. It filled her, the kindness of this place.

She had to push down the tiny loud thing in her that willed her to say no, to walk away. She deserved none of this. She could still explode it all by shaking her head sadly, saying they should continue to look. But then the problem of Lotto would remain. He had become, after all, her home.

On cue: the joke, the laugh. Mathilde turned. Her husband — god, my god, hers, for life — was smiling. He lifted his hands and cupped her jaw and traced her eyebrows with his thumbs. “I think she likes it,” he said, and Mathilde nodded, unable to speak.

They could have lived on happiness alone, in their glamorous poverty, in their apartment. They were as slender as fauns with lack; their apartment was spacious with it. Rachel’s gift — the girl’s saved-up allowance — was gone in three parties and as many months’ rent and groceries. Happiness feeds but doesn’t nourish. She tried bartending, canvassing for the Sierra Club, failing at both. The lights went out; they lit candles she’d stolen from a restaurant’s alfresco tables and went to bed at eight PM. They held potlucks with their friends so they could eat as much as they wanted, and nobody minded if they kept the leftovers. In October, they had thirty-four cents in their checking account and Mathilde walked into Ariel’s gallery.

He was looking at a vast green painting on the wall at the end of the room. He looked at her when she said, “Ariel,” but he didn’t move.

The receptionist was new, skinny, brunette, bored. Harvard, for sure. That gleam of entitlement, the length and gloss of hair. This would end up being Luanne. “Have an appointment?” she said.

“No,” Mathilde said.

Ariel folded his arms, waiting.

“I need a job,” she called to him across the expanse.

“There are no openings,” the receptionist said. “Sorry!”

For a long moment, Mathilde looked at Ariel, until the receptionist said very sharply, “Excuse me. This is a private business. You need to leave. Excuse me.”

“You are excused,” Mathilde said.

“Luanne, please go get three cappuccini,” Ariel said.

Mathilde sighed: cappuccini. The girl slammed the door when she went out.

“Come here,” Ariel said. Mathilde’s fight with herself was not visible as she neared. “Mathilde,” he said softly, “in what world could I possibly owe you a job?”

“You owe me nothing at all,” she said. “I agree.”

“How can you ask me for anything after your behavior?”

“Behavior?” she said.

“Ingratitude, then,” he said.

“Ariel, I was never ungrateful. I’d fulfilled the contract. As you always say, it was business.”

“Business,” he said. His face had grown red. His eyebrows were spiked high. “You married this Lancelot person two weeks before you graduated. I can only assume a conjugal relation. That’s not fulfilling the contract.”

“I met you in April of my senior year in high school,” she said. “If you’re counting, I extended the contract by two weeks.”

They smiled at each other. He closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them, they were moist. “I know it was business. But you hurt my feelings very much,” he said. “I was not unkind to you. To walk away without keeping in touch, that surprised me, Mathilde.”

“Business,” she said again.

He looked her up and down. He’d bought these beautiful shoes she was wearing, worn at the toe. He’d bought the black suit. Her hair had not been cut since summer. He narrowed his eyes, cocked his head to the side. “You’re skinny. You need the money. I understand. All you have to do is beg,” he said softly.

“I don’t beg,” she said.

He laughed and the sullen receptionist clanged back in with a tray of cappuccinos in her hand and Ariel said, sotto voce, “You are lucky I feel fondness for you, Mathilde.” Louder, he said, “Luanne, meet Mathilde. She’ll be joining us here tomorrow morning.”

“Oh. Goody,” Luanne said, and fell back into her seat. She watched them carefully, sensing something.

“The gallery’s employee,” Mathilde said, as they walked slowly up to the front. “Not yours. I’m off-limits.”

Ariel looked at her, and she, who’d been with him so long, could see him thinking, We’ll see.

“Touch me,” she said, “I walk. That’s a promise.”

—

LATER, WHEN SHE WAS SIXTY and Ariel seventy-three, she’d hear he was sick. From where the news came, she couldn’t say. The sky would speak it in her ear, maybe. The air itself. She’d know only that he had pancreatic cancer. Swift and ferocious. For two weeks she perseverated, and at last she went to see him.

He was on a hospital bed on the deck outside his apartment. All copper and topiary and view. She held her eyes wide open and breathed. He was a droop of flesh with bones in it.

“I like,” he rasped, “to see the birds.” She looked up. No birds.

“Hold my hand,” he said. She considered the hand but did not. He moved his head toward her. The flesh slid on the jaw.

She waited. She smiled at him. Buildings were sun-shocked in the corners of her eyes.

“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She won’t be forced.”

“Correct,” she said. But she thought, Oh, you murderous girl, hello. I haven’t seen you for so long.

“Please,” he said. “Mathilde. Take the cold hand of a dying man.”

And then she took his hand and pressed it to her chest with both of hers and held it there. What didn’t need to be said stayed unspoken. He fell asleep and the nurse came out on angry tiptoes. Mathilde went into the apartment, sterile and tasteful, and didn’t linger at the pictures she once knew too well for the ferocity with which she stared at them, counting the minutes until she could leave. Later, she walked through the cold shadows and blaze of concentrated afternoon light that poured between the buildings, and she couldn’t stop; she could barely breathe; it felt too good to be on those coltish terrified legs once more, not to know, once more, where she was going.

15

THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR her attorney had hired was not what Mathilde had expected. Not the weary hard-boiled whiskey-barrel type. Not the soft-haired British-grandmother type. Reading had infected Mathilde, she saw of herself, amused. Too much Miss Marple and Philip Marlowe. This girl was young, nose like a hatchet, shaggy peroxided hair. An ample display of bosoms, with a dolphin over the top curve of a breast, as if it were leaping into her décolletage. Huge earrings. She was all abubble on the surface with a watchfulness beneath.

“Ugh,” Mathilde had said out loud, when they shook hands. She hadn’t meant to. She’d been left too long alone, had neglected the upkeep of niceties. It was two days after Chollie ambushed her naked in the pool. They were meeting in the courtyard of a Brooklyn coffee roastery and the wind was in the trees overhead.

But the girl hadn’t taken offense; she laughed. Now she opened the folder with Chollie’s photograph, address, phone number, all the details Mathilde could think of to tell her on the phone.

“I don’t know how far you’ve gotten in your research,” Mathilde said. “He was the one who started the Charles Watson Fund. You know, the investment brokerage firm. I don’t know if you know that yet. About twenty years ago, he started it when he was just a kid. Total Ponzi scheme, I’m pretty sure.”

The girl looked up, spark of interest in her face. “You invest?” she said. “Is that what this is?”

“I’m not a fucking moron,” Mathilde said.

The girl blinked and sat back. Mathilde said, “Anyway. Ponzi scheme is the way to go, and I need proof of it, but I also need more. Personal stuff. The worst you can get. You meet the guy for three seconds, and you know he has a closet full of skeletons. Possibly literal ones. He’s a fat shithead puckered-asshole sniffer and I want to flay him alive.” She smiled sunnily.

The girl considered Mathilde. She said, “I’m good enough that I can pick and choose my cases, you know.”

“Glad to hear it,” Mathilde said. “I don’t hire ninnies.”

“My only hesitation about yours is that it seems like a personal vendetta,” the girl said. “And those get sticky.”

“Oh, well. Murder’s too easy,” Mathilde said.

The girl smiled, and said, “I like a bit of spunk in a lady.”

“But I’m no lady,” Mathilde said, already tired of this strange flirtation, drinking her coffee down so that she could go.

Mathilde stood, and the girl said, “Wait.” She pulled the arms of her shirt through the sleeves and turned it around so the low collar was in the back, now crisp-looking, professional. She pulled off her shaggy wig to show brown hair, cut boyishly short. She took off the earrings, the false eyelashes. She was a different person, severe and sharp. She looked like the only female grad student at a math department mixer.

“That was some Bond-level disguisecraft,” Mathilde said. “Hilarious. I bet it usually seals the deal for you.”

“Usually,” the investigator said. She seemed abashed.

“And the boob dolphin?” Mathilde said.

“I had a stupid youth,” the girl said.

“We have all had stupid youths,” said Mathilde. “I find them delicious.” They smiled at each other across the table freckled with pollen. “All right. You’ll do,” Mathilde said.

“Honey, I’ll more than do,” the girl said, and leaned forward and touched Mathilde’s hand just long enough to make her meaning clear.

Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself,

And so shall starve with feeding.

Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She — steely, controlling — is far more interesting than Coriolanus.

Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.

16

THE CLOUDS HAD DESCENDED, though the day through the window gleamed with sunlight.

She was new to her Internet company. It was a dating site that would later be sold for a billion. She’d been at the gallery for three years; every morning she would take a breath on the sidewalk, shut her eyes, steel herself to walk in. All day, she’d feel Ariel looking at her. She did her job. She took care of the artists, calming them, sending them birthday gifts. “My prodigy,” Ariel would say, introducing her. “One day Mathilde will run the show.” Luanne’s face pinched every time he said so. And the day came when a jittery artist flew in from Santa Fe, and Ariel and he went out for a long dinner, and when they came back, Mathilde was still in the dark in the back office, writing catalog copy for an exhibit. She looked up, froze. Ariel was in the door, watching her. He came close, closer. He put his hands on her shoulders and began massaging. He pressed himself to her back. After so long waiting for the end, she was obscurely disappointed in his lapse of taste: an unexpectedly gross gesture, frottage. She stood, and said, “I’m done,” and walked past Luanne, who’d been watching from the front, and took all her sick leave at once and found a new job in days without ever telling Ariel she was leaving the gallery for good.

But this morning, Mathilde could not keep her eyes on her work. She begged off in her boss’s office, and he watched her go with his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, his mouth in a sour twist.

In the park, the maple leaves had a sheen to them, as if gilded at the vein. She walked so far, was so lost, that when she came home her knees felt jellied. There was a bitterness on the back of her tongue. She took a stick from the twenty-pack she kept, in her terror, beneath the towels. Pissed on it. Waited. Drank an entire Nalgene of water. Did it again and again and again, and every time the patient stick told her yes. Plus sign. You’re cooked! She shoved the wands into a bag, put the bag as deep in the trashcan as she could.

She heard Lotto come in and ran her eyes under cold water. “Hey, baby,” she called out. “How was your day?” He clattered around, talking about an audition, some mean little bit in a commercial, he didn’t even want it, it was humiliating, but he saw that boy from that television show in the late seventies, the one with the cowlick and weird ears, remember? She dried her face, finger-brushed her hair, practiced her smile until it wasn’t so ferocious. She came out, still in her coat, and said, “I’m just off to pick up a pizza,” and he said, “Mediterranean?” And she said, “Yup,” and he said, “I adore you with all the marrow in my bones.” “Me, too,” she said, with her back turned.

She closed their front door and sank down on the steps that led to the lady upstairs, lay back, her arms crossed above her eyes because what was she going to do, what was she going to do?

Mathilde became aware of a strong smell of feet. She saw on the steps beside her face a pair of battered embroidered slippers held together with string.

Bette, the upstairs neighbor, gloomed down at Mathilde. “Come along,” she said, in her prim British way.

Numb, Mathilde followed the old woman up the stairs. A cat pounced at her like a tiny clown. Apartment painstakingly clean, midcentury modern, Mathilde saw with surprise. Walls a high-gloss white. Bouquet of magnolia leaves on a table, deep green shine with a luscious brown underneath. On the mantel, three burgundy chrysanthemums burned. None of this was expected.

“Sit,” Bette said. Mathilde sat. Bette shuffled away.

Presently, the old lady came back. A cup of hot chamomile, a LU Petit Écolier Chocolat Noir. Mathilde tasted it, returning to a schoolyard, light through leaves on the dust, snap of a new cartouche in her pen.

“I can’t blame you. I never wanted a child, either,” the old woman said, looking at Mathilde down her long nose. There were crumbs on her lips.

Mathilde blinked.

“In my day, we didn’t know anything. Didn’t live in a time when there was any choice. I douched with Lysol, you see. Such ignorance. When it was my time, there was a lady over the stationery store with a thin-bladed knife. Terrible. I wanted to die. Could have, easy. Instead, I got the gift of barrenness.”

“Christ,” Mathilde said. “Have I been speaking aloud to myself?”

“No,” Bette said.

“But how did you know?” Mathilde said. “I barely know myself.”

“It’s my superpower,” Bette said. “I see it in the way a woman carries herself. Many times I have gotten myself in trouble by mentioning it when it was an unpleasant surprise. Been clear to me in your case for about two weeks.”

They sat there in the long afternoon. Mathilde watched the chrysanthemums and remembered to drink her tea only when it was lukewarm.

“Forgive me,” Bette said. “It must be said that from my viewpoint, at least, a child wouldn’t be the worst thing. You have a husband who adores you, a job, a place to live. You seem to be almost thirty, old enough. A child in this house wouldn’t be the worst thing. I should like to watch over a baby once in a while, teach it the nursery rhymes of my Scottish granny. Eenity feenity, fickety feg. Or, no, As eh gaed up a field o neeps, eh? Spoil it rotten with biscuits. When it could eat biscuits, of course. Not the worst thing.”

“It would be the worst thing,” Mathilde said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the world. Or to the child. Also, I’m only twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six!” Bette said. “Your womb is practically antique. Your eggs are getting all wonky up in there. And what, you think you’d bear a monster? A Hitler? Please. Look at you. You’ve won the genetic lottery.”

“You laugh,” Mathilde said. “But my children would come out with fangs and claws.”

Bette looked at her. “I hide mine well,” Mathilde said.

“I am not one to judge,” Bette said.

“You’re not,” Mathilde said.

“I’ll help,” Bette said. “Don’t get your hackles up. I will help you. You won’t be alone in this.”

—

“SHOOT, THAT TOOK A BILLION YEARS,” Lotto said, when she entered with the pizza. He was too hungry to see her until he’d eaten four slices. By then she had recomposed herself.

In the night, she dreamt of things that lived in the dark. Writhing blind worms with a pearly gleam, flurries of blue-veined parchment. Slick and drip.

She’d always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they.

Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts. Much later, at the grocery store, Mathilde would watch a woman swollen to bursting, reaching up for the popsicles on the high shelf, and she’d imagine what it was like to have a person inside one that one hadn’t swallowed whole. One that wasn’t doomed from the start. The woman looked irritably over at Mathilde, who was gigantic, tall enough to reach; then her face changed back to the thing that Mathilde most disliked about pregnant ladies, the reflexive saintliness. “Can I help you?” the woman said, all treacle. Mathilde turned abruptly away.

Now she rose from the bed where Lotto lay breathing sweetly in his sleep, and took a bottle of rum up to Bette’s apartment. She stood outside the door, not knocking, but still Bette opened it in a slattern’s nightgown, her hair a gray swirl.

“In you go,” she said. She put Mathilde on the couch, covered her with a woolen blanket, plunked the cat onto her lap. By Mathilde’s right hand, hot chocolate with a glory of rum. On the television, Marilyn Monroe in black-and-white. Bette lay back on the ottoman and snored. Mathilde tiptoed home before Lotto woke, and got dressed as if going in to work and then called in sick. Bette, face up against the steering wheel, sitting on pillows from her sofa, drove her to the clinic.

—

[MATHILDE’S PRAYER: Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.]

—

FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD, Mathilde was clammy on the inside. A grayish clay crumbling on its surface. It wasn’t that she regretted a thing; it was that the call had been so close. Lotto was distant from her, on the peak of some hill she was too tired to climb. She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them.

But there were tiny miracles to rouse her. A rosewater macaroon in the brass mailbox, in a waxed paper envelope. One blue hydrangea like a head of cabbage on the doorstep. Cold, wrinkled hands pressed to her cheeks, passing on the stairs. Bette’s small gifts. Bright lights in the dark.

“A difficult thing,” Bette had said in the waiting room. “But right. What you’re feeling will slowly lessen.” It would.

When Mathilde was twenty-eight, her husband left for Los Angeles for a week for a small speaking role in a cop drama, and she scheduled the sterilization.

“Are you sure?” the doctor said. “You’re young enough that you might change your mind. You never know when the clock will start ticking.”

“My clock is broken,” she said. And he looked at her, high boots to blond crown, the eyeliner she wore those days curved on the outside to make cat’s eyes. He thought he saw her, and he believed her vain. He nodded, turned curtly away. He planted the tiny coils in her tubes; she ate Jell-O and watched cartoons and let the nurses change her catheter. It was a very pleasant afternoon, in fact.

She would do it again if she had to. To save the horror. To save herself. She would do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, if she had to.

17

MATHILDE DIDN’T RECOGNIZE the private investigator on the steps of the Met. She was looking for the girl from the coffee roastery in Brooklyn from two weeks earlier, either incarnation, frizzled and dolphined or sleek and sharp. There was a family of heavyset tourists, a cashmere-skinned young man whom Mathilde looked at carefully, and a scowling blond schoolgirl in a kilt and blazer with an overflowing backpack. She chose to sit next to the schoolgirl, and the girl turned to wink at her.

“Holy god,” Mathilde said. “Body language and all. Gangly legs and attitude. I thought I was looking at my own doppelgänger from thirty years ago.”

“I had a stakeout earlier,” the investigator said. “I love my job.”

“You were that little girl with a costume box, huh,” Mathilde said.

The investigator smiled and there was a sadness there. She looked her age briefly. “Well, I was an actress,” she said. “A younger Meryl Streep, that’s what I wanted to be.”

Mathilde said nothing and the investigator said, “And yes. Of course, I knew of your husband. Knew him, in fact. I was in one of his plays in my youth. The workshop for Grimoire at ACT in San Francisco. Everyone was in love with him. I always thought of him in terms of a duck, you know? Lancelot Satterwhite is to adoration as a duck is to water. He only wanted to be swimming around in a great pool of it, but it never soaked in to touch him, just always rolled off.”

“Sounds about right,” Mathilde said. “I see that you did know him.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” the girl said. “But I don’t see the harm, now that he’s gone. You of all people knew the way he was. But the cast and crew had a sort of bet. Whenever anybody flubbed something in rehearsal, they had to put a quarter in the pot, and whoever was able to seduce Lancelot first got to keep the cash. Guys and girls both. All twelve of us.”

“Who won?” Mathilde said. There was a twitch at the corner of her lip.

“Don’t fret,” the girl said. “Nobody. Opening night, we gave the cash to our stage manager because he had a new baby at home.” She took a file from her backpack and handed it to Mathilde. “I’m still working the personal angle. There’s definitely something there, but I just have to find it. In the meantime, I’ve bought us an informant at Charles Watson. Senior VP. Sees himself as a noble whistle-blower, but only after he amassed a fortune, a house in the Hamptons, ad nauseam. This file right here is the skim off the surface. And boy, does it go deep.”

Mathilde read, and by the time she looked up, the street had gone bright with sun. “Holy of holies,” she said.

“There’s more,” the investigator said. “It’s pretty dire. There’s going to be lots of pissed-off rich people. Whatever the motivation, we’re doing the world a good thing.”

“Ah, well. I’ve always been suspicious of self-congratulation,” Mathilde said. “We’ll celebrate properly when you hand me the personal stuff.”

“Celebrate? You and me and champagne and a suite at the St. Regis?” the investigator said, standing.

Mathilde looked at her strong bare legs, the narrow hips, her watchful face buried under all that blond. She smiled, felt the rusty mechanism of flirting begin to move. She’d never been with a woman. It would probably be softer, less muscular, like sexual yoga. It’d at least be novel. She said, “Maybe so. Depends on what you give me.”

The investigator gave a low whistle, and said, “Off to work I go.”

—

FOUR YEARS AFTER LOTTO DIED, when Mathilde was fifty, she bought a ticket to Paris.

Everything was so bright off the plane that she had to wear sunglasses. Even then, the brightness got in, bounced around her brain like a Spaldeen. Also, she wanted nobody to see how the smell of the place she was returning to ravaged her, made her eyes leak.

She had become tiny again here. In this language, she was again unable to be seen. She gathered herself at a café outside the gate. When the waiter in the airport brought her the espresso and pain au chocolat in a plastic pouch, he spoke to her in crisp French even though he turned and spoke uninflected English to the sophisticates at the table beside her. When it came time to pay, she didn’t understand this euro business. She searched her purse for francs.

In the grainy gray day, Paris overwhelmed her with the scents. Exhaust and piss and bread and pigeon shit and dust and shedding plane trees and wind.

The cabdriver, his nose besponged by pores, looked at her for a long while in the rearview mirror and asked her if she was all right. When she didn’t answer, he said soothingly, “You may cry here, cabbage. Cry as much as you wish. It is no hardship to watch a pretty woman cry.”

She showered and changed in the hotel, then rented a white Mercedes and drove out of the city. The roaring river of traffic comforted the American in her.

The roundabouts became tighter. The roads smaller. Eventually, they were dirt. There were cows, tractors, semi-abandoned villages of a sooty gray stone.

What had been so huge in her mind was, in fact, terribly small. The house’s stucco had been refreshed, painted white under the climbing ivy. The stones on the driveway were new, creamy, soft-edged gravel. The yews had grown, were neatly shaved across their tops like boys on the first day of school. The wine grapes in the back twined green as far as she could see, deep into her grandmother’s old cow fields.

A man a little younger than Mathilde was fixing a motorcycle’s wheel in the drive. He had a cycling jacket on and a swoop of gelled bangs cresting over his forehead. Mathilde recognized her own long fingers in his. Her own long neck. The same folded tip of the left ear.

“Papa,” she said aloud, but no, this man was far too young.

Into the bay window came a woman. Stout, bleary-eyed, elderly, though her hair was dyed a squid-ink black. She was wearing a thickness of eyeliner below her lower lids. She peered at Mathilde in the car and her puckered mouth moved, as if she were chewing something. The hand clutching the curtain was red, ragged, as if it had spent a lifetime among the cold guts of fish.

Mathilde remembered a cabinet full of ripening cheeses, the overwhelming smell. Blind at first, she drove away.

In the little village, the cathedral was embarrassing. A Romanesque pebble, when she remembered it grand, shocking, Gothic. The tabac sold eggs still crotted with chicken shit. It was barely noon and the boulangerie was closing. She went into a salon that was also a pizza takeout and the mairie.

When the mayor sat down and Mathilde told her what she wanted, the mayor blinked so furiously she left streaks of black mascara on the insides of her glasses. “But you are absolutely sure?” she said. “That house, well. It has been in their family for hundreds of years.”

“It is the only house in the world for me,” Mathilde said. The Breton accent came back easily to her tongue. Sturdy as heifers, as the rocks in the fields.

“It will cost you,” the mayor said. “They are very cheap, that family, very close with their money.” She puckered her mouth, made a rubbing motion with her fingertips close to her chest.

“I can see myself being happy there,” Mathilde said. “And only there. I long to come to this town in the summer. Maybe even open up a little antique shop with a tea place, draw the tourists.” The mayor’s face loosed with this. Mathilde pulled out the creamy card of her attorney and pushed it across the table. “Please conduct all business through this man. Of course, you’ll get a five percent commission.”

“Six,” said the mayor.

“Seven. I don’t care. Whatever it takes,” Mathilde said, and the mayor nodded, and Mathilde stood and in leaving said, “Do your magic.”

She returned to Paris feeling as if someone else were steering the car. It had been twenty-four hours since she’d last eaten when Mathilde sat down at her own table at La Closerie des Lilas. Not the best food in Paris. The most literary of restaurants, though. She’d dressed in a silver silk sheath, her hair back, her face flushed prettily.

When the waiter came over, Mathilde said only, “It has been a long time since I’ve been in France. I miss the food like a phantom limb.”

His brown eyes sparkled. His moustache gave a leap like a goosed mouse. “I shall bring you our best dishes,” he promised.

“And the wine to pair with them,” she said.

He feigned exasperation. “But of course,” he said. “Would I blaspheme?”

When he set the champagne before her, and the langoustine in its herbed mayonnaise, she said, “Thank you.” She ate, her eyes half closed.

All along, she’d known Lotto was with her, across the table, enjoying her food with her. He would have loved this night, her dress, the food, the wine. The lust welled in her until it was almost unbearable. If she looked up, she knew, she would see only an empty chair. She would not look up.

After the cheese, the waiter brought her a plate of tiny pastel marzipan fruit, and Mathilde smiled up at him. “À la victoire,” she said.

“À l’amour,” he said, twinkling.

She walked slowly back to her hotel over the cobblestones steaming from the swift summer storm that had passed lightly over the city while she ate. Her shadow paced beside her. She was able to make it to the bathroom, sitting calmly on the yellow travertine tub before she leaned over and vomited.

She flew home to the little white house in the cherry orchard. The purchase of the house in France took months. On the day the sale was finalized — for a fraction of what Mathilde would have paid, but, apparently, a great deal more than the house was worth — her lawyer sent her a bottle of Château d’Yquem.

She called him. “Excellent work, Klaus,” she said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Satterwhite,” he said. “They were… exigent.”

“Oh, but they’re exigent people,” she said lightly. “Sorry to say it, but I’m afraid I have more work for you.”

“Of course. That is why I am here,” he said.

“Now, if you please, have the house torn down. Roof to joists. The vines in the back ripped from the ground. All of it. I know it is ancient and against all sorts of laws, but do it so fast nobody has time to know what you’re doing. And do it as soon as possible.”

Only the slightest hesitation. She adored this discreet man. “As you wish,” he said. In the photographs he sent a week later, there was sky where there had been chimney, a clear view to the orchard where the four-hundred-year-old stone walls had been. The ground was a smoothly spread cloak of dirt.

It was less, she thought, like looking at a corpse than like looking at the place where a corpse had been buried.

Her heart cracked open and leaked. This one had been for her.

She sent Klaus a car much nicer than her own. His voice was amused this time when she called him. “The work is done,” he said, “but not without much screaming and much, much rage. Many tears. I am afraid you cannot show your face in that town at any time soon.”

“Ah, well,” she said. “What else is new.”

She said it lightly, yes. Still, she felt the old beast stirring in her.

18

“YOU’RE A PATHOLOGICAL TRUTH-TELLER,” Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn’t sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying.

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.

She didn’t tell him that she never minded being the breadwinner during the long span of their twenties, even the poverty, even the skipped lunches and the suppers of rice and beans, even the shifting of money from one tiny account to pay off the most pressing bills, even accepting money from Lotto’s little sister, who gave it because she was one of the few people in the world who were truly good. His gratitude for what he thought was Mathilde’s sacrifice indebted him to her.

She did mind something she never said aloud: she’d wished her husband were better at what he chose to do.

All of that standing in line in the rain. Going in only to perform a monologue. Home again to wait by the phone that rang with no job. Sulking, drinking, throwing parties. Growing fat, losing his hair, losing his charm. Year after year after year.

The very last winter in the underground apartment, she painted the ceiling gold to simulate sunshine, to cheer herself up, to give herself courage to sit Lotto down and tell him, gently, the truth: that though she believed in him, he might want to find a career he believed in as well. This acting pursuit was not going to work out.

Before she could gather the courage, New Year’s Eve came around. He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up and at a white heat wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades. When she woke in the very early morning, she saw the computer and thought, first, of her jealousy, so assiduously suppressed, of him chatting on Instant Messenger with some pretty, blond avatar of a sad sixteen-year-old outcast. She picked the laptop up to read what he’d written. And she saw with wonder that it was a play and that it had the bones of a marvel in it.

She took it into the closet in the bedroom and worked feverishly. She edited, condensed, cleaned up the dialogue, and reshaped the scenes. He didn’t remember what he’d written when he woke. She easily passed it off as entirely his.

In a few months, The Springs was finished. Polished. Mathilde read it over and over at night in the closet while Lotto slept, and knew it was good.

But though it was a wonderful play, a play that would later change their lives, nobody wanted to read it. Lotto took it around to producers, theater directors. They took the copies he’d had bound, and nobody returned his call. And Mathilde watched her husband’s reborn twinkle dwindle again. It felt like a slow death of debridement, tiny constant bleeds.

An idea came in the form of one of Antoinette’s notes, a short article ripped out of a magazine on Han van Meegeren, the art forger who had convinced the world his own wan paintings were Vermeers, though every Jesus he painted had the forger’s own face. Antoinette had circled an X-ray of a fake, where, through the ghostly round face of a girl, you could see the uninspired seventeenth-century canvas Meegeren painted on: a farmyard scene, ducks, watering cans. Fake layer atop bad base. Reminds me of someone, Antoinette wrote.

Mathilde went to the library one weekend when Lotto was up in the Adirondacks camping with Samuel and Chollie, a vacation that she had planned, to get him out of the way. She found the plate she wanted in a heavy book. Gorgeous white horse carrying a blue-robed man in the foreground, a confusion of heads on other horses, a stunning building on a hill against the sky. Jan van Eyck, she’d discovered many years ago, in college. When she saw the slide during the class, her heart had gone still.

And to think she had held it in her hands in the tiny room under the stairway in her uncle’s house. She had smelled it: old wood, linseed oil, time.

“Stolen in 1934,” the professor had said. “One panel of a larger altarpiece. It is assumed that it was destroyed many years ago.” He clicked to the next example of disappeared art, but she could see nothing but brilliant fuzz.

At the library, she paid for a color photocopy and typed up a letter. No salutation. Mon oncle, it began.

She sent both letter and photocopy in the mail.

A week later, she was cooking spaghetti, blending up pesto, and Lotto was on the couch, staring at a copy of A Lover’s Discourse, his eyes unfocused, breathing through his mouth.

He answered the telephone when it rang. He listened. “Oh my gracious,” he said, standing. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Of course. I couldn’t be happier. Tomorrow at nine it is. Oh, thank you. Thank you.”

She turned, a spoon steaming in her hand. “What was that?” she said.

He was pale, rubbing his head. “I don’t even,” he said. He sat heavily.

She came over and put herself between his legs, touching his shoulder. “Baby?” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“That was Playwrights Horizons. They’re putting on The Springs. A private financier went crazy for it and is funding the whole thing.”

He put his forehead on her chest and burst into tears. She kissed him on the cowlick at the back of his head to hide her expression, which she knew would be ferocious, grim.

—

WHEN, A FEW YEARS LATER, an attorney contacted her on her phone at the theater where Lotto was helping to cast his new play, she listened intently. Her uncle, the attorney said, had died [carjacking; crowbar]. He’d left his money to a home for indigent mothers. There was, however, a collection of antique Japanese erotica he’d left to her, Aurélie. She said, “But I’m not the person you’re looking for. My name is Mathilde,” and hung up. When the books were delivered to the apartment anyway, she took them to the Strand, and with what she earned, she bought Lotto a watch that would stay watertight to four hundred feet deep.

—

ON THE OPENING NIGHT of The Springs, Mathilde stood with Lotto in the dark.

Broadway! To begin so grandly! He’d been dazzled by the luck; she smiled, knowing that luck was not real.

The workshops had gone brilliantly; they’d attracted a Tony winner for the role of Miriam: undulant, lazy, simmering, the mother. The actors playing Manfred and Hans, the father and son, were barely known now but would be, a decade later, marquee names in feature films.

There was a smattering of strangers, some intrepid avant-gardists. But, confronted by the director in a whispered tête-à-tête with the dismal advance sales the afternoon before, Mathilde had spent all morning and afternoon on the telephone, and had filled the empty seats with their friends. The audience was boisterous, and the mood of the theater giddy and friendly before the houselights dimmed. Only Lotto could draw three hundred loyalists at the last minute out of goodwill alone. He was beloved, uniquely, deeply.

Now, in the dark, she watched the subtle transformation as her husband lost himself. So anxious these past months he’d become again the thin, too-tall boy she’d married. The curtain parted. And she watched with amusement at first and then with a warmth that bordered on awe as he mouthed the lines, made faces for each character as the actors came on and off. It became a sort of one-man show in the shadows.

In the scene where Manfred died, Lotto’s face was slick and shining. Sweat, not tears, at least she believed. Hard to tell. [Tears.]

There were standing ovations, eight of them, the performers coming back again and again and again, not merely because of the audience’s great love for Lotto, but because the play came together, like magic, congealed at the moment of airing. And when Lotto walked out from the wings, the roar from the audience could be heard in the little bar up the block, to which the friends who had been begged to attend and who had arrived to find the show sold-out had decamped to start their own impromptu party.

The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar’s closing, when there were no cabs on the street, and so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. “Chthonic,” he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance for the glory. It was so late there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves.

She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, “Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on earth?”

She, who never drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true; there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous boulder blocking their future had rolled itself away.

“They’ll still be here when we’re gone,” he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he’d be sozzled. “The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches. They will be the kings of the earth.” He was amused by her; he, who was so often drunk. His poor liver. She pictured it inside him, a singed rat, pink and scarred.

“They deserve this place more than we do,” she said. “We’ve been reckless with our gifts.”

He smiled and looked up. There were no stars; there was too much smog for them. “Did you know,” he said, “they found out just a little while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.” He did his best Carl Sagan: “Billions and billions!”

She felt a sting behind her eyes, but couldn’t say why this thought touched her.

He saw clear through and understood. [He knew her; the things he didn’t know about her would sink an ocean liner; he knew her.] “We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.”

—

IN THE HAZY SPACE after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the Internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

—

THE NEXT MORNING, after the glorious first night, when everything was good and the light was sweet and possible, she went out for the paper and a whole box of patisserie, pains au chocolat and chaussons aux pommes and croissants, and ate a brilliant almond viennoiserie in four bites as she walked back. Once home in their cozy gold-ceilinged burrow, she poured a glass of water while Lotto rifled through the paper with his hair a bed-head wilderness, and when she turned back around, his great lovely face had blanched. He made a curious grimace, drawing down his lower lip until he showed his bottom teeth, for once, perhaps the first time ever, wordless.

“Uh-oh,” she said, and came swiftly to him and read over his shoulder.

When she was finished, she said, “That critic can eat a bowl of dicks.”

“Language, love,” he said, but it came out automatically.

“No, seriously,” Mathilde said. “Whatsername, Phoebe Delmar. She hates everything. She hated Stoppard’s last play. She called it self-indulgent. She actually said that Suzan-Lori Parks was failing at being Chekhovian, which is insane because of course Suzan-Lori Parks isn’t trying to be Chekhov, duh. It’s hard enough to be Suzan-Lori Parks. That’s like the simplest criterion for being a critic, right, evaluating a work on its own terms. She’s like a bitch-face failed poet who knows nothing and is trying to make a name for herself by tearing people down. She only does pans. Don’t even pay any attention at all.”

“Yeah,” he said, but too softly. He stood and turned around haplessly for a moment like a great tall dog about to sink down into the grass for a nap, then went to the bedroom and crawled under his covers and stayed there, unresponsive, even though Mathilde crept naked into the room on her hands and knees, and dug the sheet out from under the mattress and slithered up the length of his body from the toes up, her head popping out of the duvet at his neck; but his body was lax and his eyes were closed and he wouldn’t respond, and even when she placed both of his hands on her bum, they slid off bonelessly in his misery.

Nuclear option it was, then. She laughed to herself; oh, she loved this hapless man. Mathilde went into the garden, overgrown now that poor Bette had passed away, and made a few phone calls, and at four in the afternoon, Chollie rang the doorbell with Danica on his arm—“Kiss kiss,” Danica shouted in each of Mathilde’s ears, and then, “Fuck you, I hate you, you’re so pretty”—and Rachel and Elizabeth came in, hand in hand, sporting matching tattoos of turnips on their wrists, the meaning of which they gigglingly refused to divulge, and Arnie came and made sloe gin fizzes, and Samuel came in wearing his baby on his chest. When Mathilde succeeded in putting Lotto in a nice blue button-up and khakis, and dragged him out to his friends, and with every hug, every person who came up and told him earnestly how wonderful the play was, she saw an inch of spine returning to him; she saw the color coming back to his face. The man swallowed praise the way runners swallow electrolytes.

By the time the pizza came, Mathilde opened the door, and though she was in leggings and a semitransparent top, the delivery man’s eyes were sucked to Lotto in the middle of the room, turning his arms into monster arms and bugging his eyes, telling a story of when he was mugged in the subway, pistol-whipped on the back of the head. He was emitting his usual light. He mimed a stagger then fell to his knees, and the pizza man leaned in to watch, ignoring the cash Mathilde was trying to hand him.

When she closed the door, Chollie was standing at her side. “Pig to man in a single hour,” he said. “You’re a reverse Circe.”

She laughed silently; he’d pronounced it Chir-chee, as if Circe had been a modern Italian. “Oh, you dirty autodidact,” she said. “It’s pronounced Ser-see.”

He looked wounded, but shrugged and said, “I never thought I’d say it, but you’re good for him. Well, hell!” he said, now in a vicious Florida accent. “Empty-head friendless blond model gold digger actually turning out good. Who’d a thunk? At first, I done figgered you was going to take the money and run. But no. Lotto got hisself lucky.” In his normal voice, Chollie said, “If he turns out to do something big with himself, it’ll be because of you.”

Despite the hot pizzas in her hands, the room felt cold. Mathilde held Chollie’s eye. “He would have been great without me,” she said. The others still on the couch, laughing up at Lotto, though Rachel was looking at Mathilde from the counter in the kitchen, clutching her own elbows.

“Even you couldn’t have magicked that into being, witch,” Chollie said, and he took a pizza box from her, opened it, folded three slices together, and put the box back on the stack to eat the mass in his hands, grinning at her through a mouthful of grease.

—

DURING THE YEARS when Lotto felt as if he were getting to be good enough and secure enough, even when he was working constantly, his plays all being published, productions all over the country steadily increasing so that they alone provided a comfortable living, even then he was gadflied by this Phoebe Delmar.

When Telegony appeared, Lotto was forty-four, and the acclaim was instant and near universal. Mathilde had seeded the idea in his head; it had been seeded in hers by Chollie years earlier with his Circe comment. It was the story of Circe and Odysseus’s son Telegonus, who, after Odysseus had abandoned them, was raised by his mother in a mansion in the deep woods on Aeaea, protected by the enchanted tigers and pigs. When he left home, as all heroes must, Telegonus’s witch mother gave him a poisoned stingray spear; he floated to Ithaca on his little ship, started stealing Odysseus’s cattle and ended up in a terrible battle with the man he didn’t know was his father, finally killing him.

[Telegonus married Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife; Penelope’s own son with Odysseus, Telemachus, ended up marrying Circe; half brothers became stepfathers. As Mathilde always read the myth, it was a roar in support of the sexiness of older women.]

Lotto’s play was also a sly nod to the nineteenth-century idea of the term telegony: that offspring could inherit the genetic traits of their mother’s previous lovers. Telegonus, in Lotto’s version, bore the pig’s snout, the wolf’s ears, and the tiger’s stripes of the lovers Circe had turned into animals. This character was always played in a terrifying mask, the fixity of which made the soft-spoken character all the more powerful. As a joke, Telemachus was also played in a mask in the round, with twenty different eyes and ten different mouths and noses for all of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was off on his little meander over the Mediterranean.

The whole thing was set in Telluride in the modern day. It was an indictment of a democratic society that somehow was able to contain billionaires.

“Didn’t Lancelot Satterwhite come from money? Isn’t this hypocritical of him?” a man could be heard wondering at intermission in the foyer. “Oh, no, he was disinherited for getting married to his wife. It’s such a tragic story, actually,” a woman said, in passing. From mouth to mouth it spread, viral. The story of Mathilde and Lotto, the epic romance; he was unfamilied, cast out, not allowed to go home to Florida again. All for Mathilde. For his love for Mathilde.

Oh, god, thought Mathilde. The piety! It was enough to make her sick. But, for him, she let the story stand.

And then, perhaps a week after the opening, when the advance orders for the tickets were extended out to two months and Lotto was drowning in all of the congratulatory e-mails and calls, he came to bed in the middle of the night, and she woke instantly, and said, “Are you crying?”

“Crying!” he said. “Never. I’m a manly man. I splashed bourbon in my eyes.”

“Lotto,” she said.

“I mean, I was cutting onions in the kitchen. Who doesn’t love to chop Vidalias in the dark?”

She sat up. “Tell me.”

“Phoebe Delmar,” he said, and handed over the laptop. In its dim gleam, his face was stricken.

Mathilde read and let out a whistle. “That woman better watch her back,” she said darkly.

“She’s entitled to her opinion.”

“Her? Nope. This is the only hatchet job you got for Telegony. She’s insane.”

“Calm down,” he said, but he seemed comforted by her anger. “Maybe she has a point. Maybe I am overrated.”

Poor Lotto. He couldn’t stand a dissenter.

“I know every part of you,” Mathilde said. “I know every full stop and ellipsis in your work, and I was there when you wrote them. I can tell you better than anyone in the world, much more than this bombastic self-petard-hoisting leech of a critic, that you are not overrated. You are not overrated one single whit. She is overrated. They should cut off her fingers to keep her from writing anything more.”

“Thank you for not cursing,” Lotto said.

“And she can fuck herself lingeringly with a white-hot pitchfork. In her dark shit-star of an asshole,” Mathilde said.

“Aha,” he said. “Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce.”

“Try to sleep,” Mathilde said. She kissed him. “Just write another one. Write a better one. Your success is like wormwood to her. It galls.”

“She’s the only one in the world,” he said sadly, “who hates me.”

What was this mania for universal adoration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone. She stifled a sigh. “Write another play, and she’ll come around,” she said, as she always did. And he wrote another one, as he always did.

19

MATHILDE BEGAN GOING for much longer runs in the hills. Two hours, three hours.

Sometimes, when Lotto was alive and he was in full steam up in his study in the attic and she could hear even in the garden outside as he cracked himself up, doing his characters’ lines in their own voices, she had to put on her running shoes and set off down the road to prevent herself from going up the stairs and warming herself against his happiness; she had to run and run as a reminder that having her own strong body was a privilege in itself.

But after Lotto left, her grief had begun to radiate into her body, and there was a run after she had been several months a widow when Mathilde had to stop a dozen miles from the house and sit on a bank for a very long time because, it appeared, her body had stopped working the way it should. When she stood, she could only hobble like an old woman. It began to rain and her clothes were soaked, her hair stuck to her forehead and ears. She came slowly home.

But the private investigator was in Mathilde’s kitchen, the light on over the sink. The dim brown dusk of October was falling outside.

“I let myself in,” the investigator said. “About a minute ago.” She was wearing a tight black dress, makeup. Like so, she looked German, elegant without being pretty. She wore figure eights in her ears, infinity swinging every time she moved her head.

“Huh,” said Mathilde. She took off her running shoes, her socks, her wet shirt, and dried her hair with God’s towel. “I wasn’t aware that you knew where I lived,” Mathilde said.

The investigator waved that away, said, “I’m good at what I do. Hope you don’t mind that I’ve poured us a glass of wine. You’re going to want it when you see what I found about your old friend Chollie Watson.” She laughed at her own pleasure.

Mathilde took the manila envelope she held out, and they went out to the stone veranda where the watery sun was going down over the cold blue hills. They stood watching it in silence until Mathilde began to shiver.

“You’re upset with me,” the investigator said.

Mathilde said, very gently, “This is my space. I don’t let anyone in. Finding you here felt like an assault.”

“I’m sorry,” the investigator said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought we had chemistry. I sometimes come on too strong.”

“You? Really?” Mathilde said, relenting, taking a sip of her wine.

The investigator smiled, and her teeth gleamed. “You’ll be less mad at me in a few minutes. I found some interesting stuff. Let’s just say your buddy’s got lots of friends. All at the same time.” She gestured at the envelope she’d given Mathilde and turned her face away.

Mathilde pulled out the photographs inside. How strange to see someone she had known for so long entangled like that. After she’d seen four pictures, she was shuddering, and it wasn’t from the cold. She went through all of them, resolute. “Excellent work,” she said. “This is repulsive.”

“Also expensive,” the investigator said. “I took you at your word when you said money was no object.”

“It isn’t,” Mathilde said.

The investigator came closer, touching Mathilde. “You know, your house surprised me. It’s perfect. Every detail. But so tiny for someone who has so much. It’s all light and planes and white walls. Shaker, almost.”

“I live monastically,” Mathilde said, meaning, of course, more. Her arms were crossed, wine in one hand, photographs in the other, but it didn’t stop the investigator, who leaned over the arm of the chair to kiss Mathilde. Her mouth was soft, searching, and when Mathilde smiled but didn’t kiss back, the woman went back down in her seat, and said, “Oh, okay. Sorry. Worth a shot.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Mathilde said, squeezing the other woman’s forearm. “Just don’t be a creep.”

—

YOU COULD STRING TOGETHER the parties Lotto and Mathilde had been to like a necklace, and you would have their marriage in miniature. She smiled at her husband down on the beach where the men were racing model cars. He was a redwood among pines, the light in his thinning hair, his laugh carrying past the waves, the music emanating mysteriously from the ceiling, the conversations among the women on the shaded veranda, drinking mojitos and watching the men. It was winter, freezing; they were all wearing fleeces. They pretended not to mind.

This party was near the end, though neither Mathilde nor Lotto knew it.

Just a lunch to celebrate Chollie and Danica’s upgrade in the Hamptons. Ten thousand square feet, live-in housekeeper, chef, and gardener. Stupid, Mathilde thought, their friends were idiots. With Antoinette gone, Lotto and she could buy this place many times over. Except that later, in the car, Lotto and she would laugh at their friends for this kind of idiotic waste, the kind he was raised within before his father kicked the bucket, the kind they both knew meant nothing but loud pride. Mathilde still cleaned both the country house and the apartment, she took out the garbage, she fixed the toilet, she squeegeed the windows, she paid the bills. She still cooked and washed up from the cooking and ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

These women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.

But there was one woman there whom Mathilde didn’t know, and this woman was blessedly normal. She was brunette and freckled but wasn’t wearing makeup. Her dress was nice, but not fine. She had a wry expression on her face. Mathilde angled herself toward her.

Mathilde said, sotto voce, “One more word about Pilates, I’ll pop.”

The woman laughed silently, and said, “We’re all doing planks while the great American ship goes down.”

They talked about books, the bondage manual disguised as a novel for teenagers, the novel painstakingly pieced out of photos of street graffiti. The woman agreed that the new vegetarian restaurant in Tribeca that was all the rage was interesting, but said that a whole meal that revolved around the sunchoke had a certain sameness, plate to plate.

“They may want to consider other chokes. For instance, the arti,” Mathilde said.

“I think they’ve put too much consideration into the arty,” the woman said.

They kept taking tiny steps away from the others until they were alone by the steps. “I’m sorry,” Mathilde said. “I’m not sure I know your name.”

The woman sucked in her breath. She sighed. She shook Mathilde’s hand. “Phoebe Delmar,” she said.

“Phoebe Delmar,” Mathilde repeated. “Hoo boy. The critic.”

“The same,” she said.

“I’m Mathilde Satterwhite. My husband is Lancelot Satterwhite. The playwright. Right there. That big lunk with the superloud laugh whose plays you have eviscerated over the past fifteen years.”

“I was aware. Occupational hazard,” Phoebe Delmar said. “I tend to pop up at parties like a scolding aunt. My boyfriend brought me. I didn’t know you’d be here. I would never have ruined your fun with my presence.” She seemed sad.

“I always thought I’d deck you if I met you,” Mathilde said.

“Thank you for not doing so,” Phoebe said.

“Well. I haven’t decided definitively against it,” Mathilde said.

Phoebe put her hand on Mathilde’s shoulder. “I never mean to cause pain. It’s my job. I take your husband seriously. I want him to be better than he is.” Her voice was earnest, sweet.

“Oh, please. You say that as if he’s sick,” Mathilde said.

“He is. Great American Artistitis,” Phoebe Delmar said. “Ever bigger. Ever louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country? Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that get the prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.”

She looked at Mathilde’s face and took a step back, and said, “Whoa.”

“Lunch!” Danica called, ringing a great brass bell on the porch. The men picked up the model cars, ground out the cigars, came trudging up the dune, their khakis rolled to their knees and their skin pink with cold wind. They sat at a long table with their plates heaped from the buffet. Space heaters disguised as shrubbery exhaled warmth. Mathilde sat between Lotto and Samuel’s wife, who was showing her photos of their new baby — Samuel’s fifth child — on her cell phone. “Lost a tooth on the playground, that monkey,” she said. “She’s only three.”

Down at the end of the table, Phoebe Delmar was listening wordlessly to some man whose voice was so loud, bits of his conversation were audible all the way to Mathilde. “Problem with Broadway these days is that it’s for tourists… only great playwright America has produced is August Wilson… don’t go to theater. It’s only for snobs or people from Boise, Idaho.” Phoebe caught her eye, and Mathilde laughed at her salmon steak. God, she wished she didn’t like the woman. It would make things so much easier.

“Who’s that lady you were talking to?” Lotto said in the car.

She smiled at him, kissed his knuckles. “I never caught her name,” she said.

When Eschatology was performed for the first time, Phoebe Delmar loved it.

In six weeks, Lotto would be dead.

—

I HAD OFTEN SAID that I would write, The Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses…. In short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses. Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Stein being, apparently, the genius: Alice apparently the wife.

—

“I AM NOTHING,” Alice said, after Gertrude died, “but a memory of her.”

—

AFTER MATHILDE flipped the Mercedes, the policeman came. She opened her lips and let the blood run out, for the sake of drama.

The flashing blues and reds made him look ill, then well, then ill again. She saw herself as if his face were a mirror. She was pale and skinny with a shorn head, with a chin full of blood, blood down her neck, blood on her hands and down her arms.

She held up her palms, which she’d cut on the barbed-wire fence, climbing over it to the road.

“Stigmata,” she said as tonguelessly as possible, and laughed.

20

SHE HAD ALMOST DONE the right thing. At first, that bright April morning after Hamlet at Vassar, after the full and heady flight into Lotto, the love in her blood already humming like a beehive.

She’d woken to the flick of dark when the path lights out the window extinguished themselves. Her clothes still on, no telltale soreness below. Her promise to Ariel kept, then; she hadn’t had sex with Lotto. She’d broken no commitments. She’d only slept beside this charming boy. She looked below the sheet. He was naked. And how.

Lotto’s fists were balled up beneath his chin, and even in sleep, absent that waking wit, he was plain. The scarred skin on the cheeks. The hair still thick and swirling around his ears, the lashes, that carved jaw. She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.

She should be resentful. But she could not find resentment toward him anywhere inside her. She wanted to press herself against him until his beautiful innocence had stamped itself on her.

In her ear, the voice she tried to block out all these years told her sternly to go. To not inflict herself on him. She had never been made to be obedient, but she thought of him waking to find her there, how irreparable the damage would be, and she obeyed; she dressed and fled.

She pulled the collar of her jacket over her cheeks so nobody would see her distress even though it was still dark outside.

There was a diner in town, deep into the grayer, less gleaming streets, a place most Vassar students would never go near. This is why she loved it. Also: the grease and smell and the homicidal cook who smashed the hash browns like he hated them and the waitress who seemed to be neurologically lopsided, her ponytail pulled unintentionally toward an ear, an eye floating off toward the ceiling as she took the order. On one hand, her nails were long; on the other, they were short and polished red.

Mathilde took her usual booth and hid her face behind the menu and let her smile fall off her face, and the waitress didn’t say a word, just put the black coffee and rye toast and a small linen handkerchief with blue embroidery before Mathilde, as if she knew that tears would come. Well. Perhaps they would, though Mathilde hadn’t cried since she was Aurélie. One side of the waitress’s face winked and she went back to the radio that was fuzzily playing some shock jock, all brimstone and perdition.

Mathilde knew how her life would go if she let it. Already, she knew that she and Lotto would be married if she seeded the thought in his brain. The question was if she could let him off the hook. Practically anyone would be better for him than she would be.

She watched the waitress swaying behind the homicidal cook to grab a mug from the rack under the counter. She saw how she put her hands on his hips, how he bumped back against her with his rear, a little slapstick in-joke, kiss of hips.

Mathilde let the coffee and the toast go cold. She paid, tipped far too much. And then she stood and walked into town, and stopped at the Caffè Aurora for cannoli and coffee, and was at Lotto’s room with two aspirin and a glass of water and the food when his eyelashes gave a little flutter and he looked up from whatever dream — unicorns, leprechauns, merry forest bacchanals — to see her sitting beside him.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you couldn’t be real. I thought you were the best dream I ever had.”

“No dream,” she said. “I’m real. I’m here.”

He put her hand on his cheek and rested there against her. “I think I’m dying,” he whispered.

“You’re severely hungover. And we’re born dying,” she said, and he laughed, and she held his warm, rough cheek, having committed to him in perpetuity.

She shouldn’t have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she’d had for so very, very long. She was weary of facing the world alone. He had presented himself at the exact right time, her lifeline, although it would be better for him if he had married the kind of soft, godly woman she’d know soon enough his own mother wanted for him. That Bridget girl would have made everyone happy. Mathilde was neither soft nor godly. But she made a promise that he would never know the scope of her darkness, that she would never show him the evil that lived in her, that he would know of her only a great love and light. And she wanted to believe that their whole life together he did.

—

“MAYBE, AFTER GRADUATION, we could go visit Florida,” Lotto said, into the back of her neck.

This was just after they were married. Days, maybe. She thought of Lotto’s mother on the telephone, the bribe Antoinette had dangled. A million dollars. Please. For a moment, she considered telling him all about the call, then thought of how he’d be wounded, and knew she couldn’t. She’d protect him. Better for him to believe his mother punitive than just plain cruel. Mathilde’s apartment above the mission-style antique shop was bizarrely elongated in the streetlight filtering up. “I haven’t been home since I was fifteen. I want to show you off. I want to show you all the places I juvenile delinquented,” he said, his voice deepening.

“That’s not a word,” she murmured. And she kissed him so long, she made him forget.

Then: “Baby,” he said, cleaning up with his bare foot and a paper towel a glass of water he’d spilled on the oak floor in their new, sub-rosa apartment in Greenwich Village, gleaming as it was, still sans furniture. “I was thinking that maybe we could take a weekend and visit Sallie and my mom on the beach. I’d love to see your bod kicking it with tan lines.”

“Definitely,” Mathilde said. “But let’s wait until you get your first big role. You want to come back the conquering hero. Besides, thanks to your mother, we don’t have any money.” When he looked doubtful, she stepped closer, slid her hand down the waistband of his jeans, and whispered, “If you come back with a role under your belt, you can return the cock of the walk.” He looked down at her. He crowed.

Then: “I think I have seasonal affective disorder,” he groused, watching sleet turn the street pewter, shivering from the draft coming from the windows that touched the sidewalk. “Let’s go home for Christmas and get a little sun.”

“Oh, Lotto,” Mathilde said. “With what? I just bought our weekly groceries with thirty-three dollars and a handful of quarters.” Her eyes went damp with frustration.

He shrugged. “Sallie will pay. Three seconds on the phone, and it’s done.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “But we are too proud to take handouts from anyone. Right?” She neglected to say she’d called Sallie just last week; that Sallie had paid two months’ rent, plus the phone bill.

He shivered. “Right,” he said sadly. Staring at his darkening face in the window. “We are very proud, too proud, aren’t we?”

Then: “I can’t believe,” Lotto said, coming out of the bedroom, still carrying the telephone on which he’d had his weekly update from his mother and Sallie, “that we’ve been married for two years and you’ve never met my mother. That’s insane.”

“Completely,” Mathilde said. She was still smarting from a note Antoinette had sent to the gallery. No words this time. Only a painting ripped from a glossy magazine, Andrea Celesti’s Queen Jezebel Being Punished by Jehu, the lady defenestrated and being gobbled by dogs. Mathilde had opened the envelope and laughed in surprise; Ariel, peering over her shoulder, had said, “That. Oh. Not our kind of thing.” She thought of this note and touched the handkerchief she wore on her hair, cut recently in a wedge, dyed a strange bright orange. She was repositioning a painting on the wall that she’d salvaged from the dumpster at the gallery; a moving blue that she’d hold on to for the rest of her life, long past the loves, the bodily hungers. She looked at Lotto, and said, “But I’m not so sure she’d want to meet me, love. She’s still so mad you married me that she hasn’t come to visit us once.”

He picked her up and leaned her against the door. She put her legs around his waist. “She’ll relent. Give it time.” So transparent, her husband, how he believed that if only he could show his mother how right his choice was to marry Mathilde, everything would be all right. God, they needed the money.

“I’ve never had a mom,” she said. “It breaks my heart, too, that she doesn’t want to know me, her new daughter. When was the last time you saw her? Sophomore year of college? Why can’t she come visit you? Xenophobia is a bitch.”

“Agoraphobia,” he said. “It’s a real disease, Mathilde.”

“That’s what I meant,” she said. [She, who always said what she meant.]

Then: “My mom said that she’d be glad to send us tickets for Fourth of July this year if we want to go celebrate.”

“Oh, Lotto, I wish,” Mathilde said, putting her paintbrush down, frowning at the wall, which was a strange greenish navy. “But remember, there’s that huge show we’re doing at the gallery that’s going to be taking up all the time I have. But you can go. Go ahead! Don’t worry about me.”

“Without you?” he said. “But the whole purpose is to make her love you.”

“Next time,” she said. She picked up the brush, and dabbed his nose gently with the paint, and laughed when he smushed his face up against her bare belly, leaving fading stamps against the white.

And so it went. There was never the money, and when there was the money, he had a gig, and when he didn’t have a gig, she had to work really hard on this huge project, and no, his sister’s coming to stay that weekend, and they had that party they’ve already committed to going to, and, well, maybe it would be easier if Antoinette came to visit them? I mean, she’s loaded and doesn’t have a job, and if she wants to see them so desperately, she can just hop a plane, can’t she? They are so busy, every moment jam-packed, and weekends are their time, the precious little time that they get to spend remembering why they got married! And it’s not like the woman ever made the slightest effort, seriously, she didn’t even come to Lotto’s college graduation. Any of his performances; any of the first-runs of his own plays. That. He. Wrote. Himself. For fuck’s sake. Not to mention that she never saw their wee first apartment down in that basement in Greenwich Village, that she never came to see even this slightly better walk-up, that she never in her life has come to the country house among the cherries, Mathilde’s joy, which she crafted from a wreck with her own hands. Yes, of course, agoraphobia is a terrible thing, but Antoinette’s also the woman who has never once wanted to talk to Mathilde on the phone. Whose gifts every birthday and Christmas clearly come from Sallie. Does Lotto not know how much that hurts? Mathilde, motherless, familyless, to be discarded so; how painful it is to her to know that the love of her life has a mother who rejects her.

Lotto could have gone by himself. Absolutely. But she was the one who always ordered their lives; he’d never once bought a plane ticket, rented a car. Of course, there was also the worse reason, a darker one that he turned from quickly every time he brushed up against it, a tarry fury that he ignored so long that, by now, it had become too enormous to contemplate.

The urgency abated when they bought Antoinette a computer and the Sunday chats migrated to video. Antoinette didn’t have to leave her house to send her white face floating in the darkened room like a balloon. For a decade, every Sunday, Lotto’s voice transitioned into the bright, overarticulate child he must have been. Mathilde had to leave the house when the call came in.

One time, he left the video chat to fetch something, a review, an article, to share with his mother, and unsuspecting Mathilde came in from a run shining with sweat in her sports bra, shoving her wet hair back from her cheeks, and she pulled out the foam roller, and lay on her side with her back to the computer, and levered herself back and forth across it until her IT band had loosened. It was only when she turned over for the other side that she saw Antoinette watching from the screen, so close to the camera that her forehead was enormous, her chin arrowed to a point, red slash of lipstick, hands in her hair, gazing with such intensity that Mathilde could not move. A tractor drew up their dirt road and went away with a lower tone. Only when she heard Lotto’s steps coming down the stairs could she get up, get away. From the hall she heard him say, “Muvva. Lipstick! You’ve made yourself pretty for me,” and she said in a sweet, soft voice, “Ah, you’re implying that I’m not always pretty,” and Lotto laughed, and Mathilde fled outside, into the garden, feeling loose around the knees.

Then: Oh, honey, don’t cry, absolutely, they should visit Antoinette, as sick as she is these days, at least four hundred pounds now, diabetic, too heavy to do more than totter from bed to couch. They must. They absolutely must. They will. [This time Mathilde meant it.]

Before she could make plans, though, Antoinette, ailing, called Mathilde at the house in the middle of the night, her voice almost too soft to hear.

She said, “Please. Let me see my son. Let Lancelot fly down to me.”

Capitulation. Mathilde waited, savoring. Antoinette sighed, and in the sigh there was irritation, superiority, and Mathilde hung up without speaking. Lotto called down from his study upstairs, where he was working, “Who was that?” And Mathilde called up the stairs, “Wrong number.”

“At this hour of the night?” he said. “People are the worst.”

Wrong number. She served herself a bourbon. She drank it in the bathroom mirror, watching the flush fade from her face, her eyes sizzling, all pupil.

But then a curious feeling came over her, as if a hand had reached in and seized her lungs. Squeezed. “What am I doing?” she said aloud. Tomorrow. She would call Antoinette and say, Well, of course Lotto could come down. He was Antoinette’s only son, after all. It was too late now; first thing in the morning, she’d call. First thing, well, after her eighty-mile bike ride. He wouldn’t even be awake until she got back. She slept well and went out in the night bluing into dawn. Morning fog, swift swim up the glorious hills, the cooling drizzle, the sun burning off the damp. She’d forgotten her water; she returned after only twenty miles. The glide down the country road to her little white house.

When she clipped back into the house, Lotto was in the doorway, his head in his hands. He looked up at her, pale and distraught. “My mother’s dead,” he said. He wouldn’t be able to cry for another hour or so.

“Oh, no,” Mathilde said. She hadn’t thought death possible when it came to Antoinette. [So immense, what was between them, immortal.] She walked over to her husband, and he put his face against her sweaty side, and she held his head there in her hands. And then her own grief rose, a surprising sharp bolt in the temples. Now who did she have to fight? This was not the way it was supposed to go.

—

IN COLLEGE, Mathilde went once with Ariel to Milwaukee.

He had business there and she was his on the weekend, to do with what he liked. She spent most of her time shivering at the bay window of her room in the bed-and-breakfast. Downstairs: polished brass, plates of scones, walls thick with oils painted by Victorian spinsters, a woman whose flared nostrils told her what she thought of Mathilde.

Outside, snow had fallen thigh-deep in the night. The plows had swept the street snow into mountains bordering the sidewalk. Something was deeply soothing about so much untouched white.

Mathilde watched as down the street came a little girl in a red snowsuit with purple racing stripes. Mittens, a cap too big for her head. Disoriented, the girl turned around and around and around. She began to climb the snow mountain that blocked her from the street. But she was so weak. Halfway up, she’d slip back down. She’d try again, digging her feet deeper into the drift. Mathilde held her breath each time, let it out when the girl fell. She thought of a cockroach in a wineglass, trying to climb up the smooth sides.

When Mathilde looked across the street at a long brick apartment complex taking up the whole block, ornate in its 1920s style, she saw, in scattered windows, three women watching the little girl’s struggles.

Mathilde watched the women as they watched the girl. One was laughing over her bare shoulder at someone in the room, flushed with sex. One was elderly, drinking her tea. The third, sallow and pinched, had crossed her skinny arms and was pursing her lips.

At last, the girl, exhausted, slid down and rested, her face against the snow. Mathilde was sure she was crying.

When Mathilde looked up again, the woman with crossed arms was staring angrily through all the glass and cold and snow directly at her. Mathilde startled, sure she’d been invisible. The woman disappeared. She reappeared on the sidewalk in inside clothes, tweedy and thin. She chucked her body into the snowdrift in front of the apartment building, crossed the street, grabbed the girl by the mittens and swung her over the mountain. Carried her across the street and did it again. Both mother and daughter were powdered with white when they went inside.

Long after they were gone, Mathilde thought of the woman. What she was imagining when she saw her little girl fall and fall and fall. She wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone.

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.

A light went on in the mother and daughter’s window. In it the girl sat down with a notebook. Her small head bent. After some time, the mother put a steaming cup beside the girl, and the girl picked it up and cradled it in both hands. In Mathilde’s mouth came the forgotten sweet-salty taste of hot milk.

Perhaps, Mathilde thought, watching flakes fall into dark and the empty street, I’ve been wrong. Perhaps the mother had watched her daughter fail and fail and didn’t move to help out of something unfathomable, something Mathilde struggled to understand, a thing that was like an immense kind of love.

—

AT MIDNIGHT ON THE DAY Mathilde shoved the dog away from her into a new life with the little family, she woke to find herself outside in the overcast night, no glim of moon, the pool a tar pit. Still wearing the floor-length ivory sheath, she found herself screaming for the dog.

“God!” she was shouting. “God!” But the dog was not skittering back to her. There was no noise, all still and lightless and watchful. Her heart began to pound. She went in, calling, “God? God?” She looked in all the closets, under all the beds; she looked in the kitchen, and it wasn’t until she saw the crate missing that she remembered what she’d done.

Handed the creature to strangers, as if the dog weren’t a piece of her.

She barely made it to dawn. Day was one orange scratch against the dark when she knocked on the door of the split-level out in the fields. The husband answered, pressing his finger to his lips, and came out in his bare feet. He leaned inside, whistled once, and God bounded out the door, a purple ribbon around her neck, squealing and moaning and scrabbling at Mathilde’s feet. She crouched to press the dog against her face for a long while, then looked up at the man.

“I’m sorry,” Mathilde said. “Tell your kids I’m sorry.”

“No apologies,” he said. “You’re sorrowing. If my wife died, honey, I’d burn the house down.”

“That’s next on the list,” she said, and he chuckled once without smiling.

He fetched the crate, the toys, put it all in her car. When he came out again, his wife came with him, tiptoeing in the frosted grass, something steaming in her hands. She wasn’t smiling or unsmiling; she just looked tired, her hair mussed. She handed blueberry muffins through the window, leaned in, and said, “Don’t know whether to smack you or kiss you.”

“Story of my life,” Mathilde said.

The woman pivoted and marched off. Mathilde watched, burning her hands on the pan.

She looked in the mirror at God’s foxy face in the backseat, the almondine eyes. “Everyone leaves me. Don’t you dare,” she said.

The dog yawned, showing her sharp teeth, her wet tongue.

—

DURING THEIR LAST YEAR, though she said nothing, Ariel must have felt her strengthening. Their contract ending. The world opening to her, almost painful in its possibility. She was so young still.

She had an idea of her life after college, after Ariel. She would live in one high-ceilinged room painted a soft ivory, the floors a pale wash. She would wear all black and have a job with people and come to make friends. She had never, really, had friends. She didn’t know what friends could possibly have to talk about. She would go out to dinner every night. She would spend all weekend alone in the bathtub with a book and a bottle of wine. She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.

At the very least, she wanted to fuck someone her own age. Someone who’d look her in the face.

In March, just before she met Lotto and he put color into her world, she came into Ariel’s apartment to find him already there waiting for her. She put her bag down warily. He was on the couch, very still.

“What would you like to eat?” he said. She hadn’t eaten since the night before. She was hungry.

“Sushi,” she said, unwisely. She could never eat sushi again.

When the delivery boy came, Ariel made her open the door naked to pay. The delivery boy could barely breathe, looking at her.

Ariel took the styrofoam package, opened it, stirred the soy sauce and wasabi, and took a piece of nigiri and dabbed it into the mix. He set the single piece on the tile in the kitchen. The floor was scrupulously clean, as was everything about him.

“Down on your hands and knees,” he said, smiling with all his teeth. “Crawl.”

“Don’t use your hands,” he said. “Pick it up with your teeth.”

“Now lick up the mess you made,” he said.

The parquet pressing into her palms and knees. She hated the part of her, small and hot, that enflamed itself being here, on hands and knees. Dirty girl. She burned. She made a vow: she would never crawl for another man. [The gods love to fuck with us, Mathilde would say later; she became a wife.]

“Another?” Ariel said. He dipped it, put it at the end of the hallway, twenty yards away. “Crawl,” he said. He laughed.

—

THE WORD wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip.

Weip means to turn, twist, or wrap.

In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh.

Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.

21

THE INVESTIGATOR SHOWED UP at the grocery store. Mathilde put the groceries in the trunk and slid into the front seat, and there the girl was waiting with a document box on her knees. Her makeup was all smoky eyes and red lips, sexy.

“God!” Mathilde said, startling. “I said not to be creepy.”

The girl laughed. “I guess it’s my signature.” She motioned toward the box. “Ta-da. I’ve got it all. This dude will never get out of federal prison. When are you blowing this sucker up? I want to be there with popcorn when it’s all over cable news.”

“Phase one is the private photos. That starts in a few days,” Mathilde said. “There’s a party I have to go to. I’m going to make him suffer a little before phase two.” She started up the car and drove the investigator to the house.

It was neither as strange as Mathilde had expected nor as sexy. She felt sad, staring at the chandelier and feeling the familiar warmth building in her; one would expect a lesbian to have expertise, but really, Lotto had been better. Oh, Christ, he’d been better at everything than anyone. He’d ruined her for sex. What, really, was the point of this? There could be no second act in this little bed play of theirs, just a reprisal of act one, with the characters reversed, no thrilling, messy denouement, and frankly, she wasn’t at all sure what she felt about sticking her face in some other lady’s bits. She let the orgasm spark in her forehead and smiled at the private investigator when she came up out of the sheets.

“That was,” Mathilde began, but the investigator said, “No, I get it. Loud and clear. You’re not into chicks.”

“I wasn’t not into it,” Mathilde said.

“Liar,” the girl said. She shook out her dark hair and it puffed out like a mushroom. “But it’s better. Now we can be friends.”

Mathilde sat up, looking at the girl, who was putting her bra back on. “Other than my sister-in-law, I don’t think I’ve ever had a real female friend,” she said.

“Your friends are all guys?” the girl said.

It took a very long time before Mathilde could say, “No.” The girl looked at her for a moment and leaned forward and gave her a long motherly kiss on the forehead.

—

LOTTO’S AGENT CALLED HER. It was time, he intimated with a quaver in his voice, that she begin to take over business matters again. A few times he had been the recipient of her soft venom.

She paused for so long that he said, “Hello? Hello?”

There was a large part of her that wanted to put the plays behind her. To face forward into the unknown.

But she held the phone to her ear. She looked around. Lotto wasn’t in this house, not on his side of the bed, not in his study in the attic. Not in the clothes in the closets. Not in their first little underground apartment, where, a few weeks ago, she’d found herself looking through the casement windows, seeing only a stranger’s purple couch and a pug dog leaping at the doorknob. Her husband wasn’t about to pull up the drive, though she was always on alert, listening. There were no children; his face wouldn’t shine up out of a smaller one. There was no heaven, no hell; she wouldn’t find him on a cloud or in a pit of fire or in a meadow of asphodel after her body quit her. The only place that Lotto could be seen anymore was in his work. A miracle, the ability to take a soul and implant it, whole, in another person for even a few hours at a time. All those plays were fragments of Lotto that, together, formed a kind of whole.

So she told the agent to send her what needed to be done. Nobody would forget Lancelot Satterwhite. Not his plays. Not the tiny fragments of him in his work.

—

EIGHT MONTHS AFTER she’d been made a widow, almost to the day, Mathilde was still feeling the shocks in the ground where she stepped. She climbed out of the cab into the dark city street. In her silvery dress, in her new boniness, in the hair she’d bleached white in its boy’s cut, she was Amazonian. She wore bells on her wrists. She wanted them to hear her coming.

“Oh my god,” Danica cried out when Mathilde opened the door and walked into the apartment, handing her coat to a servant girl. “Widowhood sure as shit becomes you. Christ, look at you.”

Danica had never been pretty, but she hid it now with skin orange and pumped with botulism, sinewy yoga muscles underneath. Her flesh was so thin one could see the delicate ribs where they met in the center of her chest. The necklace she wore cost a middle manager’s yearly salary. Mathilde always hated rubies. Dried corpuscles polished to a gloss, she thought.

“Oh,” said Mathilde. “Thanks.” She let the other woman air-kiss her.

Danica said, “God. If there was a guarantee that I’d look like you when I’m a widow, I’d let Chollie eat bacon for every meal.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Mathilde said. And Danica said, her black eyes moistening, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I was trying to make a joke. God, I’m the worst. Always putting a foot in it. I’ve had too many martinis, haven’t eaten a thing, trying to fit into this dress. Mathilde, I’m sorry. I’m a jerk. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Mathilde said, and went over and took the glass from Chollie’s hand and drank the gin down. On the piano, she put Danica’s present, the Hermès scarf that Antoinette — well, really, it was Sallie — had sent her a few birthdays ago, still in its ostentatious orange box. “Oh, so generous!” said Danica, and she kissed Mathilde on the cheek.

Danica went to the door to greet other friends, a former candidate for mayor and his shellacked wife.

“Forgive her. She’s drunk,” Chollie said. He had slid up unnoticed. As usual.

“Yes, well, when is she not?” Mathilde said.

“Touché. She deserves that,” he said. “Life is hard for her. She feels so insignificant, trying to keep up with all those purebred socialites. Do you want to head to the powder room to compose yourself?”

“I am never not composed,” Mathilde said.

“True,” Chollie said. “But your face, it looks. I don’t know, strange.”

“Oh. That’s because I’ve stopped smiling,” Mathilde said. “For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don’t know why I didn’t stop earlier. It’s enormously relaxing.”

He looked pained. He held his own hands and flushed, and said, darting a look at her face, “I was surprised you RSVP’d, Mathilde. It shows maturity after our talk. After what I revealed. Forgiveness. Kindness. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“You know, Chollie, I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted to garrote you with my shoelaces. I almost killed you with that ice cream spoon. But then I realized that you were full of shit. Lotto would never have left me. I know this as deep as my bones. No matter what you did, you couldn’t have hurt us. What we had was so far beyond anything you could ever do to ruin it. You’re just a little mosquito, Chollie. All itch, no poison. You are less than nothing.”

Chollie was about to say something, but only looked weary and sighed.

“Anyway. Despite it all, we are old friends,” she said, squeezing his forearm. “One doesn’t get many old friends in life. I missed you. Both of you. Even Danica.”

He stood still for a long time, looking at her. At last, he said, “You always were too kind, Mathilde. We are all undeserving of you.” He was sweating. He turned away, either annoyed or moved. For some time, she flipped through a lavish book on the coffee table called Winged Cupid Painted Blind that seemed strangely familiar to her, but the panels all blended together and she saw nothing at all.

Later, as everyone was moving through the living room on the way into dinner, Mathilde stayed a few seconds behind, ostensibly looking at the small Rembrandt that Chollie had just bought. If a Rembrandt could be boring, this was. Classical composition, three bodies in a dark room, one pouring some unguent from a vase, one sitting, one speaking. Well, nobody had ever accused Chollie of having taste. She went back toward the piano. She pulled a second gift out of her handbag, this one in light blue paper. It was thin. The size of an envelope, wrapped. There was no card on this one, but she was sure it was the best gift of the bunch. Almost artistic, strobe-lit naked Chollie among all that stranger flesh.

At noon the next day after Danica’s birthday party, Mathilde was waiting. She sat reading the paper in the breakfast room, luxuriating in her pajamas. She picked up the phone on the first ring, already grinning.

“She left me,” Chollie spat. “You hell-dog monster bitch-face cunt.”

Mathilde took off her reading glasses and propped them on her head. She fed God a rind of her pancake. “Would you look at that. My dick’s on the table,” she said. “Seems my game’s longer than yours. Just wait until you see what’s coming for you next.”

“I’ll kill you,” he said.

“Can’t. I died eight months ago,” she said. She gently hung up.

—

SHE SAT IN THE KITCHEN, SAVORING. The dog on her bed, the moon in the window. In the beautiful blue bowl, the tomatoes from her summer garden had gone wrinkled and were emitting a powerful earthy sweetness, just before rot. For two months, she had left the letter from Land there, for what she imagined was in it. What? Gratitude? Sexy words? An invitation for her to visit him in the city? She’d liked him immensely. Something in him was balm to her. She would have gone, spent the night in his surely overpriced exposed-brick loft in a trendy riverfront area, and would have driven home at dawn feeling ridiculous. Also, she would have felt smooth and fine, loudly singing to thirty-year-old pop. Sexy. Young again.

She had just come back from her penultimate meeting with the FBI detective. He had salivated for what she told him she had. The filthy photographs of Chollie had done their magic. [In three months, Danica would be a divorcée rich beyond measure.] The box of files that, tomorrow, she would give to the sweaty small agent with the sideburns was her footrest in the kitchen tonight. She kept looking down through the dark where the box was as lunar pale as a toadstool.

On her laptop there was a French movie. In her hand, a globe of malbec. There was something satiated in her; something calmed. She was imagining Chollie’s headlong fall. She pictured his fat face on the television as he was squeezed into the cop car; how childlike he would look, how at a loss.

The doorbell rang. She opened the door to Rachel and Sallie. On the porch, doubled, her husband briefly shining out.

Mathilde let herself lean for a few breaths into the buttress of their arms, felt the weight of her own body relieved for the first time in so long.

She opened cold champagne for them. [Why the hell not.]

“Celebrating?” Rachel said.

“You tell me,” Mathilde said. She’d noted Sallie’s collar askew, the ring twisted wrong around Rachel’s finger. Nerves. Something was up. But they didn’t tell her, not yet. They sat drinking. With her long and bony face, Rachel in the twilight looked molded of resin; Sallie polished in a silk jacket, chic haircut. Mathilde thought of Sallie on her world tour, imagined lushness, fruit in the shape of swans, lovers in damp sheets. The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?

Rachel put the glass down and leaned forward. The emerald tapped three slowing swings against her clavicle, dully gleamed when it came to rest in the air.

Mathilde closed her eyes, said, “Say it.”

From her pocketbook, Sallie pulled a thick kraft file and put it on Mathilde’s knees, and Mathilde lifted a corner with her index finger and opened it. From most recent to least, a gallery of vice. Most were not even hers. From freshest to oldest; all before Lotto died. Grainy photo of Mathilde in a bikini on a beach in Thailand, the failed separation. Mathilde kissing Arnie’s cheek on a street corner. [Ludicrous, even if she were canted toward infidelity, he was too slimy.] Mathilde, drawn, a skeleton, young, walking into the abortion clinic. Her uncle, strange shiny pages smuggled from some sort of secret file delineating his purported offenses as of 1991—she would read it like a novel much later. Finally, her Paris grandmother and her rap sheet in French, smiling wickedly at the camera, prostituée like flyspecks across the page.

Great gaps here: a lacework of her life’s tissue. Thank god that the worst of it remained holes. Ariel. The sterilization, the baseless hope for children she’d let live in Lotto. What Aurélie had done all those years ago. All the deficits of goodness that added up to a shadow Mathilde.

Mathilde reminded herself to breathe, looked up. “You researched me?”

“No. Antoinette did,” Sallie said, clicking her teeth against her glass. “From the first.”

“All this time?” Mathilde said. “She was committed.” A pang. All this time, and Mathilde had been vibrantly alive in Antoinette’s head.

“Muvva was a patient woman,” Rachel said.

Mathilde closed the file and tapped the papers neatly back. She poured the rest of the champagne equally into the glasses. When she looked up, Sallie and Rachel were both making grotesque puffed-up faces that startled her. Together, they began laughing.

“Mathilde thinks we’re about to hurt her,” Sallie said.

“Sweet M.,” Rachel said. “We wouldn’t.”

Sallie sighed, wiped her face. “Don’t fret. We kept you from harm. Twice Antoinette tried to send packets to Lotto, once with your uncle and then the abortion, and again when you left him. She overlooked that I was the one to walk mail down to the box at the end of the drive and back.”

Rachel laughed. “The will she sent me to have notarized was lost. Donating Lotto’s share of the trust to a chimp rescue. Poor needy monkeys are going to go without their bananas,” she said. She shrugged. “It was Muvva’s fault. She never expected gross perfidy from the meek and mild.”

Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees.

She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women. Such kindness. Their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her and they loved her even still.

“There’s one more thing,” Rachel said, so quickly Mathilde had to concentrate to understand. “You don’t know this. We didn’t until my mother died. I mean, it was a total shock. We had to process it before we did anything. And then we were going to tell Lotto after we put things in order. But he.” She left the sentence unfinished. Mathilde watched as her face, as if in slow motion, collapsed. She handed over a photo album in inexpensive cordovan. Mathilde opened it.

Inside: a confusion. A face startlingly familiar. Handsome, dark-haired, smiling. With each successive page, the face grew younger until it was a red, wrinkled baby asleep in hospital blankets.

An adoption certificate.

A birth certificate. Satterwhite, Roland, born July 9, 1984. Mother: Watson, Gwendolyn, aged 17. Father: Satterwhite, Lancelot, aged 15.

Mathilde dropped the book.

[A puzzle she’d thought she’d solved revealed itself to go endlessly on.]

22

MATHILDE HAD ALWAYS BEEN a fist, in truth. Only with Lotto had she been an open hand.

—

SAME NIGHT; ROTTING TOMATOES. Sallie’s perfume lingered, though she and Rachel were dreaming drunkly in the guest rooms above. In the window, a paring of moon. Bottle of wine, kitchen table, dog snoring. Before Mathilde, an expanse of white paper, easy as a child’s cheeks. [Write it, Mathilde. Understand.]

Florida, she wrote. Summer. 1980s. Outside, sun blaze unbearable over the ocean. Inside, carpets in beige. Popcorn ceilings. Potholders in the olive kitchen silkscreened with the lewd shape of Florida, mermaids on the left, rockets on the right. Naugahyde recliners; a bestiary of modern American life flashing on the television. Floating alone in the hot cave of the house: a boy and a girl. Twins, barely fifteen. Charles, called Chollie; Gwendolyn, called Gwennie.

[Odd, how easy it all is to summon. Like a pain from a dream. A life you’d imagined so long that it had almost become a memory; this middle-class American childhood of the eighties that you’d never had.]

In her room, the girl rubbed Vaseline on her lips, face blooming white breath in the mirror.

She would emerge in pink pajamas when the father came home, her wild curly hair in two braids, and warm up the dinner she’d saved for him, some chicken and a boiled vegetable. She’d yawn and pretend sleep. Keeping their father company in the kitchen, her brother would imagine the metamorphosis inside his sister’s bedroom: legs peeled, pale in the miniskirt, eyes darkened with makeup. A strange creature, so different from the sister he knew, breaching into the night through the window.

Her nighttime changes were not despite the fear; they were about it. Small even for a fifteen-year-old, she could have been held down by any passing boy. A refutation of the girl who had already studied calculus, who had won science fairs by building her own robots. She went shivering down the dark streets, toward the convenience store, feeling acutely the untouched place under her skirt. She walked it down the aisles. Burt Bacharach; the cashier watching her with open mouth, skin piebald with vitiligo. Man in a white jumpsuit, watching her in the soda section, jangling the change in his pocket. Get me one a those, he ordered, but about the greasy spinning hot dog. Under the angry moth light outside, three or four kids were flipping their skateboards. She didn’t know them. They were older, college-aged though she doubted — greasy hair, baja hoodies — they were in college. She stood by the pay phone, dipping her finger in and out of the coin slot. No change, no change, no change. Slowly, one came closer. Bright blue eyes under a monobrow.

Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual highwire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]

For nearly a year, a besotment of fingers and tongues. Out the window in the dark she went, again and again; and school came and debate team and band practice. Slow solidification beneath the ribs like rubber cement exposed to air. The body knows what the brain refutes. She wasn’t dumb. That year she was lucky in fashion: sweatshirts worn huge, to the knees. The mother came home late on Christmas Eve. The girl came out on Christmas morning in her flannel nightgown and the mother turned, singing. She saw her daughter, the bulge at the waist, and dropped the monkey bread she’d been making.

The girl was taken to a cool place. Nobody was unkind. Her insides were scrubbed. Voices soft. She left, not the same girl as she’d been when she went in.

[The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark. Brains are miraculous; humans storytelling creatures. The shards draw themselves together and make something whole.]

The twins turned sixteen in the spring. There were the new locks outside her door, on the windows. Her brother suddenly three inches taller than she. He began to follow her around, a goofy-looking shadow. “Play Monopoly?” he’d say, as she crossed through the room one of the dull Saturday nights. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. She was grounded, she had to murmur to the skateboarding boys who hung around the school gates waiting, to the girls she’d known since kindergarten, who’d wanted her to join them watching The Dark Crystal and eating Jiffy Pop and crimping their hair. She was always more popular than her twin, but soon a whiff of sex sullied her. She had only her brother. Then Michael.

—

MICHAEL WAS BEAUTIFUL, half Japanese, tall and dreamy with a fashionable slab of black hair over one eye. In class, Gwennie had spent weeks surreptitiously imagining her tongue licking the pale skin of his inner wrist. He dreamt of boys; Gwennie dreamt of him. Chollie liked him grudgingly; her brother required absolutes: loyalty, generosity, things Michael couldn’t give. But the marijuana he shared relaxed Chollie enough to make him begin to crack jokes, to smile. So it passed until the end of school. Her mother in San Diego, Milwaukee, Binghamton; she was a traveling nurse who took care of babies almost too tender to survive.

They met Lotto. Painfully tall, face blitzed with acne, his sweet boy’s heart. Summer stretched out before them: different drugs, beer, huffing glue, all fair game as long as the twins were home for dinner. Gwennie was the center of this circle; the boys spun around her, satellites.

[Such a brief time, this ménage à quatre. Only all summer tipping into October, but it changed everything.]

On the crenellations of the old Spanish fort, they did whippets with stolen cans. St. Augustine with its herds of tourists shining below. Michael sunbathed, twitching to the music from the tape deck, the glorious smoothness of that body. Lotto and Chollie were in deep conversation as usual. The sea below winking light. She needed them to look at her. She stood on her hands at the edge of the fort, a forty-foot drop into death. She’d done gymnastics until her body turned traitor with boobs; she held the pose. From upside down, their faces against the blue, her brother standing up in fear. She came down and almost passed out from blood to the brain, but sat. The pulse so loud in her ears she didn’t hear what he was saying, just waved her hand, and said, “Chill the fuck out, Choll. I know what I’m doing.”

Lotto laughed. Michael’s abs flexing to look at Lotto. Gwennie looking at the abs.

In early October, they spent a Saturday on the beach. Their father had begun trusting her again, or trusting Chollie to keep her in line, and had flown off to Sacramento to be with their mother for the weekend. Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over and it was sunset and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was. He said, “Spiral jetty.” She said, “In sand?” He smiled and said, “That’s its beauty.” A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hadn’t seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth. A sweetness. A sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.

Instead, she bent and helped, they all did, and deep into the morning when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind, and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed, somehow. They went home.

The next day, Sunday. Sunrise sandwiches eaten over the sink, bleed of yolk. Bed until three in the afternoon. When she came out to eat, Chollie had sunburn blisters on his face, but he smiled. “I scored some acid,” he said, the only way to bear the party at the abandoned house beside the swamp that night. She felt a pang of fear. “Great,” she said coolly. They took burgers to the beach again. Where the lifeguard’s chair had been buried at the end of their spiral jetty, it was dug out, set upright, like a raised middle finger. She abstained from the drug, but the boys partook. The strange thing between Lotto and her sharpened. He stood close to her. Chollie climbed atop the lifeguard chair and stood against the stars, shouting, holding up a handle of rum. “We are gods!” he said. Tonight, she believed it. Her future was one of those stars, cold and brilliant and sure. She would do something world-bending. She knew it. She laughed at her brother, shining in the bonfire and starlight, and then Chollie gave a shriek and jumped, hovering for a long time like a pelican, with his flabby neck, his awkward limbs, in midair. He landed with a crack. And then her brother’s screams, and she held his head, and Lotto sprinted off to get his aunt’s car, and when he drove up the beach, Michael picked Chollie up in his arms and threw him into the backseat and jumped into the driver’s side and took off without Gwennie or Lotto.

Desolate, they watched the taillights go up the ramp to the road. With Chollie’s screams removed, the wind was too loud.

She asked Lotto to come with her to tell her dad, and he said of course. [Lo, that sweet young heart.]

At home, she washed off her makeup, took out the piercings, braided her hair in two tails, put on a pink sweatsuit. He’d never seen her plain but he held in his laugh, kindly. The father’s flight came in at seven, and at seven-twenty, his car pulled under the porte cochere. He walked in the door with discontent pouring off him: it must have been a bad weekend with the twins’ mother, their marriage as thin as a thread. Lotto was already inches taller than the older man, but her father filled the room and Lotto took a step back.

Her father’s face, so furious. “Gwennie, I told you, no boys in the house. Get him out of here.”

“Daddy, this is Lotto, he’s Chollie’s friend, Chollie jumped off something and broke his leg, he’s in the hospital, Lotto just came a second ago to tell you because we couldn’t get in touch with you. I’m sorry,” she said.

Her father looked at Lotto. “Charles broke his leg?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Lotto said.

“Was alcohol involved? Drugs?” the father said.

“No, sir,” Lotto lied.

“Was Gwennie present?” the father said.

She held her breath. “No, sir,” he said smoothly. “I only know her from school. She hangs out with the smart kids.”

The father looked at them. Nodded, and the space he took up in the room was suddenly smaller.

“Gwendolyn,” the father said, “you call your mother. I’ll go to the hospital. Thank you for telling me, boy. Now out.”

She shot a look at Lotto, and the father’s car pulled out fast, and when Gwennie came out the front door, she’d put on her miniest skirt, the shirt cropped below the boobs, makeup slashed on her face. Lotto was waiting in the azaleas. “Fuck him,” Gwennie said. “We’re going to the party.”

“You’re trouble,” he said with admiration.

“You have no idea,” she said.

They rode Chollie’s bike. She sat on the handlebars and Lotto pedaled. Down the tunnel of the black road, frogs singing mournfully, the rot of marsh rising. He stopped the bike and put his sweatshirt over her. It smelled nice, like fabric softener. Someone at home loved him. Lotto stood on the pedals when they got to coasting, and rested his head on her shoulder, and she leaned back into him. She smelled the astringent on his ravaged cheeks. The house was lit by bonfires, headlights left burning. Already hundreds here, the music deafening. They stood, backs to the splintery siding, drinking beer that was mostly foam. She felt Lotto looking at her. She pretended not to notice. He came close to her ear as if to whisper, but he was, what? Licking her? A separate shock went through her and she marched toward the fire. “What the fuck,” she said, and punched a shoulder very hard. The head rose, the mouth smeary, Michael. He had pulled his face away from the blond head of some girl.

“Oh, hey, Gwennie,” Michael said. “Lotto, my man.”

“What the fuck?” Gwennie said again. “You’re supposed to be with my brother. With Chollie.”

“Oh, no,” Michael said. “I booked it when your dad got there. He’s one scary-ass dude. This chick gave me a ride,” he said.

“I’m Lizzie. I’m a candy striper on the weekends?” she said. She nuzzled her face into Michael’s chest.

“Whoa,” Lotto whispered. “That’s a girl.”

Gwennie seized Lotto’s hand and pulled him into the house. Candles on the windowsills and flashlights that cupped light on the wall and bodies on mattresses someone had dragged in here for the purpose, bare asses and backs and limbs shining. Knot of music from separate rooms. She took him up the stairs to the window that led out to the porch roof. They sat in the cool night, hearing the party thump, able to see only a glare of firelight. They shared a cigarette in silence, and she wiped her face and kissed him. Their teeth knocked. He’d spoken of makeout parties wherever he’d come from in the boonies, but she hadn’t really expected he’d know what to do with his mouth and tongue. Indeed he did. She felt the old swoon in the joints. She took his hand and pressed it against her, let him slide his fingers beneath the elastic to feel how wet she’d gotten. She pushed him on his back. She straddled his legs, took his penis out into the air, watched it grow, put him in. And he gasped up, astonished, then grabbed her hips and really went for it. She closed her eyes. Lotto’s hands pushed her shirt up and bra cup down so that her boobs pinched out like rockets. There was a new thing, a terrific heat, heat like the center of the sun. She didn’t remember such heat from all the other times. He lurched into her and she felt him leaving and she opened her eyes to see him rolling, face full of terror, over the side of the porch, and falling down. She looked around and saw in the window a curtain of fire. She jumped, her skirt flipping up, what he’d left in her leaking as she fell.

[Something wrong in getting turned on, summoning this dead girl, this dead boy, so they can fuck.]

At the jail, she shivered all night. Her mother and father were grim, set, when she came home.

Lotto was gone for a week, then two, then a month, and Chollie found a letter on his nightstand saying that Lotto’s mother had sent him off to an all-boys’ boarding school, poor sucker. He told Gwennie but she’d stopped caring. The entire party, the firemen, and the police officer had all seen the way Gwennie and Lotto had monkeyed themselves. The whole school knew she was a slut. End-stop. Pariahed. Michael didn’t know what to say; he drifted away, found other friends. Gwennie stopped talking.

In spring, when her condition became impossible to ignore again, the twins stole the neighbor’s car. His fault for keeping the keys in the ignition. They came up the drive, pondering the sago palms and grasses, the tiny pink box on stilts. Chollie made a sound of disappointment; he’d hoped that Lotto’s family was insanely rich, but it didn’t appear so. [One never can tell.] Sea oxeye daisies taunted, nipplelike in the grass. They knocked on the door. A tiny and severe-looking woman opened it, her mouth pressed thin. “Lancelot’s not here,” she said. “You should know that.”

“We’re here to see Antoinette,” Chollie said. He felt his sister’s hand on his arm.

“I was heading out for groceries. Well, you might as well come in,” she said. “I’m Sallie. Lancelot’s aunt.”

They had been sitting for ten minutes, drinking the iced tea and picking at the sable cookies when a door opened and a woman came out. She was tall, grand, plump, her hair heaped elaborately atop her head. There was something feathery about her, the gauze of her clothes, the way she moved her hands, something disarmingly soft. “How pleasant,” she murmured. “We weren’t expecting guests.”

Chollie smirked in his chair, reading her, hating what he read.

Gwennie found Antoinette’s eyes on her and made a twisting motion with her hands to show her stomach.

On Antoinette’s face, an expression like a paper blazing into fire. Then she smiled brightly. “I suppose my son had something to do with that. He does love girls. Oh, dear.”

Chollie sat forward to say something, but out of her bedroom waddled a baby in a diaper, her hair in twin puffs. He closed his mouth. Antoinette put the baby on her knee and sang, “Say hello, Rachel!” and wagged the baby’s fat hand at the twins. Rachel chewed on her fist, watching the visitors with her anxious brown eyes.

“So what is it you want of me?” Antoinette said. “Ending a pregnancy sends a girl directly to hell, you know. I will not pay for one.”

“We want justice,” Chollie said.

“Justice?” Antoinette said mildly. “We all want justice. And world peace. Frolicking unicorns. What do you mean precisely, little boy?”

“You call me little boy again, you fat hog, and I’ll punch you in the fucking mouth,” he said.

“You only show spiritual poverty when you swear, little boy,” she said. “My son, bless his pure heart, would never be so vulgar.”

“Fuck you, cunt-face hag,” he said.

“Darling,” Antoinette said very softly, putting her hand on Chollie’s, stopping him short with her touch. “It does you credit to fight for your sister. But unless you would like me to take a cleaver to your manhood, I suggest you wait in the car. Your sister and I will come to an agreement without you.”

Chollie paled, opened his mouth, opened his hands, closed them, and then walked out the door and sat in the car with the window open, listening to sixties pop on the radio for an hour.

Alone, Antoinette and Gwennie smiled politely at Rachel until the baby waddled back into the bedroom again. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Antoinette said, leaning forward. Gwennie would tell her brother and parents that she’d had an abortion. One week later, she would run away, although, in fact, she would go to an apartment in St. Augustine. It would all be arranged through Antoinette’s lawyers. She would be cared for as long as she stayed inside. Also arranged would be the adoption. After the birth, Gwennie would leave the baby in the hospital and walk back into her own life. She would never breathe a word to anybody or else the monthly allowances would cease.

[Echoes everywhere. Painful, the backstage manipulations, how money trumps heart. Good. Press the finger into the wound; bear down.]

The girl listened to the ocean, muted through the window. Rachel came in again and pressed the button for the television and sat, sucking her thumb, on the carpet. Gwennie watched her, wanting to hurt this woman who reeked of roses, baby powder. At last, Gwennie looked at Antoinette without smiling. “You won’t acknowledge your own grandchild?” she said.

“Lancelot will have a brilliant future,” she said. “Less brilliant if this happens. A mother’s job is to prop open all possible doors for her children. Besides, there will be likelier candidates to bear his children.” She paused, smiled sweetly. “Likelier children as a result.”

Inside Gwennie’s stomach, a snake was twisting. “Fine,” she said.

[How much of this is supposition, projection? All. None. You hadn’t been there. But you knew Antoinette, how her lazy sweetness belied ferocity. She would say this speech again, though the dart would miss its target the second time. Oh, yes. You knew Antoinette in your bones.]

In the car again. Chollie drove and felt queasy, watching his sister cry into her elbow. “You tell her to go to hell?” he said. He would sue that warthog for everything she had, screw the fact that she was Lotto’s mother. He’d take her for all she was worth and live in that beach house for the rest of his life, exulting, rich.

Gwennie took away her arm, and said, “Money for silence. Don’t fight me. I signed the contract.”

He tried to say with his own wordlessness what he wouldn’t say aloud, but she was having none of it. “I liked her,” she said, though this was terribly untrue.

They showed up at their parents’ house because there was nowhere else they wanted to be. Okra and chicken and cornbread from a box, their mother dropping her spatula, coming over with open arms. Gwennie announced both the pregnancy and the termination over butterscotch pudding. It was for Chollie, so he wouldn’t meddle. Her father put his forehead on the edge of the kitchen table, wept there. Her mother stood without speaking and flew the next morning to El Paso for work. It was easy for Gwennie to pretend to run away. She packed a small duffel and climbed into the car that came for her when she should have been at school, and was installed in a two-room apartment, all oatmeal carpet and plastic mugs, and was visited by a nurse every week and had groceries show up at the door and as much television as she could process, which was perfectly welcome, since she couldn’t have read a book if there had been one anywhere around, which there probably wasn’t, not in this entire sad condo complex with its turquoise fountains, dyed red cypress mulch.

The baby took. It took from her bones and took from her youth day by day. Gwennie ate little, watched talk shows all day. Dear Lotto, she wrote once to the boy banished to cold northern misery, but half the words were already a lie so she tore up the letter and put it below the coffee filter in the trashcan. Only floating in the bathtub gave relief.

Her life had paused; but in fast-forward the baby was born. Gwennie had an epidural; it was a dream. Her personal nurse came to the hospital and did everything. She put the baby in Gwennie’s arms, but when she left the room, Gwennie put the baby back in the bassinet. They wheeled him away and kept bringing him back even though she told them not to. Her body healed. Her breasts hardened. Two days, three days. Green Jell-O in cups and American cheese on bread. One day, she signed a paper and the baby was gone. There was an envelope full of cash in her backpack. She came out of the hospital to blazing July heat. She was beyond empty.

She walked all the way home, more than ten miles. She came in the house to find Chollie in the kitchen, drinking Kool-Aid. He dropped his cup. He turned red in the face and screamed at her, that their parents had filed a police report, that their dad spent all night every night casing the streets, that Chollie had nightmares of her being raped. She shrugged and put her backpack down and went into the rec room to turn on the television. After some time, he brought her scrambled eggs and toast and sat beside her, watching the light move on her face. Weeks passed. Her body worked independently of her brain, which was elsewhere, in another hemisphere. There was something dragging at her, an anchor snagged on something invisible below. It took great effort to move.

Her parents were gentle. They let her skip school, took her to a therapist. It didn’t matter. She lay in bed. “Gwennie,” her brother said, “you need to get help.” There was no point. Her brother, without looking at her, took her hand. So gently, so tenderly, that she wasn’t embarrassed. Weeks passed since she’d showered. She was too tired to eat. “You stink,” Chollie said angrily. You always stink, she thought but didn’t say. Chollie was worried, gone now only during school hours. Her father only during work. The overlap when she was alone was three hours, short. On a day when she had more energy than usual, she called Michael’s neighbor who sold drugs. He came, looked at her matted hair, her little girl’s nightgown, seemed reluctant to hand over the paper bag. She thrust money into his hands, slammed the door in his face. She put the bag between her mattress and box spring. Day after day, all the same. Sticky fringe of dust on the blade edge of the overhead fans. Enough.

Chollie had showed her his stash of Ecstasy and slyly said, “This is how my quest for world dominance begins.” Said he’d be out all night selling at a rave, would she be okay? “Go,” she said, “make your money.” He went. Their father was in his room, sleeping. Now she put the envelope of Antoinette’s cash under her brother’s pillow and considered it; then she changed his smelly sheets and placed the money under the pillow again. She took the bag of drugs from under her own mattress and swallowed one pill and waited for it to seize her, then shook the whole bottle in her mouth and swallowed the pills with milk from the carton. The ache began in her stomach.

Already woozy. The air had turned muddy. She collapsed into bed. Vaguely, she heard her father leave for work. Sleep stole over her like waves. In the waves, a sweetness, a peace.

[Go ahead and weep into your wine, angry woman, half a life away. What do you hope will follow you out of the dark? Morning coming into the window as every day it does, the dog waking on her bed out of dreams of chipmunks; but there is no such thing as resurrection. Still, you did it anyway, didn’t you, brought the poor girl back. Now what are you going to do? Here she is before you, as alive as she’ll ever be, and your apology would never have meant a thing.]

Chollie came home to a heavy silence and knew something was wrong. The father away at work, Chollie overdue because of the concert. He stood in the door, hearing nothing, then he ran. Found what he found. Everything in him flipped over. He waited for the ambulance, and as he waited, the plan emerged, what he would do, the years it would take. He slid his sister’s head on his lap and held it there. From a mile away, the sound. The sirens.

—

IT WAS DAWN, a thin pale spreading over the distance. Mathilde was shaking, but not from cold. She pitied them, the cowardly ones. Because she, too, despaired; she, too, was blinded by the dark, but to turn your back is too easy. Cheating. The handful, the cold glass, the swallow. The chair kicked back, the burn on the skin of the throat. A minute of pain, then stillness. Despicable, such lack of pride. Better to feel it all. Better the long, slow burn.

Mathilde’s heart was a bitter one, vengeful and quick. [True.]

Mathilde’s heart was a kindly one. [True.]

Mathilde thought of Land’s gorgeous back, muscled and long, the spine a delicate splitting serration. It had been Lotto’s back as well. The lips, the cheekbones, the eyelashes, all the same. The ghost manifest in the living flesh. She could give the boy this gift. If not father or mother, still blood, an uncle. Chollie had known Lotto second best, after all; he could tell Land about Lotto, summon a person out of what, to Land, had just been details, gleanings: interviews, plays, a brief moment with the widow, but Mathilde knew how closed off she was, how she’d shown him only her body, nothing real. Chollie could bring Gwennie to him, a mother. Mathilde could leave Land with something living. She could give Land and his uncle time.

She stood. The thing that had given her lightness these past months had fled, and her bones felt made of granite, her skin stretched like an old tarp over them. She hefted the box, feeling all the weight of Chollie’s evil in her arms, and set it in the sink.

She lit a match and watched its blue edge suck down the stick, and for a moment, the lightness returned, the breath to blow out the flame just behind her lips — fuck it, Chollie deserved the worst for what he’d done to Lotto in his last days, the doubt he’d created — but something stopped her breath. [Internal; not us.] Just before the flame singed her skin, she dropped the match onto the box. She watched the papers burn, bereft, her curse on Chollie going up in a tongue of smoke. She would send a letter in her own hand, later, to both men. Land could call his newfound uncle every day of his life. He would. Chollie would host Land’s wedding at his palace by the sea. Chollie would be at Land’s children’s graduations, would drive up in the Porsches he’d give them. Land would be loved.

“That’s not nothing,” she said aloud.

The dog woke, screaming at the smoke. When Mathilde looked up from the charred mess, the small, dark girl she’d summoned had gone.

23

DECADES LATER, the nursemaid would come into the tea room in Mathilde’s house. [Blue canvas on the wall; a cool, twilit sense of being young and lovelorn.] She would carry a platter of the cakes that were the only thing Mathilde would eat anymore. She would talk, this woman, talk and talk, because there was a smile on Mathilde’s lips. But when she touched her, the nursemaid would find the old woman gone. No breath. Skin cooling. The last spark in Mathilde’s brain was pulling her toward the sea, the raspy beach, a fiery love like a torch in the night almost imperceptible down the shoreline.

Chollie, who heard the news an hour later, took a flight. In the middle of the morning, he outsmarted the locks of Mathilde’s flat in London and came in with his halting, panting steps. He was as fat and antique these days as a potbellied stove. Through everything, he survived, like the rats, the jellyfish, the cockroaches would. He took the three slender books that Mathilde had written to an echoing lack of acclaim and put them in his bag. [Alazon, Eiron, Bomolochos; she was sly but unsubtle in this. In a room in his house the rest of the print runs sat in cardboard boxes, being eaten by cockroaches.] Though he was old, he was as sharp as ever. He poured bourbon, then neglected the glass and took the bottle to the attic with him. He spent a night paging through the valuable first drafts of Lancelot Satterwhite’s plays in their careful archival boxes, searching for the first ludicrously yellowed printed-out draft of The Springs. It would be worth more than this entire house. He wouldn’t find it. It was no longer kin of the other plays, having left Mathilde decades earlier one dawn, filched by the hand of a young man who had woken in shame and fury in an alien house, who had let the dog out in the dark to pee and made fruit salad and coffee without turning on the light. He had slid the papers under his shirt, had warmed them with his skin as he drove back to the city. In the end, it didn’t matter. Land had had a claim as strong as any, it is true; a boy who had explained the theft in a letter he’d tucked in a great blue bowl full of ripening tomatoes, a boy who had felt in his bones what only one other person had truly known.

—

TWO YEARS A WIDOW, Mathilde went to see Land in New Jersey. A production of The Tempest. He’d been Caliban. He acquitted himself well, but alas, there was no spark. The children of geniuses rarely being geniuses, et cetera. His greatest talent was the gorgeous face he hid behind the latex.

After the curtain call, she walked into the dusk. She hadn’t disguised herself, thinking there would have been no need; she was a healthy weight, her hair had returned, and it was a natural soft brown. But there he was in front of the theater, smoking a cigarette in his lumpy makeup, the hump on his back, the rags. “What did you think, Mathilde?” he called across the eddy of people leaving for dinner, for the babysitter, for a drink.

The look he gave her. Christ. It was as if he could see into her dark heart and was sickened to death by what he saw.

Well, it’s true, Lotto had the same moral rigidity. Had he known — all that she had done, all that she was, the anger sparking like lightning under her skin, the times when she would hear him boast at some party, jovially drunk, and hate the words coming out of that beautiful mouth, how she wanted to incinerate the shoes he kicked off everywhere, the lazy way he had with people’s swift and delicate feelings, the ego heavier than the granite slab their house was hitched to, how she was sometimes sick of his body that had once been hers, the smell of the body, the flab on the waist, the unsightly hairs of that body that was now bones — would he have forgiven her? Oh, Christ, of course he would.

She stopped still. Stand straight, she told herself. She gave poor Land her largest smile. “Don’t lose heart. Onward!” she said.

She saw his face again and again as she drove back fast through the night to get home to her house, her dog. How ugly a handsome man can sometimes be. Perhaps Land was a far better actor than she’d ever believed him to be; better, for sure, than Lotto had been. Well, she knew what that was like.

—

EMPTY THEATERS ARE MORE SILENT than other empty places. When theaters sleep, they dream of noise and light and motion. She found only one door unlocked to the street and stepped out of the freezing wind. Even now, bird-bone Danica and pretty Susannah were exhausting their small talk, waving off the waiter, almost ready to start badmouthing Mathilde for standing them up. So be it. All day at work she’d felt a ratcheting of anxiety, and when Lancelot wouldn’t answer her texts, when he didn’t come home, she went to find him. Gacy on the marquee. Play about evil, corroding him internally. She followed the faint traces of his voice through the backstage, hands out, shuffling, to feel her way in the dark; she wouldn’t turn on a light and warn him she was there. At last she was in the wings, and there he was onstage, of course, in dim light, saying:

Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart,

Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood,

When man’s worst sin is, he does too much good!

Who, then, dares to be half so kind again?

For bounty, that makes gods, does still mar men.

It took her to the end of the scene to identify it: Timon of Athens. Her least favorite Shakespeare. He started the next scene. Oh. He was doing the whole play. Alone. To nobody.

She was safe in the darkness, and there allowed herself to smile at him — ludicrous, sweet man — and the smile expanded alarmingly in her diaphragm so that she had to breathe deep, stern breaths to keep from laughing. Because look at him, too tall, stalking the stage. Keeping the old dream moribund with these infusions of acting; the old self she thought dead still secretly alive. But stagy, too loud. Not the actor he thought he was.

She stood in the black folds of the curtain, and he finished and bowed and bowed; then he caught his breath and came back down into his body again. He flicked off the lights. He had a light on his cell, and he guided himself out with it, but she was careful to stay away from its dim circle. He passed close by her and she caught a whiff of him: sweat and coffee and his own human smell, and maybe bourbon to loosen him. She waited until the door echoed closed, and then she came more swiftly through the dark by feel, outside into the icy street, and jumped into a cab and raced him home. When he came in, it was only minutes after her, but she’d smelled the winter in his hair when he leaned his head against her neck. She held his head gently, feeling his secret happiness moving in him.

—

LATER, UNDER HER NOM DE PLUME, she wrote a play called Volumnia. It played in a fifty-seat theater. She gave it her all.

[She shouldn’t have been surprised when nobody came.]

24

SO LONG AGO, and she had been so little then. There was a long darkness between what she remembered and the results. There was something ajar here. A four-year-old is still an infant. It seemed too harsh to hate a baby for being a baby, for making a baby’s mistake.

Perhaps it was always there; perhaps it was made in explanation, but all along she had held within her a second story underneath the first, waging a terrible and silent battle with her certainty. She had to believe of herself that the better story was the true one, even if the worse was insistent.

She was four years old, and she heard her brother playing upstairs in her grandmother’s house when the rest of the family was eating pheasants her father had shot that morning. In the window, the family was gathered under the tree, baguettes and cassoulet on the table, wine. Her mother’s rosy face was tipped back, sun full on her skin. Her father was feeding Bibiche a morsel. Her grandmother’s mouth was more dash than n, signaling happiness. The wind was rising, the leaves shushing. There was a smell of good manure on the air and a delicious far Breton waiting clammy on the countertop for dessert. She was on the potty, trying to go, but her brother was more interesting with his songs and thumps above. He was supposed to be sleeping. Bad boy, he would not.

The girl went up the stairs, gathering dust with her fingertip.

She opened the door to the room. Her baby brother saw her and crowed with happiness. Come on, she said. He tottered out. She followed him to the stairs, golden old oak shining from the slippers that buffed it up and down, day after day.

Her brother stood at the top of the steps, wobbly, his hands reaching for hers, sure she would help him. He pressed up against her. But instead of taking his hand in hers, she moved her leg where it was touching him. She didn’t mean to, not really, well, maybe some of her meant it, perhaps she did. He tottered. And then she watched the baby tumble slowly down the stairs, his head like a coconut, thump-a-bump all the way down.

The still knot of him at the bottom. Thrown laundry.

When she looked up, she saw the ten-year-old cousin where she hadn’t seen her before, standing in the door of the upstairs bathroom, gaping.

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

IT 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.

—

HER 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.