Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online Page B

his knees.
    Lotto felt lush. With what? Everything. The apartment in the West Village with its perfect garden, tended by that British harridan from upstairs, whose fat thighs, even now, were among the tiger lilies in the window. One-bedroom but enormous, underground but rent-controlled. From the kitchen or bathroom, one saw pedestrian feet passing, bunions and ankle tattoos; but it was safe down here, buried against calamity, insulated from hurricanes and bombs by earth and layers of street. After being so long a nomad, he was rooted in this place, rooted in this wife, with her fine features and sad, cattish eyes and freckles and gangly tall body with its tang of the forbidden. Such terrible things his mother had said when he’d called to tell her he was married. Horrible things. It made him misty to remember them. But today even the city was laid out like a tasting menu; it was the newly shining nineties; girls wore glitter on their cheekbones; clothes were shot with silver thread; everything held a promise of sex, of wealth. Lotto would gobble it all up. All was beauty, all abundance. He was Lancelot Satterwhite. He had a sun blazing in him. This splendid everything was what he was screwing now.
    His own face looked back at him behind Mathilde’s flushed and gasping one. His wife, a caught rabbit. The pulse and throb of her. Her arms buckled, her face went pale, and she fell into the mirror, and it gave a snap, and a crack crazed their heads in uneven halves.
    The doorbell gave a long slow trill.
    “Minute!” Lotto shouted.
    In the hallway, Chollie shifted the enormous brass Buddha he’d found in a dumpster on the way over, and said, “Bet you a hundred bucks they’re fucking.”
    “Pig,” Danica said. Since graduation, she’d lost sandbags of weight. She was a bundle of sticks wrapped in gauze. She was planning to tellLotto and Mathilde as soon as they opened the door—if they ever goddamned did—that Chollie and she hadn’t come together, that they’d met on the sidewalk outside the building, that she would literally never be caught dead alone in the same place as Chollie, this little troll man. His glasses taped at the bridge. His nasty mouth, like a crow’s beak, cawing its constant bitter song. She’d hated him when he visited Lotto at school and the visits extended for months until people assumed he was a Vassar student, though he wasn’t, barely a high school grad, whom Lotto had known as a kid. She hated him more now. Fattish pretender. “You smell like garbage,” she said.
    “Dumpster diving,” he said, and hefted the Buddha in victory. “I’d be sexing it up all the time if I were them. Mathilde’s weird-looking, but I’d do her. And Lotto’s fucked around enough. He’s got to be an expert by now.”
    “Right? He’s the sluttiest,” Danica said. “He gets away with it because of the way he looks at you. Like, if he were actually good-looking, he’d never be as deadly, but five minutes in a room with him, all you want to do is get naked. Also the fact that he’s a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she’s, like, diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it a million places and everyone just thinks he’s doing what boys do.” Danica pushed the doorbell rapidly, over and over. She lowered her voice. “Anyway, I give this marriage a year. I mean, who gets married at twenty-two? Like coal miners. Like farmers. Not us . Lotto will be screwing the scary lady upstairs in about eight months. And some angry menopausal director who will make him Lear. And anyone else who catches his eye. And Mathilde will get a quickie divorce and marry some prince of Transylvania or something.”
    They laughed. Danica rang the doorbell in Morse code: SOS. “I’d take that bet,” Chollie said. “Lotto won’t cheat. I’ve known him since he was fourteen. He’s arrogant as shit but loyal.”
    “A million bucks,” Danica said. Chollie put the Buddha down and they shook.
    The door swung open