Free Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

didn’t mind. If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him; and it had become painfully apparent over their short marriage that he was not worth the salt she sweated. The woman was a saint. She saved, fretted, somehow paid their bills when he brought in nothing. He had sat beside her until it was fully dark, and she turned with a rustling of silk and kissed him suddenly, and he carried her to bed without eating.
    Now Mathilde lifted a piece of salmon burger to Lotto’s lips, and though he didn’t want it, she was looking at him and the gold specks in her eyes glittered, and he took the bite off the fork. He kissed her on the freckled bridge of her nose.
    “Disgusting,” Arnie called from his distant sheet. His arm was around some tattooed chick he was dating from his bar. “You’ve been married for a year. Honeymoon’s over.”
    “Never,” Mathilde and Lotto said, at once. They did jinx pinkies, kissed again.
    “What’s it like?” Natalie said quietly. “Marriage, I mean.”
    Lotto said, “A never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full.”
    Mathilde said, “Kipling called it a very long conversation.”
    Lotto looked at his wife, touched her cheek. “Yes,” he said.
    Chollie leaned toward Danica, who leaned away. He whispered, “You owe me a million bucks.”
    “What?” she snapped. She was dying for a chicken leg, but had to plow through a heap of salad before she allowed herself anything fatty.
    “Last year, at their housewarming,” Chollie said. “We bet a million bucks they’d be divorced by now. You lose.”
    They looked at Lotto and Mathilde, so handsome, the still axis of the garden, of the spinning world. “I don’t know. How much of it’s an act?” Danica said. “There’s some sort of darkness there. Probably that he’s pretending to be faithful and she’s pretending not to care.”
    “You’re mean,” Chollie said with admiration. “What’s your beef with Lotto? Were you one of his vanquished millions? They all still love him. I ran into that girl Bridget who was calling herself his girlfriend in college, and she burst into tears when she asked about him. He was the love of her life.”
    Danica’s eyes and mouth tightened. Chollie laughed, revealing a roil of lasagna. “Naw, it’s the opposite,” he said. “He never went for you.”
    “If you don’t shut up, you’re getting salad in the kisser,” she said.
    They sat for a long moment, eating, pretending to eat. Then Danica said, “Fine. Double or nothing. But I get longer. Six years. Until1998. And they’ll be divorced and you’ll pay me two million bucks and I’ll get an apartment in Paris. Enfin .”
    Chollie blinked, bulged. “You’re assuming that I’ll be able to pay.”
    “Of course you will. You’re the kind of slimy little man who makes a hundred million dollars by your thirties,” Danica said.
    Chollie said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said about me.”
    When the shadows thickened just enough for the gesture to be hidden, Susannah gave Natalie a pinch on the rear. They laughed into their cups. It had been tacitly agreed upon: another night they would end up at Susannah’s. Only Natalie knew about Susannah’s new role as the bratty daughter of a soap opera villain; only Natalie knew about the new rising sea of feeling between them. “My career would die before it was born if everyone knew I was a big fat lesbo,” Susannah had said. Something sat wrong with Natalie, but she kept it in, let Susannah blaze inside her all day while she stood at her sad, gray desk trading commodities, her bank account spinning richer second by second.
    Natalie was looking better, Lotto thought, watching her brush her hand over the last mint. She had bleached the moustache, lost weight, was dressing with flair. She had found the beauty he’d known was there all along. He smiled at her, and she blushed, smiled back.
    Their eating slowed. The group fell silent. Caramel brownies went