If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him.
Lotto lost too many people to be able to live through another loss of a loved one. He didn’t want to be left on his own. The man was ready to pretend that everything was fine, that he hadn’t had “to wait in the drizzle on the street for two hours” to get a chance to read his lines just to get rejected from another job opportunity. “In truth,” he “didn’t mind.” If his dear Mathilde was “happy,” Lotto was ecstatic, for it meant that she “wouldn’t leave him.” According to him, the woman was “a saint.” Lotto was dependent on her. Having been deprived of a family for so many years, he was lucky to have his own.
Kipling called it a very long conversation.
When their friends asked them what “marriage” was like, Lotto said that it was “a never-ending banquet,” and you could “eat and eat and never get full.” Mathilde agreed with Kipling and “called it a very long conversation.” Their friends couldn’t believe that. Lotto, who used to be a womanizer, and Mathilde, who used to be called an ice queen, seemed to be genuinely happy together. Some of them still believed that it was “an act,” at least partially. Some of them sensed “some sort of darkness there.” They thought that Lotto was “pretending to be faithful” and Mathilde was “pretending not to care.” However, they couldn’t prove that.
I will never be old.
Lotto and Rachel were separated many years ago. He was sent away to a posh boarding school that he hated and where he learned how cruel teenagers could be. Later on, he found a friend, but before that he had to suffer through humiliation and loneliness. Rachel was isolated too. Her poor mother, who refused to leave the house for she was ashamed of her obesity, and Sally, an aunt who was so busy that she couldn’t find even a minute to play with Rachel, were her only company. That life convinced Rachel that adulthood was a rather sad place, so she promised herself that she would “never be old.” She would “never be sad.” She decided to “kill” herself “like that friend of Lotto’s” everyone was crying about. According to her, life wasn’t “worth living” unless you were “young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flower.” If anything, Rachel was the loneliest soul in all of New York.
