been inside this apartment. She has never met me. She chose to be angry and stay angry. We can’t be sorry for her choices.” Lotto saw her hands trembling; rage, he realized. He loved the rare times she showed how thin her calm surface was; how, beneath, she boiled. Aperverse part of Lotto, it’s true, wanted to lock Mathilde and his mother in a room and let them claw it all out. But he wouldn’t do it to Mathilde; she was far too sweet to spend even a minute in his mother’s company without coming out maimed. She turned off the chandelier so the Christmas tree with its lights and glass icicles overcame the room, and he pulled her onto his lap.
“Breathe,” Lotto said softly into his wife’s hair. Rachel blinked in the tree’s gleam.
Sallie had been speaking hard truths, he knew. It had become evident over the past year that he could no longer count on his charm, which had faded; he tested it again and again on coffee baristas and audition gauntlets and people reading in the subway, but beyond the leeway given to any moderately attractive young man, he didn’t have it anymore. People could look away from him these days. For so long, he had thought it was just a switch he could flick. But he had lost it, his mojo, his juju, his radiance. Gone, the easy words. He could not remember a night when he didn’t fall asleep drunk.
And so he opened his mouth and began to sing. “Jingle Bells,” a song he hated, and he was never the world’s best tenor anyway. But what else was there to do but sing in the face of dismay, the image of his fat mother sitting up alone by a potted majestic palm strung in colored bulbs? The others now were joining in, miraculous, all of them save Mathilde, still rigid with anger, though even she was softening, a smile cracking her lips. At last, even she sang.
Sallie watched Lotto, cleaving. Her boy. Heart of her heart. She was clear-eyed, knew that Rachel, being of finer moral stock, kinder, humbler, deserved her affection more than Lotto. But it was for Lotto that Sallie woke praying. These years of distance were hard on her. [ . . . in a one-horse open sleigh . . . ] It came back to her now, the Christmas before he’d finished college, before Mathilde, when he had met Sallie and Rachel in Boston, where they stayed at a redoubtable ancient hotel and were snowed in under three feet of powder, like beingstuck in a dream. Lotto had maneuvered a rendezvous with a girl at another table at dinner, his smoothness so like his mother’s when she was young and lovely that it took Sallie’s breath away. Antoinette, undulating, had for a moment been superimposed on her son. Later, Sallie waited in ambush until midnight, standing at the diamond window at the end of the hallway where their rooms were, the endless snow falling into the Common at her back. [. . . o’er the fields we go . . . ] At the other end, in minuscule, three housemaids with their trolleys were laughing, shushing one another. At last, her boy’s door opened and he emerged, bare but for a pair of running shorts. Such a beautiful long back he had, his mother’s, at least when she was thin. There was a towel around his neck; he was going up to the pool. The sin he intended to enact so painfully obvious that Sallie’s cheeks burned in imagining the girl’s buttocks gridded with tile marks, Lotto’s knees scabby in the morning. Where did he learn such confidence, she thought, as he became smaller, going toward the housemaids. He said something and all three pealed, and one gave him a little flick with a cloth, and another sent a slow glitter, chocolates, at his chest. [ . . . laughing all the way, ha ha ha! ] He caught them. His laugh rumbled back to Sallie. How ordinary he was becoming, she’d thought. He was turning banal. If he wasn’t careful, some sweet girl would glue herself to him, Sallie saw, and Lotto would drift into marriage, a job as some high-paid menial, a family, Christmas cards, a beach house,
“Breathe,” Lotto said softly into his wife’s hair. Rachel blinked in the tree’s gleam.
Sallie had been speaking hard truths, he knew. It had become evident over the past year that he could no longer count on his charm, which had faded; he tested it again and again on coffee baristas and audition gauntlets and people reading in the subway, but beyond the leeway given to any moderately attractive young man, he didn’t have it anymore. People could look away from him these days. For so long, he had thought it was just a switch he could flick. But he had lost it, his mojo, his juju, his radiance. Gone, the easy words. He could not remember a night when he didn’t fall asleep drunk.
And so he opened his mouth and began to sing. “Jingle Bells,” a song he hated, and he was never the world’s best tenor anyway. But what else was there to do but sing in the face of dismay, the image of his fat mother sitting up alone by a potted majestic palm strung in colored bulbs? The others now were joining in, miraculous, all of them save Mathilde, still rigid with anger, though even she was softening, a smile cracking her lips. At last, even she sang.
Sallie watched Lotto, cleaving. Her boy. Heart of her heart. She was clear-eyed, knew that Rachel, being of finer moral stock, kinder, humbler, deserved her affection more than Lotto. But it was for Lotto that Sallie woke praying. These years of distance were hard on her. [ . . . in a one-horse open sleigh . . . ] It came back to her now, the Christmas before he’d finished college, before Mathilde, when he had met Sallie and Rachel in Boston, where they stayed at a redoubtable ancient hotel and were snowed in under three feet of powder, like beingstuck in a dream. Lotto had maneuvered a rendezvous with a girl at another table at dinner, his smoothness so like his mother’s when she was young and lovely that it took Sallie’s breath away. Antoinette, undulating, had for a moment been superimposed on her son. Later, Sallie waited in ambush until midnight, standing at the diamond window at the end of the hallway where their rooms were, the endless snow falling into the Common at her back. [. . . o’er the fields we go . . . ] At the other end, in minuscule, three housemaids with their trolleys were laughing, shushing one another. At last, her boy’s door opened and he emerged, bare but for a pair of running shorts. Such a beautiful long back he had, his mother’s, at least when she was thin. There was a towel around his neck; he was going up to the pool. The sin he intended to enact so painfully obvious that Sallie’s cheeks burned in imagining the girl’s buttocks gridded with tile marks, Lotto’s knees scabby in the morning. Where did he learn such confidence, she thought, as he became smaller, going toward the housemaids. He said something and all three pealed, and one gave him a little flick with a cloth, and another sent a slow glitter, chocolates, at his chest. [ . . . laughing all the way, ha ha ha! ] He caught them. His laugh rumbled back to Sallie. How ordinary he was becoming, she’d thought. He was turning banal. If he wasn’t careful, some sweet girl would glue herself to him, Sallie saw, and Lotto would drift into marriage, a job as some high-paid menial, a family, Christmas cards, a beach house,
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