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Life was rich with possibility, or life was possibly rich…She felt incandescent with the news.Cold sun. Jack in the pulpits nosing out of the still-frozen mud. Lotto lay watching the world incrementally wake up. They had been married for seventeen years, she lived in the deepest room in his heart, and sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself, abstraction of her before the physical being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of the sudden, the dark whip at the center of her, how, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. She put her cold hand on his stomach, which he was sunning to banish the winter’s white. ‘Vain,’ she said. ‘An actor in a playwright’s hide,’ he said. ‘I’ll never not be vain.”Oh well, it’s you,’ she said. ‘You’re desperate for the love of strangers, to be seen.”You see me,’ he said. And he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased.’I do,’ she said. ‘Now please, talk.’She stretched her arms over heads…she looked at him, savoring her own knowing, his unknowing…
