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.

Outside, a New York June day steamed. Soon there’d be the party, dozens of college friends descending on them for the housewarming, though the house was already sizzling with summer. For now they were safe, inside.

“It’s six. We invited them for five-thirty. We can’t,” Mathilde said.

But he wasn’t listening, he put his hands up her peacock skirt and under the band of her cotton panties, sweated through at the crotch. They were married. He was entitled. She tilted her hips back into him and put her palms on either side of the cheap long mirror that was, with the mattress and a ziggurat of suitcases where they kept their clothes, all their bedroom held. A tiger of light from the transoms prowled the clean pine floor.

He slid her underwear to her knees and said, “We’ll be quick.”

Point: mooted. He watched in the mirror as she closed her eyes and the flush crept over her cheeks, lips, the hollow of her neck. The backs of her legs were humid and trembling against 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.