Mathilde drowns her sorrows in any man she can gets her hands on. Around the area she lives in, she “makes a name for herself without saying anything at all” (242). Her bitten-through tongue still isn’t all the way healed.

One night, after she’s shaved her head “to velveteen (242)” in the pool, she picks up the local bus driver and they go to a motel room. In a rare exchange of vulnerability, she confesses she sleeps around to find out what she’d missed by being monogamous for so long and concludes most men besides Lotto are terrible at sex.

After she leaves the crying man, Mathilde recalls her role as the brutal advocate of Lotto’s art—a necessary evil to keep their household financially afloat. She is caught by Lotto once during one of his previews for “reaming out a script supervisor with such vicious skill that the poor boy’s knees went out from under him” (245). After this, Mathilde is stealthier about her draconian ways regarding business matters.

Mathilde then recalls the other time Lotto’s absence—aside from his death—had made her feel so lost. This was when he went to the artist colony. Mathilde had stalked him and then returned home in a fever of apathy.