It’s all in vain
Gawain “had been thought slow,” yet “when his parents died in a car crash when he was twenty, leaving him with a seven-year-old sister, he was the only one to understand the value of the family’s land.” He was clever enough to use their savings as “down payment to build a plant to bottle the clean, cold water from the family’s course.” Gawain “accumulated wealth, spent none.” When his desire to find a wife got “too intense,” he’d built “the plantation house with vast white Corinthian columns all around.” “Wives loved big columns,” he heard. He waited, but “no wives came.” The irony is that wives are not cockroaches. They can’t appear just out of nowhere.
The only one problem
The dean summoned Lotto, for he had heard that Lancelot was “troubled.” The dean wanted to know the reason. It couldn’t be school, for Lotto’s grades were “perfect”, he was “no dummy.” Lotto’s words about his unhappiness astonished the dean. The boy was “tall, smart, rich.” Not to mention that the teenager was “white”. Lotto and boys like him were “meant to be leaders.” Perhaps, “the dean hazarded,” if the boy “bought facial soap”, he would be able to “find a higher perch on the totem pole”. The irony is that the dean can’t believe that the boy can have more serious problems than acne.
Beauty is in the eye of beholder
Everyone considered Lotto a womanizer. “Coed bathrooms: soapy breasts.” “Dining hall: tonguing soft-serve ice-creams.” “Within two months,” Lotto was called “Master of the Hogs, Hoagmeister.” Contrary to popular opinion, Lotto did have standards. The irony was that Lotto “saw the stun in every woman.” “Earlobes like drupes.” “Soft golden down edging the temples.” Such things managed to outshine “the less savory rest.” Lotto imagined his life as “an antipriest, devoting his soul to sex.”
