He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity that he had not thought to end things with Zoe. But his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay.
Sadie,” he said. “Do you know why I want to make a game?” “Of course. Because you foolishly think it will make you rich and famous.” “No. It’s very simple. I want to make something that will make people happy.
We walk back to town, and he looks at me seriously and he says, ‘Sadie, when you tell this story, say I asked you at the glass flower exhibit. Don’t say it was closed.’ The myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importance to Sam.
So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.
Reading a great book.
While Sadie experienced this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.
Dov was a producer on Ichigo, and he was so well known that she worried that people would think her work was his work. That they wouldn’t know where her work began and his work ended.
A great textile, like the William Morris Strawberry Thief, is a piece of art, but it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn’t simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.
From the window, she could see the water tower of the New England Confectionery Company’s factory, which had recently been painted to resemble a roll of Necco wafers, those barely flavored, pastel-colored, vaguely religious-looking chalky disks. As they approached the factory, the air increasingly smelled of sugar, and the scent made Sadie nostalgic for a candy she had never even tasted.
With his sweet, roundish face, light-colored eyes, and mix of white and Asian features, Sam looked almost exactly like an anime character. Astro Boy, or one of the wisecracking little brothers of manga.
One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity.
She understood neither the conventions of Noh nor the language. Marx would occasionally whisper poetic, cryptic commentary into her ear: “The fisherman’s ghost was killed for fishing in the wrong river.” Or “The drum is silent, and the gardener is killing himself.
To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.
But the reason she was bourgeois was so she could make work that wasn’t bourgeois. If she were cautious in her life, she could avoid compromising in her work.
And eventually, Sadie would be a stranger. And this would be a disaster for Sam. A tragedy. He would know that if he hadn’t been the person he was, terrified and cowardly and petty and insecure and sexually panicked and broken, Sadie might have been his.
The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing. And how could she not feel that as well? There would never be another Sadie, and now this one was lost to him.
But Ant was no longer a kid, and his eyes reminded Sam of his own. They had the patina of a person who had felt pain and expected to feel it again.
Marx loved college theater. It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art. He mourned every time a production was over, and he rejoiced when he was cast in a new one.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.