Unbuttoning my suit jacket, I took a cigar from the inner pocket of my coat. From a still smaller pocket I took out my cigar cutter and matches. Though it wasn’t after dinner, I lit the cigar – a Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3 – and stood smoking, trying to calm myself. The cigars, the double-breasted suits – they’re a little too much. I’m well aware of that. But I need them. They make me feel better. After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected.
Still point of the turning world.
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.
English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.
Buffeted but not broken.
When Annie flirted she didn’t always admit to herself that she was flirting. Sometimes she preferred to suspend her mental faculties so that she could flirt, as it were, without her mind watching. It was as if her body and mind separated, her body stepping behind a screen to remove its clothing while her mind, on the other side of the screen, paid no attention.”.
Let’s just say that during my travels I’ve become acquainted with interior states that collapse the distance between people. Sometimes, despite how far apart we are physically, I have drawn very close to you, right up into your innermost chamber. I can feel what you’re feeling. From here.
I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can’t be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen. Someone had switched on my eyes.
For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.
Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I’ll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school.
I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally. When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed.
Emerson said, “I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the still, small voice.
All this led up to the day Desdemona dangled a utensil over my mother’s belly. The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.
The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical.
General John L. Throckmorton set up the headquarters of the 101st Airborne at Southeastern High, where my parents had gone to school.
How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure? As it was, we didn’t know them any longer, and their new habits – of opening a window, for instance, to throw out a wadded paper towel – made us wonder if we had ever really known them, or if our vigilance had been only the fingerprinting of phantoms.
I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages. I was as much of a man as Olivia could bear at that point. I was her starter kit.
To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han during cocoon season. What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets...
We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid.
But it’s mostly the act itself that brings relief, the self-forgetfulness, the diving and plunging into other lives.