We’ve been reckless with our gifts.” He.
The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow. “I.
Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.
What kind of shark is a shark that doesn’t attack? A dolphin. Who needs dolphins? Dolphins are delicious. They make great snacks.
Go back to what you know,” she said. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “You know me,” she said. He looked at her, his face smeary with newsprint, and began to smile. “I do,” he said.
Felt like yesterday, all that bodily joy. Begun so young they didn’t even know what they were doing and they wouldn’t give it up, so when they were old enough, they married. Not the worst thing to build a marriage around, such juice. The first years had been delirious, the latter ones merely happy.
Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.
Also the fact that he’s a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she’s like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he’s doing what boys do.
Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual high-wire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations.
When she shouted, the gulls hidden by the dune buckshot the low clouds.
Whatever happened to all of those friends of ours” Lotto wondered. The ones who had seemed so essential had faded away.
How swift, the slippage from keeping it together to losing it.
Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.
In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.
She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.
Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn’t sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying. Great.
She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.
Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax.
Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She – steely, controlling – is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.
His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song.