There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time.
She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.
What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear.
One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.
This, for eternity. He closed his eyes and wished. Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they’d done. Marriage meant forever.
My husband is an almost entirely good person, and I say this as someone who believes that our better angels are matched by our bitterest devils, and there’s a constant battle happening inside all of us: a giant cockfight.
She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.
She misses believing in God.
Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts.
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.