Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.
It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.
Oh. That’s because I’ve stopped smiling,” Mathilde said. “For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don’t know why I didn’t stop earlier. It’s enormously relaxing.
Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?
He’s like a perfect, windless pond, her husband once said. You throw something in just to watch it sink, and you’re going to see it on the bottom staring back at you for the rest of your life.
It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.
Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.
She would always feel this wild girl was the truest of any of the people she had already been: adored daughter, bourgeois priss, rebel, runaway, dope-fiend San Francisco hippie; or all the people she would later be: mother, nurse, religious fanatic, prematurely old woman. Vivienne was a human onion, and when I came home at twenty eight years old on the day the monster died, I was afraid that the Baptist freak she had peeled down to was her true, acrid, tear-inducing core.
Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they’ll always share the warm, dark swim.
And the great Now What stretching without end.
She’s a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge.
The stories themselves aren’t what moves him now... What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire... The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear... a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...
The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it’s the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world.
The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?
The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.
His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.
Happy birthday, friend of my heart,” she said.
Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself.
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world? Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.