Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.
He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.
Most of us are safe. If you’re not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn’t trouble the constellations, nobody’s going to cast a spell on you.
Yes,” she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It’s a little like reading, isn’t it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer.
I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen – into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.
What marriage doesn’t involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn’t unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?
He’s one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won’t, possibly can’t, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.
She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation.
There’s no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.
It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.
He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing’s wrong.
The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.
End of story. ‘Happily ever after’ fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.
Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.
The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.
But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it. With that, you’re gone.
It’s remarkable, being alive.
He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca’s living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in... something. Something viable, something living, that’s surprised when he wakes at this hour, that’s neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal inchoate musings.
Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.
There’s the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It’s possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It’s possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine.