You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you’re a drunk.
We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been.
And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us – excuse me for saying this – but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.
When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.
The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.
It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.
Suppose I say summer, write the word “hummingbird”, put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.
We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We’d reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.
I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn’t do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I’d have when I had been young and looking ahead to things.
But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn’t that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone.
Why don’t you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. “Why don’t you dance?
Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure.
But he understood it was over, and he felt able to let her go. He was sure their life together had happened in the way he said it had. But it was something that had passed. And that passing – though it seemed impossible and he’d fought against it – would become part of him now, too, as surely as anything else he’d left behind.
In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God.
He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth.
I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.
He seemed full of some goodness she didn’t understand.
I wish I could be like everybody else in this neighborhood – your basic, normal, unaccomplished person-and go up to my bedroom, and lie down, and sleep. It’s going to be a big day today, and I’d like to be ready for it. I wish I could sleep and wake up and find everything in my life different. Not necessarily just the big things,... but things clearly within my power.
She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.