When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
What’s there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.
He understood that it only took one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin.
A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.
He left through the patio door. He was not certain, but he thought he had proved something. He hoped he had made something clear. The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed. They’d talk again. Maybe after the holidays were over and things got back to normal. He’d tell her the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example.
Then i don’t know I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked, running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him – Chef’s House.
I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn’t have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep.
You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where! Pillows, too. It’s all the same. He.
It made him feel older, having married friends.
I don’t want to talk to anybody. Actually, I’d talk to Molly, if I could, but I can’t any longer – she’s somebody else now. She isn’t Molly any more. But – what can I say? – I’m somebody else, too.
I knocked stuff out of the medicine cabinet. Things rolled into the sink. ‘Where’s the aspirin?’ I said. I knocked down more things. I didn’t care. ‘Goddamn it,’ I said. Things kept falling.
Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
Today, my heart, like the front door, stands open for the first time in months.
Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one.
There were things he wanted to say, grieving things, consoling things, things like that.
It seems to me we’re just beginners at love.
All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.
I said I’m sorry.” “Sorry isn’t good enough.
He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it slowly, as if thinking about something else. He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it tenderly, as a lover would.
When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking.
I thought we’d be like that too when we got old enough. Dignified. And in a place. And people would come to our door.