Looking back across that first week of our acquaintance I was struck by how much about how she spoke, dressed, behaved seemed designed, if not precisely to rebuff, then to make clear that if a certain degree of access had been granted much more was withheld and was likely to continue to be. Even when she at last undressed for me in her room her ( Read more... )

"We make and sell women now." "What ( Read more... )

Further down the hallway the doors stopped and murals began, pictures of some city far away in someone else's country and deep in their past, what looked like both sides of a major thoroughfare, the sidewalks and windows and signage and doorways of shops. Walkers in the mural - not passersby, as the only one passing was you - were rare and spaced ( Read more... )

She threw more than forty parties every year, counting having a couple or two of friends over for dinner or post-dinner drinks. Even this involved preparation. To catch a single party requires netting considerable amounts of time, food, alcohol and assent. Not to mention the work she put into conversation, drawing on The Atlantic, The New Yorker, ( Read more... )

"If you're serious about getting what you want don't take it so seriously." That's what they tell you. I think I've never known what to want but have taken it seriously anyway. It just always seemed like I might start to any second ( Read more... )

To leave the freeway is to arrive at her door with flowers. Finding a parking garage at the lower end of town is seeing her eyes through her hair at a crack in the door. Searching floor B and then floor C for a space and then finding one back on B heading out is talking with her about their colors as she arranges them in two vases, one for the ( Read more... )

They understood that a single spotlight roved over the near-infinite crowd and a single strafing machine gun. One popular belief was that you needed to be ready to speak your piece, your word, in brief in case you were lit up before being cut down, as must be true for half. So everywhere you went you heard phrases being practiced, in various ( Read more... )

I returned past the building with the bleak facade, but the posters were no longer there. I never saw that face again. It was hard to believe she'd been up all over the city. But the city is like that. Like a forest, but worse, as no season repeats. You do find a leaf now and then that's long outlived its context: machine gun shells, a dusty bag of ( Read more... )

She directed my attention to the ground near my feet. I guessed, "Grass. Bugs? Twigs? Clover. More grass. Wet grass." She nodded then shook her head no. Right but wrong? Not grass? Not wet ( Read more... )

When once the lights went out you had to assume it would be forever. So when the fluorescent went dim and then a day later the dim started to flicker everyone in the room went into a sort of frenzy. We'd all been fairly sedate before, but now love was being declared. I love yous, in language or proof-touch, here and there, but mostly other things ( Read more... )