All Fours: A Novel

And now in this lifetime we only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway; we only became us against insurmountable odds. The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved and then some of the time we were fucking furious about this and it

Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it.

I can never quite explain how the terms of my success are built upon an agreement to carry this person on my back for the rest of my life. There has to be a burden to keep everything in balance.

So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it. “I think this is good,” I rasped. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.

He didn’t understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life.

That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like a stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I

I was so good at knowing what I wanted and then choosing something else at the very last second.

You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’