Black Wings Has My Angel

If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed, or a bad breakfast that causes the doctor to sew the absorbent cotton inside you. From a slick tire tread or the hiccups or from kissing the wrong woman. Life is a rental proposi

I think if God were to say to me: “Kenneth, I’m going to let you take your pick and live again any incident in your life that gave you a particular bang,” I’d pick that one on the edge of the hole when, after forcing ourselves to look into it, we felt as if we’d rid ourselves of some loathsome disease. I remember the only thing that worried me then

She looked more like she used to than she used to, if that makes sense.

We wore the long-billed silly-looking caps of straw Virginia had bought for us so we’d look like tourists. She said if we were going to look like tourists we might as well get accustomed to looking silly, because that was the biggest part of it, a kind of over-all silliness. I thought that was pretty smart. And I still do.

It seems that when you’re rich you do a lot of waiting for night, since daylight is neither sophisticated nor secretive and is more or less devoted to perspiring and recovering.

She kissed the way an expert dancer follows the lead, giving and taking at exquisitely the right moment, and getting across the idea that she had a lot in reserve and this was only a sample. I’m not lying when I say I think that kiss lasted a quarter hour. But I still planned to leave her in the ladies john of some filling station. Because you can’

“Virginia!” “What, Tim?” “I don’t know too much about loving, honestly loving, but I think I love you.” “You’re drunk, Tim, drunk on sunshine and exercise and having a woman all to yourself.” “No. I feel funny about you.” “Then you’re crazy.” “Of course, but that has nothing to do with it. I want to make you happy, so I guess I love you.” “Tim, you

She was breathing oddly, her shoulders moving as if her lungs were upstairs there, in her shoulders. She wore a T shirt of some kind of cocoa toweling and when she leaned back hard against the seat it was a splendid thing to see. Her skirt was gray flannel and it fitted as if it had been smeared on her, and below it were the legs. You hear and read

And I felt so marvelously clean and soaped and so in tune with the whole damned universe that I had the feeling I could have clouded up and rained and lightninged myself, and blown that cheese-colored room to smithereens.