Dream State: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel

Maurice Sendak

Male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel, it was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. The rhythm itself said the important th

Mrs. Margolis approached the couch and kissed Cece in the same spot Charlie had and then rested her hands on her shoulders, kneading them with her fingertips. She was always kissing Cece or whispering things in her ear. Sometimes Charlie felt like he was being cuckolded by his own mother.

Second thing he notices is the boredom. Even now, with the wedding in less than a week, he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Sometimes he finds himself standing around the yard in a kind of trance, waiting for god knows what, befuddled by the fact that he isn’t even on call. In LA he often complained about not having enough time—but wasn’t

So why, driving home from the airport, had they struggled a bit to make conversation? They’d kissed, yes, and had said I missed you to each other, but then a murky drizzle of embarrassment seemed to descend upon them, as if they had to live up to the momentousness of the occasion. For the first time in his life, Charlie felt a brush of terror that

But Brig had outdone them all, dressed as a businessman caught in a storm. His umbrella had been turned inside out, exposing its ribs, and he’d shellacked his hair so that it looked like it was gusting back; even his tie was sticking up in the air, molded to seem like it was blowing over one shoulder. He staggered around, hunched and bandy-legged,

He had no desire to go to a bachelor party, Charlie’s or anybody else’s, but he knew from past experience that reneging on the basic requirements of friendship was a slippery slope.

Why this unditchable sadness? Would it hound her to the grave? Couldn’t she have a bachelorette party, for fuck’s sake, without it trailing her like a pet?

warming was a hoax—or at least a symptom of “catastrophic thinking.” Only when Garrett was in the field like this, exhausted from trap checks, did his brain get up to its old tricks; even then it was just a glimpse, like the flash of a monster’s tail.