Love and Trouble

Even in public, the women wept unrestrainedly and loudly. Not because they lacked social skills or because they were emotional exhibitionists. They cried like this because they’d been crying for so many months now that it just came real natural to them. Crying was simply what they did when confronted with a sympathetic face and perhaps a question o

He seemed to be somehow sending up the awkwardness of the situation; even though he was famous, one of the rulers of the room, and even though he was obeying the conventions of the party—chatting, sipping—there was something about him that was simultaneously acknowledging its inherent awkwardness and subverting it. Something about him, like me, did

I was not the picture of efficiency in Bruce’s absence. He was, after all, the organizing principle of my life. He brought me coffee in bed each morning and instilled in me a certain sense of shame if I lingered there too long. He chatted with me about work and bickered with me about the dishes. Because he was a naturally anxious type, his worry ab

I couldn’t keep my head together. The incubus/kisser came most nights and perched on me. I never got used to him, and he kept being an incubus. I didn’t want to think of him as a cheesy old incubus. I wanted to think of him as at least a more literary monster and not one that had the same name as a terrible rock band. But incubus is what he was. He

She loved the Moment: when the grown-up would turn to kiss her for the first time, and his eyes would go soft with lust, and she wouldn’t be feeling lust in return, just as she hadn’t with her first boyfriend. But now that emotional inequity felt like power, felt like control: to make a grown man go soft (and also: hard) like that! It made her feel

An aside on the question of pleasure: The subject didn’t really get much pleasure from all this fornicating she was doing. The compulsion wasn’t to feel good, it was to enjoy the feeling of making someone want her, of making someone else feel good.

This kiss would make me guilty and excited and full of sharp pain for the lost purity of my marriage. This would go on for months or for god knew how long. I would be tormented by it, and this person, this kisser, would not understand my torment. I would care, and he would not. Why should he? Just a kiss.

6. The, You Know, Encroaching Darkness

But I do know that I was, as the years went on, going to grow very, very weary of this sexual self, the girl who saw every question as a sex question because that was the only answer she thought she had.

I began to feel embarrassed. There I was, waiting. There was my hand, which had come to seem an almost disembodied thing. Did he not want it? Was he against hand-holding? Was there something wrong with me for wanting him to hold it (likeliest scenario)? I was hurt, but also kind of pissed. Why couldn’t I get what I wanted? It didn’t matter that he