Love and Trouble

It was a kind of adult drag I was trying on. I was enjoying the grown-up music, the grown-up book, the grown-up feeling of looking like a seductress. But that didn’t mean I was seductive or that I wanted to seduce.

I had isolated myself from that, in my house in the country, where I had thought I would be safe. But I wasn’t safe, just isolated. I believed my cohort, my fellowship, the formerly weird, the troubled, the angsty, the fucked-up was nowhere to be seen here on my island. People on my island were life’s winners. Most had cruised through college and o

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.

My parents fixing to die just when I started to like them. The years wasted on the wrong projects, places, self-conceptions. What would happen if our landlord raised our rent to market value? Various occasions upon which I have humiliated myself. The earth dying. Face sag. Child porn. Varicose veins. Dying alone, i.e., the fate of every single huma

Aside from taking drugs, Fred and I had other shared interests, like . . . well, I can’t think of any right this minute. Fixing complicated midnight snacks in our vegetarian dorm’s smelly kitchen? Giggling? Trying to make our handwriting quirkier? (In the days before social media, quirky handwriting was one of the only ways you could demonstrate to

They looked on, I imagine, in horror as I determinedly fell in love. Why the Quark Basher? Who knows? I didn’t even like him. He was censorious and moralistic. Not in an interesting way but in that boring way that hates Americans. “You eat in cars! That’s uncivilized.”

I almost fainted from happiness—not because I thought it would ever happen but because he’d imagined it, and I was inside his imagination, a girl in a castle in the air.

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

In the winter when I was forty-six, we went to L.A. on a kind of art-seeing blitz. We visited maybe a dozen or more galleries in two days. What I was after was the bright white light and the feeling of possibility, both of which had faded from my life.