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.

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

He paused for a moment, and gave me a look that was, if possible, even more intent than the way he’d been looking at me before.

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

She is slow, and un-daring, and uptight. She is maybe a little boring. She doesn’t need to prove anything; she is exactly what she is through and through.

She wanted sex to achieve something for her, something outside of itself. This something could have a name: connection, redemption, purpose, pleasure, pure feeling. But really what she wanted was for sex to make her known. You have edges, you are something, you are here, you exist, defined by these hands, this mouth, this penis.

The Basher was in his mid-thirties. Being with an older man made me feel my youth—which, let’s face it, was so often a burden—as a kind of material good. When I was with other people my own age, my youth was invisible. We were all the same; youth is a relative notion. But set against his oldness, my youth itself became a fetish or a beauty mark.

We took a break for a moment in the midst of the crying and the “I know”–saying, the way you pause in the middle of an especially long bout of sex or jogging.

If you’re not a good cook by the time you’re our age it’s a serious character defect, and it means something bad, something ungenerous, about your personality. Sorry to break the news. Anyway, we could cook just fine, but somehow we’d forgotten how to eat. Food was wearisome. We’d been dealing with food, planning it buying it growing it storing it