Love and Trouble

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

We’ll go back to work just after Miss Catharine puts the cornflowers in her hair. This is one of our favorite moments in the movie, when the octogenarian gentlewoman Miss C is given piles of cornflowers by George and his kind-eyed father, who says, “There are no jewels more becoming a lady. I like to see them in your hair.” And so father and son de

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

I myself was the second-weirdest kid from my high-school senior class (the weirdest was Vanessa, now at Bennington), and while I had no interest in modern dance, I had written more than my fair share of poetry, which is like modern dance for uncoordinated people.

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.

I walked home through the bright, light gray snow to Fred, and we did the things real married people do: made coffee, nagged each other about our messy living quarters, told jokes to compensate for the terrible world.

Secret 8 Here I had been going around thinking my friends and acquaintances were living morally upstanding, partnered, educated, organic lives. I thought we were like Tennyson’s Ulysses in middle age, “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.” I thought we were made of stern stuff, stuff that wouldn’t give way to the chaos of midlife love an

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.

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 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