Sex and Rage: A Novel

She had seen the very worst of the Old World seductions and had even drunk its bad waters, which were supposed to be fatal to innocent virgins, but here she still was. She’d lived to tell the tale.

To ride such a stampede you had to be alive with balance, for the speed welled up beneath your feet, blooming faster and faster, as the green glass smashed into foam, throwing you into its tangoed embrace forever and ever.

Every time between Max and Jacaranda was different, but it was always a tango, and the tango is not a dance that lends itself to much beyond sex and rage.

something one finds nowhere else on earth . . .” “Taquitos?” Sonia laughed; her laughter rolled around them like soft pearls. “Well, that, too,” she said. “But what I really miss is the sea. Are you still by the sea?”

The last time she’d seen Sonia, in her villa blooming with birds of paradise and geraniums in Beverly Hills, he had just died and Sonia simply glowed away, only stronger, so strongly that Jacaranda had a feeling that Sonia’s blood—which was probably made of pink roses—was, each evening at twilight, bled into the sunset so that she could live foreve

For breakfast they had coffee and hot fudge sundaes with nuts and unsweetened whipped cream. They both had iron constitutions. Outside, New York had begun its Sunday best.

The Last Dawn They were waiting for room service to come. Gilbert was all packed, on his way to Paris to shoot a new movie. Jacaranda looked out the window where it was becoming light; no outlines were blurred in the distance the way they are in L.A., softened and yellowed by the morning dew and sunshine.

Someone besides her had noticed that there was something from those days, and from Max, which still glowed in the dark, an historical incident of some kind.

reminded Jacaranda of the way her grandmother had always sighed, unable to hide the depth of her disappointments at the way life had cheated her of her natural place and forced her to live among those who could never understand and would wallow content in ordinariness. When her grandmother sighed, it inspired bleak gloom in all who heard. The more