Sublime

Eldest was Frances, with skin as pale as milk and blood-red hair, who early on had the ability to commune with birds, which flocked to her window as if called when she was still in her crib.

Eve Babitz, and Joan’s longtime friend, Earl McGrath, who was married to an Italian countess and introduced the Dunnes to tout L.A.

Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

Charlie doesn’t reply. Her gaze is flicking over Forrest critically, and she’s thinking that if she and Barbara really are like North and South Korea, she would just as soon they dropped this pretense and North Korea took Forrest political prisoner. There’s always the worry of starvation and reeducation, of course, but maybe he’d be detained in one

The daughters he and his partner adopted are Eritrean, so he is touchy about anything having to do with Africa, particularly since a Fascist branch of his family made a fortune from the cotton trade in Asmara. He continues: “And a spoiled signora having a fling with the skipper is no different from a husband fucking the nanny. Just plain common.

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

She felt too young to be washed up, but then again, she had ridden an improbable string of luck. Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune—she had been given whiteness. Blonde hair, a pretty face, a nice figure, a rich father. She’d sobbed out of speeding tickets, flirted her way to endless second chances. Her whole life, a bounty of