Sublime

Maggie’s destiny arrives one afternoon without a clarion call. It comes on cat feet, like everything else in the world that has the power to destroy you. She had

Hemingway and Fitzgerald each went his own way that summer, 1925. Ernest and his wife Hadley journeyed to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, Scott and Zelda to the south of France.

He believed, I think, that I’d become a West Heart Woman, spending my days sunbathing at the lake, walking in the woods, looking after the children. But I wasn’t. I liked coming during the week, without him, especially after Otto left home, because then I could just stay in the cabin without seeing anyone, without talking to anyone, for days and da

She existed. She had not existed, and then she had, summoned out of whatever matter her consciousness had been made, and had stuck her small bare foot in his door. It was disastrous. There was a pain in his heart, as if it had acquired a new chamber to contain her, and so all his life he’d be carting her about.

After a moment, Amelia reached to untie her bonnet with trembling hands, and discovered the ribbons were hanging loose. One ribbon, actually. The other … Removing her bonnet, Amelia regarded it with a perplexed frown. One of the red silk ribbons was gone except for the tiny remnant at the inside edge. It had been neatly cut. He had taken it.

She looked at the couple at the next table. When we are young, she thought, we have enormous hope, we expect that someone – a man bearing love and mystery and new ideas – will come and help reveal us to ourselves. She looked at David’s waiting face. He was no longer mysterious to her.

Occasionally she would seem to become the sole focus of his interest, and he’d interrogate her with the attention of a student making notes: why did she have to wear a hat on Sundays? Why did she never wear jeans? Why didn’t she have a television? Was it true she’d never been to the cinema? When she answered, she said either it was because her fath

That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.