Sublime

Her guilt was so large that it was gravitational, warping space and time, connecting through non-Euclidian geometry to the guilt she hadn’t felt while wrecking Charles’s marriage.

These intakes weren’t medical examinations conducted by registered dietitians. They were trauma-bonding tactics carried out by regular people, like Becca and her mother-in-law.

‘I do.’ Horribly it occurred to her that perhaps she wept because in fact she did not want this real Nathan, in his compromised flesh. Was this what she’d waited for? Had she bartered her soul for a gaunt man with a wife and child and a dragging foot?

They were married in weeks. Gregory arrived within the year. Bawling, strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the infant’s fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

morphine

pinioned

But with Linda it was as though I had been cast back to the time when my feelings swung from wild elation to wild fury, to the pits of despair and desperation, the time when I lived in a series of all-decisive moments, and the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except b

It was the summer of 1929 when Tom first discussed with Perkins his relationship with a married woman, the celebrated scenic designer for the Neighborhood Playhouse, Aline Bernstein.