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with a view out the bathroom window of a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash,
WHEN HE WALKED OUTSIDE again, the sky was shining like a nickel
In the bar at the St. Regis, under the jovial gaze of Parrish’s King Cole, their conversation had veered so quickly from Bacon’s difficulties with the character of the Escapist that Sammy could not remember now what wisdom, if any, he had been able to offer on that score.
The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs—snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge—were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.
Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.
The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
Sammy still refused to admit to himself—at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later—that he was in love, or falling in love, with Tracy Bacon.
“Something like you and me is not a question of choosing or not choosing. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday—but when?—he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there—somewhere—waiting for him.
