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“Okay,” he said, which to Meredith Wren was like saying fuck me up, darling. And to that she thought yes, that sounds nice, I think I will.
It engulfed her. It made her feel the way love was supposed to make her feel, the way other people talked about sex. She couldn’t talk about ballet without a noticeable degree of horniness, as if desire and dance were inseverable, as if she couldn’t feel passion any other way but on her toes, with the tips of her fingers so far outstretched as if to graze the cheek of God. She only ever slept with other dancers, never understanding how to explain to the normies the way she ate, her early bedtime, her early rising, the way that one mistake over the course of a near-perfect performance would
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despite the fact that Meredith Wren had never technically learned that love was a tacit agreement not to grievously injure the other person—despite
Most of Meredith’s poor reputation in the industry came from a place of personal dislike, because in order to become as successful as she was, she had had to tell a lot of men to suck her dick in various ways, largely for the crime of having been smarter than they were to begin with.
Magic the unofficial version continues to refer to individual practitioners in lesbian astrology communes or third-world immigrants who pray to the god of their colonizers.
She will never have to worry about how to pay the rent. She will never have to wonder whether a cough is bad enough to see the doctor. She will never have to hear a landlord tell her he’ll call ICE if she complains about roaches, about the gas line that seems to constantly leak, about the way a fleeting whim can suddenly make their shitty house untenably expensive. Poverty is in a thousand ways a death sentence,
Lou tries to feel something like desire, which is a sexier form of fear.
“I had a friend once,” Arthur began telling Philippa, “who told me our dreams were sometimes a meaningful communion with the fabric of nature, the connectedness of our spirits to things in this world and beyond. But other times they’re just neurological snapshots, like all our thoughts were poured into a bottle and shaken up. She said that things became unrecognizable when we saw them from a different perspective like that, as if they’d happened inside someone else’s heart.”
You could fall in love with anything, Lou had said to him. A light breeze. A good idea. The smell of cookies in the oven.
“Oh, I don’t know about the one. Lots of people have gotten away.” Never because he let them. True, people had the tendency to float in and out of his life, but not for lack of connection. Never because he hadn’t cared.
Arthur was very good, he realized, at being loved for a brief window of time; in the honeymoon space where nobody really had to know him. The reality of him was disappointing, irreconcilable with the person that other people’s imaginations routinely built him up to be.
“You should. The steak was the best part.” “The sex must have been terrible.” “The sex was great. I just happen to really love steak.”
“I feel nothing resembles my ethical failings more than a desiccated brie,”
Biologically speaking it all seemed so unlikely, borderline absurd. A penis, in this economy?
What was it about grief, the eroticism of sadness, the desperation not to be, how else to put this, alone?
How long had she been holding her breath like this, and when had she started, and what might shatter if she stopped?
Success was a myth, a sharp cliff—couldn’t she at least be unsatisfied in a way that felt less hollow, more like a life?
“The problem is that my heart is very tired and needs to rest.”
love was an ailment she couldn’t cure.
Participation in capitalism is its own form of doom—it can only end pointlessly no matter what you do, we all go into the ground.
the men found her abrasive for the mere fact of her existence—her success, which somehow took inherently from theirs.
Arthur has a way of assigning meaning to things unnecessarily. It’s very preternaturally witchy of him, and/or slightly OCD.
“You can’t honestly tell me you’ve spent the last decade pining for me. Right?” “I haven’t,” he confirmed with a shrug. “There were long spells of time when I didn’t think of you at all, or when I thought of you and it didn’t hurt. I can go months without thinking of you, actually. I went a whole year once.”
“You’re not marrying anyone else, Meredith Wren. I’m not letting you. You told me you love me and I’m holding you to it. You’re going to be accountable for at least one fucking thing in your life, and if it won’t be federal prison time then it’ll be me, god damn it.”
If I ever actually believed that happiness was real, I would have made a different choice. I didn’t want happiness, for fuck’s sake—I wanted an A!”
“No,” was nearly Jamie’s answer, “no, she doesn’t make me happy, when I’m with her I don’t even know what happiness is or what it means, it seems too small and unimaginative an idea, I’m not sure happiness was ever even real, I mean what is that? I was happy before her, now I’m something else, something sickly and weak and yet massive and esoteric, I am confounding and arcane, I am consumed by something ancient and universal and yet no one has ever felt the way I feel, I’m sick with it, I’m sick to death with it, I want to hold her forever, I want to crawl inside her heart and wear her skin!”
The worst bit about people was the goodness they always had if you could bring yourself to look for it.
Thayer seemed to find me amusing the way all men find combative women amusing. Something to squash as a treat.
Life was loving someone on purpose! Intensity mattered!
Dummies, every single one of us. The gifted ones most of all.
