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It felt great to realize that I could simply stand up and smile and be graceful and say good-bye.
“I need a man in my life like I need a hole in the head. Like a fish needs a bicycle,”
I was thinking with my Barbie brain.”
“He is a ship. A big, ugly tourist ship that’s about a mile high and unseaworthy and serves too much food and has bad steel-drum music playing all day long.
The German woman surprised me with a single English word. “Men,” she said and shook her head.
“Have you ever gone a hundred miles an hour? You’ll feel it everywhere. You’ll feel it forever.”
And I did the girl calculation.
“I didn’t like being apart from you, Heather. It didn’t feel right.”
For once in my life I didn’t have to make everything tidy.
I think this is our world, and we don’t have to leave it.”
I am so hopelessly gone that nothing can save me.
“Do you have a bad name? Is that why you’re keeping it from me?” “How do you mean, bad?” “Like, I don’t know, Pancake or something.” “You think my name is Jack Pancake?”
“We’re getting married now, are we? And I’m taking your name? It’s all established?” “It’s inevitable.”
“I don’t think you denounce a habit.” “What do you denounce?” “Satan, I think.”
“I admire a man who wants to see the northern lights so much that he sees them in a gas station sign. That’s a man who understands dreaming.”
The ineffable is the only thing worth toasting. Every toast in the world is about the ineffable even if the people toasting don’t know it.”
“And our lives are going to change today?” “Without question.”
Then we had one of those love fogs.
his shy, soft smile that invited me in, invited me to share the pleasure of being here, in a foreign city, being in love, or the beginning of love, and knowing that we had the world by the goddamn tail if we wanted it, wanted each other, stayed with each other.
pull your eyes off him, because his eyes are a rabbit hole, and if you keep looking you are going to fall and fall and fall.
“Salt is the foundation of life. Salt and vodka, of course.
I felt as if I had entered on a pair of train tracks that traveled into his body and mind and I could not escape, could not veer for an instant, that wherever Jack went so would I.
“I’m filled with you, Heather.”
“I don’t want to name it yet. That’s too easy and too predictable. I want it all to rise on its own.”
Whatever had occurred here, whatever had transpired in the wake of a world war, had now been reclaimed by the land.
“You were my biggest fear,”
You’ve made me examine my choices, and that isn’t easy.
We live in our heads, Jack, and you can travel your legs off, but you’re still going to be right inside your brain when the day is done.
Isn’t that what you say? Life is one long fight against glitches?
“So now that’s part of us. We can’t go back. We can break up, but we can’t go back.”
“We don’t have to stop falling in love, do we? We can fall deeper.”
Whatever you bring to Paris, it takes away and uses for a time, then it returns it to you. But what it gives back is altered, sometimes subtly, sometimes more noticeably, but the city guards a small part of whatever you brought and keeps it for itself. Paris is a thief. It is a smiling thief, one that lets you in on the joke but steals just the same. And you can’t resist, because it is Paris,
He was rough at times, as if he’d fallen through something to be with me,
“A tree is an arrow into the future,”
Maybe the tree is a rebel tree. Maybe the bucolic life is not for our tree. It might be an alternative, punk kind of tree.”
“It may not even be love. It’s just inside me—the
Isn’t that a metaphor for life? We all think we have one more good day, but maybe we don’t.
You need gin. It’s a dangerous business to drink a gin martini, because gin turns people into savages. Everyone knows that. A vodka martini has no danger. Gin is the way to go.”
She has to be in on it for it to be alluring.”
“We can’t be the absurd couple that keeps dancing even when the music stops,” Jack said. “It would make me rethink our entire relationship.”
The city felt like a flying carpet, a carpet that possessed magic but lacked the will to get up and move.
Nothing is always. Nothing in the universe is always.
I didn’t like flying especially, but I liked where flights brought me.
Travel sheds skin, and it takes time at home to grow it back.
It’s kind of the white man’s overbite of musicianship.”
If I had six lives, I would want to spend them with you. Every last one.”
After great pain, a formal feeling comes.
And can he spell? Or is that text code?
it is not right to turn into a lemony pill after being jilted by He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
Sometimes it’s easier to ruin a thing than to guard it.
