Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ. Oh Jesus Christ. What are you doing? Do you know . . . what . . . you’re doing?” Afterward, while she was eating another cookie: “Who taught you that, Mary-Alice? Who have you been with?” “No one,” she said, picking a crumb off her lap and eating it. “I just imagine what would feel good and I do it.” “Well, you have quite an imagination.”

“Darling, don’t continually say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Next time you feel like saying ‘I’m sorry,’ instead say ‘Fuck you.’ Okay?” “Okay.” “Got it?” “Uh-huh.” “So?” Alice sniffed. “Fuck you,” she said weakly. “Good girl.”

“Tell me something.” “Okay.” “Do you ever think this isn’t good for you?” “On the contrary,” Alice said a little too loudly. “I think it’s very good for me.” Ezra laughed softly. “You’re a funny girl, Mary-Alice.” “I’m sure there are funnier.” “You’re probably right.” “Anyway,” she said. “You make me happy.” “Oh, sweetheart. You make me happy, too.”

‘Endeavors in art require a lot of patience,’

“Don’t worry about importance. Importance comes from doing it well. Just remember what Chekhov said: ‘If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off.’ ”

Might they acknowledge that everything was still more interesting with him than without, and perhaps even that her gameness and devotion were qualities the world needed more of, not less?

She slid the paper away, undid her sandals, and drew her legs up to lie as close beside him as she could. She put an arm around his chest and hid her face in his ribs. He smelled, as ever, like chlorine, Aveda, and Tide. The sky bled pink, then violet. Ezra reached up to turn on the light. “Mary-Alice,” he said, with the gentlest forbearance conceivable. “Your silences are very effective. Do you know?” Alice rolled onto her back. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve spent a lot of time here,” she said finally. “Yes,” he replied, after another long moment. “I expect this room will be imprinted on your brain always.” Alice closed her eyes.

Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.

demonstration of how very simple and egoless an existence can be: Put one block on top of another. Now another. Now another. Now knock ’em all down. Repeat.

And if it’s violence driving up your employer’s advertising revenue and you’re the one reporting the violence it’s hard to see how in that respect, too, you aren’t one of the ones perpetuating the violence. So, no, I don’t always sleep soundly at night.

I looked rather more like the embodiment of a line I would later read—something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person. A problem, I suppose, that it is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.

What it’s like to be so old. The short answer is that you go about your business reminding yourself to look at everything as though you’re looking at it for the last time. Probably you are.

Do you always use the language of possession when talking about love? EZRA BLAZER: It’s impossible not to! Love is volatile. Recalcitrant. Irrepressible. We do our best to tame it, to name it and plan for it and maybe even to contain it between the hours of six and twelve, or if you’re Parisian five and seven, but like much of what is adorable and irresistible in this world it eventually tears free of you and, yes, sometimes you get scratched up in the process. It’s human nature to try to impose order and form on even the most defiantly chaotic and amorphous stuff of life. Some of us do it by drafting laws, or by painting lines on the road, or by damming rivers or isolating isotopes or building a better bra. Some of us wage wars. Others write books.

We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary