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and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free.
They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.
But her body when tipsy has a brittleness, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable in his arms.
a view of Brewer spread out below like a carpet, a red city, where they paint wood, tin, even red bricks red, an orange rose flowerpot red that is unlike the color of any other city in the world yet to the children of the county is the only color of cities, the color all cities are.
It would begin with Mr. defending the little girl, and then as the neighbors listened old wounds opened like complicated flowers in the night.
Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
As swiftly, he bends his face into a small forest smelling of spice, where he is out of all dimension, and where a tender entire woman seems an inch away, around a kind of corner. When he straightens up on his knees, kneeling as he is by the bed, Ruth under his eyes is an incredible continent, the pushed-up slip a north of snow.
Clothes just fall from a woman who wants to be stripped.
“It’s the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don’t know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and the television going and meals late or never and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.”
I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
That was the thing that surprised her in high school how ashamed they were really, how grateful they were if you just touched them there and how quick word got around that you would.
Usually, the dream is worse than the reality: God rules reality.
Her house is expensively but confusedly furnished; each room seems to contain one more easy chair than necessary.
Eccles’ heart seems to twist with the child’s body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.
Her voice has risen in pitch and abrades Eccles’ face like a file; he feels covered with cuts.
Why not? With his white collar he forges God’s name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud with every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please all his life, the God who smokes cigars.
Mrs. Angstrom has four-cornered nostrils. Lozenge-shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra-defined; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light.
Her confrontation is with everybody, and secure under the breadth of her satire he can say what he pleases.
Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink.
A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.
Eccles tries to defend him; he goes to the weaker side of a fight almost automatically.
They have the same narrowness, and a serviceable vulgarity that offends him.
Eccles has found other partners either better or worse than he; only Harry is both, and only Harry gives the game a desperate gaiety, as if they are together engaged in an impossible quest set by a benevolent but absurd lord, a quest whose humiliations sting them almost to tears but one that is renewed at each tee, in a fresh flood of green.
He is a man of brick: as if he was born as a baby literally of clay and decades of exposure have baked him to the color and hardness of brick.
With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death;
the past was a vine hanging on by just these five tendrils and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank.
A serious shadow crosses her face that seems to remove her and Harry, who sees it, from the others. Ruth and Harrison across from them, touched by staccato red light, seem to smile from the furnace of damnation.
Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.
Thus curled near one edge, he draws backward into sleep like a turtle drawing into his shell.
For a third, your wife’s parents can’t get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there’s something relaxing and even comic about them.
“Good. Do you like your new job?” “Not much.” “Oh. That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?” “I don’t know. I don’t suppose you’re supposed to like your job. If you did, then it wouldn’t be a job.” “Jack likes his job.” “Then it’s not a job.”
