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Brief moments of sympathy and absent-minded kindness did not make a good man,
I liked the anticipation as much as the thing itself, and though I hoped Nick wouldn’t be one of those, sometimes more.
Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.
Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.
People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another.
However, it was a crowded summer, and it was not until later, when I could thread the steps to disaster together like glass beads on a string, that those times stood out at all.
They came East looking for some kind of excitement they thought they lacked, and then they shut themselves up in stuffy rooms like they had never left home.
Aunt Justine once gave me some advice when I was newly come to New York. If I was going to be passing anything more than time in public with a man, I should always find out what happened when he heard no, whether it was from me, a taxi driver, a waiter, or his employer.
Sometimes, the only excuse for doing something stupid is knowing that you are doing it and being willing to accept the consequences.
As we pulled away, I saw an unlikely woman with flaming red hair dressed in lemon yellow. She came out of a garage door, a cigarette between two stiff fingers, and a dark fingerprint smudging of ash already on her skirt. She watched after the train with something I could only term a contemptuous longing, and I swore for a moment that our eyes met.
Maybe if she breaks enough, something true will come out.
They would look at each other, reach for each other, crashing together in a way that could have set the entire world deaf if they could only hear it.
“When you can’t fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no can see what truly happened.”
Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.
What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved?
“What beautiful shirts they were!” she cried, but for a moment they had been birds.
When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.
Even after all our time together, I hadn’t quite resigned myself to being a couple yet, half of an equation when the male half could somehow continue as a whole without me.
That night, I dreamed about sitting on a sticky tile floor, laughing crazily as I gathered up menus and receipts, cutting them, crushing them in my hands as I shaped the pieces into a soldier’s form, a gun in his hand and death in his eyes.
“Being lonely is not the same as missing me,”
I was tired of the heat and the summer, I thought, but maybe I was only tired of who I was in the heat.
We can just wait for fall. Life starts over again in fall.”
He does love her, I thought in surprise, and at that point, I suppose I thought that it counted for something even when it stood up alone, without kindness or consideration or mercy or intelligence to back it up.
We ended up walking slowly through the rain to his door, as if neither of us wanted to remember the last time we had dashed from the water to his doorstep. We were different people now. We didn’t run through the rain together.
He hesitated, and I saw the terrible moment when he realized he had nothing left to give me but the truth.
