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You sit at a bar and you’re gifted with that feeling of utopia peculiar to places frequented by wanderers. Hotels are like train travel, like early-morning pillow talk with a stranger. They allow you to occupy a space that’s caught in indefiniteness.
One learns so much about a person when one merely wants to fuck him.
and even if we’d not spent much of that time together, the points had intersected often enough to create the illusion of a straight line. From a distance an ellipses looks solid.
I have always found it hard to listen when a man pulls my head back by my hair. I should have listened. I should have known. I did neither.
Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an
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I could not then imagine I’d ever have a lover who would not want to see me again. I still can’t.
I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn’t know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power—and I wanted power even then.
I knew that the students’ interest in me was in direct proportion to how well I conformed to their prepackaged expectations, and I knew that the more I teased the edges of their working diagnoses, the longer I could keep them hanging on.
In the outside world, you can’t escape fate’s cruel crossing. You turn a corner, and there buying a hot dog is the editor of your college paper; you engage in conversation; you go out for lunch, and then to dinner, and then into bed, and then you love. Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.
friends, for me, are usually people I like well enough to act as if our relationship isn’t wholly transactional.
Adolescence immersed me in an ouroboros of desires, and it was ecstasy.
I protected my good name with excellent information, and I didn’t fuck anyone I couldn’t ruin.
My philosophy has always been that if you look hard enough, you will find something wicked on nearly every man—everyone has at least one devastating piece of information.
You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.
Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.
Sometimes it’s just nice to know what you can know.
Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love.
What can be said about cancer that hasn’t already been said. It’s a rotting death, and it reduces people with wants and drives and desires and thoughts and quirks to puling, puking, pained animals. There is no grace in cancer.
New York City may have a commercial skin, but it’s built on a skeleton of sex and magic.
New York City, it’s a place that doesn’t care who fucks whom, as long as you do it. Fucking, metaphorical or literal, is New York City’s soul. Fucking with, fucking up, fucking over, fucking around, fucking right: New York Fucking City has earned its name.
found Italy an interesting place to be a young American woman. I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining.
alone. Italians abide by the saying, “Chi mangia solo crepa solo”—he who eats alone dies alone.
of course, love Rome. Aside from New York City, Rome is the only place that I could imagine myself living. Rome wants to lie back and let you stroke it, lick it, and devour it whole. Rome makes my head swim with its beauty, the sheer weight of its history, its crazy quilt of architectural movements, and its breathtaking men. The men in Rome saunter like they have great towering monuments between their legs. I find it difficult not to go entirely bent-kneed and supplicant, mouth open and teeth delicately bared, so great is the power of Rome.
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
To give up sex for thirty years is one thing, but the vestal virgins wielded serious Roman weight; power almost always compensates for other losses, and the vestals had much. To have and to hold the written wills of powerful men is to have a mother lode of information.
suspect what makes these women irresistible is this: the women who impassion men are those who can maintain that tension between being not in love and succumbing to it.
respect men who teach me something new about myself. They fall so far and few between.
Restaurants, in short, open and close like eyes in the City That Never Sleeps.
All you need to be a food critic is a mouth and internet access, and almost every asshole has both.
“Eat what you love,” they say, and I have. But that’s facile. It’s not merely that I loved Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco; it’s also that I lost them.
We talk about love like it’s an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love, we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice. Your heart thumps because there’s danger and adrenaline in love. You lose yourself in love because you’ve displaced yourself. But dating sites and yentas, arranged marriages and speed dating, advice columns and blind dates, all argue that love is something we can manage, a losing that we can find. I suppose
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loved a man, once. I didn’t merely feel passionately for the man; I loved him. By this I mean that when love is real it’s not a noun; it’s an action.
Here was a man taller than I, big and strong enough to keep me from falling, a man of appetite and well-cut garments and limbs.
