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And it was a performance, her face. He felt instinctively that he could watch it for hours.
But before you can create order, you have to make a mess.”
Why did she feel the need to make everyone, even this waiter, like her? What a thing it must be to be indifferent to indifference.
We want because we’re wanting. Both senses of the word. The lacking and the longing, all rolled into one. The more you find yourself wanting, the more you want.”
Cleo watched them and wondered what ancient belief was at play that, despite their lives of great abundance, they felt there could never be enough for them both.
Two parts contentment, one part desire. It seemed a good formula for living, though one she had not mastered yet. Her mother certainly never did.
My mother is like a hummingbird in that if she stops moving, even for a moment, she will surely die.
Personify
When Frank introduces me, his gaze slides over me like he’s scanning a news article he has realized too late is of no interest to him but must somehow finish.
“All men leave! We outlive them anyway. I’ve got news for you, baby, in the end it’s always just us.”
“I never wanted you to have less!” she says. *
Okay, so I am not beautiful or blond or British. But I can make jokes, be nice to your mother, and give a decent blow job. That’s what I got.
I haven’t heard anyone referred to as that since high school. That was it, I realized. Cleo, her life, her friends, were still that of a girl’s. I looked older than her when I was eighteen. I probably was older than her when I was eighteen.
“I don’t understand this obsession with happiness,” she said. “Happiness is like the Hollywood sign. It’s big, it’s unattainable, and even if you do make it up there, what’s there to do but come back down?”
Talking to his mother bewildered him. He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip
the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other: the more he longed for her, the more disappointed he felt by her; the more disappointed he felt, the more he longed.
That was what it felt like whenever he was near Eleanor. They had never touched, never kissed, but his response to her was titanic. Everything in him rose to meet her.
She was the only woman he had ever seen who used a pen to hold up her hair not as an affectation, as Cleo sometimes did with chopsticks or a long-stemmed feather, but out of absentmindedness.
He watched for a change in her expression, but she was impenetrable, as per usual.
Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding all at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.
If he could, he’d ask her if she remembered how the first time they met a current had passed from his hand to hers, an electric shock. It was a detail seemingly inconsequential, but which had come to signify everything to him. He would ask her if his emails were the highlight of her day, like hers were of his. He’d ask if her father was dying and if that was why she was always a little sad, even when she said she wasn’t. He’d ask her what it was like to have a father. He’d ask her if she believed you could be in love with two people at once. If she knew what it felt like to love someone you
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The quest for individuality had resulted in the opposite: complete predictability.
He had offered them moments when they wanted months, years, marriages.
They slept next to each other, sometimes fitfully, sometimes peacefully, every night for two weeks.
He liked her this way in the mornings, unadorned.
Now, in the quiet of the taxi, the thought of Cleo being his all the time, out in the open, not just for a few stolen moments, kindled a warm blush of pleasure within him. But at what cost would that pleasure come?
But being with Cleo made him feel reckless, as though he could burn his life to the ground and rebuild it anew.
shame that her mother was dead and she could not ask her for advice, shame that
her mother didn’t want to be her mother enough to not be dead, just shame, shame, shame.
Cleo found she was disappointed that he didn’t bother to inquire further.
Quentin loved pretending he and Cleo were together. She always wondered if this was a way of fulfilling a secret fantasy for him, one in which he didn’t have to lie to his family about who he was. Who could blame him? His family had taught him that the only way to be loved was to lie.
Did Cleo want that? And if not now, ever? What had she done, marrying Frank? She should have married Quentin. She should have married no one. How did a person learn to live? Learn to be happy? She had surrounded herself with people who didn’t know.
Cleo was so tired of being the kind of person who made other people uncomfortable. She could see it when she was with Frank, strangers trying to work out their relationship to one another.
felt impossible to talk to him—just when she needed to talk to someone most.
She had expected it to feel supple, velvety, but it was waxen and stiff. So they were not faces at all, but cadavers. These flowers were all dead and pretending to be alive. They were rotting behind their waxen masks.
She needed to return to the earth, simple and unadorned. She had been living too long in Frank’s false world. She thought she would find security there, but she had not.
He accused her of not wanting anything, but she said she did have wants, which included being a different person, ending the war for her children, staying married to one person her whole life, and being able to bring back library books on time. Except the woman did not say this out loud, she said it only to herself and the reader, so no one would ever know but them.
“I want my mum,” she said.
Dominique’s body had character and a story. It was substantial like her, generous like her. Seeing the beauty in her made him feel like someone could one day see the same in him. Anyone could see the beauty in Yaayaa.
Nothing changes if nothing changes. He was tired of being the affable doormat.
Santiago thought about how at Slim Again, Begin Again the group talked a lot about why people ate, the hunger that was beyond food. They ate because it reminded them of their parents feeding them and the times they were taken care of. They ate because their parents did not feed them, and it’s how they learned to take care of themselves. They ate because they felt less alone when eating. Because they wanted to feel full, then wanted to feel nothing.
He asked for love to come to him again. Finally, he humbly asked God for the strength to bear his hungry heart, the heaviest weight of all to bear.
Worst of all, when Cleo looked in the mirror, it was her mother who now stared back. She was fighting to think of them both, her mother and herself, as something other than broken and suicidal. They were women, at least, who could make fires.
Alcohol had soothed him, numbed him, loved him, when no one else could.
“No, you could feel your disappointment in you. Proximity to me just made you aware of it.”
I wanted to be married to you. I wanted you to be enough. I wanted to be surprised by you every day.” She began counting on her fingers for emphasis. “But I never knew when you were coming home. You’re obsessed with your work and prioritize it over everything, over me. And you refuse to grow up and stop blaming your mother. Tell me, who would that be enough for? Who?”
She seemed to delight in listing in his shortcomings. In that moment, he learned that he had the capacity to hate her.
When it gets messy and difficult and unglamorous. That kind of partnership.”
“I’m happy for it now. Gave me the life I wanted. Helped me give you the life you want.”
She knew enough to know that there was nothing less special than thinking you were.
