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Halve me like a walnut Pry the part of me that is hollow From the part that yields fruit. —OMOTARA JAMES Let’s be hungry a little while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can. —MAYA C. POPA
“Older. What’s your name?” “Cleo,” said Cleo. He nodded. “Appropriate.” “How so?” “Cleopatra, the original undoer of men.” “But I’m just Cleo. What’s your name?” “Frank,” said Frank. “Short for?” “Short for nothing. What on earth would Frank be short for?” “I don’t know.” Cleo smiled. “Frankfurter, frankincense, Frankenstein …” “Frankenstein sounds about right. Creator of monsters.” “You make monsters?” “Sort of,” said Frank.
he noticed her hair first. It hung over her shoulder in two golden curtains, sweeping open to reveal that much-anticipated first act: her face. And it was a performance, her face.
“My bag? Dick.” She laughed, then tilted her head to consider this further. “Maybe with a side bag of pussy. But just a small one. Like one of those little clutches you wear to the opera.”
“That’s what painting is like for me. Inevitably, there’s a moment when I’ve pulled everything out of me, and it’s just … it’s chaos on canvas. I feel like I should never have started. But then I keep going, and somehow things find their order. I know when I’ve finished because I feel … I feel this click that means everything’s in its place. It’s all where it should be. Total peace.”
He took her hand. She squeezed it back. They both jumped.
“Eighty percent of relationship,” she said, “is tolerating difference.” “What’s the other twenty percent?” asked Frank. The woman shrugged. “Fucking.
‘Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.”
When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.
“When was the last time you were with a straight man, I’m talking any straight man, and he said something more interesting than what you were already thinking?”
Reality was sweaty and ugly. It was deodorant stains on black clothing and cold sore cream and utility bills.
Fun was fine when you were young, but as you got older it was kindness that counted, kindness that showed up.
It felt almost impossible to imagine the severity of the cold now during the heat of August, the same way it’s impossible to think of being hungry when one is full.
“The hole is loneliness,” said Cleo quietly. “Why’s that?” said Audrey. “You can’t stand above someone and tell them to get out of it,” she said. “Or teach or preach it out of them. You have to be in it with them.” “You really think that’s it?” said Zoe. “That’s why it’s a riddle,” said Cleo. “Someone else being in the hole with you means you’re no longer in the hole.”
“Sometimes,” she said. She paused to think some more. “And sometimes … Frank is the hole.”
Then Cleo did something Zoe didn’t expect; she lifted her hand and kissed the center of her palm. Zoe had never been kissed there by anyone. It was so tender, she thought. The tenderest part of her. Cleo released her hand and placed it gently back down between them.
Zoe and Audrey could have slept on the sofas, but Cleo insisted they all get in her and Frank’s bed. Zoe was squeezed in the middle, curled between Cleo’s back and Audrey’s shoulder. She’d never slept so well.
“You should enjoy the fact that people admire you,” he’d said. “You’ll miss it when you’re my age, trust me.”
“Here’s the thing. 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.”
prophesy. Two parts contentment, one part desire. It seemed a good formula for living,
She had not wanted him to see her sadness, which was so ugly and so old. Grief wasn’t linear, she knew, but she hated to feel the old sensations return. She felt sluggish, low, in a way that she had not since living in London. She’d considered going back on her antidepressants, but she still hoped it would pass. And she was mostly doing a good job of hiding it. She washed her hair and ate dessert and tried to laugh when everyone else laughed.
am lonely, of course. I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness. In my mind it looks like South America, colossal, then petering out to a jagged little tip. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m the fucking Falklands.
I tell him I think that’s a good thing to hope for in life, for the carpet to grow thin before you.
“I was trying to be, like, hyper-rational,” says the first girl. “And explain to him that he can’t treat me this way.” “That’s smart,” says her friend. “But all my human feelings got in the way,” says the first girl. “That happens,” says her friend.
want to dream a sky / Full of hummingbirds. I would like to die in such a storm.
Passion was one thing, but hysteria was another.
Eleanor laughed again. 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.
She seemed suddenly to have receded from him. Her body was there, but he could feel her presence withdraw. It felt like stepping from the sunlight into shadows.
The underside of her forearm was very pale, tawny skin gradually blanching to soft exposed white, like the belly of a dog. She needed to be shocked out of this feeling, control it so it would stop controlling her.
Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.
