Button’s Reviews > In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play > Status Update

Oh.

'Leo: If there is any type to whom I am attracted - it veers toward women with doe eyes. And your eyes are more - they are more - thin - the light bounces off of them rather than into them. And I cannot see your soul hovering there, where I would like to. Your soul is locked somewhere inside your body, so I cannot see it. Another man could perhaps bring your soul outside your eyes but it's not me, I'm afraid.'

'Mrs. Givings: Mrs. Daldry, did you dream of love from a young age?

Mrs. Daldry: Yes.

Mrs. Givings: And what did you think it would be like?

Mrs. Daldry: I thought it would be - never wanting for anything. Being surrounded and lifted up. Like resting on water, for eternity.'

Heartrending.

'Mrs. Givings: We were just discussing breakfast. You know, in Italy they hardly eat breakfast. Just a little bit of sweet cracker to dip in very strong coffee. They eat something light to recover from the great passions they spent during the night. Better to skip breakfast and move on to lunch, a great big lunch, when the silence isn't quite so loud, no the silence is not quite so deafening at lunch.'

Poor thing.

'Mrs. Givings: Have you loved many women, Mr. Irving? Do you remember many - hands?

Leo: I have loved enough women to know how to paint. If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

Mrs. Givings: Are poets required to love many women?

Leo: Oh, yes. Love animates every line.'

Be still, my beating heart.

'Leo: ...to express in my paintings. The memory - of the movement - of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas.'

I can feel, even now, the hands of Patrick, and Jonathan, and Atticus, and Rachael, and Mitchell, and Lydia, and my mother, and Daniel (there, though, only in relation to dance), and David, and Brooke.

Reminds me of Paul:

'Leo: Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance - they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved - the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish...(cont.)'

'Mrs. Givings: Most men would be - pale with rage!

Dr. Givings: Pale with rage, exactly, in a sentimental novel. My point is: this is not the end of a book. You made a mistake, that is all. The treatment I gave you made you excitable. It is my fault. A hand on the cheek, these are muscles, skin, facts. It needn't mean that one is preferred absolutely, or that one isn't loved. So why then jealousy?'

Why indeed?

'Dr. Givings: ...but it doesn't, it needn't.

Mrs. Givings: The writer of Madame Bovary was not a woman.

Dr. Givings: He was french, which is much the same thing.'

Oh snap.

'Dr. Givings: It is odd - for some husbands such things end in a screaming match or even in death, one hand on a cheek. It has come to mean an absolute thing: the end of a book, those dreadful Mrs. Bovary books - but how can it be absolute when there are so many shades and degrees of love? Lady novelists like for it to be a tragedy - because it means that the affair mattered. mattered terribly - (cont.)...'

'Mrs. Givings: We talk, we talk, and we surround ourselves with plants, with teapots, with little statuettes to give ourselves a feeling of home, of permanency, as if with enough heavy objects, perhaps the house will not fly away, but I experienced something the other day, Mr. Irving, something to shatter a statuette, to shatter an elephant.'

Welcome to the female orgasm, darling.