Writing

He is stubborn, so I dropped the subject and went to get the groceries. Our shrinking family requires more coffee, more eggs, more cheese, less butter, less meat, less orange juice, more grapefruit.

I passed our local bookstore, which was doing well, with “The Joy of All Sex” underpinning its prosperity. The owner gave me, a dependable customer of poorly advertised books, an affectionate smile. He was a great success. (He didn’t know that three years later his rent would be tripled, he would become a sad failure, and the landlord, feeling himself brilliant, an outwitting entrepreneur, a star in the microeconomic heavens, would be the famous success.)

I put in a nice row of spruce. Then one day in the morning she comes to me, my wife. She shows me a spot over her left breast. I know right away. I don’t touch it. I see it. In my mind I turn it this way and that. But I know in that minute, in one minute, everything is finished, finished—happiness, pleasure, finished, years ahead black.

Nature is only a backdrop, like scenery at the theatre, and all the man-made objects only props. People are the beauty and the light and the point and the purpose.

Overcome by emotion, Luce has fled into the kitchen clutching her violin, as if to shield it from staring eyes. She has exposed herself, she thinks—her very soul outside her body, but perhaps it is her body as well, unclothed, naked.

Frozen grass underfoot has the soft bristle of walking on a sandwich with lettuce.

On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.

They were newly married, each for the second time after living alone for years, like two grazing creatures from separate pastures suddenly finding themselves—who knows why—herded into the same meadow and grazing the same turf.

Suddenly my outside eyes saw a fine-looking woman named Margaret, who hadn’t spoken to me in two years.

Grass tiptoes over the whole world, holds it in place—except the desert, of course, everything there is loose, flying around.

You’re a lucky girl that these books are in the living room, more on the table than on the shelf.

The woman thought, That isn’t a dog. It’s a human being on its hands and knees! Such surreal thoughts bombarded the woman’s brain, waking and sleeping. As long as no one else knew about them, she paid them little heed.