They're all middle-aged and wear the kind of rampantly bright sports clothes that suburban men favor on weekends, colors so strident they might serve as illustrations of the folly of second childhood.
Golf. That anal round of scrupulous caution and petty griefs.
She wanted to go down, although she worked on the eighty-third floor, because she was in the wrong building.
I hate those goddamn things. They can damage your bone marrow. My life is crud enough as it is.
Then she was gripping hard, released to the contagion of recurring motion, rising, as they ached and played, sunny as young tigers.
You have to bring it out. Even if you have no intention at the time of doing it out of whatever fear or trem-bling, you still must make it begin to come true by articulating it. This changes the path of your life. Just telling people makes the change begin to happen.
"Loud and prolonged applause."
"That plane looks like it's going to hit."
The color of his blood intrigued him, its meaty bloom, a near sheen of the gayest sap imaginable.
Then he decided to count to fifty. At fifty he would call one last time. When she didn't answer, he lowered the count to twenty-five.
She also knew Ethan and Jack would enjoy her story of going out to the airport, smashed, in a mile-long limo, although she had to admit she disliked hearing other people go on about their drinking or drug-taking, the quantities involved, the comic episodes that ensued.
The bronze shock of it was pure truth, the kind that reveals conditions within, favors and old graces coming into the light.
She showed little sign of whatever measures of desire his own body might have been expected to arouse in her.
Pammy and Lyle, she thought. We sound like a pompom girl and a physics major. Or chimps, she thought. The names of chimps learning language with multicolored disks.
"Just as Englishmen never cease being schoolboys, Americans are doomed to perform heroic deeds."
He looked like a man who sponsors a women's softball team.
He had a feel for numbers. He didn't have to write anything down. He'd developed ways to remember, methods that went back to early adolescence.
When Rosemary came out, ten minutes later, she had a plastic phallus harnessed to her body.
We are down to eating and sleeping, if that.
A sunset is the story of the world's day.
Movies did that to people, awful or not.