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Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart and would sing melancholy songs to him, with a sigh; but she would find that she was as calm afterward as she …

MY SENIOR YEAR of high school I worked in a coffee shop. I took the bus there after school and stole bagels to eat before my shifts, 3 PM to 11 PM most nights. I met a man there—let’s call him Mike. I was 16 when we met; he was 25. I was 18 when he took me to his place after work one night, poured …

[...] As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped …

Each fact that Russ conveyed fell into place as if it had been meant to be there all along. Without noticing how, she’d come to be holding a burning cigarette on the patio outside the bedroom. The base of the telephone was at her feet, its cord stretched to its limit. Although the sun was still gol…

It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her …