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Arrogant, ironic, devoted Emile became her asylum. She felt infinitely adult with him. He said he'd had enough of marriage his first time around, but he obligingly took Denise to Atlantic City and (in the words of the Barbera D'Alba she'd been drunk on when she proposed to him) made an honest woman…

[...] Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling's paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw- taxing performance anxieties and her ow…

Boys her own age wanted something, but they didn't seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function— the role she'd played on more than one lousy date—was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as i…

It didn't occur to her that Don Armour was smiling in embarrassment at the obviousness of his play for her sympathies, the staleness of his pickup lines. It didn't occur to her that his performance at the pinochle table the day before had been staged for her benefit. It didn't occur to her that he'…

The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.