Zhenbao looked out of the window. The sky was blue and the clouds were white, the oleander was blooming in the courtyard, and the flute was still playing in the street—as sharp and wheedling as the voice of a low-class woman. It wasn’t a very good flute. The notes were shrill and hurt his ears.

Here on this lovely spring afternoon, Zhenbao looked around at the world he had made. There was no way to destroy it.

The quiet house was filled with sunlight. Downstairs, a man’s confident voice came over the radio, droning on and on.

He couldn’t smash up the home he ’d made, or his wife, or his daughter, but he could smash himself up, the umbrella whacking the water and the cold, rank mud flying into his face. Again he was filled with tender sorrow for himself, a lover’s sorrow, but at the same time a strong-willed self stood opposite the lover, pulling and pushing and fighting with her. He had to be smashed to bits! Smash him to bits!

When he worked, Starling had sold business properties—commercial lots and office buildings. He had studied that in college, and when he got out he was offered a good job. People would always need a place to go to work, was his thinking. He liked the professional environment, the atmosphere of money being made, and for a while he had done very well. He and Lois had rented a nice, sunny apartment in an older part of town by a park. They bought furniture and didn’t save money. While Starling worked, Lois kept house, took care of plants and fish and attended a night class for her degree in history. They had no children, and didn’t expect any. They liked the size of the town and the stores, knew shopkeepers’ names and where the streets led. It was a life they could like, and better than they both could ’ve guessed would come their way.

Then interest rates had gone sky-high, and suddenly no one wanted commercial property. Everything was rent. Starling rented space in malls and in professional buildings and in empty shops downtown where older businesses had moved out and leather stores, health-food and copy shops moved in. It was a holding action, Starling thought, until people wanted to spend again.

On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we ’d repeatedly smeared over each other’s bodies. When your bikini top fell away, my hands caught your breasts, memorizing their delicate weight, my palms cupped as if bringing water to parched lips.

There wasn’t a particular night when we finally broke up, just as there wasn’t a particular night when we began going together, but it was a night in fall when I guessed that it was over. We were parked in the Rambler at the dead end of the street of factories that had been our lovers’ lane, listening to a drizzle of rain and dry leaves sprinkle the hood. As always, rain revitalized the smells of smoked fish and kielbasa in the upholstery. The radio was on too low to hear, the windshield wipers swished at intervals as if we were driving, and the windows were steamed as if we ’d been making out. But we ’d been arguing, as usual, this time about a woman poet who had committed suicide, whose work you were reading. We were sitting, no longer talking or touching, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to argue with you anymore. I didn’t want to sit like this in hurt silence; I wanted to talk excitedly all night as we once had. I wanted to find some way that wasn’t corny sounding to tell you how much fun I’d had in your company, how much knowing you had meant to me, and how I had suddenly realized that I’d been so intent on becoming lovers that I’d overlooked how close we ’d been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again.

In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye; I packed a tiny bag and left a note. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. Then I sat on her porch and pretended I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all these ages, I had dreamed of today; I had even imagined sitting here, waiting for Pip for the last time. She had the opposite problem: her mom would let her go. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse, and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times.

We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone ’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

[...] He became touchy and irritable, especially with his landlady, who asked him all manner of personal questions; on the other hand, sensing his own disagreeableness, he waylaid her on the stairs and apologized abjectly, until mortified, she ran from him. Out of this, however, he drew the consolation that he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered. [...]

Orra Perkins was a senior. Her looks were like a force that struck you. Truly, people on first meeting her often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition. She was a somewhat scrawny, tuliplike girl of middling height. To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I’m not the only one who said that. It was because seeing someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth meant you had to decide whether such personal distinction had a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser, laughed at.

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.