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Time compressed. She felt herself aging telescopically, older now than she’d been last week, or yesterday, even this morning, before the sun made its lazy arc across the bed.
She and Wolf left the room only rarely. When hunger drove them out, they ate ravenously at one of the town’s three restaurants, eyes fastened together across a white cloth, feet buried in each other’s laps. They ate mushrooms big as steaks, melting gnocchis in pesto sauce; they washed down lamb and veal and osso buco with bottles of Chianti. Phoebe grew fond of Tuscan bread, rough and saltless, perfect with the dry, tart cheese they were often served. When they’d eaten their fill, they walked straight back to their room and undressed.
ok not gonna lie this sounds amazing (really captures the sumptuousness of food/scenery/company)
Phoebe took his hand and led him into the nook. Tangled in the ivy at their feet were wine bottles, a pair of blue socks. As they kissed, Phoebe felt the responsibility drain off Wolf like an actual substance and it thrilled her, having that power. Wolf leaned against the wall while Phoebe unzipped his jeans—he’d joked about his permanent erection—now he gasped at the touch of her cool hand. The act itself was more awkward than Phoebe had imagined; being taller, Wolf had to bend his knees, but this didn’t seem to bother him now that they’d begun. Phoebe’s skirt virtually covered them—only the front was lifted. Wolf threw back his head, bracing it against the wall. Afterward he stayed like that, eyes shut, baring his throat while his breathing calmed. After a while he put his arms weakly around Phoebe’s shoulders and leaned there. “I’m gone,” he said.
And he was. Gone. Lost—in her. In bed he gathered Phoebe’s long hair in his hands and moved close to her face, watching the movement of her eyes. “You do what you do” was the nearest Wolf came to explaining all he’d jeopardized to be with Phoebe now. But it was less an explanation than an assertion of the pointlessness, the self-indulgence of attempting one. At times a certain wry fatalism would overtake him, a brooding ill humor whose basis, it seemed, was the belief that everything was lost. These moods terrified Phoebe at first, but their only effect was to drive Wolf back to her with even greater abandon, as if, by surrendering to Phoebe anew, he were proving that this—she—was worth the loss of everything else.
He looked away. Phoebe imagined him wishing her gone, and it crossed her mind that perhaps she should make a scene the way women did in movies, holler some insult, flip the table into Wolf’s lap. But instead she thought of Carla, alone in the empty Munich apartment, left behind with nothing but the lovely diamond on her hand. Phoebe’s outrage dissolved into pity. “Well, I feel guilty,” she said.
Their ostensible goal was a Jethro Tuli concert in Rome, but really it was killing time at sixty miles an hour, everyone tumbling around in the carpeted back of the van, hitchhikers hopping in and out, a jam jar full of liquid LSD sloshing around in someone’s lap. They’d lost the eyedropper, were just dipping in their fingers and licking off the drug. There was only one other girl besides Faith, an Italian sixteen-year-old who was shooting speed and running out of money. By the time they got to Rome, she’d been reduced to begging people for the cottons they used to shoot up. Once, in her excitement at receiving one, she’d dropped the cotton on someone’s white shag rug and spent twenty minutes crawling around in search of it, running shaking fingers through the dirty white shag, such a miserable sight that finally Wolf gave her the money for a bag. For the next two days she kept staring at him with these beautiful ruined eyes, saying, “Please, baby, I won’t ask again. But please.”
oh god
Wolf let go of her hand and backed away. The rest of them were propped against the church, watching Faith sort of goggle-eyed. The whole thing felt unreal. Wolf was terrified but riveted, too, in the grip of something bigger than himself. He leaned against the church. Faith stood on the wall. She had such guts. Someday we’ll look back on all this and die laughing, Wolf told himself, die when I admit how goddamn scared I was, and he felt himself reaching for that time, that calm, sweet place out ahead. Faith shielded her eyes from the sun. Wolf kept having the urge to sneak up behind her; the wind was loud enough so that she probably wouldn’t know until he was on her, pulling her down—he thought of that and rejected it time after time because it seemed low, so undignified against the vision of Faith alone on that wall facing the sea and open sky, something pure, almost noble in the sight of her, and Wolf found himself thinking, If I let her do this, the whole craziness will finally be behind us.
Looking down made something go easier in Danny. When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom—those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto—the word was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably.
Danny used to get a weird feeling, overhearing this stuff when he came in the house and his mom was talking on the phone to one of his aunts about Howie. Dirt on his cleats after winning a game, his girlfriend Shannon Shank, who had the best tits on the pom squad and maybe the whole school all set to give him a blow job in his bedroom because she always did that when he won, and thank God he won a lot. Hiya, Mom. That square of purple blue almost night outside the kitchen window. Shit, it hurt Danny to remember this stuff, the smell of his mom’s tuna casserole. He’d liked hearing those things about Howie because it reminded him of who he was, Danny King, suchagoodboy, that’s what everyone said and what they’d always said but still Danny liked hearing it again, knowing it again. He couldn’t hear it enough.
not super interested in the content of the paragraph itself except for that purple blue imagery
But that wasn’t Danny’s line, that was Howie’s. He was heading into memory number two, I might as well tell you that straight up, because how I’m supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don’t know. Rafe went first with the flashlight, then Howie. Danny came last. They were all pretty punchy, Howie because his cousins had singled him out to sneak away from the picnic, Danny because there was no bigger thrill in the world than being Rafe’s partner in crime, and Rafe—well, the beautiful thing about Rafe was you never knew why he did anything.
this is the first time the narrator interjects i think
Bottom line: Danny didn’t know why he’d come all this way to Howie’s castle. Why did I take a writing class? I thought it was to get away from my roommate, Davis, but I’m starting to think there was another reason under that.
You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are. My teacher, Holly, told me that.
I started the class with a bad attitude. For the second meeting I wrote a story about a guy who fucks his writing teacher in a broom closet until the door flies open and all the brooms and mops and buckets come crashing out and their bare asses are shining in the light and they both get busted. It got a lot of laughs while I was reading it, but when I stopped reading the room went quiet.
There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?
I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.
What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.
I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks—she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.
She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.
She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.