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He’d assumed she really was sick, therefore settling on a dapper exit to cheer her. ‘Promise you’ll make sure my little girl gets home safe,’ he said smarmily to the cab driver. It was a wry little joke that had always gotten a good-natured chuckle from a stranger the first time he was married.
But this time, the driver looked at him gravely. ‘I promise you, sir: I will take care of your daughter.’ Douglas tried to explain the irony – the husband, overprotective to the point of fatherliness, though of course he wasn’t actually anyone’s father – but the cab driver just kept saying, ‘Your daughter is in safe hands, sir.’ Later, when he came home, she pretended to be asleep, and the next day he couldn’t make her admit her own pretense. Another time, they visited Ramona, and it was all a very nice afternoon until she began crying on the way back. He asked why she was crying. ‘Because you don’t know what I mean even when I mean what I say,’ she said.
looked at him gravely ... brutal
For a long time, Douglas had wished that he was the sort of man who could derive pleasure from the thought that Miranda was now with an ugly man. He could tell people that he used to be married to Miranda Shelby, the Wittgenstein scholar, and now she was with an ugly man. But the truth was, he didn’t even understand what she meant by with her. He only knew what it meant to be without. And to be without her was to see her always, as if the very symbols of his misery had married themselves to the designs of life. It was for the world never to answer his pleas.
But should he see Miranda now, he would know finally what to say. If a man becomes better too late, he’d ask, was he worse than if he never got better at all?
‘Never mind,’ she said, and sipped her glass of gin, a glass full of silvery ice and magic. The sun was dipping down toward the horizon and as it did the drinkers rose to their feet and moved out toward the dock in ones and twos. Gertrude and Purdy were almost the last ones to follow. They stood watching as the sun’s disk touched the horizon in a little notch between the trees, as it sank slowly out of this world and into the next. Gertrude thought of strangers awakening with the sunrise in another world, this world their dreamlife. Her and Purdy and all the others on the dock were characters in a dream on the other side of the world, things that needed to be expressed or worked through. The sun slipped lower and lower, a dome of orange light and then a slit and then, almost like a sigh, the sun was gone and the dense Florida night descended all at once. The drinkers on the dock all applauded and the Christmas lights lit up on the railing.
And that was it, pretty much. A few half-remembered moments: some driving, an argument, another bar. Some violent dream that a person on the other side of the world needed to have, some bad brain chemical, a residue of injury or accident. Purdy and Gertrude players on some unconscious stage.
weird but kinda pretty
[...] Just over a generation ago, refuse was rarely a problem because families, then largely poor and rural, used and reused everything. As cities have grown, urban support systems have been unable to keep up with the growing demand for the processing and disposing of waste. Most landfills are poorly managed and have only thin linings of plastic or fibreglass. These sites leach heavy metals, ammonia and bacteria into the groundwater and soil, and the decomposing waste sends out methane and carbon dioxide.
photo, third to last at https://granta.com/traces-ii/
‘Keep biting the hand and it might slap you across the face one day,’ she said. ‘Boys like you are a dime a dozen out there. You think those Hollywood people will be lining up just to tie your shoes? You think you’re so lucky? You want an easy life? You want to roller-skate on the beach? Even the hairs on your head are numbered. Don’t forget that.’
I really did want an easy life. I looked out the window at the short little houses, the flat open plains, the sky purple and orange, blinding sparks of honey-colored light shooting over the western mountains where the sun went down. ‘Nothing ever happens here,’ I said.
sunset desc is nice
Sarah talking about her fabled student loans again while I pulled the trigger on some new dresses for my new lifestyle.
wow. such a good portrayal of privilege, amazing
[...] Oona wanted to be an actress. The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and breach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness. Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reasons Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through.
fascinating. perhaps the only valid use of "prettiness", then, is to wield it as a weapon in order to attack the hierarchy itself
How to explain - if Alice wasn't taking a class, if she wasn't otherwise engaged, that meant her terrible job, her terrible apartment, suddenly carried more weight, maybe started to matter. The thought was too much to consider squarely.
on dead-end jobs and the extremely "capitalist realism" idea that we must always be hustling for a better life, as opposed to trying to make our jobs better right now
There was no one ahead of him, there was no one behind, but still: there was waiting. A condition so chronic, so Messianically anticipant, that its trappings didn't matter. [...]
there's something weirdly poetic about this in a very religious way that i can't quite unpack but still like
[...] the flights were almost always full, booked far in advance, bought out by the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, and Hong Kong, as well as by corporate partners, the latter tricky at first, many corporations at first resisted - they had stockholders they were accountable to, they couldn't be spending millions on luxury travel - but soon it became clear that certain favors were being granted, playing fields tipped, regulations loosened or disappeared, sabers rattled more or less virogously, so that in numerous ways, plausibly deniable and otherwise, those in the Zeppelins were accruing certain advantages [...]
too real (also very DFW)