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Now he was having an affair, for Christ's sake, and he didn't know what to do about it. He did not want it to go on, and he did not want to break it off: you don't throw everything overboard in a storm. Al was drifting, and he knew he was drifting, and where it was all going to end he could not guess at. But he was beginning to feel he was losing control over everything. Everything. Recently, too, he had caught himself thinking about old age after he'd been constipated a few days - an affliction he had always associated with the elderly. Then there was the matter of the tiny bald spot and of his having just begun to wonder how he would comb his hair in a different way. What was he going to do with his life? he wanted to know.
He was thirty-one.
something useful to remember: everybody worries about what they're going to do with their lives. it all ends the same way..
He ran his hand over his face, tried to put it all out of his mind for a minute. He took out a cold half quart of Lucky from the fridge and popped the aluminum top. His life had become a maze, one lie overlaid upon another until he was not sure he could untangle them if he had to.
"Tell you, Jill," he said, "skating on thin ice. Crash through any minute ... I don't know." He stared at her with a fixed, puffy expression that he could feel but not correct. "Serious," he said.
and then she (his mistress) tries to squeeze his blackhead lol
"Is everybody going crazy?" she said. "I don't know what's going to happen to us. I'm ready for a nervous breakdown. I'm ready to lose my mind. What's going to happen to the kids if I lose my mind?" She slumped against the draining board, her face crumpled, tears rolling off her cheeks. "You don't love them, anyway! You never have. It isn't the dog I'm worried about. It's us! It's us! I know you don't love me any more - goddamn you! - but you don't even love the kids!"
"Betty, Betty!" he said. "My God!" he said. "Everything's going to be all right. I promise you," he said. "Don't worry," he said. "I promise you, things'll be all right. I'll find the dog and then things will be all right," he said.
to think about: the repetition of "he said" in the second para? Why?
"It's good to get out now and then. I'll make more of an effort, if you want me to."
She reached for celery. "That's up to you."
"That's not true! It's not me who's ... who's ..."
"Who's what?" she said.
"I don't care what you do," he said, dropping his eyes.
"Is that true?"
"I don't know why I said that," he said.
When they had started on the main course, Wayne said, "Well, what do you think? Is there a chance for us or not?" He looked down and arranged the napkin on his lap.
"Maybe so," she said. "There's always a chance."
"Don't give me that kind of crap," he said. "Answer me straight for a change."
"Don't snap at me," she said.
"I'm asking you," he said. "Give me a straight answer," he said.
She said, "You want something signed in blood?"
He said, "That wouldn't be such a bad idea."
She said, "You listen to me! I've given you the best years of my life. The best years of my life!"
"The best years of your life?" he said.
"I'm thirty-six years old," she said. "Thirty-seven tonight. Tonight, right now, at this minute, I just can't say what I'm going to do. I'll just have to see," sse said.
[...] His life had changed, he was willing to understand. Were there other men, he wondered drunkenly, who could look at one event in their lives and perceive in it the tiny makings of the catastrophe that thereafter set their lives on a different course? [...] he put his face up close to the pitted mirror and looked into his eyes. A face: nothing out of the ordinary. [...]
[...] I kept on pushing at my own limitations and at the limits of science fiction. That is what the practice of an art is, you keep looking for the outside edge. When you find it you make a whole, solid, real, and beautiful thing; anything less is incomplete. [...]
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel - or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel - is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human being [...] could not know anything about himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know fully what it is to be human. [...]
[...] the shadow stands on the threshold. We can let it bar the way to the creative depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them. For the shadow is not simply evil [...] without it, the person is nothing. What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. The person who denies his own profound relationship with evil denies his own reality. He cannot do, or make; he can only undo, unmake.