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Bunny thought of Konrad and her drunken night on the beach; he had talked about Libya. She thought of Sofie’s jeremiad. She could never have shown her this document. Bunny understood, logically, that Sofie was right about everything. But it was impossible to reconcile Sofie’s prognostications with the world Bunny saw before her, with all its foregone conclusions. She envied the men like Frank Turnbridge, the young man Frank Turnbridge had been, all the oil men, who had worried only about the bottom line and how they might close the deal. These men ran into each other across the world, on the course at Marsa el Brega, by the pool at Dhahran camp, on the shuttle plane at Bontang, always going somewhere new. As Bunny’s plane banked over Houston she looked down over the miles of cars, the sun glinting off the windshields. She imagined herself a young man, a full moon casting its light over the shimmering oil sands.
not bad
“Houston is cool,” Sofie said, looking around. “I was not expecting this. It has so many parks and bars and things.” Bunny also felt that Houston was cool, although she knew she did not have any meaningful connection to the cool part, the bars where people had gorgeous tattoos and wore crop tops and fanciful denim and were not all white and did not work in oil and gas. She appreciated being able to see, tangentially, this element of the city, to sample the foods and music of many nations, to have access to its multicultural riches at the most superficial level.
painful writing but i get the sentiment
Francis made it into the shower and out the door at 2:28, the bag containing his tuxedo and shoes remembered by Bunny pressed into his arms as he left. She returned to her place in front of the mirror, her brushes and products before her. She had gotten a blowout that morning in a salon she found on Yelp, and she twisted and clipped it up to prevent further damage from the shower steam. Her face was red and she re-covered it carefully with a primer she had researched on Reddit, and then her Bare Minerals, and then her blush. She filled in her eyebrows and brushed them. She lined the top of her eyes and put on eye shadow. She pressed her eyelashes into the curler. She applied mascara with her mouth open.
what is the point of this? it's just boring time/place stuff, just scene setting. why include this stuff without a larger purpose?
Bunny wanted to ask how this woman had gotten her job. She had been strategizing with Francis about this during their long vacation, which had started with a flight to Seattle and a rental car and moved into a slow trip through the rainforests of the Washington coast, down through Oregon and into the redwoods, meandering between the One, I-5, and US 101. They listened to audiobooks as they drove. Francis was lightly obsessed with September 11 histories, because in his mind September 11 was a glaring example of unforgivable process error. Bunny had protested the selection of books in his Audible library, books whose titles made ominous reference to looming towers and black banners, but as they listened and drove, she was caught up. For one, the books affirmed the Glenn family’s longstanding disdain for the CIA, which Maryellen felt endangered regular diplomats by posing at embassies as something they were not. They also informed Bunny that the group in the joint FBI-CIA office that was supposed to prevent things like September 11 was largely composed of young women, and that they had derisively been called “The Manson Family” by their colleagues. There were a lot of women involved in the whole thing, actually, Bunny was surprised to learn. She was likewise surprised to learn that perhaps the first men to be extraordinarily rendered, by some iteration of this cadre, were snatched up in Baku just after the embassy bombings. Bunny felt a shiver at this. She had been there! It had not seemed like a threatening place, she told Francis. Francis told her that whenever he was tempted to obfuscate a mistake at work, or hoard information, or big-time someone, he remembered September 11. Bunny had laughed but stopped when she saw how hurt Francis looked. His current consulting project was streamlining returns processing to mitigate loss and maximize profit for a major athleisure retailer.
this is funny but maybe too heavy handed
“Please get in,” she said. “I can drop you somewhere.” Gulbahar had been beautifully hostessing all day, and Elizabeth hated to keep her longer. She knew little of Gulbahar’s life outside of her work. She assumed she was unmarried—no ring—but she didn’t know for sure. Elizabeth had been amazed to learn that the receptionist in the BP office, a very young woman, had two small kids. Their photos were on her desk; she had first assumed they were her younger siblings. Elizabeth was constantly being surprised by the revealed information of people’s lives.
such boring writing
Elizabeth regretted immediately that they had done it before nightfall. It should have been a culmination, taking place at the last possible minute of their time together. How would they now spend the remaining hours? She prayed he wouldn’t get up and leave. She could almost hear the plea on her lips, for him to stay, to be kind to her, but she held it in. She ran her hand across his chest, the faded ink of his tattoo. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt her whole life hung on what the next utterance of a man might be. She had been with Francis for five years, had never been unfaithful, never considered being unfaithful, never had a real opportunity to be unfaithful. She could see how this event now put her beyond the pale, but it also seemed to put her into the stream of life itself, instead of beside it.
“Will you spend the rest of the day with me?” he said to her, his chest moving under her hand, and she nearly wept with relief.
kind of sweet section
“I believe that women should have educations and jobs and refrigerators to put their fucking food in and that they should be able to give birth in hospitals with incubators in the NICU,” she said, genuinely pissed. “That’s not a controversial statement.”
This was what Francis had said to her on Phil Miles’s roof the first time they met, and it was such a just and tidy logic she had never really moved away from it.
“Oil companies don’t care about incubators,” said Charlie. “They don’t give a fuck about you, or any woman in Kazakhstan, or any woman anywhere.”
“Neither do you,” said Elizabeth. “You’re wearing a fucking wedding ring.”
good argument, decent dialogue
Charlie murmured and then looked vacant. He rustled in the bed, suddenly no longer there. She could feel the pull of his phone, his clothes, his laptop, his life in the small bag on the table by the TV. She felt a mixed revulsion and sadness, seeing for a moment what this might have been to him, how that might differ so much from what it was to her. That would make it indescribably sordid. She tentatively stroked his hair, realizing that she wouldn’t see him again, in fact could never see him again, because seeing him again would make what happened real, something that counted, and would make the gulf in their realities matter too. She would put the experience in a black box. She traced a finger over his tattoo. “Nobody gets hurt,” she said again.
Mostly Elizabeth felt grateful for their life. Jobless, she had managed the retrofitting and renovation of their Portland house, bringing all her idle scrolling on TikTok and in Meta rooms to bear on the selection of tiles and wallpapers along aesthetic lines, but applying her fluency to securing the house, thinking about their individual energy future and availing herself of some of the innovations that had come about in the last decades. They were fully solar, built on a relative of the same perovskite technology Phil Miles had doggedly pursued in the early years. Often in the reno she found herself in a room full of men, dealing with engineers, contractors, plumbers, electricians, and she smiled to herself at the way the conversations re-created themselves throughout time. She deferred, she wheedled, she flattered, she played dumb, all to bring them around to her view, and if she couldn’t, she fired them. Francis ceded the project to her and was grateful that she did such a good job.
god this is so depressing
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
I walked west for a block, then turned south. On Ninety-Sixth Street I hijacked a cab at the lights – I just yanked open the door and swung my case on to the seat. The cabbie turned: and our eyes met horribly. ‘The Ashbery,’ I told him, for the second time. ‘On Forty-Fifth.’ He took me there. I gave the guy the two bucks I owed him, plus a couple more. The money changed hands very eloquently.
this is amazing. i love the build-up to the reveal
(backstory: he was previously ejected from this very same cab)