inspo/dialogue

She flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the pool. It floated for a second, then sank. She said, I don’t like facts.

Danny: I don’t like nouns. Or verbs. And adjectives are the worst.

Nora: No, adverbs are the worst. He said brightly. She thought hopefully.

Danny: She moaned helplessly.

Nora: He ran stiffly.

Danny: Is that why you’re here? To get away from all the adverbs back in New York?

Who says I’m from New York?

Aren’t you?

Nora cocked her head. Short-term memory problems?

Oh, yeah. Facts.

Nora: Anyway, there’s no getting away from adverbs. They’re rampant.

Danny: She confessed anxiously.

Nora: They’re in our heads.

She cried desperately.

Nora: I hope you don’t actually write like that.

Danny: I write for shit.

Nora: I’m an excellent writer.

She said smugly.

Nora: Not smugly. Factually.

Danny: Ah. So you’ll make an exception to brag.

"What about Dad, though?" she said. "Did you forget it's his birthday?"

"I lost track of time here."

"I wouldn't push you," Denise said, "except that I was the person who opened your Christmas box."

"Christmas was a bad scene, no question."

"Which package went to whom was pretty much guesswork."

“You want to talk about technology. You know how they used to get oil?” Frank was explaining to them animatedly. “The Burmese dug a big ol’ hole. And then they climbed down there and dug some more till they hit sands. They couldn’t stay down there more’n a minute at a time, and then they had to recover for twenty once they got back up top. They had the women stay up top and hoist up the cuttings they dug up. They were catching oil centuries before any Rockefeller ever thought to do it. They had to do it naked, with rags around their mouths, these little brown guys, but by god they did it.” He laughed. “Took two years to dig one hole.” Bunny held her face in her fixed expression of listening.

I didn’t know you would be here, the famous author said when I arrived at the book party. Before he left he put his arm around me for a moment, and I ran my hand down his back like an idiot.

Did you get your Porsche? I asked disdainfully, to punish him for my unmanageable feeling. He’d just received an enormous book advance and wanted to buy himself a vintage 911.

Strong, vibrating shame. I wanted to hit him with a car. I wanted to sit next to him at a dinner that would never happen, his fingers tickling the skin under my knee.

I wrote him the next morning at 7:42 a.m. with clear purpose. I’m sorry I teased you about your Porsche. Please don’t hate me.

Then all I had to do was accept the fact that he wouldn’t write back, and then discreetly masturbate about it for ten years.

But three hours later he wrote back. I didn’t realize you were teasing me until now, so just starting hating you this very minute. Plus, I may get a Jaguar instead and you will want a ride at some point.

'Why did she leave you?'

'Because I became a bore and a fool too. But I wasn't born one, Henry. You created me. She wouldn't leave you, so I became a bore, boring her with complaints and jealousy.'

He said, 'People have a great opinion of your books.'

'And they say you're a first-class chairman. What the hell does our work matter?'

He said sadly, 'I don't know anything else that does,' looking up at the grey cumulus passing above the south bank. The gulls flew low over the barges and the shot-tower stood black in the winter light among the ruined warehouses. The man who fed the sparrows had gone and the woman with the brown-paper parcel, the fruit-sellers cried like animals in the dusk outside the station. It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices. 'I wondered why you hadn't been to see us all that time,' Henry said.

“Remind me never to be pregnant in the summer,” said the first assistant. The pregnant woman did look quite uncomfortable. She was wearing a black dress.

“You have to make sure you plan it right,” said the second assistant. “The best time to have a baby is in the late fall.”

I was interested to learn that other young women had given this much thought to the then (to me) seemingly abstract ideas of pregnancy and birth. I mean, I suppose I did picture myself as a parent to some unimaginable infant in some ethereal future realm, but five, ten, fifteen years stretched out in front of me like some other kind of eternity.

“I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby,” said the first assistant. “Sometimes I don’t think it will ever happen for me.”

“All I want,” said the second assistant distantly, “is for someone to save me.”