Light Years

You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find

LIFE DIVIDES ITSELF WITH SCARS like the rings contained within a tree.

In the end the things that were bitter are always the best.”

they cruised along Broadway. It was their natural street, their boulevard, they were blind to its ugliness.

“He likes a certain kind of big workman’s handkerchief, and I found some. I don’t know, sometimes he drops out of sight for a week or two. Sometimes he even goes away. I wish I were a man.

Her life was one in which everything was left undone—letters unanswered, bills on the floor, the butter sitting out all night. Perhaps that was why her husband had left her; he was even more helpless than she. At least she was gay.

He was self-indulgent, a failure. He had not abandoned failure; it was his address, his street, his one comfort. His life was one of intimacy and betrayal. Of himself he wrote: extravagant, false. He was impractical, moody, a deviate. He suffered and loved like a woman

THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT marriage. I love the familiarity of it,” Nedra said. “It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’re hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I’m very conventional,” she decided.

Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less—at least it was the preparation for one—and it was an illustration of life for their children. They had never expressed this to one another, but they were agreed upon it, and these two versions were entwined somehow so that one being hidden, the other was revealed. They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure

was afraid of the sudden glint of a wrist watch, the flash of a smile, the sun on the hub cap of a car—any powerful male emission that might wake her