"HOLE"

↳ Cast in Doubt

↳ “Now a pang – a kind of hole – lodges just under my heart, a register of longing or emptiness, which may be the same. This hunger I experience – to be full and whole. Do terribly obese people suffer this in the extreme? Still, why shouldn’t one long for eternal life? Why shouldn’t one crave immortality? Or is this pang an intimation of heart disease?” — p.153

↳ “Gwen next expounded on ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ – perhaps the three of them, Gwen, John and Alicia, had had a nude picnic on Alicia’s floor? – and how that painting made Gwen crave, to eat ravenously or to make love, because in its centre was an empty space as great as lost love, a hole that the figures created through their position, they encircled it, and had I never noticed it…?” — p.183

↳ What Would Lynn Tillman Do?

↳ “But in their words, she’s just a hole: ‘You wait and see,’ said Andy Kurins. ‘He’s following that metal dick of his into a cold and lonely place.’” — p.242

↳ American Genius, A Comedy

↳ “When he was first here, the tall balding man gave his attention to the Count as well as to the disconsolate or sad-eyed young woman, divining in her some pleasing quality or grace no one else did, except the other disconsolate woman. Early on I observed an acute scene between them, the man of no consequence to me or the woman, when he held her skinny, psoriatic hand to his face, brushed her palm against his sunken cheek, and then uttered some words I couldn’t hear, but their thin-lipped exchange held some fascination. Thin lips are scant protection, a mere lining to the crater in the face, that worthy hole, but my lips are full, suggesting a lushness I don’t believe I deliver, just as big breasts incriminate the female body with lusty abundance and comfort.” — p.81

↳ Haunted Houses

↳ “When she played with Jimmy, Jane insisted upon wearing dresses. He’s too wild, her mother told her. But his nostrils flare when he speaks, she responded, which meant to Jane that Jimmy was sensitive, like a rabbit. She could even tell him about the children’s book she loved and hated because it confused her. There was a little girl who had a blanket. The blanket got a hole in it. She wanted to get rid of the hole so she decided to cut it out. She cut it out and the hole got bigger. She cut that out too, and the hole got bigger. Eventually the hole disappeared but so did the blanket. The little girl cried and Jane was genuinely puzzled.” — p.10

↳ No Lease on Life

↳ “The ugliest hole was in the deepest shadow. It was too dark in the vestibule to take pictures. The light overhead was the dangling naked bulb that the landlord had recently put in, the one they wanted the tenants to pay extra rent for every month. It was weak. If anyone wanted to mug you in the small vestibule, you’d never see him well enough to identify him. The weak light wasn’t a deterrent in any way. Just the opposite. Ernest and Elizabeth were standing very close to each other in the small entryway. She could feel his anxiety. She liked it and hated it.

– I need more light, Elizabeth said.– You don’t have a good enough view? Ernest asked.– I can see the hole with my eyes, but itwon’t come out on the photograph.
– Let me open the door, he said. He opened the front door as wide as it would go. Then he studied her with a worried expression.
– Is that better?
Is that better? she thought. The way he said, Let me open the door, his perplexity about photographing the hole, the way he said, Is that better? was priceless and ridiculous at the same time. She fell in love with him. For a minute. He changed in her eyes in the dark, ugly vestibule. She could fall in love with anyone. He was still holding the front door open so she could get a better shot of the hole. She knew the picture wouldn’t come out. It was close to hopeless, futile. The City might still be impressed by the documentation.” — p.60

↳ “Jessica interrupts my silent reverie as she lifts little Caleb. He gurgles and mewls, a far cry from the hand of death. His mother’s hand cradles his bare head that needs support and has, at its crown, a hole or soft spot covered by a thin membrane, which is awful to reflect upon. And may be why many of us at some moments feel a need to wear hats.” — p.183

“RUB”

↳ Cast in Doubt

↳ “I make my home, my bed, in a rational world, but I awaken in an irrational one. That might be a good line for Stan Green, though perhaps too refined. Is it any less rational to consider accepting this, the Gypsy’s prophecy, for instance, than Eliot’s acceptance of God, his submission to faith? Perturbed, I rub my eyes. How is it possible to think about something one cannot or does not understand?” — p.231

↳ American Genius, A Comedy

↳ “My mother doesn’t refer to herself as sensitive. She has beautiful skin that is still unlined and smooth, to which, during the majority of her life, she applied nothing but cold cream, though regularly, and to which medicinal creams must now be applied daily, because her skin has become more dry and sensitive with age, but she can no longer apply it herself. Her hands, once capable, tremble and sometimes shake. The cold cream jar was milk glass, large, with a wide mouth and black metal top, and sat on a shelf in my parents’ bathroom, smelling of sweet dreams that might fragrantly coat not only skin but the whole body of existence. I often watched my mother apply the cream and rub it rapidly and efficiently onto her face and neck, which she appeared to do without any significant pleasure, as if in the act of replenishing her skin she was also denying it, but I can’t remember if, afterward, she washed her hands, rubbed the cream onto them thoroughly, or wiped the cream off her hands onto a soft cloth or towel. Her only sister, and the oldest in her family, there were four brothers younger than her, had skin as slippery as butter, like my father’s cottons and silks, smoother and softer even than my mother’s supple skin. Her sister used ordinary Jergen’s Lotion, my mother explained, that was her secret. Still, if I apply cream now, when I didn’t for years and years, in the vise of a perverse vanity, it’s because of the Polish woman and her concerned, attentive expression when she tenderly pats and caresses my face. It is this picture of her and the thought of her future admonishments, when she clucks her tongue slightly, a sound I dislike and associate with eating habits I also dislike, that arouses me and makes me uncomfortable enough to close my book, get off the bed, walk to the dark wood dresser, a piece of furniture I would never have bought, but which is appropriate for this old-fashioned room, open a large jar of moisturiser, and rub the expensive cream upward on my cheeks, careful not to rub it under my eyes where the skin is more delicate and might become damaged by vigorous motion. I’ve never understood why.” — p.31

↳ “To Find Words”, Madame Realism

↳ “So she closed her eyes. She covered herself with her coat and pretended to go to sleep. He didn’t do anything for a while. Then he placed his hand on her pants, first on her thigh, and then he moved his hand there. He began to rub her. No one had ever done that. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t think she wanted him to stop because the feeling was strange and nice. She knew it was wrong but it didn’t matter what it was. She watched the feelings she was having. She felt very far away. Then she became more and more uncomfortable. She felt hotter. She pretended to wake up and went to the bathroom. There are always bathrooms on Greyhound buses. Everyone else was asleep. She was really alone. Inside the small toilet she felt her underpants. They were wet. She went back to her seat and told the dirty old man, ‘I know what you were doing and it was wrong. Don’t do it again.’ The words came from outside of her, as if spoken by an intruder. It was a strange voice, almost unrecognisable.” — p.193

↳ Men and Apparitions

↳ “I want other pictures to rub away what I do know, and bare a braver, newer world, something exciting – for a change.” — p.167

↳ Haunted Houses

↳ “She remembered that when reading A Stone for Danny Fisher she used to put her finger in her vagina and rub it until small pieces of her vagina – or what she thought was her vagina – rolled into balls and stuck to her fingers. She learned that men who ran candy stores liked to see a young girl’s breasts pressed against the glass cabinet and that, if the girl did that she could get some candy, or something for free, or for very little.” — p.38

“BLUE”

↳ “Dear Ollie”, Someday This Will Be Funny

↳ “One night, you brought a friend home from Juilliard, a fellow student. If you recall, our dining room had dark walls and no electricity. We ate by candlelight – there were many candles in different states of meltdown on the long table that night. About ten, I think. Before dinner, one of the research psychologists suggested it’d be fun to put blue vegetable dye in the mashed potatoes. Your friend wouldn’t know. We’d act as if the potatoes weren’t blue, just the usual white, and even though your friend might protest and insist they were blue, we’d keeping insisting they were white. We’d just pretend he was crazy for thinking they were blue. We cooked this up in the kitchen. When you came in with him, someone took you aside and told you. You went along with it. Everyone has a streak of sadism, one of the psych guys said. I don’t remember who brought in the potatoes, we all participated, though, and then we all sat down around the big wooden table. The blue mashed potatoes were served in a glass bowl. Even by candlelight, they were bright blue. We passed the food. When the bowl of blue potatoes reached your friend, he reacted with delight. Blue mashed potatoes, he said. Someone said, They’re not blue. Your friend said, They’re not? They look blue. Someone else said, No, they’re not. You were sitting next to him. The potatoes kept going around. Your friend said, again, They really look blue. Everyone acted as if nothing was happening. Your friend kept looking at the bowl. He became visibly agitated. He said, They look blue. Someone said, Maybe it’s the candlelight. The flames have a bluish tinge. Your friend kept looking, squinting his eyes. Then he insisted, They look blue to me. Someone said, with annoyance, Would you stop it? They’re not blue. Your friend turned quiet. He kept looking, though, and we all kept eating. The coup de grâce, I guess you’d call it, was dessert. In the kitchen, someone decided to dye the milk blue. The cake, coffee, and blue milk were brought to the table. We served the blue milk in a glass pitcher. No one said much as the pitcher went around the table. Your friend watched silently. When it came to him, he stared at the pitcher and poured the blue milk into his coffee. This time, he said nothing. Nothing. At that point I ran into the kitchen. I couldn’t control myself.” — p.49

↳ Cast in Doubt

↳ “The sky is so blue today I can scarcely bear it.” — p.25

↳ American Genius

↳ “From the time I learned to count and read, when I read or heard a number, I saw a colour, and when I heard or read the word for a colour, or saw a colour, I registered its numerical value and equivalent. Orange four, black ten, white one, red five, purple nine, blue eight, powder blue three, pink three, yellow two or three, depending upon how light, muted, or bold it was. The elements had weight, numerically, and shades and hues of colour. Numbers and colours were figures in my imagination that fused into patterns about which I never spoke, though in some way it helped the world make sense, as things added up in my young mind. But the weight of death is heavier, there is no scale for it, and I shove it into a corner, where it lies, an insurmountable lump, threatening to spread its ugliness.” — p.148

↳ Madame Realism

↳ “The house is old. It is old enough to be an antique. The shadows in the room obscure the objects in it. I sit on a chair made of dark wood. I am wearing blue cotton pyjamas that my father once wore. Blue is the colour of hope. I nursed my father for many years before his death. He died of throat cancer. At the end he could not speak. I have my memories.” — p.201

↳ Weird Fucks

↳ “Jack was from Chicago, a spoiled and wealthy Irishman who wanted to write. He had just gotten to Athens from Tangier. He had reddish hair, pale skin and eyes Carla would have called ‘sadist blue’.” — p.43

“FOOD”

↳ “The Regulation of Pleasure”, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

↳ “Marinetti deploys food to construct ‘the modern man,’ the new subject, to build him from the inside out, where food is what one ingests as metaphor and fuel. Futurist Marco Ramperti asserts: “The allegorical Italian has always got his avid mouth wide open over a plate of tagliatelle when he isn’t dangling dripping strands of vermicelli down his greedy gullet. And it’s an offensive image: derisory, grotesque, ugly … Our pasta is like our rhetoric, only good for filling up our mouths.” Since Marinetti’s the poet who advanced the idea of ‘words-in-liberty,’ it makes sense that food might be seen as rhetoric, freed from its traditional position as just food, or that using certain words and dropping others, like dropping pasta and adding rice, might signify departures and surprises, changes in thinking, changes in being. In the new diet, taste alone certainly isn’t enough. Like art, food must strive to interact with its environment, and the environment itself, like the cuisine, must be shaped to serve higher ends, the evolution of society Marinetti calls for. At a Futurist dinner all the senses must be engaged and taught to renounce the habits that dull pleasure.” — p.152

↳ Mothercare

↳ “My family was physically healthy, fortunately, good genes, no fried food.” — p.55

↳ “Mother didn’t have osteoporosis, she had taken hormones, was physically strong, walked fast all her life, and, though she fell maybe ten times in as many years, she never broke a bone. She ate healthily, always. Drank almost nothing, and when she did smoke in her forties, and found herself waking up coughing, she stopped just like that. She was healthy, good genes. We ate well – no fried food.” — p.90

↳ American Genius, A Comedy

↳ “First, the assistant cook wanted to know what I could and absolutely wouldn’t eat, and, as I wrote this down on a blue-lined index card, I was conscious of impinging on her time. Then the head cook, who immediately knew what was occurring, as it had again and again with every new resident, she had been the head cook for years, walked into her kitchen, and I saw that her pale forehead creased, her blue eyes receded under eggshell-hooded eyelids, and her head angled toward the low ceiling, which hung over all of our heads. Fearing her boredom or weariness in this repetitious event, I wrote quickly that I ate everything in moderation, except octopus and Jell-O, that I liked greens, fruit, cottage cheese, cheeses, generally, though I wanted to avoid fats and some carbohydrates, ate fish and beef, chicken, didn’t like fried foods, and when the assistant cook handed the head cook my list, she read it and nodded but didn’t look at me.” — p.45

“DREAM”

↳ Someday This Will Be Funny

↳ “A dream is a disguise, his college therapist explained, while his Spanish teacher taught Calderón’s La vida es sueño, and if a dream is a disguise, and life is a dream, then life is a disguise, too. The tautology satisfied him since it demonstrated he was able to think, so he wasn’t crazy yet, but if life were a disguise, what did it disguise. Was there a design? No, not a design, there was too much randomness, but then what does life disguise? Thomas sat on the log again, thoroughly engaged in the question, listening to his thoughts, to the birds who sang again or argued or cried, until he fell asleep. He must have fallen asleep, because time passed and kept passing, and reality didn’t feel real, he was looking at himself looking at himself. The big striped tent was back, he saw himself go through the opening, he saw her walk down the aisle, everything repeated itself, he saw himself, he saw his twin, Tony, she was a man and a woman, and she didn’t hate him, his parents smiled, then looked sadly upon him. He saw life rushing by, was he dead? Life is a dream, life is a dream. Now everyone was in disguise, everyone, and he fled the tent again, horrified, because if everyone’s in disguise, and a disguise is also disguise, then where does it end. IN DEATH. In death, in death. He was dead. He wasn’t asleep, he was dead. Life disguises death. We only think we’re alive. That was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and, realising that, he breathed. He wasn’t dead, he was only reading a book. Nothing made sense. A dream is life, life is death, death is life, and all of it is a disguise.” — p.79

↳ Cast in Doubt

↳ “He turns again. There is on his face an expression of disgust so great that I must avert my gaze. Surely he cannot hate me that much. This is a dream, a poisoned vision.” — p.106

↳ American Genius, A Comedy

↳ “Living with unfamiliar persons who will never be more than relative strangers, whom I awaken at night by going to the bathroom and flushing the toilet, since I usually get up twice in the night, I can have fitful dreams. I have dreamed of tiny mice, who, though adorable, are nuisances and must be destroyed, I have watched them die slowly and in agony on glue traps, which I chose rather than traps that beheaded them, because I thought it more humane, but when I watched the mouse squirm with pain, I realised it wasn’t, or, if Contesa has again spoken of Kafka and Felice and showed me their pictures not long before I go to bed, I dream about them, who are strangers to me, as is Contesa, relatively. She believes she knows Kafka, especially through his letters to Felice, though she can’t know Felice that way, her letters to Kafka aren’t extant, but still it is by her faith in their intellectual and spiritual connection that they invade my unconscious world. Felice’s pleasant, homely face was oily and dry in patches, even scaly, and around her nostrils an irritated aureole of pimples the size of pinpricks. She broke out in welts, red hives on her back and thighs, just as she was about to meet Kafka, who looked like the tall balding man, but was wearing a frayed black business suit. Felice, like the disconsolate woman, but much stouter, stood at the door to the café discreetly rubbing her thigh. Suddenly she was terribly skinny, suddenly, and her digestion was poor, so there was a terrible smell coming from her mouth, like the breath of the demanding man, she wasn’t a vegetarian like Kafka, and horrified she ran away and fell down. She tore the skin on her leg, and the ragged wound bled furiously, so in my dream I became dizzy and nauseated. Her skin inadequately protected her, it now flaked like snow on her cheeks, as dry as mine. But skin is the agent of the body that protects its other organs, by covering them, and by being an information station that allows the other organs, my doctor explained patiently, to adjust to changes in the outer environment.” — pp.85-86

↳ Haunted Houses

↳ “She rarely dreamt – remembered them – but lately she’d begun to dream of cats, and it predated the reading of ‘The Black Cat’. It was as if she were reading ‘The Black Cat’ because of her dreams, her cat dreams, the few that stuck. Mark laughed when she recounted how in one there were kittens everywhere, but then it turned weird. Grace’s baby is attacked by a small kitten, wounded in the stomach, and while the mother cat tries to kiss the baby, by now the baby is paranoid that it will be attacked again. ‘Only you,’ Mark insisted, ‘could turn kittens into instruments of the devil. My dear, you’re the baby.’” — p.69

↳ Madame Realism

↳ “Cut to: Interior – a studio apartment in Manhattan. It is raining. Paige is sleeping. She awakens and begins to cough. She has no voice. She remembers her dream. In it she is making love with a man. He wants her desperately, the passion is incredible, huge, overpowering, bigger than both of them. But he is impotent. They stop. They start again. He cannot. His flesh is weak. Then he crawls into her arms and lies across her lap. They form the Pietà. In the dream she says to him, So you would rather be the baby than the penis.” — p.206

“PARAKEET”

↳ American Genius, A Comedy

↳ “In the summer, on mysterious, sultry nights, mosquitoes viciously attacked my family and other families – I was not then concerned with other families, except that I compared mine negatively to them – though we had screens on all the windows of our comfortable house, I loved more than anything except our cat, the ocean, later my dog, who was my present for Christmas, when I was ten. I had begged for one, our cat having been killed by my parents, after my ice-blue parakeet was decapitated by the cat, and my father had refused me a Shetland pony that could have lived in our garage, I had implored. No one, or very few, had air conditioners then.” — p.94

↳ Madame Realism

↳ “Animals move her in a way that human beings never do. She will not admit this nor will she write about it. Her parents gave away her dog. She didn’t talk for weeks. Her calico cat ate her powder blue parakeet. The cat was given away. She was beyond words and didn’t even write about it in her diary. Her father asked: Cat got your tongue, Paige?” — p.201

↳ Mothercare

↳ “It’s fascinating, and also strange, to me that Mother wondered about ‘still thinking’ of Griselda. She had given her beloved cat away, because Griselda had killed my parakeet. I was just eight. Our unusual cat had opened the closed door to the large den, by turning the doorknob. My ice-blue parakeet had been set free to fly there. I discovered my pet parakeet headless on the floor. I suppose I was upset, and crying. I don’t remember that, only the aftermath. Mother drove Griselda to a shelter, the Bide-a-Wee home, maybe the next day. I have no memory of being told she was going to do this, maybe I was. It was traumatic for the Carolina sister, who loved Griselda, and for me. And, worse, it was my fault. My parakeet’s death caused by Griselda was the reason she was abandoned to a shelter. At the shelter, Griselda ran out of her cage and somehow out the front door and raced into the street or highway. She must have wanted to find her way back home. I used to hope she’d been found and had a new home. But most likely she was killed on the highway. Imagining her alone and miserable, missing Mother, who delivered her babies, and whom she loved, and on that highway remains a deeply disturbing memory. It doesn’t stop feeling raw, a punch in the gut.” — p.45