And divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment...
A vending machine hung tilted from the wall, advertising laundry soap at fifty yen a packet to customers who might as well have been ghosts.
A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a nondescript office building. I paid the driver and we got out. The rain had stopped but the street was empty, almost forlorn. If I hadn’t known where we...
Provocation.
It came to feel more a fortress than a home. A fortress of solitude.
Client? I asked the same question. Hort wouldn’t tell me. For your ears only. But if you want to share, I’m a good listener. I said
Because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good?
Well, the club is open until three in the morning and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home… I get the picture, I said. Though in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attac...
We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, Look, I’ve got an idea of what you feel for this woman, okay? I saw her. She’s a head-turner. She’s more than that, he said softly. The dumb, sappy bastard. Hi...
Treat me well, and I’ll treat you better. Treat me badly, and I’ll treat you worse.
The hawk with talent hides its talons.
The guy was shrewder than he looked. I realized I had given too much credence to the scrawny body and the obvious age, and had underestimated him. Watching him set up what would be our makeshift class...
Something about all that power seemed to make the assholes who wielded it believe they were invulnerable.
She’s a bargirl. You don’t know where her loyalties lie. That one was unconvincing. No one had directed her against me—I was the one who had been pursuing her. She hadn’t needed to warn me about the b...
She spun around and I heard her inhale sharply. What the hell? she exclaimed in her Portuguese-accented English. I raised my hands, palms forward. I just want to talk to you. I used English because it...
Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details...
People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t. Well, I could. And I was going to.
Naomi, you think this is all an accident? It’s a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.
Music reveals a personal past of which, until then, each of us was unaware, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. —Jorge Luis Borges
Men use these words to frighten us, Livia would tell them. To intimidate and paralyze. We need to habituate to what upsets us so we can fight through it. Deny our attackers the weapon of their words....