Briefly, A Delicious Life

The world is full of cowards she thinks. And it turns out sometimes the opposite of cowardice is playfulness.

The women that survived me! They stepped out of their houses into the daylight and if I'd had any breath I would have been breathless at the sight of them. The hands of women. The ankles of women. The voices of women as they called to each other across the square.

That was it. The bracket of her bent leg against the stones. The way her mouth angled around the cigar in a grimace that was almost a smile. The sight of a woman in a well-tailored jacket and trousers. Unexpected, unimagined. A prickling sensation. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love.

What are you doing here and how can I persuade you to stay?

Unexpected, unimagined. A prickling sensation. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love.

The feeling was like a phrase ending on a deceptive cadence, hovering, deliciously unresolved.

I don’t want to be alone, I said. I don’t understand why I am here alone.

I had never seen anyone like her. That was the thing. No woman had ever been as definite, as robust. No woman, no man, nobody had ever been so much like themselves as she was.

Now that the family had announced in absentia that they were not only foreign odd consumptive cross-dressers, but Godless foreign odd consumptive cross-dressers? Now things would be much, much worse.

(...) thought of all that could be done between two women in possession of bodies, what effects could be achieved with fingers and tongues.

When I was alive, I lived in a time of beautiful men. They were everywhere: big and broad and manly, managing everything mannishly, manifesting whatever they wanted and manhandling what they didn't.

Imagine you are about to bite into an apple. Imagine never having bitten into an apple before. The fruit at your lips is an unknown thing. It might burst like a tomato! Yield like a peach! Snap like a carrot! You have no idea about its insides: what colour or texture. You have no reason to suspect it will be cloud-white, bloodless, foamy, crisp. An apple, could be like an orange: segmented, oozy. An apple could be salty and jaw-breaking like a rock. This is what it was like for me, the first time I heard Chopin play the piano.

Turn your big black eyes right on me and see me from the inside out. Put out your cigars on my lungs. Spit coffee into my mouth. Write your spidery words all over my stomach.

Let’s see how it feels when taken at the crushing, trudging pace of ordinary life, so incredibly slow, ponderous, deadening, and with so many astonishing moments in between.

When was the last time I had told her I loved her, was proud of her, was grateful to her for showing me what life was like when lived at length and gently?

I understood by then that Chopin’s music was the best of him. It was where his loveliness resided.

The sky is turquoise, the sea is azure, the mountains are emerald, the air is heaven. Sunny, hot days; everyone in summer clothes. Guitars and singing all through the night…. Briefly, a delicious life. —Frédéric Chopin

The hands of women. The ankles of women. The voices of women as they called to each other across the square. I could have kicked myself for not realizing it before.

As my mother used to say: we had two religions; there was the Church, and then there were the men.

It wasn't even a lie - I don't feel well - it was really very true. She did not feel well in the world ; she did not feel well taken care of; she did not feel well loved.

When George stuck her head around the door and watched him work, his stomach clenched and his skin tingled. The feeling was like a phrase ending on a deceptive cadence, hovering, deliciously unresolved. There was something unsettling and adolescent about it, as though they were both teenagers and falling in love for the first time.

My little black cloud’ George would say, lopping Solange’s hair through her fingers as the child was falling asleep. It took me some time to understand this was intended as a term of endearment. Maurice was always: ‘my little cub’, ‘my bear’; Solange: ‘cloud’, ‘thunder’, ‘little tempest’. How many time do you have to call a cloud a tempest before it turns stormy?

The world is full of cowards, she thinks, and it turns out that sometimes the opposite of cowardice is playfulness.

What do we call the giraffe, Solange?’ George asked, and when Solange said nothing George finished the joke: ‘Her Highness.

The storm had cried itself to sleep, and what remained in the subsequent days were crisp blue skies and a slightly shell-shocked peace, as though we had been granted a reprieve from winter.

she started dreaming a lot about Paris: about the pink-gray sky, thick and soft like felt.

What is desire, without a body to have it in? All I can say is that to me it was like the kind of hunger people get in dreams. It was formless, gutless, all-consuming because unconfined. It had no edges.

She feels trapped by her body, her still-swollen, pudgy belly and the perineal tear that bleeds afresh whenever she moves and makes her scared to pee. Her milk has just come in and her breasts feel weighty and thrumming, hard as stale bread; her shirt is drenched and sticky. She is all seepage, bloat, and frayed edges. She can go nowhere. She can seduce nobody.

Her periods stopped. But still she could not bring herself to eat, in case that one piece of bread, that drop of oil, that scrap of chicken, would be the bite to bring the blood back.

She had imagined fresh, wholesome food; less cream than they ate in France, less sugar, more fish. She had imagined that their bodies would strengthen and unfurl like shoots towards the sun, and that everything would be easy: her writing, her children, being in love with Chopin.