Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.

But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?

He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

She's not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her.

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake.

From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.

According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect.

When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.

What is a stromatolite? he asks rhetorically, his eyes gleaming. The word comes from the Greek stroma, a mattress, coupled with the root word for “stone.” Stone mattress: a fossilized cushion, formed by layer upon layer of blue-green algae building up into a mound or dome. It was this very same blue-green algae that created the oxygen they are now breathing. Isn’t that astonishing?

Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.

all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money,

What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet?

she doesn’t want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse.

Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance.

there are some things that do not fare well in high definition.

When it came to love, wasn't believing the same as the real thing?

Why couldn’t the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he’s here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.

Constance did not have a bun. She didn’t need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed.

As his editor put it, “Yeah, it’s a piece of shit, but it’s good shit.

Lighting a fire is an act of renewal, of beginning, and she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division,