Browse Topics
Romantic Love
How To Prosper During The Coming Bad Years
In the summer of 1979, I fell ruinously in love with a coltish, athletically robust Greek girl of fifteen named Nicole Liarkos . When I think of her now (which isn’t very often), I always imagine her poolside, her creamy caramel skin twice bisected by the triple triangles of her buttercup yellow bikini, her left arm blocking the sun from her eyes.
February 2002
Cómo Aguantamos
The thing Terry hates most about going back to England, even on vacations, is that it’s like coral: a living dead thing. There is sweet nothing to do. Football. Sky television. The cancer of the reminiscence.
January 2002Everything Beautiful Is Far Away
I’m not supposed to come within five hundred yards of her house, but rumor has it she’s hired a gang of Vietnamese hard cases to get rid of me; so, order of protection or no order of protection, I’m going in. The back door is unlocked, and her mom and dad are just sitting down to dinner. They look like a couple of ghosts; I could put my fists right through them.
November 2001
The Rivers We Call Ourselves
At every step, the brook changes; it becomes deep or shallow, wide or narrow, silent and frozen or splashing over logs and stones. I see now that we are like that water, carving our experience into life’s terrain.
October 2001Ecstasy
I suppose it might make sense at this point in my life — with a wife and a son and long afternoons of contentment drawn around me — to disavow my passion for Solange. Or, at the very least, to relinquish her memory. But you don’t relinquish anything when you’ve fallen in love, no matter how briefly. The heart writes in indelible ink.
June 2001Decomposing
It’s all in the way she comes out of her shop and says, “Come in here, my dear,” as soon as she sees you on the sidewalk in your nightgown, your dog beside you. It’s the way she says, “There, there,” though she has no idea what’s wrong. The way she clutches at her own breast when you try to tell her.
March 2001
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