"The Woman Upstairs"

The betrayal in the end was entirely predictable, but the Cambridge setting gets bonus points - ("And sweets: I’d bring such sweets—the famous Highland Avenue cupcakes or sesame buns soaked in honey, or salted chocolate oatmeal cookies, or loukoum.", "It took less than fifteen minutes to go from their town house by the river up to my triple-decker on the wrong side of Huron Avenue.")

• The actual sky was vast and blue and impeccable and American, the very canvas of possibility,
• What if she didn’t feel the same way? And what if she did feel the same way? And how could it be that all the great welter of emotion I experienced in her company would be somehow and suddenly summarized by—reduced to—this?
• With the distance I have now, I can see that it was one small thought among all the other thoughts that drift like dust motes through a cluttered mind. But it was a thought I made an object, and held on to and turned over and over in my hand, as if it were an amulet, as if it gave meaning to what had come before; and holding on to it changed everything again.
• “I’m not denying your feelings, I’m just asking a question about the story you’re choosing to tell about those feelings, that’s all.”
• When Reza said, “I never want you to go away,” I believed him. I built houses, and entire lives, upon those beliefs. If you’d told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. Or crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be—that it will yet be, and most certainly—as you would wish it.
• Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?)
• This was a Fun House of its kind, this strange place of safety into which 9/11 could erupt as if from nowhere, as if without logic, to our utter surprise. Already liberated into what seemed an anti–Fun House reality of the emotions—a knowledge of love—and then on the cusp of my artistic freedom also, I longed now, too, for the expansion of my intellect.
• Lebanon, its history—bits of history over centuries, millennia: Phoenician history, Roman history, Ottoman history. He told me that Rome’s capital in the Middle East, Heliopolis, could still be visited
• four hundred sober people at a feast), while the bride in her resplendent finery arrived at her celebration gliding the length of a giant swimming pool on an inflatable raft draped in white satin, pushed from behind by invisible swimmers, as flaming Catherine wheels illuminated her path on either side and fire-eaters and sword-swallowers performed at the end of the pool in her honor.
• what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I’d lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?
• There are times in life like that, where you know intuitively that everything hinges on this time and nothing will be the same again, when, as a consequence, your brain remembers, it notices the small things—
• “You seem wonderfully calm in your life, as though it’s in enviable order. As though there’s nothing extra that you would require. You don’t have messes, or make them. You’re so generous to everyone—to your school, to Reza, to Sirena—even to me. You don’t look like a ravenous wolf.”
• “It’s a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. For whatever reason: out of love, or duty, or something else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don’t need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful.”
• All my life, I’d shied away from things I couldn’t imagine. My basic feeling had been that if I couldn’t imagine it, it wasn’t a good idea.
• the story in my head, my desire for some confession, my wish to activate a drama between us, to lay claim to her attention, was up against some stronger reality of hers.
• the Miss Nobody Nothing that everyone smiles at so cheerfully and immediately forgets.
• When I looked at her in real life, she seemed to me almost to create a haze around her, a visible air; but in its tiny-fying precision, the camera recorded her spinning like a science.
• long, straight perfect limbs of a still god-held child
• “I see,” I said again. I don’t need to tell you that she was flaying me alive. “So, no more pictures. I’ll choose one or the other, by tonight. Maybe I’ll choose blind and see what comes back.” She gave a harsh laugh and daubed at her eyes. She’d gotten quite worked up. No, of course I wouldn’t know what it was to have a chance, or a life, at all.
• Neither Alice nor Edie would have had time or patience for my prudery, silly cow that I was. The point was to be good at it—at art—and not to care. It wasn’t clear which of these was the more important, or whether simply in caring one fell at a crucial hurdle.
• He filled his wine cup, lit another cigarette. “They are at the same time truthful, and emotional—and so small.” “So small?” It didn’t sound like a compliment.
• “I know, your insatiable ravenous wolf. But how will you know his rampaging, unless you free him from his cage?” I was both in the moment and outside it, aware of the theater and the kitsch of it—how could I not be?—and yet wholly involved—my fingers, my skin, my heart.
• But then, the pull upon me was not who I thought I was; it was who he thought I was
• if you could only separate that bead from its neighbors, take it out of time and hold it up to the light, how beautiful and clear a bead it would be. If you were to make a room for the artist Nora Eldridge, and depict in it that experience, it would be joy.
• (don’t ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast, breathing skin, will insist otherwise),
• I’d been extra-angry because I felt betrayed by my own kid, my special boy, the boy who wanted to make the world better; but here, like a slap, was the reminder that he wasn’t mine. Here was his mother, and the look on her face was the look not of my friend but of his parent
• I’d realized too late that Skandar was my Black Monk, my Chekhovian familiar. Even more than Sirena, Skandar was the one who could convince me of my substance, of my genius, of the significance of my thoughts and efforts. If you took away my Black Monk, what was I? If nobody at all could or would read in me the signs of worthiness—of artistic worth—then how could I be said to possess them? How could I convince myself, against the whole world’s determination?
• hope. I felt I’d been seen, and seen clearly, and discarded, dropped back into the undiscriminated pile like a shell upon the shore.
• the touch of his skin on mine—so much uncovered skin, that thinnest of pulsating sheaths between our souls: ours was a touching replete with all meaning. Or I’d thought so. It had meant, for me. There are other ways of reading the signs: “We didn’t even sleep together” would be one.
• I, stock-still, eyes open, waiting for dawn, seized in an unmasterable panic at the loss of my so-beloved, apparently unreal life.
• I should have been flattered to be given her half-full bottles of aged balsamic vinegar and French mustard, the remnants of her cotton balls and hair conditioner: that she chose me as their recipient was as much an intimacy, in its way, as had been entrusting her son to my babysitting expertise; and was similarly faintly demeaning
• longing” is a better word than “desire”: it carries its quality of reaching but not attaining, of yearning, of a physical pull that is intense and yet melancholy, always already a little sorrowful, self-knowing, in some wise passionate and in some measure resigned. Desire suggests a burning, fervid, unreflective, something that wants, above all, satisfaction.
• But the final imaginary nature of those few objects would matter quite a bit, I think, in my peculiar ability to keep alive for so long the intensity of my connection to them all.
• understood. In my thoughts, I’d even set aside times of day for them, and places, where I permitted myself the indulgence. For example, the wholesale fantasies—some old, some new—were permissible in bed after lights-out.
• with her unexpected high heels and her square hands and her fairy-tale deftness with the needle and thread … any moment of it all, all of it, I could have handed over, translucent, shining bead upon shining bead, had Sirena but wanted to hold them—which, it seemed, she did not especially, as she said, “Oh, I can remember if I try—I’m not that old yet! But it’s all fuzzy, and in my memory, dark. Even though I know it can’t be. Surely Boston isn’t always dark?”
• I felt, in that half hour, so full, like an overflowing vessel, its trembling meniscus arced toward the sky.
• “Buddhist, no, obsessive, yes. I know you too well, and I know you hoard things under your rock to nibble away at when you’re alone.
• All the clichés of a city are new to any individual visitor and hence not clichés; just as love, in spite of the paltry means we have to express it, is, each time experienced, completely new: it can be pyrotechnic in its intensity or slow and tender but overwhelming, like a glacier passing over a landscape; or evanescent but glorious like the field of fireflies on Martha’s Vineyard in my youth—whatever it is, each time it is familiar and new at once, an overturning.
• I had all this anger. Years of it, decades of it, my very body full of it, bloody with it. And I’d lumbered across the Atlantic to lay it all down upon a doorstep. Almost like blackmail: love me absolutely, or take this shit from me. I had the mother lode. Yes, the term is apt. It was to be assuaged or offloaded. And yet, while I left their home feeling welcomed, even loved, it was a different, smaller sort of love than I’d wanted—not so much a glacier or a fireworks display as a light shawl against an evening breeze. Recognizably love, but useless in a gale.