"The Paris Wife"

[fiefoe]

New friends:

• It’s so bad you’d think every last word has to swim through his lungs to reach his mouth.
• She looked as if she cultivated that—a fine blurriness.
• “I’m dying for my Scottie to be a flapper, you know. Decorative and unfathomable and all made of silver.”
• They certainly didn’t seem our sort, but I wasn’t sure I knew what our sort was anymore. The rules seemed to be changing all the time.
• Before we’d even gotten to the door, the gap had closed around the table and you couldn’t even tell I’d been there.
• And for the rest of the lunch our table was like an intricate game of emotional chess, with Duff looking to Ernest, who kept one eye on Pat, who was glaring at Harold, who was glancing furtively at Duff.
• The young matador bent over the bull, slicing off its ear with a small knife. He called a boy over from the stands and sent him to me with the ear cupped in his palms.
• Ernest was a writer, not Duff’s lover. He’d seen her as a character, maybe even from the beginning.
• "I want to be useful.” She paused and laughed at herself. “I think I read that in a novel somewhere, too.”
• It was ironic to think that nearly all of the women I knew now were direct benefactors of the suffragette work my mother did decades ago, right in our own parlor, while I curled up with a book and tried to be invisible.
• Gerald had cleared it himself, a few yards at a time, and now it was pristine. Before the Murphys came along and made it fashionable, no one ever thought to sun on the beach. They invented sunbathing.
• Scott could be a terrible, painful drunk. Ernest could shove cruelly against everyone who’d ever helped him up and loved him well—but none of that mattered when the patient was at hand. In the end, for both of them, there was really only the body on the table and the work, the work, the work.

<<