Acts of Service

A life knows that it needs a shape and, taking cues from films and lives it has glimpsed, chooses a core around which to bend itself. A life recognizes the theater in which its keeper appears most real.

I felt toward him the softness you feel toward the one room in which you are allowed to be alone.

A feeling that visited me often, the sense that there was some depth I was avoiding, some sincerity or passion, a drama greater than the petty arguments and achievements that peppered my life.

I knew that the hour in which sex occurred was the least superficial thing: For that hour, at least, I was absolutely real and present, capable of feeling, intuition, care, vulnerability. Why couldn’t I feel like that with the help of a little solitary tool, like meditation or exercise?

How can a body ever be safe when it’s only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house? But Nathan was not alien. He had seen the lights on in the house; he had discerned the scenes that took place away from the windows, in the secret rooms. His acknowledgment of my body had allowed me to start to forget about it. The façade of the house had been my duty, my obsession, and now I could wander away from it for days, trusting that it had proved its use.

For him my coming out was another personal rejection. I was just another woman who didn’t believe men had it in them to be worthy objects of love, to be more than long-suffering providers.

It takes a little bit of sex to remember you don’t really know people when you see them on the street. Sex forces you back into awe—reveals to you just how difficult it is to know someone, just how much attention and self-delusion are required to conjure love.

I wasn't going to text him. I had decided. But every time I checked my phone I expected that he would have texted me - never mind that in the weeks since I had last walked out of his apartment his name hadn't appeared once. And if he did text me I would have the pleasure of ignoring it.

I felt a little of my strength come back. It was erotic to challenge Nathan. Yet in the bottom of my mind I knew what was erotic was the knowledge that, in the course of the hours that followed, I would surrender to him.

a look that told me he enjoyed it when I challenged him.