She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.