Slow Days, Fast Company

It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place”—that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.

That’s the trouble with Hollywood; the things that don’t exist are likely to kill you if you threaten them.

“It’s something from inside,” Carl said. “She’s so thin. It’s as though she’s caving in; her rib cage is like a bird’s. She’s still gorgeous. She was wearing some kind of faded-rose suede suit that really must have been beautiful. But when I thought about her afterward, I couldn’t figure out why she did it anymore. Why she did it at all.”

So there I was, putting my groceries in the back of the car, waving good-bye to Mary. Alone in the twilight outside the Arrow Market, all at once not knowing, at the age of twenty-nine, what any of the main givens were: love, money, or beauty. To say nothing of truth, of course.

Her nervous charm and beauty had been so easily banished it made you afraid for beauty itself.

When I first saw him fresh from Texas and he told me in all seriousness that he wanted women screaming after him in the way they did for the Beatles, I told him he was crazy and that no one went to the movies anymore.

“They will now,” he said. “I’m here.”

Gabrielle had always believed in movies too. It drew them together.

“Well, who is he?” I asked, the first time I saw Mary with this glazed expression.

“Money,” Mary said.

Men aren’t haunted by the way a woman holds a glass. Men are haunted by women who’re just like the one who married dear old dad. (“He can’t possibly be serious; she’s too fat!” one overhears, only to remember that his mother is too fat.) Or else they love a woman because they think she is absolutely unlike their mother and is such an affront to everything their mother stands for that it will plague her for the rest of her life.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.

And Mary would sit on the arm of her couch, unconsciously weaving her delicate feet into impossible postures, her head leaning forward to listen with a dreamy contentment in her face, her hands forgotten except for a joint hanging limply from her fingers. She was a major social instigator, a force for parties. Her two special words were “festive” and “perfect.” And throughout it all, she remained true to her convent manner;