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The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.
It made him smile out loud.
He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.
If he touched her he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.
“Promise me you’ll always love each other,” she’d say, as she drew her children to her. “Promise,” Estha and Rahel would say. Not finding words with which to tell her that for them there was no Each, no Other.
The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.
He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains.
In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
