Summer Crossing

It was not that she meant to be cold; rather, she meant nothing, felt little, except, perhaps, a fallen-in, ironed-out apathy.

a flag, a flower, your sweetheart’s name? This isn’t going to hurt a bit. But it had hurt; G-R-A-D-Y, the letters of her name, blue and red and linked with a line, were still afire, so he bought a bottle of baby oil, and sat on an open-top Fifth Avenue bus massaging it into his wrist.

All this would go on, these waves, these sea roses shedding sun-dried petals on the sand; if I die, all this will go on: and she resented that it should.

“How long have you known me, Peter?”
Peter said, “Since you made me cry

If he had a Milky Way he always gave his mama half.

Starless nightfall sky had closed down like a coffin lid, and the avenue, with its newsstands of disaster and flickering fly-buzz sounds of neon, seemed an elongated, stagnant corpse. The pavement was wet with a rain of electric color; passersby, stained by these humid glares, changed color with chameleon alacrity: Grady’s lips turned green, then purple. Murder! Their faces hidden behind tabloid masks, a group, steaming under a streetlamp and waiting for a bus, gazed into the printed eyes of a youthful killer.

Dazed, and moving with a clumsy stealth, she’d gathered the ingredients of a cake; but in separating her eggs she’d dropped a yolk into a bowl of whites, and she stood now staring at her mistake as though she’d reached an impasse not ever to be surmounted.

but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him

One Monday, which was Clyde’s day off, they had gone to a shooting gallery and he had won the lighter there and given it to her: since then she liked lighting everybody’s cigarettes

And she took to wearing the thinnest dresses she could buy, dresses so thin that every leaf-shadow or wind-ripple was a coolness that stroked her; but she would not eat, she liked only to drink Coca-Cola and smoke cigarettes and drive her car, and she became so flat and skinny that the thin dresses blew all around her.