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‘Yes, I’m tired,’ she said. ‘And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.’

But that was part of the trouble: she lived in memories all the time. No sight or sound or smell in the whole of New York was free of old associations; wherever she walked, and she sometimes walked for hours, she found only the past.

For a year she found an exquisite pain – almost pleasure – in facing the world as if she didn’t care. Look at me, she would say to herself in the middle of a trying day. Look at me: I’m surviving; I’m coping; I’m in control of all this.

It’s just one of those things you’ll never know. Life is full of things like that.’

get it over with somehow, and try to remember that Howard Dunninger was there with her

This was going to be awful. The only thing to do was get through it,

the poet regrets a time when he stood at a London doorway regretting still another, earlier time.

Emily took a drink, finding her keen sense of melancholy enhanced by the way the alcohol seemed to go straight from the roof of her mouth into her veins

‘I always talk in circles, and you always talk in a straight line.

she felt the weight of all the unaccustomed drinking she must have done last night. The sun assaulted her, sending yellow streaks of pain deep into her skull; she could barely see, and her hand shook badly in trying to open the door of a taxicab.