The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai
My 9 highlights
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She’d had the wrong amount of wine for self-analysis.
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Yale mentioned to Dwight, the copy editor, that he was about to head up to Door County again, and Dwight, who’d grown up vacationing there, had all sorts of advice for him, most of it seasonally inappropriate.
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Yale dug his face into her clavicle. He tried to slurp the snot and tears back in, but he was drenching her. Cecily said, “Here.” Somehow she had a fresh glass of water for him, with ice cubes. Yale sipped it, and he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been holding things in.” “It’s fine,” Cecily said. And Fiona said, “It’s fine.”
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She had silver hair, a bracelet of smooth green beads. The kind of woman who seemed made entirely of scarves.
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He’d been away long enough to induce that wonderful coming-home-after-a-long-trip feeling, the way you’re hit with the smells of your own building, the dimensions of your own hallway, which have somehow readjusted themselves so the place feels dreamlike, off by a few vertiginous inches in every direction.
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The ex was a big man, big with both fat and muscle, in possession of a remarkably uncharming Irish accent.
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She laughed with the desperate air of someone who didn’t want the conversation to turn uninteresting lest you leave her alone with no one to talk to.
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“Got it,” he said. “Got it.” Although he couldn’t have.
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(And who was he kidding? It wasn’t love. It was attraction. It was a seed that might have grown, given better soil, more sun.)