self help reading + music

from Flesh and Blood, Michael Cunningham:

Billy was lying on his bed looking at this comic strip when his mother called him to dinner. It was an old strip, one his mother had given him, about a cat in love with a mouse who despised her. With every brick the mouse threw at her the cat fell more deeply in love, until her head was lost in a whirlwind of hearts and exclamation points, the mingled signs of her devotion and her wounds. Bill had so adored the comic strip that he’d begged his mother to let him keep it, and he looked at it almost every day, the big nosed cat stupefied by love for the furious, spindle armed mouse. His mother read the words to him until he knew them by heart. “ignatz my dollink. I loves ya a million times. Wham.” The sequence of panels excited him, stirred round in his chest. He never tired of watching the cat and the mouse go through their unchanging sequence of injury and pure, bottomless affection.


She liked the idea that her own body would fit completely inside his. She could wear him like a suit of armor. A wet, frigid smell rose from the grass and she contemplated his belly, where little pools of his semen lay, opalescent in the shifting dark. At first his discharge had repelled her but gradually her revulsion had turned to interest. This viscous juice came from Todd’s inward, secret self. Todd, the senior class president, whose mother ironed his undershirts. The spilling of semen was so unlike him that Susan couldn’t help but be moved. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Tasting you,” she said. “Strictly for scientific purposes,” she said. But she heard the thinness in her own voice. She had miscalculated. What she’d done was not the province of people in love. She was sluttish, grotesque. They sat up and began putting their clothes on, Todd took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his stomach with swift unsentimental motions, as if he was cleaning the windshield of a car.


The inner workings of his body were implicit under his skin the way most men’s nakedness was implicit under their clothes, and she imagined undressing him, peeling the skin away from the wet purple skeins of muscle and reaching in for the lungs and intestines. She imagined taking out his rampant, glistening heart, and holding it—its obstreperous thump—in her hands. Levon’s body was blatant, unashamed, unmysterious. His only secret resided in his brain, where he kept a tight little knot of Levonness, strange griefs and needs that nothing, no comfort or sex, no ceremony, could touch. What did she mean to tell him? That she loved him so much she wanted to dismantle him, organ by organ, and hold each part reverently as the sun rose over the tenements. That she wanted to fuck him right there, on the fire escape, to be blotted out and sung to and moved around until she was something else, another shape in the changing world. He finished the song in his own time. While she waited, running her open hands over the ropy surface of his back, Zoe knew what it was like to be a sea captain’s widow, out on the walk with her husband’s ghost who was wailing her the news an hour before the messenger arrived. Mourning was straightforward, a simple anguish. From now on, life would be easier. No more wondering if he was safe. No more worrying that his love has started to ravel and fade.


“You’re growing up aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Forgive me for being corny. You’re growing up. You’re turning into somebody.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
“Jamal?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Do me a favor, all right?”
“What?”
“Don’t grow up to be an asshole.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve been a good mother to you, haven’t I? A reasonably good mother, considering?”
“I guess.”
“Well, if you’re going to grow up without me, that’s about all the advice I’ve got for you. Try not to be an asshole.”
“Okay.”

Amy Millan - He Brings Out The Whiskey In Me (web)

Women were pulled through the world. Only the most powerful disappointment could make them stop loving, and once they'd stopped . . . Inner valves would close. Their body chemistry would change. It wouldn't be what they wanted.