Either Or Elif Batuman Quotes

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

I'm going to become whatever I was going to become.

Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable.

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

When I woke up in the morning, there was a second or two when I felt light and free, unaware of any reason to feel upset. Then all my knowledge and memories rushed back and a weight descended on my sternum and the creaking started behind my eyes.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.

That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor's characteristic delight at not imparting information.

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities

I learned a lot from that, like how much it hurt to see how other people described you, and how things that you said about another person, especially your parents, seemed neutral when addressed to a third party, but lethal when you thought about your parents reading it.

All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

So what do you think about love?' I asked Mesut in a casual tone. 'Love is to get caught on something,' he said readily. 'It's to be unable to forget.

Of course, an ending was always sad, but to not end something that needed to end was even more sad.

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

Fiona Apple's album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing.

What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes— so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside of the script.

Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.

Anyway, I didn’t want to be “nurtured” in an “environment” that was set up for me to “excel.” I wanted to do whatever was the most real and rigorous.

Without meaning to, I looked into his eyes. What I saw, it was beyond my pay grade. I went out to get a taxi.

There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so much that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is.

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parents seemed to experience most of their children's actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around. People with kids had to go to work every day, at boring, reliable jobs. On the plus side, work was an acceptable way to escape your children, without seeming to want to. The children, having no such escape, lived through long stretches of boredom and powerlessness, punctuated by occasional treats that they overvalued and freaked out over because the rest of their lives were so empty.

(What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries.

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn't said anything at all.

Near the beginning of “The Portrait of a Lady,” there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write “Madame Bovary.” But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick facades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

If any poet tried to enter my personality like a vacant building...!

I thought we should be rewriting the categories and trying to think of a better organization than whichever one we happened to have inherited.

Please don't leave me all alone." Was that what I, too was afraid of? And maybe not just me, but everyone?

What a beautiful girl you are,” he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of “important” itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.

A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't stop, and it's this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read,” wrote Hélène Cixous, in a sentence that could definitely have been shorter.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

How unjust it was, when people treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible! I felt that this was what I was fighting against, and always had been: the tyranny of the particular, arbitrary way that things happened to have turned out.

...adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy-- as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was is there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

For some reason, the image that came to my mind was of Peter explaining to someone in a quiet, serious voice that Selin's problems had been more serious than anyone had realized. No way, I thought. I was going to stick around and bury those people.

Wasn’t that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the “reality” that happened elsewhere?

Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get--you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research into alcoholism that people were doing in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue of how to make people less intolerable? “It might be a case of having to reduce a big problem we can’t solve to a smaller problem that we can solve,” Juho said.

That whole time, all of high school and also middle school, was something I didn’t like to think about. It had been like prison. I knew it was wrong to compare my experience at a prep school in New Jersey to that of a disadvantaged person in an actual prison. Still, I compared it. Enforced idleness, arbitrary punishment, being trapped for hours among people crazed by hormones and boredom. . . . Some rewards went to the domineering, others to the servile. You couldn’t not be in an unhealthy relationship to power.

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from “being” Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn't a crush, but love. "A crush is about build- ing up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you're secure with, to give to the other person." I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn't have a self I was secure with.

That's what can happen when you fetishize an aesthetic life. It can make you irresponsible and destructive.

That reminded me of a Woody Allen line, about how “the thing with feathers” turned out not to be Hope, but was actually his, Woody Allen’s, nephew.

I didn’t need some underachiever with a master’s degree to tell me how my problem was that nobody loved me the way he loved his defeated conformist-looking wife. —

A young girl who wants to please by being interesting really only succeeds in pleasing herself.

Provai un senso di affinità e di ammirazione nei loro confronti per il modo in cui si chiamavano fuori da tutto quello che gli altri consideravano fico.

A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you're secure with, to give to the other person.

Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work...

And yet, the second time had blocked out the first time, and I didn't like to think that it hadn't been the first time.

I don't see how obeying our nature was scientific, since it was also our nature to die from smallpox and to be unable to fly.

Did I only feel that way because my parents were divorced?

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other's rooms...

The books I enjoyed were usually long, containing descriptions of furniture and of somebody falling in love, and often had ugly nineteenth-century paintings on the cover.

....my mother was still an elegant heroic woman, and I was an awkward overprivileged teenager with no power or independence or boyfriend...

Nothing would go back to how it had been. It would become more and more like the way it was.

The more I read, the more parallels I found to my own experience,

Worse than that: I wasn't even an ex-girlfriend. I didn't have the dignity of having once been a girlfriend.

Isolation, though detrimental for a young man, was essential for a girl.

All my effort to be interesting: was that, too, something I had to be ashamed of?

Why are all these details so precious to you?

Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words.

The Other,” I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. “That’s

It seemed possible that one or both of these books might change my life.

In America, childhood was a time to play and be innocent, to not have to make money or do anything that counted for anything.

The world looked particularly crisp and etched-out in the sunlight.

Was there a version of “The Seducer’s Diary” where they were equal—where he wasn’t tricking her into doing something she didn’t want? Or was that what seduction was?

What is style, what is taste; how do you develop a style, how do you develop a taste? Who that we knew had one, how did they get it?

Another saying, “The egg didn’t like its shell,” was used for people who tried to distance themselves from where they came from, or who disrespected their parents.

I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

And yet, the second time had blocked out the first time, and I didn’t like to think that it hadn’t been the first time.

What was the relationship between leaving the country and an aesthetic life? What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one’s life unaesthetic?

Last spring, months before we had to declare our majors, Svetlana had started soliciting advice from her parents and other old people.

When he leaned in to kiss me, it was like sliding back into the water on one of those long days at the beach, where you just get out so you can go back in again.

Riley made me a tape of her Fiona Apple album.

And I had never heard anyone describe so accurately the difference between last year and this year: Last year, I admired wines. This, I’m wandering inside the red world.

How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things? If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. On the other hand, why couldn’t Rumi have said that?

Isabel’s friend Henrietta showed up, wanting Isabel to marry a square-jawed American who charismatically ran his father’s cotton factory.

It was like when Isabel managed not to marry the guy with the cotton mills, and it was her first taste of victory—because “she had done what she preferred.

Wasn’t Pushkin’s love, and the love of everyone who read Eugene Onegin, more important than Onegin acting like a loser?

Had that been when I lost the thread of the story I was telling myself—the thread of the story about my life?

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

I have a cat now. Nothing happens that I don't want to tell you.

At the T stop, I stared fixedly ahead, as tears streamed down my face, and my nasal passages shut down. Was this the "work" you had to do? Was I getting better?

I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing and why.

A literature major whom I knew slightly was walking her lame boyfriend around on a leash.

Joining the literary magazine hadn’t previously occurred to me. I didn’t want to be an editor, or run a magazine, so why would I want to do a fake version of those things in college?

Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched–one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia. Music, too, was adjacent.

What were the regrets that came later? Was it that she had thought he loved her, and then it turned out he didn't? It couldn't be that, again–could it? Was that what everything was about?

Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness.

I picked up a secondhand copy—$7.99—and read the text on the back: “Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.” My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?

It couldn’t have been depressing, because my mother had worked so hard to make it not be depressing. And yet—was it possible that how hard my mother worked was part of why it had been depressing?

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me--nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

The hours I had spent like that, making my fingers simper at each other. I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

I recognized that the idea of being penetrated and dominated was exciting to me, too, though the mechanics, as well as the implications, were unclear and troubling. Also, why did we have to be excited by that? Why couldn’t we be excited about something else? But I knew I was being childish and unrealistic, and Svetlana was right. Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get- you will get it someday. Yes, you will get it, but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

The implication of “good riddance”—that love would switch off, like an electric light, once you realized the object of your love was dumb, or cowardly, or had bad taste—was not strictly borne out by observation.

This year, I had decided to get a job. The highest-paying student job, Dorm Crew, was presented as a fun team-building experience, except that instead of going to the wilderness, you cleaned other kids’ bathrooms.

Joanne had just biked fifty miles to Lowell, Massachusetts, and back. "Is there anything special in Lowell?" Riley asked. Joanne looked thoughtful. "There probably is," she said, hanging her bike on its special rack.

He was the only other Turkish person I had ever met who was actually interested in some specific field of knowledge, and who wasn’t just automatically doing medicine, engineering, or the thing they called “management.

My mother said that that had been wrong. She said that children were people, whose dignity and privacy were worthy of respect. She was the only person I had ever met or heard of who thought or said anything like that.

How was a therapist going to help me see things more clearly, when he didn’t know any of these people, and couldn’t know anything other than what was told to him, by me: a person who apparently didn’t see things clearly?

Back in Cambridge, the bank clock read 8:40. We went to Ivan’s dining hall. The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered.

I hadn't expected Ivan to write back. It felt magical, like hearing from a dead person. I almost started to cry...I wondered if I should write back to him, but I decided to wait for him to call, as I was sure that he would.

I couldn't help thinking it was wasteful for people with such good logic skills to spend so many years and so much energy learning to reconcile an old book with the way things were now. Couldn't a person just write a new book?

I recognized this mania for referrals from people our parents’ age: the way they thought that the most difficult problems could only be solved by special insider information that you had coaxed out of some guy with a name like Chuck.

È così ingiusto quando la gente considera la realtà dei fatti come una prova che limita la sfera del possibile! Sentivo che era proprio contro questo che lottavo, da sempre: la tirannia del corso particolare e arbitrario degli eventi.

but even with Varenka, Koznyshev almost proposed to her when they were picking mushrooms. Koznyshev had therefore at least contemplated having sex with Varenka. There were no women in that book with whom nobody thought about having sex.

She must have been jealous,” Zita said. “Of course, I hope she feels more secure now. I’ve moved on. I have a new boyfriend. I’m happy now.” “That’s great,” I said, recognizing the rule that, once you had a new boyfriend, you were happy.

I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored.

He left before she woke up—because of how disgusted he was by women’s tears and prayers, “which change everything yet are really of no consequence.” I thought about that a lot: about what she could have said that would have been of consequence.

Malin opened the glass sliding door and the dog sailed out over the dunes and started doing everything at once: peeing and frolicking and scrabbling in the sand. There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

On that journey, Pushkin returned to the lands he first visited at age twenty-one […] Everything was different now: “Whatever feelings I harbored then— no longer exist. They all either passed or changed.” Pushkin turned thirty on that second trip.

Was this because their neurological hardwiring made them better at systems, while women were better at empathy—because men valued abilities and things, while women valued feelings and people? How could we learn to place less value on feelings and people?

Still, I found the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling. It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said that that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed it, when I was growing up: the way adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids.

Why was it considered laudable, sociable, and funny to do this thing that made a person feel like they were dying, and did on occasion induce death? Of course, you couldn't have a party without alcohol. I understood this. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn't there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research that people were doing into alcoholism in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue, of trying to make people less intolerable?

But, for some reason, the laws of their universe didn’t allow them to openly oppose you. All they would do was smile fixedly and try to tell you not to take so many classes and, if you smiled fixedly back for long enough, they would eventually sign the petition.

They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn’t a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know,

Love wasn't a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

I turned my copy over to reread the back cover: always a creepy experience once you had finished a book, like getting a message from a dead person. “Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written,” it said.

Love wasn't a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had heath in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

One must always be thinking,” Isabel told Ralph. “I am not sure it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless.” And Ralph replied: “For weak people I have no doubt it’s a greater happiness.’’ It was a confirmation of my own idea of strength—of my determination to be strong.

There were two grad students, Burcu and Ulaş, who sometimes came to the club meetings to circulate petitions about the Armenian genocide. They were really stressful people—not just about the petitions, but about everything. You could see exactly what their parents were like.

I understood that novels, unlike children’s books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents’ job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone’s job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

Why was it important to keep doing that? Some people, usually men, talked about genetic programming, and said we couldn't deny our nature. This was supposed to be scientific. I didn't see how obeying our nature was scientific, since it was also our nature to die from smallpox and be unable to fly.

Well, that's just it, I thought: you didn't just write down a cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That's what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire. I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say?

Furthermore, whenever parents talked about “love,” some part of my brain switched off. They had their story, and they were sticking to it. The story was that they loved us with a love that we were incapable of understanding, and the reason things were the way they were was because they loved us so much.

Lines like, “The Fishery serves up huge portions of fresh but mediocre fish to a family-oriented clientele,” impressed me with their judicious apportionment of strengths and weaknesses, as did the writers’ easy conversance with social types I had never heard of (“chatty alterna-folk,” “relaxed Gen-X waitrons”).

I sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history. The room had a maximum occupancy of thirty, which might have been OK if everyone was just sitting there, but not if the idea was to make your body as long as possible and do sweeping motions with your limbs. Svetlana always made us get there early, to secure an advantageous position. Then the people who came later would try to crowd us out, inserting themselves between us, or directly in front of us, blocking our view—not apologetically, but with a self-righteous attitude. If you didn’t defend your space like Svetlana did, sitting up extra straight and doing elaborate stretches, you got hemmed in and couldn’t do the movements. People kept hitting you (or were you hitting them?) and giving you dirty looks.

It went on like that all day: the previous night replaying over and over, seeming to confer a kind of weighted legitimacy onto all the routine, boring parts of the day, making me feel like I was in a movie. Why was it that, when you got to a routine or boring scene in a movie, you didn’t panic or despair? In a movie, the number, duration, and meaning of scenes were determined in advance. You just had to wait it out. Theoretically, I supposed, this was true of real life—certainly, the number and duration of scenes weren’t infinite—but there was always the chance it would just end without anything meaningful happening at all.

Why did I insist on blocking myself against the marrow of life? Wasn’t this—this, being outside, here, negotiating with a handsome, possibly disabled mugger—wasn’t this, the cigarette butts and melon guts in the gutter, the faint smell of horses, the sickening pulse of bass from the clubs—wasn’t this what life was?

I sat across from Riley and Ivan sat next to me. Riley glanced at Ivan, who was vigorously cutting up a Salisbury steak: something Riley would never have eaten. Then Oak, Ezra, and Lucas turned up, managing to seem like at least five people. They kept sitting down and jumping up and going to get things and changing seats.

In the car, my father asked if I agreed with him that there was nothing worse, ethically, than betrayal, and that women were particularly prone to betraying people. Clytemnestra, for example, had betrayed Agamemnon when he had one foot out of the bath, fulfilling the prophecy that Agamemnon would die neither on land nor at sea.

Sometimes, when I caught that glimmer of promise, I tried to touch myself to see if I could have an orgasm. It never quite worked. Afterward, when Mesut had gone into that weird trance, I wondered if I should get up and go to the bathroom and try to do it by myself in peace. But it always felt like more hassle than it was worth.

But I had never doubted that, when I got back to school, I would find an email from him, explaining everything. It was not, after all, conceivable that there was no explanation, or that the explanation could come from anyone else, or that it could come in any way other than email, since that was how everything had always happened between us.

On the other hand, wasn’t that what you were supposed to do: give up on the bad boy you liked, and maturely, self-respectingly accept the attentions of a less charismatic guy who had proven his essential goodness by wanting to be with you? Wasn’t that the plot of 40 percent of romantic comedies? Wasn’t it what Alanis Morissette had finally done?

I thought there was something wrong with the way departments and majors were organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study ? Why wasn't literature classified by word count ? Why wasn't science classified by country ? Why did religion have its own department, instead of going into philosophy or anthropology ? What made something a religion and not a philosophy ? Why was the history of non-industrial people in anthropology, and not in history ? Why were the most important subjects addressed only indirectly ? Why was there no department of love ?

On the plus side, Matt was good-natured and didn’t have a self-esteem problem, so you didn’t have to deal with him blaming you for making him feel stupid. On the other hand, the minute you tried to talk about anything interesting, he would swiftly, good-naturedly, inexorably change the subject back to one of the three kinds of things he ever talked about.

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn't a crush, but love. "A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you're secure with, to give to the other person." I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn't have a self I was secure with.

How confident the other people in the class seemed to be in the rights that had been conferred on them by being there first—which was really only a matter of luck, because their aunts hadn’t happened to call just then. Where, exactly, did they want me to go? Did they want me to just not exist? Was that how the Israelis and Palestinians felt about each other?

Lakshmi had assured me, when I pointed it out, that the insufferability of clubs was widely acknowledged. Why else did I think everyone was on drugs the whole time? My reluctance to talk to the guy you had to talk to to get the drugs was exceeded only by my mistrust of the drugs themselves. If I messed up my brain, what else did I have? Why wasn’t Lakshmi scared?

I had thought that an aesthetic life would be more like a string of adventures than like a coming-of-age novel, or the life-cycle of a frog, where there was a grand progression ending with 'maturity' and the ability to procreate. But it was impossible to imagine an aesthetic life, or any life, without falling in love. Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition. 'My country.' 'Learn about my country.' Being in love was the only thing that made you want to learn about a person's country, or about anything else outside your experience. Falling in love was the essential feature of a novel. The Russian word for 'novel,' roman, could also mean 'love affair.' A 'love affair' implied sex, at least the question of sex.

That was what Russia had done: taken a fork in the road to a different future. For all my life there had been another world, and no one had come out, and no one had gone in--until one day the borders turned out to be fictitious, the insurmountable barrier became nothing but a pack of cards, so that now you could walk right through the looking glass, into the world of backward N's and R's.

It was usually the people I thought of as all-American who were like that—the white people, as my high school friend Clarissa called them. I had been surprised to learn that Clarissa, whose parents were from China, did not consider herself white. According to Clarissa, I wasn’t white, either. But I asked my mother, and my mother had said, sounding scandalized, that of course we were white.

You have a lot of time, you don’t need to be in a hurry.” That’s what the deans said, when you tried to take five classes. Easy for them: they were already deans. Either that was something they wanted to be doing, in which case they could afford to relax; or it wasn’t what they had wanted to be doing, and now they were invested in preventing anyone else from accomplishing anything, either.

I had just taken an enormous bite of peanut-butter sandwich. I wasn’t like Riley, who always seemed able to leave a meal at any point, regardless of how much she had or hadn’t eaten. Pushkin said that was the greatest good fortune: being able to leave the table before the wine was drained from the chalice. Not me; I was eating my sandwich. Riley lingered a moment, looking concerned, then left.

Gavriil aggrottò la fronte. - È possibile, secondo voi, che sia stato sottoposto a un indottrinamento ideologico in ottemperanza al Patto di Varsavia? Pensate che sia stato formato allo scopo di distruggere le donne? Tipo che lo mandano in Occidente per familiarizzare con donne che sarebbero potute diventare ingegnere o docenti universitarie famose, e che invece per colpa sua non lo saranno mai?

What as the relationship between leaving the country, ruining peoples, falling in love, and having sex? There clearly was one. It was starting to occur to me that, when it came to having sex, I had mistaken an emergency measure for a sustainable policy. But the emergency had been childhood itself, and sex was the thing that made you not a child. It was the thing that made your childhood finally end.

People said you had to be careful whom you lost your virginity to, because you would become attached, you would want to do it again, you would never get over it. Indeed, even though it had been one of the most painful experiences of my life, still what I felt toward him was something like gratitude, and a feeling of submission that was hard to differentiate from desire—because you had to submit to something.

Were we really more interesting than other people, or did we only seem that way to ourselves? I thought that we only seemed more interesting to ourselves. A corollary of this belief was that we had no particular responsibility to think about other people. They found themselves interesting, they could think about themselves. Svetlana thought that we really were more interesting, and thus had certain responsibilities.

In my heart I didn’t see the need for a backpack. Wouldn’t I be better off with a suitcase? Especially now that suitcases all had wheels. People never even talked about that anymore, and acted as if it had always been that way. Yet, all through my childhood, everyone had been yelling, “You’ll hurt your back!” and wrenching suitcases out of each other’s hands, in an effort to personally be the one who hurt their back.

The taxi driver already knew how to get to the bus station. Once you got there, it was basically people’s job to answer your questions about bus schedules. You didn’t have to explain anything, or account for anything, or manifest love. If anyone got annoyed at you, they couldn’t cry, or scream at you, or accuse you of offending them, and at any point you could just leave. It was totally different from being in your family.

Why was that the thing you had to do when you saw a girl: to prosecute whether and in what way she was beautiful—as Lara, I realized, was? With guys, some of them were physically repellent or appealing, but a lot of them initially presented as neutral, and there wasn’t that immediate, urgent-feeling cognitive puzzle to slot them in, as there was with literally every female person, including one’s own self, in windows and storefronts.

The heavy gears creaked into motion behind my eyes and in my chest. I felt just like I had for the whole fall. I couldn't imagine how I had lived like that. At the same time, I felt so lucky to feel it again-to be here again. It was as if some portal had swung open. Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility. This seemed to prove the material reality of thoughts and feelings.

Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other's rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing--to follow the right leads.

But sometimes something shone like a gold ring at the bottom of the stream, and a sentence came to me with perfect clarity. Like this one: "Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get - you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

I told a story about how my dad had once worked in a lab at a VA hospital on the same floor with a guy who managed to get dogs addicted to cigarettes. There was a tracheostomy tube so the dogs had to inhale the smoke. At first the dogs hated smoking, but eventually they got addicted, and when the cigarettes were taken away, they howled, all day and all night. I didn’t realize until I got to the end that it was a really depressing story. There was a pause.

By a similar operation, the write-up of Wholesome Fresh moved me almost to tears. Supposedly open 24 hours, Wholesome Fresh offers pretty much everything your heart desires. Hearty sandwiches. Hot dishes. Sushi. Chocolate Sauce. Paprika. Napkins. There it was, finally on display: the gap between the idea that Wholesome Fresh promulgated about itself, in a naïve or sinister way, and what it felt like to actually be there. What a relief to see it articulated!

Pushkin said that some readers would condemn Tatiana–they would call her impulsive or unseemly. But those readers weren't being truthful. What they really meant was that Tatiana wasn't strategic. She didn't know how to play games. 'The coquette reasons cooly; Tatiana in dead earnest loves and unconditionally yields.' I loved Tatiana, because she didn't hide what she felt, and I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue. You still met people like that: people who acted as if admitting to any feelings of love, before you had gotten a man to buy you stuff, was a violation–not of pragmatism, or even of etiquette, but of morality. It meant you didn't have self-control, you couldn't delay gratification, you had failed the stupid marshmallow test. Ugh. I refused to believe that dissimulation was more virtuous than honesty. If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn't want them.

I felt my face contort with sorrow. I would never again climb into Mesut’s white Opel, we would never drive around the phallogocentric columns in which Byzantine people had hidden, we wouldn’t drink astringent wine on that roof, or go to the hotel and have sex for hours. Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me—nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

And then it was like slipping back into the water again after lying on hot sand, and knowing you were going to go back and forth like that, between the beach and the sea, until the sun burned up and sank into the water. I felt simultaneously calm and excited, in a way that felt somehow inhalable—I wanted to inhale it. There was a brief jolt when he unbuttoned my jeans—wasn’t he being a bit overliteral?—but, once I recovered, it wasn’t unpleasant to be wearing fewer clothes.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched--one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia. Music, too, was adjacent. It was like Trieste, which was Italian and Slovenia and also somehow Austrian. Music was the thing that made it the most clear what sex would be like. The feeling of different places being touched and resonating at the same time. Like sitting on a parapet with your eyes closed, feeling sunlight on your left eyelid and a breeze on your right forearm. Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-- promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You're going to die without it. YOu're never going to get it. You're going to die. Here it is.

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about.

Lakshmi’s father sometimes joked about women who married for love: how much they must value themselves, to think they were more attractive than the sum total of all other women—to think they were enough, without the institution of marriage, to keep a man faithful to them. He teased Lakshmi, asking if she thought of herself that way. I felt a wave of gratitude toward my parents, who would never have thought or said anything like that about me. On the other hand . . . that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

For the first time, his eyes met mine, and it was as if some curtain had gone up and I was seeing him, the actual person, for the first time. I felt relief and promise, like maybe this was the beginning of our real relationship. But the curtain came down again almost immediately, everything went back to how. it had been, and I understood that what had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.

Some key seemed to reside in the phrase “leaving the country.” “I’m leaving the country.” “I’ll have to leave the country.” Hadn’t international travel been, in some sense, the yardstick that Ivan used to measure human worth—even though, in most other ways, he had seemed to look down on rich people? Later, in Hungary, other people had asked the same question—“What other countries have you been to?”—in the same tone; implying that leaving the country wasn’t a sign of privilege, but a kind of accomplishment.

Lakshmi said that, according to French feminist theory, you couldn’t ignore the men, because their views on women were baked into culture at such a deep level. Just by using words, you were perpetuating their ideas, because they were the ones who had made up language. “So what are you supposed to do? Not use words?” “Well, they say that women have to make up their own language, and their own kind of writing, outside of the patriarchal hegemony.” I stared at her. “You’re joking.” “No, not at all. It’s called écriture féminine.

But once I had managed to calm my grandmother and remove myself from the house, everything was easier than I had anticipated. The taxi driver already knew how to get to the bus station. Once you got there, it was basically people’s job to answer your questions about bus schedules. You didn’t have to explain anything, or account for anything, or manifest love. If anyone got annoyed at you, they couldn’t cry, or scream at you, or accuse you of offending them, and at any point you could just leave. It was totally different from being in your family.

But once I had managed to calm my grandmother and remove myself form the house, everything was easier than I had anticipated. the taxi driver already knew how to get to the bus station. Once you got there, it was basically people's job to answer your questions about bus schedules. You didn't have to explain anything, or account for anything, or manifest love. If anyone got annoyed at you, they couldn't cry, or scream at you, or accuse you of offending them, and at any point you could just leave. It was totally different from being in your family.

It seemed strange that Rumi had been married twice, and had children, but they hadn't been the most important people in his life. Some random guy had been more important. Did that mean he was gay, or would have been gait if it had been allowed? Or did it mean that there was some different way that I hadn't heard of for one person to be important to another? You are not the bride or the groom. You do not fit in a house with a family. Was it possible to be like that--to not be the bride or the groom, to not fit in a house with a family? What happened to you, then?

In relation to “Killing Me Softly,” I was surely a poseur, the kind of coward to whom crossover albums were marketed or, worse yet, someone co-opting someone else’s bad experience. And yet, now, in the Tower Records, I understood that there was a sense in which “Killing Me Softly” was just a song—it itself wasn’t the cursive font in which the titles were printed, which made me think of a tattoo, and caused me to feel sheltered and useless. I ended up buying the cassette single, because it was only two dollars, and because it seemed more honest about just being into the most popular song on the album.

The essential qualities of radio music were: a tone of oracular truth; an appeal to “you”; an uncertainty as to whether you yourself were “you.” Radio music was summed up by the woman with the sexless, sphinxlike voice who had traveled the world and the seven seas, and had found that everybody was looking for something. “Some of them want to use you; some of them want to be used by you”: I recognized this to be absolutely true, without qualification—either despite, or because of, how it contradicted the logic of self-interest, in a way that would be revealed by adult life, and would be in some way its defining feature.

I had wanted to be become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad are Friends: it wasn't a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know, like why Toad was the way he was--why Toad is essentially unwell, and why Frog helped Toad, whether he really wanted Toad to get better, or whether he benefited in some way from Toad's unwellness.

I couldn’t believe how relevant and applicable The Portrait of a Lady was to my life—way more so than Against Nature. The main character, Isabel, was my age, American, and lively. Only some people thought she was beautiful. The work of art she was creating was her own character: how she acted, how she was, how other people saw her. From this perspective, the aesthetic wasn’t really the opposite of the ethical. The way Isabel wanted to be, and act, and seem, was generous and brave. Her main goal was to avoid meanness, jealousy, and cruelty—not because God said they weren’t permitted, but because who even wanted to be like that?

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parents seemed to experience most of their children’s actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around. People with kids had to go to work every day, at boring, reliable jobs. On the plus side, work was an acceptable way to escape your children, without seeming to want to. The children, having no such escape, lived through long stretches of boredom and powerlessness, punctuated by occasional treats that they overvalued and freaked out over because the rest of their lives were so empty.

Walking back from Somerville, we kept passing curbside piles of discarded household items. I pulled out a doormat that said I AM NOT YOUR DOORMAT. “It’s like it’s capable of self-deception!” I enthused. Joanne asked in a kind voice if I wanted to take it home and have it be our doormat. I imagined seeing it every day, this protesting resentful doormat: we would crush its conception of itself, again and again, with our feet. I replaced the mat where I had found it, between a CD tower and part of a disassembled futon. A few blocks later, Riley found another doormat that had seven cats on it spelling WELCOME with their tails. It was clearly the correct doormat.

I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion for medieval people. It gave you energy to face injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery. The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the feeling of being ignored, a feeling of being spared, an impossibility of anything happening, which was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew love could be reciprocated. It was something that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn’t a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know, like why Toad was the way he was—why Toad was essentially unwell, and why Frog helped Toad, whether he really wanted Toad to get better, or whether he benefited in some way from Toad’s unwellness. I understood that novels, unlike children’s books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents’ job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone’s job to write novels.

I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn't know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I'd been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people's plan was to have children and amass money for them. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get everything interesting over with while they were young.

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people’s plan was to have children and amass money for them. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get everything interesting over with while they were young.

Near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

Still, I found the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling. It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have in your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed it, when I was growing up: the way adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked a why a particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as blasphemy--as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as if there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

I hadn’t expected Ivan to write back. It felt magical, like hearing from a dead person. I almost started to cry. Then I did “finger” and saw that Ivan was actually logged on to the Harvard network. He was physically here. Such relief—like some vital element had been restored to the atmosphere. He was finally here again, like last year, and he must have been planning to see me; that was why there had been hope and futurity in his tone. I wondered if I should write back to him, but I decided to wait for him to call, as I was sure that he would. — With the passage of time, this expectation came to strike me as insane. Of course he wasn’t going to call. If he had hoped to see me, he would have told me he was coming. He was here to visit his girlfriend, to have sex with his girlfriend, to do any number of things and to see any number of people, but not me. I was literally the one person he would be least likely to want to see, out of everyone on the planet, including all the people he had never met.

At dinner, Morris described a debate his Moral Reasoning class had had about Kant’s categorical imperative. The idea of the categorical imperative was that moral rules were universal, with no exceptions. Lying, for example, was wrong—always, for everyone, under all circumstances. But what if an axe murderer knocked at your door and said, “Hello, sir, may I know where your children are so that I can murder them?” Were you morally justified to lie? Someone had actually asked Kant that, and Kant had said no. Morris’s Moral Reasoning section had debated it for the whole hour. I didn’t see the point of debating how I would respond to an axe murderer saying something that an axe murder would literally never say. More broadly, I mistrusted the project of trying to generalize a set of rules that would work in all circumstances. Surely, whatever rule anyone thought of, there would be some situations where it wouldn’t work. I myself had often had the experience of being prevented, by my life situation, from following some rule that made sense for everyone else. When I explained it, people would laugh and say, “How could we have thought of that?” —

One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions. Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions. Svetlana liked taking introductions and survey classes, “mastering” basics before moving to the next level, getting straight A’s. I had a terror of being bored, so I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn’t taken the prerequisites and had no idea what was going on. I could see how my way might be called aesthetic. It was less clear to me why Svetlana’s way was ethical, though it did seem “responsible” and obedient.

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back—promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is. At first, I didn’t see the point of an orgasm. It seemed like an annoying abrupt spasm that interrupted things just when they were getting interesting. But gradually it started to take longer to get to, and to unfold into its own experience, and then it became this sought-after thing in the distance—like during the long periods in a symphony when nothing seemed to be happening, when it was just shifting textures, and then a glimmer of the soaring sought-after melody shone through—and the fact that you could glimpse it, even for a second, was a miracle that promised everything, that deferred everything to the future, and made living seem worthwhile. I knew that what I had experienced was clitoral orgasm, which was immature and incomplete and somehow selfish and immoral, by comparison with a vaginal orgasm. The flickering, pulsing, agitated feeling I had sometimes afterward was proof. It wasn’t real or right by yourself. But what was the man going to do—how was it going to work? I tried again to put in a tampon. ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY.

Still, when Harvard said I wasn’t eligible for financial aid, and another university offered me a full scholarship, I thought I should go there. My mother became furious and said I was always sabotaging myself. She was proud of being able to borrow money at a loss from her own retirement fund, and give it to Harvard. I felt proud of her, too. But I did not feel proud of myself. It made the college application process feel, in retrospect, somehow hurtful and insulting: all the essays and interviews and supplements and letters seemed to be about you, about your specialness—but actually it was all about shaking your parents down for money. — Harvard seemed really proud of its own attitude toward financial aid. You were always hearing about how “merit-based aid,” which was fine for other schools, didn’t work here, where everyone was so full of merit. When your parents paid full tuition, part of what they were paying for was the benefit you derived from being exposed to people who were more diverse than you. “My parents are paying for him to be here, so I can learn from him,” my friend Leora said once, about a homeschooled guy from Arkansas in her history section who started talking about how the Jews killed Jesus. Leora had been my best friend when we were little, and then we went to different middle schools and high schools, but now we were at college together. She already thought every single person on earth was anti-Semitic, so she definitely hadn’t learned anything from that guy. To me, the part of financial aid that made the least sense was that all the international students got full scholarships, regardless of how much money their parents had. The son of the prince of Nepal was in our class, and didn’t pay tuition. Ivan had once caused me pain by saying something deprecating about “people whose parents paid a hundred thousand dollars for them to be here.” Did he not know that my parents were paying a hundred thousand dollars for me to be there? The thought that really made me crazy was that my parents had paid for Ivan to be there. It was another experience they had paid for me to have.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, how much simpler our lives would be if we could date each other. That delousing kit cost eleven dollars! “Do you ever think it would be easier if we could go out with girls?” I said aloud. Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I find most of the lesbians I know a bit intimidating,” she said, finally. “And I don’t really share their aesthetic sense—or they seem not to value aesthetics that much. I just don’t think I’d fit in. Especially since I’m always lusting after boys.” That was something I thought about, too: the physical response I felt to Ivan, the dull electric jolt, some heavy, slow machinery starting to turn in my chest and between my legs. I had never felt those things with relation to a girl. On the other hand, I usually hadn’t felt them in Ivan’s presence, either; it was more when he wasn’t there. And how much was that physical feeling worth? Was it really enough to counterbalance all the disadvantages? You couldn’t just talk to Ivan like he was a normal person; he didn’t hear, or he didn’t understand, or he went off somewhere and you couldn’t find him. Also, all his friends thought I was crazy. Instead of dealing with those people, how much more fun and relaxing it would be to pet Svetlana’s shining golden hair, to tell her how pretty she was and to watch her get more pretty, as she always did when someone complimented her. Her body wanted to be complimented, and I knew just what to tell her, so why couldn’t I? “But girls are more beautiful, and so much easier to sort of negotiate with. And the lust for boys never seems to work out well for me. So it just feels like girls are at least something to think about.” Again, Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I would feel squeamish with anything beyond kissing and playing with each other’s breasts,” she said after a moment. I realized that I, too, had only been thinking about kissing and playing with each other’s breasts. What else did lesbians even do? Other than oral sex, which was apparently horrible. The way people talked about it on sit-coms: “Does he like . . . deep-sea diving?” You had to be altruistic to do it—a generous lover. That said, oral sex with a boy also seemed likely to be disgusting. Guys themselves seemed to think so. Wasn’t that why they went around yelling “cocksucker” at people who cut them off in traffic? “Do you not feel squeamish when you think about sex with a guy?” I asked. “I do, but it feels exciting. The idea of being penetrated and dominated.