My Education, by Susan Choi

From Susan Choi’s:

My Education:

     ‘At the time, I believed the least relevant factor of all was that we were both women.  Of course this was the first fact that anyone saw, but for us it felt last.  It failed to register, at least with me.  My adoration of her was so unto itself it could refer outward, to other affairs between women or even between human beings.  It was its own totality, bottomless and consuming, a font of impossible pleasure that from the start also bore down on me like a drill until at last it accomplished a permanent perforation.  And yet, irrelevant as I thought gender was to our sex, and to all the disasters it wrought, I now see that the form our love took was fundamentally girlish. … the way I loved, and the way she loved me…we might as well have been sylphs capering through the glade, crowned with daisy tiaras and trailing lace rags. … we wept a great deal, and loudly; and endured our orgasms like shipwreck survivors with hoarse shrieks of actual fear.’

(Um...WOW).

‘Love bestows such a dangerous sense of entitlement.  … Did I marvel at such a change of fortune? …No.  I exulted, I reveled, I buried her flesh beneath tireless kisses, but I also felt arrogant justification.  I felt I was finally where I belonged.’

‘We liked to make love very clean and go to sleep very dirty, sweat-enmatted and pungently syrup-adhered.’

DAMN.

‘…through our escalating argument, which we conducted in stage whispers, not for risk of behind heard but because, perhaps, hissing is second only to shrieking for the gratification of heated emotions.’

When they spend a week in NY, she describes how that city salutes them:

‘…and in a flash I perceived the lifeblood of that city, its particular meaning, paradoxically mapped at the cross point of the greatest breadth of possibility with the highest expectation.  You could be anyone you wanted, yet you had to be someone.  I was wearing her clothes … but I felt less diminished than transposed into my own ordained form.’ 

‘And yet there were times in that endlessly dilating week – for every day’s newness made days within days, so that the week seemed to have magically lengthened, the more it diminished – when Martha and I, having drunk our way past drunkenness to a gritty sobriety; having eaten ourselves hungry again; most rare having fucked ourselves calm, so that sex relinquished its hold for a while in our minds; … would sit across from each other … simply pouring ourselves out to each other in talk, as we had somehow not done before.’

That's New York Ci-TAY for ya, people.  That's my NYC!

‘Always, in her lengthy experience, sex had been the key to a door behind which lay a realm of shared secrets.  Sexual love was a conspiracy, the blood pact with the partner in crime – '

Then re being unable to sleep, wondering where the other is:

‘The wretched deathless consciousness: this was why people murdered themselves.'

(Indeed).

         'That winter, I misplaced myself.

         ‘I was not even lost, a condition which still retains something intended.  … I only slid down, in near silence, from whatever had carried me forward.  I slid down like a scrap from some pile on a cart.  I slid down, into dusty unregarded margins, and was left behind and forgotten by the flesh part of me, which went on. … 

     'Waking in the morning I was conscious I had woken, a pain so intense that it solved its own problem.’

(I remember that post-heartbreak, esp the waking thing, much, much too painfully well…)

Re odd couples: 

     ‘Something foreign to logic cleaved such pairs together:  pure ardor.  A sheer force of love.  Matthew and I were a pair of quite similar envelopes.  Close in age… genetically lucky with our looks and our minds.  Inclined … toward all the same places, people, and things.  One might wonder, if feeling unsteady, how deep a deficit of ardor such a list of matched traits could conceal.’

Ouch.