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You didn’t have to attract desire. . . . Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing.
—Marguerite Duras,
I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, and that doing whatever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.
—Bret Easton Ellis,
One day—I can say precisely when, I know the date—I find myself in the bar of a hotel lobby in a provincial city, sitting in an armchair across from a journalist, a low round table between us, being interviewed for my latest novel, which recently came out. She’s questioning me on the themes of the book, on separation, the act of writing letters, whether exile can ever save us. I answer her almost without thinking. I’m used to the questions so the words come easily, almost mechanically, as I allow my gaze to wander to the people walking across the lobby. I watch their comings and goings, and invent the lives of these people in my mind. I try to imagine where they are coming from and where they are headed. I’ve always loved to do that, to invent the lives of strangers in passing. It could almost be considered an obsession. I believe it started when I was a child. I remember its worrying my mother.
“Stop with your lies!” she would say. She used the word “lies” instead of “stories,” but nevertheless, it continued, and all these years later, I still find myself doing it. I’m inventing these scenarios in my head while answering questions about the pain of abandoned women—I’m good at that, at disconnecting, at doing these two things at once—when I notice the back of a young man dragging a small rolling suitcase behind him. I stare at this man in the process of leaving the hotel. I know he’s young, his youth is emanating from him, in the way he’s dressed and in his casual allure. I’m dumbstruck. I think,