from the title story, “Love”:
The man I am talking to wants to kill me. He has a knife in his pocket and in the last five minutes he has begun to feel the weight of that knife, just above his groin. He has even gone so far as to trace the outline of the knife inside his pocket with his fingertips, under the table, where I can’t see. We have a table between us but it’s a small table and he could grab me by my hair and pull me forward easily, turning my body away as he pulled me by the hair so that I would be stretched backward across the table and he could bring the blade down along my throat.
There would be a second as the blade slit into my throat when there would be no blood and then, with what satisfaction would he watch the thin line fill with blood, overflow. He would pull my head down a little farther towards him, so that the blood would run over my chin, my face, into my nostrils and over my eyes.
Since it is my eyes that he particularly despises.
He considers another possibility. Why not just take my head between his palms and gouge out the offending eyeballs with his thumbs. He stretches his large hands on the table between us.
My own hands, small, white, useless, busy themselves with a pen. “Do you have a car?” I inquire.
from “The Mechanics of It”:
This happened five years ago. I was lying in bed with Jerome and I bit him on the thigh. Before I did it I had been looking at his thigh, which was just next to my face, raised slightly above me, as his knee was bent, and it occurred to me that I would like to feel this thigh between my teeth. I leaned forward, as if to caress him, pulling his leg down over my face and then I bit him, hard, harder than I had imagined I would. What was I expecting? I expected him to shout with pain. Instead he wound his hand through my hair and pulled my head up, abruptly. I didn’t resist, my head being pulled away from his leg, pulled up to where he could reach my face with his other hand, to where I could see him, smiling sleepily at me, and he slapped me across the face, hard, then let me drop. I recoiled to my place between his legs, lay curled up there, my hand covering my face, touching the place where the skin was stinging. Jerome continued to work his hand through my hair, rubbing my skull, lazily.
This was five years ago. Since then I have married, had a child, moved away from the city where Jerome lives, changed everything. And in that time not one day (not one) has passed when I haven’t dragged out this memory and examined it, gone over it, tried to bring it back to some kind of life. And not once a day. Once a day would be nothing. I could go on forever if it were only once a day. Twenty times a day, forty, God knows how many. There are days, after I have dreamed about Jerome, when I think of nothing else. Just this little scene. My teeth sinking into Jerome’s thigh and the slap, delivered without particular passion, lazily, the way a lioness slaps down her misbehaving cub. On these days anything that distracts me from this memory is an annoyance. I can barely tolerate having to eat on these days.