‘I should get out of here,’ I say. ‘Where’d you find that asshole?’

‘Please,’ says Brian. ‘If I weren’t here and you weren’t babysitting, you’d have gone home with him already.’

‘I go home with a lot of assholes,’ I say. ‘At least I don’t love any of them any more.’

‘Really?’ says Brian.

‘I’m over Jay,’ I say. ‘We don’t speak. And anyway, he told me once that love was not a real thing because it was comprised of too many subsidiary emotions.’

I wait for Brian to laugh, but he doesn’t.

‘Jay wasn’t the one I was talking about,’ he says finally.

‘Stop.’ I say. I look away and then turn back.

Brain told me once that I was the only woman in the world he was completely honest with. He said my problem with relationships is that I make everyone feel like it’s good enough to be who they actually are. At the the time I had thought these were both good things.

‘Trust me on this,” he’d said. “Appreciate the liars. When people don’t hide things, it means they don’t care enough to be afraid of losing you.’

Danielle Evans, “Where Ever You Go, There You Are.”

[Anti-Love #5]

The critic Joshua Clover has argued that loving novelty is perfectly appropriate, because the material conditions of mass culture make it ever-renewable: if you wear out one pop song, there will always be another. Ranking lastingness above novelty is a holdover from an aesthetic of scarcity, predating the age of mechanical, or digital, reproduction. So today we can love a song for being one of many, part of the crowd, rather than as an intimate partner. A rich taste life will include both, just as a rich erotic life includes infatuations and flings as well as long-term relationships, because they do different things to us. (Don’t we feel a bit sorry for people who marry their high-school sweethearts, even as we admire their constancy?) And luckily, songs are not jealous of one another, and don’t have any feelings to be hurt.

Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love.

[Pro-Love #5]

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

e. e. cummings, “I Like My Body When It’s With Your Body”

[Pro-Love #4]

…At home they tried to quarrel over tea, though it had all been said already, and then she mentioned his projected trip to Bad Homberg, and he started shouting again, and in reply she shouted back and went into the bedroom - he locked himself in his study, but later came to kiss her goodnight - a nightly habit, especially after a quarrel or disagreement - the gentle awakening to caress or kiss her, because she was his and within his power was her happiness or misery - his awareness of total power over this ingenue, playing with her at will, was probably like the feeling which I have towards sleek young dogs who, at the sight of a hand stretched out for a stroke, wag their tails in a nervous, pleading way, flatten themselves against the ground and begin to tremble - it began with the kiss, then his lips on her breasts, then the swimming began - swimming with large strokes, thrusting their arms in unison from the water to take great gulps of air into their lungs, further and further from the shore, towards the deep-blue arch of the sea - but inevitably he found he was swept into counter-currents bearing him away at an angle, almost back on himself, and he could not keep up, as her arms continued to thrust from the water, still in rhythm, to vanish into the distance - and he felt that he no longer swam but floundered about in the water, his feet reaching for the bottom - and strangely this current, bearing him away, preventing him from moving with her, seemed to turn into the yellow eyes of the commandant with dilated predator pupils and into the rushed unbuttoning of his convict’s jacket in order to prostrate himself over the low oak table in the centre of the guard-house polished by thousands of bodies, and into the groans he could not suppress when the blows of the birch rods rained down, as if someone tightened a red-hot wire across his muscles and bones, and into the spasms of pain which began after the beating, and into the mocking or pitying faces of the onlookers, and into the satisfied smile of the commandant as he ordered the doctor to be summoned, turning sharply on his heels to march out of the guard-room - and the same thing happened with other women because, like Anya, they had all been invisible witnesses, peering through the metal grilled windows, or through the guard-house door, as they struggled to enter to plead on his behalf, but they were barred - all witnesses of his humiliation, and he hated them for that because it denied him experience of the full flight of his feelings - and today as well was added the insulting impudent look of that waiter and the face of the Saxon officer, so like that of the commandant.

Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden

[Anti-Love #3]

What she saw, or smelt, in this dreary little dog I never could understand. Disillusioned women often upbraid their husbands with: ‘You only like me for one thing!’ and this might have been the case between Tulip and Watney. During her heats he practically lived on our doorstep, and, when she appeared, slung like a limper to one of her hind legs—he could reach no higher—while she patiently stood and allowed him to do with her as he would and could. But when, in the long intervals between, she visited him in his pub in all her fond and radiant beauty, he never found her for more than a moment to spare. Having trotted round her once and ascertained, with a sniff, that there was nothing doing, he would retire stiffly on his apparently hingeless legs to his duties behind the bar (he guarded the till and rang the bell at closing time)—duties which he totally neglected when she was in season—leaving her siting, frustrated and forlorn, in the Saloon.

J.R. Ackerly, My Dog Tulip

[Pro-Love #3]

BILL. You want to argue? Is that what you need to do? Well, pick a subject, all right, and let me know what it is, so I can have a fighting chance—
BARBARA. The subject is me! I am the subject, you narcissistic motherfucker! I am in pain! I need help!

(Jean enters from the second-floor hallway, sits on the stairway, listens.)

BILL. I’ve copped to being a narcissist. We’re the products of a narcissistic generation.
BARBARA. You can’t do it, can you? You can’t talk about me for two seconds—
BILL. You called me a narcissist! And when I try to talk about you, you accuse me of psychoanalyzing you!
BARBARA. You do understand that it hurts, to go from sharing a bed with you for twenty-three years to sleeping by myself.
BILL. I’m here, now.
BARBARA. Men always say shit like that, as if the past and the future don’t exist.
BILL. Can we not make this a gender discussion?
BARBARA. Do men really believe that here and now is enough? It’s just horseshit, to avoid talking about the things they’re afraid to say.
BILL. I’m not necessarily keen on the notion of saying things that would hurt you.
BARBARA. Like what?
BILL. Don’t.
BARBARA. What? Say it. You must realize there’s nothing you can say that would hurt me any more than I’m already hurting. The damage is done.
BILL. I think you’re wrong. I think you get in this masochistic frame of mind that actually desires to be hurt more than—
BARBARA. What?!
BILL. Barbara, please, we have enough on our hands with your parents right now. Let’s not revisit all this.
BARBARA. Revisit, when did we visit this to begin with? You pulled the rug out from under me. I still don’t know what happened. Do I bore you, intimidate you, disgust you? Is this just about the pleasures of young flesh, teenage pussy? I really need to know.
BILL. You need to know now? You want to have this discussion with Beverly missing, and your mother as crazy as a loon, and our daughter twenty feet away? Do you really want to do this now?
BARBARA. No. You’re right. I’ll just hunker down for a cozy night’s sleep. Next to my husband.

(She calmly gets under the covers.)

BILL. This discussion deserves our care. And patience. We’ll both be in a better frame of mind to talk about this once your father’s come home.
BARBARA. My father’s dead, Bill.

Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

[Anti-Love #2]

for Francois K. Needles

you say love is a burning building: then run in: to save the woman on the second floor: the one you’ve watched as she stood in the window: as you walked past her apartment: on the other side of the street: she always seems to be wearing red: always in the window: as though she knew you were coming: and yes: you do have a tendency to be punctual: like a self-fulfilling prophecy: both of you approaching ritual: and now this fire: this urgency: you run through the flames: wrapped in a sheet: through trapped billowing smoke: you bound the stairs: you know the door: you kick it in: you pull her body into your arms: carry her out into the street: as you’ve always known you would: when you first struck the match: so many weeks before

LOVE IS A BURNING BUILDING, J.P. Dancing Bear for DIAGRAM

[Pro-Love #2]