All Fours: A Novel

you couldn't think your way to a physical place, you had to go there.

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I

She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.

I was entirely known and I thought: This is the happiest moment of my life. And with that sentence came tremendous sorrow because nothing was more fleeting than a dance—dance says: joy is only now.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’

Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.

That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like a stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

A different kind of person would have commented on what had just happened, made a joke or offered to get me napkins. By not doing any of these things, he was complicit, inside the performance with me. But it wasn’t a performance, was it? No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be unde