Sims, Laura. Looker. Scribner: New York. 2019. Transcribed 10/14/19.
This book scared the shit out of me. And probably would any other super educated, pompous, self-styled intellectual person. I’m at a point right now where this could be me. I already see the edges of it forming. What happens when the things that make one observant, compassionate, and a good writer sours into obsession. (12/4/19). Additional notes then.
- (7) “Nathan. That hand is gone, and has taken him with it. Or vice versa. Whatever. He’s gone.”
- (9) “Even to hear her say the actress’s name would have given me a little thrill.”
- (11) “I walk past the actress on my way home from the grocery store. Our eyes meet for a moment, then she looks away. You’re ugly, I think. Without meaning to. But it’s true—at least today, in this afternoon light, she looks too raw, too hugely featured.”
- (14) “It feels good. Clean. Empty—like my womb. Ha.”
- (19) “They are one of the new breed infesting our neighborhood: generic rich folk. I despised them in general but liked them in particular—or tolerated them, anyway.”
- (30) “I never pursued money. I thought it would come to me. I did! I thought the life of the mind would deliver it up in a matter of years—that my PhD in literature, with a specialization in poetry, of all things, would elevate me in ways that weren’t merely intellectual. That, in addition to being feted and admired as a scholar of great renown, I would have job security. Health insurance. Steady, and steadily rising, income.”
- (31) “In grad school, Nathan and I would sit in the library with our heads bent over books, under the green glow of old-fashioned desk lamps. At a corner, away from the rabble. As I read deeper into John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, I felt my cheeks flush and my heart rate accelerate. When I couldn’t contain my ecstatic fervor anymore—over the strange and glorious diction, the untamed turns of phrase—I shoved the book under Nathan’s nose as if to say, See? This is what matters. This.”
- (38) “They would refuse him, and then, in the dead of night, he’d come back and start a campaign of subtle terror against them.”
- (40) “…but the quality of her aloneness differs from mine. Hers is fuller: surrounded, swaddled even—an island on whose shores laps a vibrant, busy sea. Her aloneness is temporary; mine is infinite. Mine spreads out from the center like a puddle, muddying everything it touches.”
- “The camellia—
it fell into the darkness
of the old well”
- Thought of the actress falling. “Don’t! I would scream, reaching my arms down the well. But then I would linger, waiting for the distant splash.”
- (44) Topped with Burt’s Bees for a hint of shine.
- (46) “I admire the cleanness and honesty of such an expulsion; I would have ben able to taste and touch an emptiness like that.”
- (47) “We lock eyes for a moment. I can tell he’s evaluating me. I can tell he likes what he sees.”
- (48) “Why have I maintained this friendship, built on the bonding that took place over a shitty admin job more than a decade ago? Shana and I are strangers really—she knows nothing about me and has nothing I want. Nothing I need.
- (50) Looking around at the pots, the picture frame. In Actress’s house. “The husband won’t seem to notice, or mind. Before I know it, my bare ass will be up on the island and he’ll be pushing his dick deep inside me.”
- (51) “I recite the first stanza of poem number 249: ‘Wild Nights—Wild Nights!/ Were I with thee/ Wild Nights should be / Our luxury’ while remembering how the actress’s husband’s face contorted when he came. Does he make the same face with her? I wonder.”
- “remember”
- (53) “Imagine the actress discovering us! On our crusty gazebo bench. On the kitchen island, my legs raised in a V…. But wouldn’t it make us sisters of a kind, the actress and me? Wouldn’t it be an act of communion with her, in the end? Could I ever make her see it that way?”
- Sex only about possession and not even the person having sex with. A way of proving that one matters enough to hurt somebody else.
- (54) “Those letters, arranged in that order, raise a wall of black before my eyes.”
- (54) “When I look up at the window, I see the light has shifted. The angle and quality of the light. Without warning, we’re lodged inside the sad husk of late afternoon and I’m spooning food into Cat’s dirty bowl.”
- (56) “It’s the wine or it’s the fast slippage of time that pulls me along for hours before I realize my fatigue.”
- “I see her husband in there, phone to his ear, showing his white teeth, insatiable wolf.”
- (58) “I said yes to lunch with Shana only because I didn’t have the energy to explain that I never wanted to see her again.”
- (61) “I am sick to death of women. Kind women, careful women, strong-and-silent women, care taking women, lonely women, old women, young women, perfect women, dead women, crazy women, haunted women, bitter women, hateful women, harsh women, hounded women, all women!”
- (68) “I go inside and masturbate. Angrily. On the worn couch, Cat curled on the floor beside me, undisturbed. When I’m spent, I found my breath again. It comes in gasps.”
- (73) “Or: we met at school. I made eyes at him in poetry class. We were college sweethearts. Held hands on campus, marched side by side for political causes, carried handmade signs with our passively held strident beliefs. NO WAR. NO NUKES. PRO-CHOICE. TAKE BACK THE NIGHT. After the fist time we made love, I stole his jeans and wore them with the waist rolled down. We talked nonstop over steaming cups of coffee at the local diner. We were serious, earnest, impassioned, ready to Change The World. He lay under blankets, recovering from the flu, while I read Donne’s sonnets out loud. He said, ‘Stop it, you’re making me sicker.’ We tipped our heads back in the rain and laughed openmouthed. We got drunk and went streaking. We fucked as quietly as we could in his dorm room, right across from his sleeping roommate. We were young and dumb and madly in love. Or: “
- Re: being a good writer and a panicked thinker/ imaginer
- (78) “Ravish me,” he whispered up close in my ear at the bar. I could feel his smile in the tiny hairs on my earlobe, and all through the hairlike filigrees of every nerve in my body.”
- “I am sick to death of men… Hot liquid men.”
- (79) “THERE IS SOMEONE IN YOUR HOUSE, I want to tell her but I relish the suspense of it, relish knowing something she, even she, doesn’t know, feeling all the more achingly how beautiful she is, how bare her long, curved neck is, until the man steps out of the shadows behind her and I scream.”
- (81) “His lush skin seems to be steaming under the lights…. How have i managed to teach him for all these weeks without marching over to straddle him?”
- (87) “I don’t know what I’m doing! I want to shout. Sure, I studied the greats, but I only took one lousy poetry workshop in grad school!”
- (91) “The thought sends something scrambling in me—little fingernails gaining foothold in the crumbling brick of an old well—and I rally.”
- (108) “I hear what I think is someone calling my name, softly and gently as I’ve always dreamed a lover would.”
- (115) “Everyone stays as they were, but everything shifts imperceptibly. The hum of the party quiets a little. No one turns to gawk, but people struggle to maintain the conversation they’re in—‘What was that, Bill?’ ‘What was I just saying?’”
- In the head or no?
- (117) “I’ve orchestrated this moment, as if I’ve attached myself to her via a thin silken cord, and given it a tender pull, so that she walks evenly toward me and stands there, one and amenable to further direction. Is this what the directors feel? Such power!”
- (123) After Nathan comes: “One man laughs at a joke—softly at first, as if he knows it’s wrong, but then a moment later his laugh swells into an outright guffaw. He gives in to it, leaning back, his face in the air.”
- (133) “We stare at her in disbelief and something almost like dread—that a creature of such transcendent grace and beauty…”
- (153) “Then I sit there letting the silence drag and bloom until the system shuts me off”
- bloom! wow!
- (167) “Later in the day, after hours spent searching the academic job listings on the MLA website and updating my CV I stand in the empty….”
- (180) “As if I were seated in a velvet multiplex hair, tipping my head back, watching as the figures loom larger, much larger, than life—the young, beautiful woman holding the older woman’s body to her, weeping over her, feeling everything that is rich and terrible and dark and lonesome in this life, feeling abandoned and full of despair, and beaming it out to us. Beaming it to me. When the actress leans her head back and screams, I draw in a delicate breath and my hands go to my chest. It moves me so much. The tears slide down my cheeks, just as they did in the dream. I sink to my knees and wait for the sirens to come.”