Sex and Relationships Theme Analysis

Leah believes in objectivity in the bedroom:

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her.

— Why do you treat me like an idiot all the time?

Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K: “You can’t sleep here, son. You either need to move it along or we’ll have to take you in to the station to sleep it off.” You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap.

“She’s knows what she’s about. She’s conscious.”

“And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.

“You’re dreamin’,” he said.

Keisha Blake thought to the left and thought to the right but there was no exit, and this was very likely the first time she became aware of the problem of suicide.

Perhaps sex isn’t of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited—there are only so many places for so many things to go—and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank’s silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom.

Here nothing less than a break—a sudden and total rupture—would do. She could see the act perfectly clearly, it appeared before her like an object in her hand—and then the wind shook the trees once more and her feet touched the pavement. The act remained just that: an act, a prospect, always possible. Someone would surely soon come to this bridge and claim it, both the possibility and the act itself, as they had been doing with grim regularity ever since the bridge was built. But right at this moment there was no one left to do it.

“I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.