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Women
And why men need them
He first read about it in a book called Going Down in a chapter titled Dividing Heaven. They’d all slit their wrists at once, and if someone lived, they’d carry the message, rebuild the tribe. That’s the way cults were. Full of ideas, misplaced courage, and hallucinogenics.
If you could convince a woman she was made for man, you could control her, and the easiest way to do that was through religion.
They were redacted in all the texts, altered to black bars where words had been, since men had too liberally described women’s breasts in the same paunchy ways: as firm or round or full or supple, forgetting altogether that behind them, a woman existed.
“Why,” Henry asked, “can’t I see you?”
“You can,” she said. All of her but her breasts. These were blurred out, as if the City had stolen his memory as well as his wife. But she wasn’t in her breasts, or milk, or the wanting mouths. She was in his need. She encompassed his need, desire, and want.
He had never been good at relationships but he knew moments. As when a strange man looks at a woman, reducing her to his gratification when she is another man’s romance and her own spirituality.
Henry never took a woman home from the bar. Not because he was good, but because you don’t take people.
