Trust Exercise Kitap Alıntıları – Susan Choi

Are we still recognized if seen by the wrong eyes?

She’d kept lifting it to her lips from politeness but when her tongue touched the tart liquid her mouth flooded with warning saliva.

All her concentration was required to eat with a show of enjoyment.

Perhaps the inclination skips generations.

She understood without having been told that some code to which he adhered required that he know her before he let her know herself

I want to know about you, Claire. My story is not interesting.

Preoccupation with the dread irresistible object marginalized every other concern.

Nor did her differing reactions to her parents bother Claire, although she recognized how unfair they were.

Her father’s mouth formed a tight line as he read, by which Claire knew he was moved to the point of fighting tears.

Leaving the building, Claire had gotten lost. Or rather, she had never known where she was, and only went further astray.

He raised his still mostly black and very barbed eyebrows slightly when she said yes and kept them there, in a notched-up position.

But he was old, she reminded herself, though he didn’t seem old, if old meant befuddled or weak. He didn’t seem that way at all.

There was something shaming in his making her spell it all out.

He made to pore over the sheet again, even running his finger down each of the lines.

He took much longer to look up from the sheet than it would take even a very slow reader to read it.

She’d misconstrued him, but it was too late to stop the sensation of having been seen, which instead of being the recognition she always desired took the unpleasant form of a wave of heat under her clothes.

He was not what she’d expected.

Claire could see the girl was very beautiful. Her natural makeup and lovely winged brows appeared professional, the look of an off-duty starlet.

But the crowd was so enormous it seemed not even made out of faces. It was a carpet of life that did not even have individual threads.

Claire swiveled her gaze around, trying to scan every face in the crowd.

Claire meant to see to the heart of every long-ago young ancient face.

The emotion in the room grew more audible the queasier the colors and the worse the resolution.

The crowd groaned along like a glacier carrying with it all the squealing

Instead Claire was plunged in this agoraphobe’s nightmare where she lingered not courageously but because it was impossible to leave.

She was, however, sure of how it would feel: the electric shock of being recognized, of being herself the object of a quest, the one thing someone else had been missing.

Claire’s hold on the idea had been so tenuous already that she’d been glad, at that moment, for the chance to abjure it.

As usual, her Listener had undermined her efforts to not be this way by praising her as “courageous and determined” in “creating conditions for change.”

Someone—not Claire —would say something, or do something, or be something, and then Claire would know what to say, do, and be.

For all the time and money she’d spent anticipating this event, she’d less formed a plan than fostered a hope, that if she brought herself here, something would happen.

This building emanated a smugness that if Claire hadn’t already felt sick with self-doubt would have made her feel sick with disdain.

You were nervous about going and the fact that you went is what matters. Even if the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped.

It was a carpet of life that did not even have individual threads.

Claire swiveled her gaze around, trying to scan every face in the crowd. But the crowd was so enormous it seemed not even made out of faces.

Her mother had neither scolded nor cried, as Claire had no reason to think that she would. But their closeness ensured that Claire would feel the vibration of sadness her mother failed to hide.

This building emanated a smugness that if Claire hadn’t already felt sick with self-doubt would have made her feel sick with disdain.

She’d stopped short, but she’d gotten somewhere. And
another day she’d get farther. And she’d keep getting farther, a bit at a time, until she finally reached there, that place she was trying to go.

CLAIRE CLOSED HER laptop. Then she foolishly felt she’d been rude. It wasn’t as if she’d closed a door in someone’s face.

I don’t know what I hoped. I know what I said I hoped, but did I really mean that? I was terrified it would come true. And then I got there and saw there was no way. And that made me wonder if I’d wanted it at all. If I’d set myself up for a disappointment that I’d actually hoped for.

You were nervous about going and the fact that you went is what matters. Even if the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped.

I felt like a fool afterward. Like I could have ever spotted someone in that crowd. Or like someone could have ever spotted me.

“What have you done to him?” Sarah screamed. As usual, not listening.

“You won’t die,” Karen reassured Martin. “You just won’t be the same.”

Sarah’s usual smoky murmurousness was now shrill and high-pitched while Martin’s usual jagged singsong had gone moaning and low.

Why should customs or, God forbid, laws interfere with the ways we dispose of our Selves?

They were gorgeous flowers, actually. Karen put her face in them, and closed her eyes.

Over the past several weeks I’d convinced myself that he’d forgotten everything that had happened between us, but now I knew he hadn’t, and that was harder somehow to digest than the thought that he had.

Having someone in the audience who knows who you are is a certain reminder you’re acting and I hadn’t wanted to know I was acting.

Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.

I’m sure all of us look for that message, although some people seem to receive it so early they don’t recognize it’s a message.

Karen watches Sarah struggle with her unwanted position no way to prove her goodness and caring, no way to disprove her discomfort and guilt.

Don’t ask her Why now? Ask her Why not every moment up to now?

At last, says Karen’s inner therapist, so much more cost effective than a real one. At last you’re done crawling around inside Sarah, measuring all of the ways that she wasn’t a good friend to you.

She feels light, not a lightness of heart but the lightness of being cut loose and set adrift in a void.

She looks tired and slightly green beneath her permanenttan. Karen tries to recall her obsession with Sarah but can’t retrieve the feeling-state.

It seemed like her own lonely, unloved competence hidden in that scratched plastic box.

Telling herself to not think about it too much she put her arms around David and at her touch he slumped heavily and then jerked back to life with a terrible sound like an animal caught in a trap.

Karen had no room for other people’s unresolved emotions because she had no room for her own lack of generousness.

Maybe it was unfair of Karen to see Sarah and David as twin narcissists, each fixated on the other’s ancient image and seeing in that hapless teenage lover some lost part of themselves that they still wanted back.

David was sitting up slightly too straight, staring down the length of his nose and holding his cigarette out to one side.

paradoxically since it was a decision to make no more decisions, to seek out superior judgment, to acknowledge there was such a thing.

The sound of his voice, unemotional but not exactly cold, drawling a little in a way she’d somehow never noticed before,

Bunk bed, toilet, telephone. That was London.

Despite his obvious defects of character he’s persisted in her psyche as a weird jokergod, malicious and omniscient.

And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring.

It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling state at that moment was disguised as a different emotion.

He looked like a little child who’d just been offered candy. His joy was that unembarrassed and pure.

her coarsely permed hair tickling Karen’s cheek, and they watched the sun rise until the light was so bright they could no longer look.

Karen stares at her greenish-gray face in the mirror.

But in the moment, staring into the darkness which she can’t keep her eyes off in spite of how frightening it is, Karen feels only resentment of Sarah.

Like a ghostly flight attendant floating in the aisle I gaze down at the two teenage girls, at Sarah who doesn’t love Liam, and at Karen who is not loved by Martin, and I’m filled with melancholy that’s almost compassion.

Gazing down on them from the future, on Sarah self consciously holding her book in one hand, cigarette in the other, like a woman three times her age;

She sees a total blackness of night she’s never even imagined, back home where the night sky is always hazed out.

Karen, seated next to the window, presses her face to the glass. The glass is icy cold, its touch makes her eyes water.

Because they are sixteen years old, “parental awareness” of their passport applications is “required” but incredibly easy to fake, far easier than faking the credentials for buying a beer.

As they drive home their last night from the corporate park Karen’s outfit is ruined by grass stains and her vision is blinded by tears.