The Collected Wisdom of Bruce Willis, 1:32-3:45 P.M., Thursday |
Five tiny pears on the tray in front of Bruce Willis. A couple of bottles of water, too. And these five pears. A setup from the hotel. Really small pears, small enough that all five pears would equal the bulk of one really hefty Bartlett from the Piggly Wiggly. He fusses with them throughout the conversation. He eats them each and all, doesn't offer to share. With a lot of time in between each one. Five times he voids his bladder. Five urinations over a little more than two hours. The bathroom is at the other end of the hotel suite. From the moment he excuses himself to the one where he sits back down again to talk about his movies, Bruce Willis stares into the palm of his hand, texting someone. This pattern inadvertently becomes the structure of the afternoon, as the subject changes every time he returns. It's fair to think the act of excusing himself, of having a pee, might be masking his opportunity to communicate with his wife, the model Emma Heming, who is out-to-here pregnant at this moment. "All I want right now," he says, "is to be with her, to stare at her belly." When he sits back down after the first urination, Willis begins again in earnest with the business of his life — assessing the upcoming Bruce Willis summer box-office deluge that might be his biggest ever, unraveling his delight in fatherhood, asserting and reasserting that he is simply happy and that he will not advertise any other part of himself or his life. "I'm happy every day," he says. This he repeats many times, as if to assert that there's no conflict in him and thus no story. It might be five times. Maybe more. Also fair to note: When he returns each time, the phone disappears. He's all business. |
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I'm a U.S. Veteran. I Went to Ukraine to Train Civilian Volunteers to Fight. |
Locals tell an old joke about the Ukrainian city of Lviv. A man emerges from a train at the railway station there, glad to have finally reached the faraway east. Across the platform, another man steps down from another train. He takes in a breath of air in the strange, exciting west.
Lviv is a gateway, a cipher, a place caught between. Refugees, aid workers, idealists, and goons gather there now because of the war, some coming, others going. It's become a haven for those fleeing the horrors to its east while a staging ground for those bound for the same. They call it the City of Lions, and it would be difficult for even the most obtuse visitor not to connect their chosen symbol with the emerging national will that's so fierce it seems to belong to a past century. In early March, a few days after Russia's multifront invasion of Ukraine, I joined a small group traveling to Lviv to help advise and train a city defense force of local volunteers. I'd gotten on the plane there mostly thinking I was going as a journalist. Once we landed I knew that one more writer looking for a story was the last thing Ukraine needed. My friends, though, sought a third trainer. So I said I'd do it. They didn't pressure me. The moment did. |
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It is 1992 and a house built on hope is cracking under pressure. A frightened young family huddles in the living room, hiding beneath a torn roof, praying to survive. The floors are lifting, the carpet is flooding, and as one wall then another splinters, this family's dreams start to collapse. Outside, Hurricane Andrew: the sound like a freight train, loud and ominous, relentless and otherworldly. It is coming for them, this force of wind and rain and some other power that feels unstoppable and ungodly, spiteful even. A tree spins through violent gusts, snapped cleanly from its roots. Manicured lawns in the housing development explode. Sidewalks heave and ripple. Windows shatter. It's impossible to know where inside ends and outside begins. Time has stopped, yet everything else is still in motion. The edges of the world have blurred. I'm going to die, thirteen-year-old Oscar Isaac thinks as he hunches beneath flimsy sofa cushions with his brother and sister, with his parents and their already fraying relationship. I'm going to be hurled into the air by this hurricane and disappear. |
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The Sexiest Erotic Novels of All Time |
Sex in fiction, like sex on a beach, ought to be a no-brainer. On the one hand, there's, well, sex, a source of mystifying pleasure and profundity that for most people rarely elicits any articulation other than a contented grunt, groan, or gasp. On the other hand, there's the novel, an artistic enterprise devoted to making verbal sense of mute experience. In theory, the setup seems the perfect illustration of the Reese's principle: two great tastes that taste great together. But theory is not practice, and life, friends, is not a peanut-butter cup. We all recognize that the boy who develops certain notions about the compatibility of sand and skin from the swimsuit issues stacked next to his grandfather's BarcaLounger must soon discover the rough reality of forty-grit lovemaking. A similar lesson awaits the young litterateur who insists that a good book should move not only the head and the heart but also the loins. There are so many perils awaiting sex in serious fiction these days that you could almost forgive a writer for playing it safe and sticking to the merely suggestive. Almost, that is, until you remember that prudence, no less than prudery, is the enemy of art. (Consider this your obligatory reminder that Ulysses, the preeminent anglophone novel of the twentieth century, takes place on a date that commemorates the first handjob James Joyce ever received from his future wife.) All credit, then, goes to the following twelve writers, who press forward in spite of the sniggering. And a special shout-out to those whose devotion to literature has not rendered them too stingy to flirt with their readers, to seduce them—in the end, even, to try to turn them on. |
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My girlfriend's hand tightened on my arm. She sensed me turning my body toward the guy—Black, as she is—who had just sidled next to me on the escalator and in a low, insinuating voice said, "Yeah, you like that chocolate." She knew I wanted to trash-talk this guy, she knew I could do a good enough job of that to very likely get the crap knocked out of me, and she wanted to pull me back before that happened. And, to the mutual benefits of my safety and her dignity, I satisfied myself with a cold, hard stare. Did I feel better? Hell no. But I can tell you that had I given this guy the satisfaction of knowing he had gotten to me, making my girlfriend part of a public spectacle in the process, it would have been a bigger insult to her than any pathetic remarks he could have come up with. And I can tell you the disgust with which she watched Will Smith bitch-slap Chris Rock at the Oscars after Rock made a G.I. Jane joke in reference to Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head. This might be a good time to mention that my girlfriend, like Pinkett Smith, and like her mother and grandmother and all her female cousins, has alopecia. She's had it for more than twenty years now. About fifteen years ago, around the time she realized dreadlocks could not be manipulated into a comb-over, she shaved her head and has been gloriously bald ever since. So when I hear, as I've been hearing since Sunday night, What would you do in that situation? I think I'm in a pretty good position to answer. |
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A Drinker's Dilemma: Hangxiety |
I'm not a bad drunk. I don't throw fights at the bar. I don't cry when I drink wine. I won't corner you at a family party or force shots down your throat. I'm a lightweight. If I drink too much, I throw up. And as much as I love that immaculate feeling of a drink knocking my lights out–for me, it's my fourth whiskey–I really hate throwing up. But, partly thanks to the pandemic, and the work required to keep a romantic relationship intact during several months in quarantine, I've discovered I have a drinking problem. We call him Gloominick. He's a sneaky little turd. He waits until the next morning to come around. Mean, mopey, futzy, and, during those particularly rough hangovers–you know, those News Year Day-style hangovers–fully apocalyptic. "Go away, Gloominick," my fiancée will say. "Go to your room." |
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