That's how most boys were, in her experience, they could love with real tenderness, but their love was almost always aimed at a woman's most generic qualities -- her sweetness, or softness, or relative beauty, her archetypal feminine characteristics, whatever Freudian maternal shadows she cast -- and it was fungible, nonspecific. Empty, finally, even if it was technically real. Just look at Harold and the accounting major! Lily had been wise to practice a strategy of passive resistance, of conscientious objection, throughout the entire relationship. Boys were all the same, even Sebastian, who had seemed so promisingly weird. All he really wanted was a woman (any woman!) who was sweet and reasonable and attractive.



Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois