New York Magazine - USA (2020-10-12)

86 newyork| october12–25, 2020

itbeginswith

“terrifyingpleasure,”

thispleasurethat’s sobig

thatThereseis scaredofit

evenasshe’s walkinginto

it.Butthenthephysical

descriptionsfallaway.

There’s suchspecificity

there—theuseofleaped,her

bodyvanishinginwidening

circles,thatbeautifulline

“beyondwherethought

couldfollow.” Andthen

suddenlyPatriciaHighsmith

is reminding us of allthose

things that have happened

to Therese and Carol to get

to this moment. If there

was a handbook for writing

aneroticscene,I’msureit

wouldsay“Don’t dothat.”

Youcan’t pulloutofthe

moment—we’velost the

haironthebreastsandthe

tinglingpleasure.Butthat’s

whatI loveaboutthescene.

Highsmithwasadeptat

constructingthesevery tightly

plottedcrimenovels,andshe

bringsthattalenttobearin

ThePriceofSalt.Fromthe

momentThereseencounters

Carolinthedepartment

store, we are really building

toward this scene more than a

hundred pages later. That also

puts an unbearable pressure

on this scene to work.

Best Sex I Ever Read: Emily M. Danforth on the I

“Carol’s fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on t

only a continuation of the moment when Carol had sl

wanted to say again, and then the words were erased

from Carol’s lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rush

around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of C

her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in wide

where thought could follow. While a thousand memories and mom

met her at the store, a thousand memories of Carol’s face, her v

tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale-blue dist

flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an i

on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still c

was herself. She saw Carol’s pale hair across her eyes, and now Caro

ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not h

against her, and felt Carol’s mouth on her own smiling mouth. The

away from her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if t

from. And it seemed strange that it was still Carol’s face, with the f

mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it many time

plain bad heroines will be published by William Morrow on October 20.

novelist Emily M. Danforth, author of The

Miseducation of Cameron Post and Plain Bad

Heroines, hadn’t yet come out when she first

encountered this passage from Patricia Highsmith’s

The Price of Salt back in her 20s. At the time, she

wished the scene had been more anatomical.

Today, it’s Highsmith’s sublime metaphors that pull

her in. Although she appreciates Todd Haynes’s

film adaptation, Carol, Danforth insists there’s

something inevitably missing from this iconic

scene. “She’s a fucking comet arcing into space,”

Danforth says. “That’s something you can only do

in prose, that you can’t mimic with two actors ina

hotel stage room.” as told to lila shapiro