In Love

She had a tiny scar over the ridge of one eye . . . She knew a dozen words in French; she had never learned to drive a car; I measured her once, against a wall, kissing her for every twelve inches and she was five feet, four and a half inches, without her shoes on.

 


Fifty years ago, Alfred Hayes was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists, and he deserves to be better known today. In Love is set in the Manhattan bar scene of the 1940s and reads like a Edward Hopper painting. A middle-aged man tells a young woman on an adjacent bar stool the story of his last love affair: a relationship in the thoroughly modern sense, full of misplaced lust and misunderstood emotion. He depicts the boy of his tale as moody and evasive, the girl as even worse. It was a mostly erratic affair, downbeat, dysfunctional, and on the brink of sinking without a trace until an unscrupulous millionaire intervened. The ensuing turmoil will be recognizable to anyone who has fallen into and then out of a relationship. This tale is as much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, an examination of heartbreak rather than the heart itself.