In Love

And isn’t that, after all, what we really want? Things in their place; a semblance of order; a feeling, true or deceptive, of well-being; an afternoon in which something apparently happens. Nothing shaken; nothing really momentous; a certain pleasure, without a certain guilt. The guilt comes later, doesn’t it? Hayes's masterpiece is an exquisite depiction of a doomed love affair set in noirish, 1950s New York. In a Manhattan bar, a middle-aged man tells a pretty girl a story: of how he fell into a relationship with a lonely young divorcee; a relationship of misplaced lust and confused emotion, of how one night she was offered a thousand dollars to sleep with a stranger; and of how he and she would subsequently betray each other in turn. In Alfred Hayes's exquisite novella, love - in all its bewildering turns of longing, elation, heartbreak and regret - is dissected with unforgettable honesty and heart-breaking clarity.