Gifts

Julia Glass only hints at the significance of bodily gifts in this quote from her National Book Award winning novel Three Junes.  The novel focuses on several different love relationships, including the one featured below between the intense NYC bookstore owner and art historian, Fenno, and his (temporary) partner, free-wheeling Tony: 

Among those charms was Tony's talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams's Journey to Love (its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. ("Here. Picked this up for you.")

---Julia Glass, Three Junes