Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Of course, in the flesh-and-blood world of a child living in a postdivorce family, economic issues are not separate from psychological is-sues—a fact that is rarely talked about. After divorce, the drop in income carries other losses that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, like being forced to move away from friends in a familiar neighborhood to less expensive housing, like being exposed to the violence and chaos of a bad neighborhood, like being sent to a more crowded school with overwhelmed teachers. The extras that make life comfortable for a child are lost. Special weekend activities, movies, summer camps, swimming lessons, piano and ballet lessons, uniforms for athletic teams, and other after-school activities, not to mention private schools, are the first to go. Later on, there is the real possibility that children from a father’s second marriage will receive more resources and be given greater opportunities than the child of divorce whose mother does not remarry. The narrowing of educational opportunities and usurping of their place within the family have a chilling effect on children of divorce. Why aim high when you’ve been pushed to the bottom of the ladder with others blocking your way? Loss of StructureI VIVIDLY REMEMBER the first time I saw Paula six months after her parents had separated. A small, wiry child with unkempt, dark curly hair and vivid green eyes, she roamed my playroom restlessly, too anxious to settle down and play. As she picked up and threw down toy after toy, I tried to ask her about her life, her house, her parents, her school, and her sister. Instead, she talked endlessly about her pet dog, Daisy, and ignored all my questions. Then she startled me—for the first of many times—when she suddenly stopped her anxious wandering and said clearly, “I’m going to find a new mommy.” Here was a child overwhelmed with anxiety. The world had changed overnight into an incomprehensible, unpredictable place in which her central, all-important, caregiving mother had disappeared and was replaced by a series of hastily chosen, low-paid babysitters and a person who resembled her mother but who had little energy or time left over for Paula. Paula’s father, while largely absent from the everyday routines during her early childhood, had brought presents and had played with Paula and her sister when he lived at home. After the separation, his absences grew longer, and after the first year, he disappeared for several years. Paula had lost her place in the world from being a cherished, well-cared-for, protected child who was the centerpiece of the family life to being a child who felt she was a leftover from a failed marriage and a burden around her mother’s neck. At age four these losses cannot be put into words. They are felt and expressed in overwhelming internal panic. Trust and spontaneity, which are the outward manifestations of feeling loved and nurtured, disappear as panic and anxiety give way to disappointment and anger.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The light rose steadily, there were bars of orange above the tops of the firs, a blackbird started up, clear and unconcerned. It was just the time to see the place, not the kind of dawn Luc's grandfather had named the house for or would ever have witnessed there, cold skies above a drenched wilderness; though there were hints of classic pleasures, a cloud on the lake just big enough to clothe a god in a fresco stooping on a sex-quest. I'd lost Marcel; I wandered down towards the water, reluctantly moved by the relics of all this fake galanterie, my mind vaguely in summer, though a cold gust insisted it was December and made me twitch up Luc's jacket-collar. I turned back and saw the tiny top windows of the tower colour in the early sun, as though lanterns burnt in them. The main part of the Pavillon de l'Aurore was a French-looking villa with long windows boarded up and stucco that gaped here and there on to cheap red brick. One end of it had sunk and opened a wandering crack in the upstairs wall; above it the roof was hidden under a canopy of rusting corrugated iron that the wind had loosened and buckled—from time to time it gave a squawk. Marcel was quite excited. "I think he could be here," he said. He'd been exploring the garages and the kitchen-yard—apparently a window had been forced, but he wouldn't be able to get through it without a leg-up and a push from me. He took me round to show me and I peered in at a derelict pantry, the door at the back half-open on to pale gloom. Well, it could have been Luc, but I played down the likelihood. "Thieves always break in at the remotest part of a house," I said, alarmed for a moment that Marcel might dare me to go in. I poked at the mossy sill as if I knew what to look for. "It's probably not that recent." He leant in and called "Luc", then jumped back when there was a distant scuffling and the creak of a pigeon's wings. I laughed nervously and Marcel gripped my arm.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Mothers and fathers often make every effort to shield their marital troubles from their children. It’s only after one or both have decided to divorce that they fight in full view. Children who sense tension at home turn their attention outside, spending more time with friends and participating in school activities. (Gary, whose parents’ marriage was often unhappy, did exactly the same thing.) Children learn at an early age to turn a deaf ear to their parents’ quarrels. The notion that all or even most parents who divorce are locked into screaming conflict that their children witness is plainly wrong. In many unhappy marriages, one or both people suffer for many years in total silence—feeling lonely, sexually deprived, and profoundly disappointed. Most of the children of divorce say that they had no idea their parents’ marriage was teetering on the brink. Although some had secretly thought about divorce or discussed it with their siblings, they had no inkling that their parents were planning to break up. Nor did they understand the reality of what divorce would entail for them. For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives. The world is newly perceived as a far less reliable, more dangerous place because the closest relationships in their lives can no longer be expected to hold firm. More than anything else, this new anxiety represents the end of childhood. Karen confirmed this change in several of our follow-up interviews. Ten years after her parents’ divorce, I learned that she was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz so that she could run home on weekends and be available for crises. And there were plenty of those, mostly involving both her younger brother and sister. When she was twenty, she told me angrily, “Since their divorce I’ve been responsible for both my parents. My dad became a pathetically needy man who always wants a woman to take care of him. I’m the backup when his girlfriends leave him. My mom is still a mess, always involved with the wrong kind of men. I’ve had to take care of them as well as my brother and sister. ” Many Losses W HEN MOST PEOPLE hear the word “divorce,” they think it means one failed marriage. The child of divorce is thought to experience one huge loss of the intact family after which stability and a second, happier marriage comes along. But this is not what happens to most children of divorce. They experience not one, not two, but many more losses as their parents go in search of new lovers or partners. Each of these “transitions” (as demographers call them) throws the child’s life into turmoil and brings back painful reminders of the first loss.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I thought, I'm too upset already to have to think about Rodney young. "I can't explain," I snapped. "He's just my bête noire." Paul made a "Sorry I mentioned it" face, and went on at once: "I'm not criticising you, my dear Edward. I don't know if what you've done is right or not. Some would say that you are in a position of trust in the Altidore household, as you are in ours, and that such a trust hardly envisages your starting an affair with your pupil." I muttered my fatalistic tag, "It happens, it happens." It would have been too feebly extenuating, too woundingly true, to have said that it was the boy who had seduced me. "Of course it happens. I know it happens. Really what I want to say is that it does not alter or diminish my trust in you at all." The curiously formal language with which Paul entered this new phase of candour. "Thank you." I glanced at him and saw that he was stiff with nerves; I began some further socially graceful acknowledgement, but he cut across it with the already prepared continuation of his speech, perhaps with a tiny stutter of delay— "No, it's all quite fascinating to me. May I—there's something I'd rather like to tell you." We were nearing another small city, large signs gathered to explain the inescapable choices we had to make. I gazed out across fields, depots, the sun-reflecting car-parks of factories, to the cluster of gothic towers like a bungled version of our own. I felt a certain reluctance to listen to Paul. My mind was running on ahead to the meeting with Martin, which I imagined would test me a good deal more thoroughly than this one with Paul. I thought Paul could be using this hour to rehearse me, as if for a viva after a wobbly exam. I didn't want the journey to be over too soon, but at the same time I fidgeted to be out of the car. I suspected what he was going to say would be one of those admissions the teller considers to be "oddly similar" to your own and which, offered as proof of sympathy, serve only to rob your predicament of its force and singularity. As if I hadn't heard him, I said, "I'm terribly worried about seeing Martin Altidore." I felt him flinch from my rebuff—for a second I recalled the atmosphere of scenes in the car, the two parties strapped in their positions, glaring forwards. But when he spoke it was in a tone of negotiation: "I can see it's difficult"; and after a moment he reached out and patted me on the arm just as I moved it. "Are you thinking of coming clean?" "No. Not unless it's clear that he knows—if Luc's said something, or . . .

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The man and woman decided to settle for what they had. Who were the women who stayed in these poor marriages? I can’t put my finger on any one trait but I can say that they all shared low expectations of themselves and of marriage. Several grew up in chaotic, violent families. Some maintained the caregiver role they’d learned in childhood; the husband was a stand-in for the mother or father or both. One woman from a seemingly stable postdivorce family who maintained close contact with both parents married a man who criticizes her constantly for her sexual frigidity and humiliated her for “doing nothing right.” Her mother told me twenty-five years earlier that these were her husband’s complaints. A few of the women had devoted stepfathers, but somehow this did not brighten their expectations of marriage. Many had been very young when their parents divorced and grew up like Paula, feeling lonely and driven to sexual frenzy. The women who married early and then divorced tell similar stories about drug and alcohol abuse, low expectations, and anxieties about leaving the marriage. At their core, the bad marriages that lasted and those that ended in divorce all looked pretty much alike. But the women who did leave finally said “enough.” The decision to divorce was fraught with anxiety because these women had few resources and little money to start over again. They did not expect to get child support. Paula will shed more light on this aspect of the story in the next chapter. In talking to the women from divorced families who married young, I thought a lot about our comparison group. Many of the women from good and “good enough” intact families told me that they were often drawn to losers in their late teens and early twenties. The guy in the motorcycle jacket was exciting and fun to play with. Men who used drugs and drank hard were wonderful party boys and excellent lovers. But they did not go on to marry such men. As they told these stories, I heard time and again how their parents’ concern played an important role in not choosing such men for life partners. “I knew my mom wanted me to be taken care of and respected,” said Donna. “I didn’t always follow her thinking and I lived with one guy who drove her up the wall. But I didn’t marry him. In the end, I listened to my mom’s advice about men.” Another woman told me, “I knew all along that my folks disapproved of my lover. But it took me five years to dump him. It was a narrow escape.” By contrast, few of the divorced parents tried to intervene in their children’s poor choice of marriage partners. I don’t know of a single father who sat his daughter down to warn her about what was ahead of her.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When I looked down I was giddy almost as if I'd been up there—it was steadying to hear my name called out. I turned and there was Patrick coming quickly towards me, half-smiling, glancing away. There was something free and yet formal in our coming together at the centre of this great square, and I spread my arms to gesture at the scale of it, though he may have thought that I expected to embrace him. He was vividly conspicuous in a pink skiing-jacket over a green tartan shirt that as usual hung out at the front. I thought how good-looking he was, and then saw the disquiet and resolve of someone who brings bad news. We shook hands and frowned and stamped as if waiting for others to turn up, the rest of the routed Three perhaps: I saw that Patrick and I only had a friend in common, we weren't friends ourselves. "Do you want to go for a coffee?" he said. I had come out in search of breakfast, but any appetite I had was obliterated by worry. We moved off towards an old cafe on the far side of the square, a place I thought might be too smart and hushed, but I lacked the will to suggest an alternative. "Have you heard from Luc?" I said lightly. "Not for a week," he said, almost as though he didn't know anything had happened. "Ah. I thought you might have done." "No, I haven't seen or heard from him since that night we all met in . . . the bar. I think you're the last person to have actually seen him." I knew I was in very deep. I wondered at moments if I had murdered Luc and then wiped all memory of it—he was crouched rigid in one of my big cupboards, and the Spanish girls were picking up the smell. "Your friend Sibylle has spoken to him since, of course." Patrick shot me a glance that was oddly mournful. "Well, she may have done," he said, pushing open the door and giving me a shiver as we stepped into the warm. I sat down wondering why I went through life not knowing anything, never any the wiser; I seemed to be my pupils' pupil. "You mean she was lying?" Patrick flung himself down opposite, his chair at an angle—his arm sweeping the table. "No, I wouldn't say that." He seemed to me reserved and proud and a little solemn with those early emotional upheavals adults are accused of not understanding. "She makes up shit," he said, like the bully he once was, and with the same hidden doubt. I thought of her snooty theories about my friends—but wasn't a certain premature decidedness allowed among the young?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was bleak and barely furnished—a loft, a fashionable space, Luc might think, and feel at home there, unaware of his own clothes lying newly laundered in the cupboards. I felt secure about that, I kept all the Luciana tidied away from Cherif—in fact the past two weeks had turned me into a humourless char, putting everything straight at once where Cherif had made himself at home. I wondered if the room was going to smell. When we approached the house Luc fell back, as though having second thoughts, or thrown into a reverie by the sight of the white façade. I opened the wicket and looked round and after a moment he jogged up to me with a smile that seemed to deny his hesitation. "What a quite obscure place, Edward," he exclaimed. There was something camp, mischievous, about him that I hadn't heard before; I hurried through into the yard with my face fixed and tormented. Of course he'd been drinking. It occurred to me he might be deliberately teasing me and tempting me into some bungled assault—I wasn't sure I could carry on being pally like this any longer, without at last defying the force around him, like some enchantment in The Magic Flute, that froze my intentions in mid-air and padlocked my tongue. "Is that where you live?" he said, looking up at the square of the Spanish girls' window. I caught a strand of music and laughter. He sprang lightly up the stairs behind me and stood with his hands in his jerkin pockets as I groped for the key. I was distinctly paranoid, I thought there was something quite plain clothes about him, almost leaning on me, sceptical, observant. Then I remembered he was only a teenager, and that he never noticed the same things as I did, certainly never noticed me. I flicked on the light and bustled obstructively round the room—just checking. Luc ambled over to the window and peered into the dark; the room itself seemed to pass him by. I didn't know what to say, my mouth was dry, my mind milling and jamming as if I had to deliver an important speech without notes. I watched him covertly, thinking he could see my reflection in the glass. But he pressed his hands around his face: his eyes were working on something farther off. "It's my old school," he said, in a tone of puzzled recall. "Did you know you could see St Narcissus from here, Edward?" "Of course. I'm always being interrupted by the bells and boys pissing out of the window." "Oh, you have to do that," he said abstractedly, straining to make out the dark gables against the sky.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was trying to picture a meeting with Luc—they were hitching and ran up to the car with a grateful look, not a great car but still, Luc saw it was his mother and swerved away, while Sibylle tugged open the door and saw with horror it was me. Luc and I not knowing if we were friends or enemies, friends or lovers. Or we met at the coast, and for a long time said nothing at all. I lost my feeble advantage, I didn't know how to talk him down off the high ledge of his decision. The memorial was a little crag in itself, with a hundred names still sharp in the granite of the base. Up above stood a bronze soldier, handsome, downcast, with a virtuoso moustache, not quite attractive to me, but solid with pathos. He was broad and steady, and confident of effect. I took him in with a shock—the rain-shiny helmet and cape, the out-of-doors certainty of him after the arcane fictions of Orst. I was watching the Mini for a second or two before the thump of recognition—its provoking mauve, the unforgotten number-plate. It trundled toy-like across the square, the driver's visor down against the sun and the lights still on from the rain. I saw the mission helplessly complicated by Patrick, coming after the others to persuade and alter and exercise whatever his uncertain power was. And then it made my job more lonely and absurd. Already I was embarrassed to be seen, so quick off the mark, there ahead of him, panting after Luc, he would think. I Turned away from the approaching car. But when it came past it wasn't Patrick but Sibylle at the wheel, frowning forward—though in the moment she was alongside her eyes flicked to me (a figure she knew, in clothes she remembered), held me and then denied me, though a little swerve of the car betrayed the effort of self-control, and I saw her in silhouette shift her head to follow me in the mirror. So Luc was here or close by, there was a twist of relief that it was almost over already . . . I ran towards the cafe, gesturing through the window at Marcel. I'd seen which road Sibylle had taken out of the square, but by the time we were back in the car and after her there was no one to be seen ahead. The street curved and wandered for a few hundred yards, until it reached a T-junction. We both of us peered to left and right and Marcel gave a shrug and dropped his hands, as if to say he had never rated our chances. I went right, with what may have seemed like decisiveness. "Keep your eyes open," I said. Rain slapped across the windscreen, like water tipped down from an awning after a storm. If I had chosen left it might all have been over sooner.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  “About marriage. About being happy. You see, it’s not all behind me. Part of me is always waiting for disaster to strike. I keep reminding myself that I’m doing this to myself, but the truth is that I live in dread that something bad will happen to me. Some terrible loss will change my life, and it only gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of my parents’ divorce. Gavin says I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve learned to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy, but this feeling does not ever go away.” “So how did you make up your mind to marry him?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange, but a near catastrophe made me change my mind. Gavin was in Nashville, giving a talk, and on the drive home was caught in a freak ice storm. He got pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere by the highway patrol and couldn’t get to a phone for eight hours. I was home, waiting for him, hearing about all sorts of fatal accidents on the roads. I was beside myself. Anything could have happened to him.” “You must have been scared out of your mind.” “Oh, yes,” said Karen. “It was ghastly. I just knew it was the disaster that I always expected and that it would blow my life away. But something really important happened to me at the same time. I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I could lose him either way. And that’s when I realized that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married.” Smiling at her calculation, I said, “So you decided to take a chance, to reach out for what you really want?” “That’s right, although it’s still hard for me to know what I want. But I’ve learned what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationship with Nick or with my mom or dad.” “And what do you want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I can stand on my own two feet.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The hope and the effect of this fusion in the breast of the American Negro is one of the few hopes we have of surviving the wilderness which lies before us now. 13 . The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy I walked and I walked Till I wore out my shoes. I can't walk so far, but Yonder come the blues. -MA RAINEY I FIRST met Norman Mailer about five years ago, in Paris, at the home of Jean Malaquais. Let me bring in at once the theme that will repeat itself over and over throughout this love letter: I was then (and I have not changed much ) a very tight, tense, lean, abnormally ambitious, abnormally intelli gent, and hungry black cat. It is important that I admit that, at the time I met Norman, I was extremely worried about my career; and a writer who is worried about his career is also fighting for his life. I was approaching the end of a love affair, and I was not taking it very well. Norman and I arc alike in this, that we both tend to suspect others of putting us down, and we strike before we're struck. Only, our styles are very differe nt: I am a black boy from the Harlem streets, and Nor man is a middle-class Jew. I am not dragging my personal history into this gratuitously, and I hope I do not need to say that no sneer is implied in the above description of Norman. But these are the facts and in my own relationship to Norman they are crucial facts. Also, I have no right to talk about Norman without risking a distinctly chilling self-exposure. I take him ver y seriously, he is very dear to me. And I think I know something about his journey from my black boy's point of view because my own journey is not really so very different, and also because I have spent most of my life, after all, watching white people and outwitting them, so that I might survive . I think that I know something about the American masculin ity which most men of my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been. It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of 269 2""'�'0 NOBODY KNOWS MY NA ME walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one's own personality, for the sexual insecur ity of others.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And now I had to begin to arrive at some kind of modus vivendi with New York-f or here I was, home again, for the first time in nine years-to stay. To stay: if this thought chilled me, it also relieved me. It was only here, after all, that I would be able to find out what my journey had meant to me, or what it had made of me. NO NAM E IN THE STR EE T And I began to see New Yo rk in a ditTerent way, seeing beneath the formlessness, in the detail of a cornice, the shape of a window, the movement of stone steps-stoep, say the Dutch, and we say, stoop--b eneath the nearly invincible and despairing noise, the sound of many tongues, all struggling for dominance. Since I was here to stay, I had to examine it, learn it all over again, and try to find out if I had ever loved it. But the question contained, or so I suspected, its own mel ancholy answer. If I had ever loved New York, that love had, literally, been beaten out of me; if I had ever loved it, my lif e could never have depended on so long an absence and so deep a divorce; or, if I had ever loved it, I would have been glad, not frightened, to be back in my home town. No, I didn't love it, at least not any more, but I was going to have to survive it. In order to survive it, I would have to watch it. And, though I had nightmares about that Southland which I had never seen, I was terribly anxious to get there, perhaps to corroborate the nightmare, but certainly to get out of what was once described to me as "the great unfinished city." Finally , I got my assignment, and I went South. Something began, for me, tremendous. I met some of the noblest, most beautiful people a man can hope to meet, and I saw some beautiful and some terrible things. I was old enough to rec ognize how deep and strangling were my fears, how manifold and mighty my limits: but no one can demand more of lif e than that lif e do him the honor to demand that he learn to live with his fears, and learn to live, every day, both within his limits and beyond them. I must add, for the benefit of my so innocent and criminal countrymen, that, today, fifteen years later, the photograph of Angela Davis has replaced the photograph of Dorothy Counts. These two photographs would appear to sum up the will of the Americans-heirs of all the ages-in relation to the blacks.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In my own experience, genuine, disinter ested compassion or conviction are very rare; yet, it is as well to remember that, rare as these are, they are real, they exist. Giving these people the benefit of the necessary doubt-as suming, that is, tor example, that if they were called to serve on a Grand Jury investigating the legal murder of a black, they would have the courage to vote their conscience instead of their class-I would hazard that, in the case of most people in gatherings such as these, their presence is due to a vivid, largely incoherent uneasiness. They are nagged by a sense that something is terribly wrong, and that they must do what they can to put it right: but much of their quality, or lack of it, depends on what they perceive to be wrong. They do not, in any case, know what to do-who does? it may be asked-and NO NA ME IN THE STREE T so they give their money and their allegiance to whoever ap pears to be doing what they feel should be done. Their fatal temptation, to which, mostly, they appear to succumb, is to assume that they are, then, ofF the hook. But, on the other hand, always assuming that they are serious, the crucial lack in their perception is that they do not quite sec where, when the chips are down, their allegiance is likely to land them-a Ia lanteme! or to recantation: they do not know how ruthless and powerful is the evil that lives in the world. Years before, for example, I remember having an argument-a most mel ancholy argument-wi th a friend of mine concerning our re lation to Martin. It was shortly after our celebrated and stormy meeting with Bobby Kennedy, and I was very low. I said that we could petition and petition and march and march and raise money and give money until we wore ourselves out and the stars began to moan: none of this endeavor would or could reach the core of the matter, it would change nobody's fate. The thirty thousand dollars raised tonight would be gone in bail bonds in the morning, and so it would continue until we dropped. Nothing would ever reach the conscience of the people of this nation-it was a dream to suppose that the people of any nation had a conscience. Some individuals within the nation might, and the nation always saw to it that these people came to a bad, if not a bloody end. Nothing we could do would prevent, at last, an open confrontation. And where, then, when the chips were down, would we stand? We were seated near a fireplace, and my friend's face was very thoughtf ul. He looked over at me, almost as though he were seeing me for the first time.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Their moral ob ligations to the darker brother, if they were real, and if they were really to be acted on, placed them in conf lict with all that they had loved and all that had given them an identity, rendered their present uncertain and their future still more so, and even jeopardized their means of staying alive. They were tar from judging or repudiating the American state as oppres sive or immoral-they were merely profoundly uneasy. They were aware that the blacks looked on the white commitment very skeptically indeed, and they made it clear that they did not depend on the whites. They could not depend on the whites until the whites had a clearer sense of what they had let themselves in tor. And what the white students had not expected to let themselves in fi>r, when boarding the Freedom Train, was the realization that the black situation in America was but one aspect of the fraudulent nature of American lif e. They had not expected to be t<>rced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realized how cheaply, after all , the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defense of the rejected and destitute, they were confronted with the extent TO BE BAP TIZED of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free. I next came to San Francisco at the time of the flower chil dren, when everyone, young and not so young, was freaking out on whatever came to hand. The flower children were all up and down the Haight-Ashbury section of San Fran cisco-and they might have been everywhere else, too, but for the vigilance of the cops-with their long hair, their beads, their robes, their fancied resistance, and, in spite of a shrewd, hard skepticism as unnerving as it was unanswerable, really tormented by the hope of love . The fact that their uniforms and their jargon precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible-or no longer possible- could not be considered their fault. They had been born into a society in which noth ing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity. Their flowers had the validity, at least, of existing in direct challenge to the romance of the gun; their gentleness, however spe cious, was nevertheless a direct repudiation of the American adoration of violence. Yet they looked-ala s- doomed. They seemed to sense their doom. They really were flower children, having opted out on the promises and possibilities offered them by the shining and now visibly perishing republic.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  James asked in the selfconscious silence that ensued. I was obliged to live up to it. ‘Not in a serious way. I put our young friend over my knee from time to time, but …’ In fact, drunk one night and recalling an evening when I had been picked up by a Polish workman who got me to whip his ass with his thick leather belt, I had made Arthur half kneel, half lie over the corner of the bed and given him several strokes of my old webbing corps-belt from school. I knew he would have let me go on, but excited though I was I dropped it. ‘I just can’t see the point of it,’ complained James. ‘Does Arthur actually like it?’ ‘I think he does rather. I mean it gives him a hard-on, and all that.’ The man beyond James looked up in a bothered way as the train started again. With James I often reverted to the flaunted deviancy we practised at Oxford, queening along the Cornmarket among the common people (as we more or less ironically called them), passing archly audible comments on boys from the town who took our fancy: ‘Quite go for that’, ‘Don’t think much of yours, dear’, ‘Get the buns on that’. James had worked up a cult of an overweight black youth, with a central gold tooth and a monstrous, lolling member. ‘What’s he really like?’ he asked, as we hammered into Lancaster Gate and the racket of the train spaced out and slowed. ‘I mean, is he a nice sort of person?’ ‘He is, actually, very nice, I think.’ I felt entirely penned in by not being able to speak of all the things that made the set-up so strange, and which, depriving Arthur of initiative, made him a non-social being. ‘Very nice in bed, certainly.’ James and I both saw how crass this comment was. ‘But what happens when you go out? I assume you’ve tired of each other’s company sufficiently to go to the pub or the flicks or whatever.’ I longed to tell him, whom I could completely trust; but my trust to Arthur, enforced by the whole way I was living my life, had become an unbreakable code to me, that is to say a principle of honour as well as an enigma. I merely shrugged. ‘And that fight, for God’s sake.’ I shrugged again. Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I found my hand was oddly empty and pushed myself among them to the bar. I heard myself booming, "Well, what's it to be?" First of all I talked to Sibylle—I was suddenly too upset to manage Luc under the scrutiny of his best friends. I half-turned my back on him, though I kept picking up his chat with Patrick through the thin medium of our own conversation. I thought if I was very charming and could somehow imply a closer knowledge of Luc than I had then she might let some commonplace thunderbolt drop—"When Luc and I get married", something like that. She had great composure, as of a child brought up to talk well to strangers, and keep cool under the pressure of extravagance or bad behaviour. Her face was round and calm, a convent-girl's face, lightly made up to suggest other attainments. She was wearing white jeans, in ominous twinship with Luc, and a shirt open over boyish white collar-bones and buttoned firmly between unboyish breasts; there were old, elderly pearls at each ear. I wanted to find her naive or even brittly snobbish in the English way, and was rather daunted by her poise and openness as she assessed my career and aptitudes. "You also teach my friend Marcel, don't you?" she said. "Oh yes, I do." I was tracking a story of Luc's about a holiday in Italy . . . Padua . . . Galileo . . . the anatomy theatre . . . How formal he was with them tonight. I wanted to shout "At ease", to drag him back to the beach, kids sparring in the sand . . . "Yes, he's, he's a nice lad. Of course he's had a difficult time." "He's very frightened of you," she said, in a way which showed conclusively that she wasn't. But I respected fright this evening, I knew the warping pressure and panic that another person's presence could cause. "He has no need to be," I said. "In fact I don't think he can be any more—we've become great friends." I pictured him at home, pottering with the pastry scraps, always reaching back for childish solace, just the opposite of these three, drinking beers in a gay bar. "He tells me you've been doing work for his father." "Yes, that's right." " . . . incredibly handsome Italian men . . . " Patrick was saying. "I always think he's rather a pathetic figure." "How come?" I said, with a cross little laugh. "Oh, having lost his wife in that bizarre way. Marcel and I talk about it a lot. We think he hasn't had the heart for anything since." "He's extremely fond of his son," I said warmly, wondering if even so I did justice to his devotion. Sibylle shook her glossy bob and leaned back on the bar. I thought I didn't really like her confidence.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “Lick it,” she said. Just like that. Matter-of-fact. “Lick it.” And, still standing over her, sort of leaning in, I slowly brought my hand up to my mouth. Yes! All the traffic noise seemed to fade away. The volume of the world had been turned down, leaving nothing but the roar of blood rushing from my balls to my ears. I let her see what I was doing. My tongue sponged along my knuckles, over the backs of my hands. I tasted the briny flavor of what I guessed was pee. I made a show of it, darting my tongue between my fingers, wiggling it, like a goldfish plucked out of its bowl. Then she spoke up again. “I didn’t mean that, Bobby. I meant this.” I stopped my knuckle lapping, looked down again, to where her finger was describing little circles. Her wrist blocked all but the purple-pink clit. “You know,” she said huskily, “the little man in the boat.” “You mean .. . right here?” My face got hot. I imagined police. Choppers swooping out of the sky, fixing us in a telephoto lens, filming everything, and presenting the evidence to a horrified jury. I could see the wit nesses: Dolores Fish and Dr. Mushnik, Ned Friendly, Weiner, Tennie Toad and Farwell, and Headmaster Bunton. All of them dying to testify, itching to send me to Perv Jail. My head wouldn’t stop. I saw my mother, pill-drunk and burbling baby country-and-western, hiking up her salmon nightie and telling the judge, "He tvuvs to cuddle. ..." They’d drag her from the courtroom facedown in a box of turtles, yelp ing for electroshock. Somewhere in sweaty heaven, watching all of it, Mr. Schmidlap would crack a Rheingold with his flip per while Dad banged his head off the nearest wall. "BOBBY!” Michele’s harsh whisper brought me blinking back. “Bobby, GO AHEAD. Bobby, I FE4ATT you to....” She touched herself and I shivered. “But there’s ... I mean ... There’s all these people.” “I know,” she said, but huskily, edging her back against the tire well of the VW bus. She parted her naked thighs slightly farther. “I know.” The way she studied me, it’s like she was measuring some thing, seeing how far I’d go. Or else—and this really made my stomach sink—how much I loved her. I was so hard I thought my dick would crack off. But all those people! Those cars! The weather. . . You didn’t think of sex and weather in the same breath. You didn’t have to. Not normally. Not ever. Except for here, in the Miracle Mile parking lot, where Leia the Hare Krishna, who used to be Michele Burnelka, was on the run from Shiva— whoever Shiva was—and on her haunches for me. Whoever I was. That’s what I wrestled with. Not can I do this? But what the fuck was it I thought I was doing? And who the fuck was doing it?

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Usually, the farther away the parents live from each other, the harder it is to get the child to all of their activities and events. Racer seems to be a sturdy child who is very aware that he is missing out on some practices and opportunities, but once he’s there, he’s able to try his hardest and enjoy the experience. Other, more delicately balanced kids worry themselves sick over the possibility of being late, missing a practice, disappointing their dance teacher or coach, or being the only one in their group to miss the slumber party. They spend hours fretting about upcoming conflicts in the schedule. This, too, is detrimental to their development. I have found that their anger at feeling “pushed around” is often lasting. As in intact families, parents attempting joint custody should pay close attention to how much stress their children are experiencing. There needs to be fairly constant checking in with the child, with each other, and with teachers. Parents should be prepared to readjust their own schedules as the child progresses in critical areas of learning and social development. Mediated agreement or court orders should make provision at the outset for changes based on the predictable changes in the child. Parents in intact families monitor their children carefully for a match between their schedule and the child’s response. Surely the child of divorce deserves the same loving care. She needs it even more. There is no way to generalize about the custody of teenagers. They mature at different rates and they follow idiosyncratic pathways. One principle is clear. In intact families teenagers have increased voices in planning their schedules. The same privileges should be available for youngsters in divorced families. It is absolutely clear that parents will need in most instances to confer even more frequently and help each other during these years if only to keep the youngster from playing them off against each other or going from home to home in order to avoid responsibilities in either place. I can only conclude that joint custody as a legal presumption for all children is a misguided policy. Although our legal system is mandated to protect the best interest of children, it often makes life harder for them. The emphasis on finding policies that suit all children is unrealistic and detrimental to the individuality of children and their family situations. We need to develop procedures that allow children to discuss their needs and wishes before visiting arrangements are made—and we need to make provisions for monitoring these arrangements through time. Each arrangement should be tailored to individual circumstances .

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I was wary about expressing such strong opinions to Walter’s family because I hadn’t investigated the case enough to be sure there was more evidence to convict Walter. But reading the record of his trial had outraged me, and I felt that anger returning—not just about the injustice done to Walter but also about the way it had burdened the entire community. Everyone in the poor, black community who talked to me about the case had expressed hopelessness. This one massive miscarriage of justice had afflicted the whole community with despair and made it hard for me to be dispassionate. “One lie after the other,” I continued. “People were fed so many lies that by the time y’all started telling the truth, it was just easier to believe you were the ones who were lying. It frustrates me to even read it in the trial record, so I can only imagine how you all feel.” The phone rang, and Jackie jumped up to answer it. She came back a few minutes later. “Eddie said that people are getting restless. They want to know when he’s going to be there.” Minnie stood up and straightened her dress. “Well, we should probably get going down there. They been waiting most of the day for you.” When I looked confused, Minnie smiled. “Oh, I told the rest of the family we would bring you down there, since it’s so hard to find where they live if you’ve never been there before. His sisters, nephews, nieces, and other folks all want to meet you.” I tried not to show my alarm, but I was getting worried about the time. We piled into my two-door Corolla, which was stacked with papers, trial transcripts, and court records. “You must spend your money on other things,” Jackie joked as we pulled away. “Yes, expensive suits are my spending priority these days,” I replied. “There’s nothing wrong with your suit or your car,” Minnie said protectively. — I followed their directions down a long, winding dirt road full of impossible turns through a heavily wooded area. As darkness fell around us, the road twisted through dense forest for several miles until it came to a short, narrow bridge with room for only one car to pass. It looked shaky and unstable, so I slowed the car to a stop. “It’s okay. It hasn’t rained that much, and that’s the only time when it’s really a problem,” Minnie said. “What kind of problem?” I didn’t want to sound scared, but we were in the middle of nowhere and in the pitch-black night I couldn’t tell whether it was a swamp, a creek, or a small river under the bridge. “It will be all right. People drive through here every day,” Jackie chimed in. It would have been too embarrassing to turn around, so I drove slowly across the bridge and was relieved when we had made it to the other side.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  The second reason is that covetousness destroys peace of heart, which is indeed highly delightful. The covetous man is ever solicitous to acquire what he lacks, and to hold that which he has: “The fullness of the rich will not suffer him to sleep” [Eccles 5:11]. “For where your treasure is, there is your heart also” [Mt 6:21]. It was for this, says St. Gregory, that Christ compared riches to thorns [Lk 8:14]. Thirdly, covetousness in a man of wealth renders his riches useless both to himself and to others, because he desires only to hold on to them: “Riches are not fitting for a covetous man and a niggard” [Sir 14:3]. The fourth reason is that it destroys the equality of justice: “Neither shall you take bribes, which even blind the wise, and pervert the words of the just” [Ex 23:8]. And again: “He who loves gold shall not be justified” [Sir 31:5]. The fifth reason is that it destroys the love of God and neighbor, for says St. Augustine: “The more one loves, the less one covets,” and also the more one covets, the less one loves. “Nor despise your dear brother for the sake of gold” [Sir 7:20]. And just as “No man can serve two masters,” so neither can he serve “God and mammon” [Mt 6:24]. Finally, covetousness produces all kinds of wickedness. It is “the root of all evil,” says St. Paul, and when this root is implanted in the heart it brings forth murder and theft and all kinds of evil. “They that will become rich, fall into temptation, and into the snare of the devil, and into many unprofitable and hurtful desires which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the desire of money is the root of all evil” [1 Tim 6:9-10]. And note, furthermore, that covetousness is a mortal sin when one covets one’s neighbor’s goods without reason; and even if there be a reason, it is a venial sin. ARTICLE 12 THE TENTH (NINTH) COMMANDMENT “YOU SHALL NOT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S WIFE.”St. John says in his first Epistle that “all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life” [1 Jn 2:16]. Now, all that is desirable is included in these three, two of which are forbidden by the precept: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.” Here “house,” signifying height, refers to avarice, for “glory and wealth shall be in his house” [Ps 111:3]. This means that he who desires the house, desires honors and riches. And thus after the precept forbidding desire for the house of one’s neighbor comes the Commandment prohibiting concupiscence of the flesh: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In the hard times and strain of the postdivorce years, the image of her mother was recast and with it Paula’s image of herself. Again, it takes years for these transformations to be understood and to be voiced. All of the children in our study who experienced the divorce when they were preschoolers, except a few whose parents maintained two well-functioning households, felt abandoned and neglected as little children. They lost their mothers to full-time employment, her return to school, and the mother’s efforts to establish her social life. They also felt abandoned by their fathers, who worked full-time and similarly got caught up in dating. These years remain very painful memories. With divorce, preschool children lose the benefits of a structured childhood, which has serious consequences for their development. Children need regular routines—bedtimes, naptimes, mealtimes, playtimes. Even adolescents need household routines. Such stability gives teenagers the freedom to test their aggression and to learn self-control from observing that life has uniformity and rules. But after a divorce, households are typically disorganized. Mealtimes are helter-skelter, children make their own lunches, bedtime is haphazard. This is almost always true at the time of the breakup, but the chaos can continue for many years if, as in Paula’s case, the mother embarks on a new, demanding schedule and cannot restore the previous routines. The fallout has many faces. Without a regular bedtime, a child wakes up tired and cranky and won’t learn well at school. Older children given the task of caring for younger siblings feel angry and resentful. The responsible parent looks and feels exhausted, pressed to the limit of human endurance. Parents need to know that it’s extremely important to restore routines as quickly as possible after divorce. This structure helps children resume their regular school activities, learning, and friendships. These are the rungs of their developmental ladder. Actually, many divorced parents know this but are too pressured to put their knowledge to work. Also, as they soon find out, rules established in one home can be undone in the other. Routines and bedtimes vary in each parents’ home. In some parents’ homes the preschool child sleeps with the parent regularly whereas in others the child has her own room. So-called junk food and unlimited television are permitted in one home and forbidden in the other. Nudity is the mode in one household and frowned on in the other. (In one family the five-year-old child returned from a visit to her father’s home full of excitement about the tattoos on his new girlfriend’s upper thigh.) These seemingly small differences can become major issues that are never settled and contribute to the difficulty of stabilizing the life of the preschool child in the divorced family. The Loneliness of the Youngest Children of Divorce W HEN I ASKED Paula-the-Adult to tell me the memories of Paula-the-Child, she said, “I remember that I was in trouble and I remember anger.