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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  And Uncle Sam, who made so many things tax deductible, had just two years ago electrocuted the Rosenbergs in the name of civilization. Was two years ago the olden days? My mother and I conspired to pretend it was as we hugged each other before turning out the light. But where was my mother now? She hadn’t saved me then and she couldn’t save me now, but if only she’d appear, I’d surely be able to get through the night. Night by night, we get by. If only I could be like Scarlett O’Hara and think about it all tomorrow. SEVENTEENDreamwork It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing—I mean it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning to do without something one really wants…. What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better. —Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook When it was clear to me that I’d never fall asleep, I decided to get up. As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you. I sat upright on the bed, pinned my hair in a barrette, and took off my soiled clothes. I marched to the curtain, pushed it aside with great fake courage, and looked around. No one. I straddled the bidet and peed rivers into it, astonished at how long I’d gone without emptying my bladder. Then I washed my sore and sticky crotch and cleaned out the bidet. I splashed my face with tap water and gave myself a perfunctory sponge bath. The dirt streaked off my arms as it had when I was a child and played outdoors all day. I went to try the lock on the door to make sure it was secure. When someone coughed in the next room, I nearly hit the ceiling. Relax, I commanded myself. But I was dimly aware that being able to get up and wash was at least a sign of life. Real lunatics just lie there in their own piss and shit. Some comfort. I was really grasping at straws. You’re better off than someone, I said and had to laugh. Naked and somewhat encouraged by being a little cleaner, I stood before the flaking full length mirror. I had the oddest sunburn from our days of driving in the open car. My knees and thighs were red and peeling. My nose and cheeks were red. My shoulders and forearms were burnt to a crisp. But the rest of me was nearly white. A curious patchwork quilt.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Once I read about a woman patient in psychoanalysis who referred to her essential identity as her “prettiness”; my companion—gray-eyed, her wrists braceleted in firm, healthy fat, hair swept up into a brioche pierced by the fork of a comb, her expression confused and sweet as she floated free of the cloud—she surrounded and kept safe her own “prettiness” as though it were a passive, intelligent child and she the mother, dazed by the sweeping lights of the world. She was both afraid and serene—afraid of being noticed and more afraid of being ignored, thrillingly afraid of the sounds outside her bedroom window, but also serene in her conviction that this whole bewildering opera was being staged in order to penetrate the fire and get to her “prettiness.” She really was pretty—perhaps I haven’t made that clear: a sad blur of a smile, soft gray eyes, a defenseless availability. She was also crafty, or maybe willfully blind, in the way she concealed from herself her own sexual ambitions. Becoming my father’s employee clarified my relationship with him. It placed him at an exact distance from me that could be measured by money. The divorce agreement had spelled out what he owed my mother, my sister and me, but even so, whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him (one weekend out of every month and for long periods every summer), she invariably told us, “Be nice to your father or he’ll cut us off.” And later, when my sister was graduated from college, he presented her with a “life bill,” the itemized expenses he’d incurred in raising her over twenty-one years, a huge sum that was intended to discourage her from thoughtlessly spawning children of her own. Since Dad slept all day, he seldom put in an appearance at the office before closing time, when he’d arrive fresh and rested, smelling of witch hazel, and scatter reluctant smiles and nods to the assembly as he made his way through us and stepped up to his own desk in a large room walled off from us by soundproof glass. “My, what a fine man your father is, a real gentleman,” my colleague would sigh. “And to think your stepmother met him when she was his secretary—some women have all the luck.” We sat in rows with our backs to him; he played the role of the conscience, above and behind us, a force that troubled us as we filed out soon after his arrival at the end of the workday. Had we stayed late enough? Done enough?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘It travelled. Victor Hugo did use it, but it’s Malay originally. It’s basically interlinked quatrains, usually rhyming a-b-a-b, and the second and fourth line of each stanza go on to be the first and third . . . is that right? So long since I . . . no, that’s right – the first and third lines of the next stanza – mine’s a broken pantoum, anyway. It’s kind of hard to explain . . . it’s better just to look at one,’ she said and opened the book to the relevant page, handing it to Jack.  the anatomy lesson On Beauty No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can’t forgive us. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. It is always beginning to snow. Of sins they can’t forgive us speech is beautifully useless. It is always beginning to snow. The beautiful know this. Speech is beautifully useless. They are the damned. The beautiful know this. They stand around unnatural as statuary. They are the damned and so their sadness is perfect, delicate as an egg placed in your palm. Hard, it is decorated with their face and so their sadness is perfect. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. Hard, it is decorated with their face. No, we could not itemize the list. Cape Cod, May   On Beauty Jack was now faced with a task he dreaded: saying something after reading a poem. Saying something to the poet . It was a strange fact of his tenure as Dean of the Humanities Faculty that Jack himself was not overly enamoured of either poetry or fictional prose; his great love was the essay, and, if he were really honest with himself, beyond essays themselves, the tools of the essayist: dictionaries. It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love, bowed his head in awe and thrilled at an unlikely tale, for example, the bizarre etymology of the intransitive verb ‘ramble’. ‘Beautiful,’ said Jack at last. ‘Oh, it’s just old crap – but a useful illustration. Anyway – Jack, I really have to run – ’ ‘I’ve sent someone over to your classroom, Claire, they know you’re going to be late.’ ‘You have? Is something wrong, Jack?’ ‘I do actually need a quick word with you,’ said Jack, oxy-moronically. ‘Just in my office if that’s possible.’ 

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Instead, she paraphrased: ‘They seem to be angry about America’s involve-ment in Haiti. The rhymes are very . . . crude, is the best way to put it.’ ‘We have something to do with Haiti?’ asked Hannah. ‘We have something to do with everywhere,’ said Claire. ‘And how does your brother know those guys?’ asked Daisy. Zora widened her eyes. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’ ‘I can’t hear myself think,’ said Ron, and got up to go to the bar. The fattest boy on the stage now took his turn with a solo. He was also the angriest, and the other boys dropped back in order to give him the space he needed for whatever it was he was angry about. ‘It’s a very worthy effort,’ shouted Claire to her class above the  the anatomy lesson unbearable noise of another chorus. ‘They have the power of the troubadour voice . . . But I’d say they have a little to learn about integration of idea and form – you break a form in two if you have all this undigested political fury in it. I think I’m going to go up for a cigarette.’ Deftly she rose without the need of putting her hands to the floor. ‘I’ll come up too,’ said Zora, and made heavier work of the same movement. They made their way through the crowds in the basement and restaurant without conversation. Claire wondered what was coming. Outside, the temperature had dropped another few degrees. ‘You want to share? Be quicker.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Claire and accepted the cigarette she was passed. Her fingers trembled a little. ‘Those guys are wild,’ said Zora. ‘It’s like, you so want them to be good, but – ’ ‘Right.’ ‘Something to do with trying too hard, I guess. That’s Levi all over.’ They were silent for a minute. ‘Zora,’ said Claire, letting the wine take her along, ‘are we OK?’ ‘Oh, absolutely ,’ said Zora with a certainty and speed that suggested she’d been waiting for the question all night. Claire looked at her doubtfully and passed back the cigarette. ‘You sure?’ ‘ Seriously . We’re all adults. And I have no intention of not being an adult.’ Claire smiled stiffly. ‘I’m glad.’ ‘Don’t mention it. It’s all about compartmentalization.’ ‘That’s very mature of you.’ Zora smiled contentedly. Not for the first time when talking to Howard’s daughter Claire felt estranged from her own being, as if she were indeed just another of the six billion extras playing in that fabulous stage show, the worldwide hit called Zora’s Life. ‘What’s important,’ said Zora, her voice turning excessively  On Beauty diffident, ‘is finding out, you know . . . whether I can actually do this thing, writing.’ ‘That’s a daily discovery,’ said Claire evasively. She felt Zora’s avid stare; she sensed something important was about to be said. But now the door of the restaurant was thrown open.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Poor Carlene! Kiki dreaded the idea of spending even one night with this man with whom Carlene must spend a lifetime. Fortunately there were many people Monty Kipps wanted to be introduced to. He quickly demanded a list of significant Wellingtonians, and Kiki obligingly pointed out Jack French, Erskine, the various faculty heads; she explained that the college president was invited while failing to explain that there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would come. The Kipps children had already disappeared into the garden. Jerome – much to Kiki’s annoyance – remained skulking upstairs. Kiki accompanied Monty through the rooms. His meeting with Howard was brief and arch, a stylized circling of each other’s more extreme positions – Howard the radical art theorist, Monty the cultural conservative – with Howard coming off the worse because he was drunk and took it too seriously. Kiki separated them, manoeuvring Howard towards the curator of a small Boston gallery who had been trying to catch him all night. Howard only half attended to this small worried man as he pressed him on a proposed Rembrandt lecture season that Howard had promised to  On Beauty organize and done nothing about. Its highlight was to be a lecture from Howard himself, with a wine and cheese event afterwards, part sponsored by Wellington. Howard had neither written this lecture nor looked deeply into the matter of the wine and the cheese. Over the man’s shoulder, he watched Monty dominate what was left of his party. A loud, playful debate with Christian and Meredith was being conducted near the fireplace, with Jack French at its borders, never quite quick enough to insert the witticisms he kept on attempting. Howard worried whether he was being defended by his supposed defenders. Maybe he was being ridiculed. ‘I suppose I’m asking what the tenor of your talk will be . . .’ Howard tuned back into his own conversation, which he was apparently having not with one man but two. The curator, with his moist nose, had been joined by a young bald man. This second fellow had such lucent white skin and so prominent a plate of bone in his forehead that Howard felt oppressed by the sheer mortality of the man. Never had another living being shown him this much skull. ‘The tenor?’ ‘ ‘‘ Ag ’inst Rembrandt’’,’ the second man said. He had a high-pitched Southern voice that struck Howard as a comic assault for which he had been completely unprepared. ‘That was the title your assistant mailed us – I’m just tryna figger what you meant by ‘‘ag’inst’’ – obviously my organization are part-sponsors of this whole event, so – ’ ‘Your organization – ’ ‘The RAS – Rembrandt Appreciation – and I’m sure I’m not an innellekchewl, at least, as a fella like you might think of one . . .’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  they were aware of her (this had also been the point of the traffic island). She held a cigarette and struggled to enjoy the sear of it on desiccated, winter lips. She watched a little behavioural pattern develop just across the street. People paused at the doorway of the McDonald’s, waited for the passing car to displace its gallon of grimy water and then continued on their way, proudly, swiftly adaptable to anything the city could throw at them. ‘Anybody call the water board? Or is this the second flood?’ inquired a throaty Boston voice, just by Zora’s elbow. It was the purple-skinned homeless guy with his coiled beard of solid, grey clumps, with white panda rings around his eyes, as if half his year was spent in Aspen. He was always here, holding a polystyrene cup to hustle for dimes outside the bank, and now he shook this at Zora, laughing gruffly. When she didn’t respond, he made his joke again. To escape, she moved forward to the road’s edge and looked into the gutters to imply her concern and further investigation of the situation. A patina of frost had collected on top of the puddles here in the potholes and natural gulleys created by uneven asphalt. Some puddles had already resolved themselves into slush, but others maintained their pristine, wafer-thin ice rinks. Zora threw her cigarette on to one of these and at once lit another. She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face – as her favourite poet had it – to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn’t seem to her that she had a face at all . . . And yet in college, she knew was famed for being opinionated, a ‘personality’ – the truth was she didn’t take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn’t feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were  On Beauty all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  seen them around – it’s a big group of Haitian and African boys, they sell things on the street – I guess they’re traders.’ ‘Is it legal?’ Kiki pursed her lips. She had always been sweet on Levi, and nothing he ever did could be completely wrong. ‘Oh, boy,’ said Jerome. ‘I don’t know that it’s especially illegal .’ ‘Mom, it either is or it – ’ ‘No, but that’s not . . . it’s more that he seems so involved with all of them. Suddenly he has no other friends. I mean, in a lot of ways it’s been interesting – he’s a lot more politically aware, for example. He’s in the square pretty much every weekend with leaflets helping this Haitian support-group campaign – he’s there now.’ ‘Campaign?’ ‘Higher wages, unfair detention – a lot of issues. Howard’s very proud of course – proud without actually thinking about what any of it might mean .’ Jerome stretched his legs out across the grass and crossed one foot over the other. ‘I’m with Dad,’ he had to admit. ‘I don’t see the problem, really.’ ‘Well, OK, it’s not a problem , but . . .’ ‘But what?’ ‘Don’t you find it a little strange that he’s so interested in Haitian things? I mean, we’re not Haitian, he’s never been to Haiti – six months ago he couldn’t have pointed to Haiti on a map. I just think it seems a little . . . random .’ ‘Levi is random, Mom,’ said Jerome, standing up and moving around to get warm. ‘Come on, let’s go in, it’s cold.’ They walked quickly back across the grass, through squelchy mounds of blossom forced off the trees by the previous night’s rainstorm. ‘Will you just hang out with him a little, though? Promise? Because he tends to go all in for one thing – you know how he is. I worry that all the crap that’s been going on in this house has been . . . throwing him off balance somehow. And it’s an important school year.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘How . . . how is all the crap?’ asked Jerome. Kiki put her arm round Jerome’s waist. ‘Truthfully? It’s damn hard work. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. But Howard’s really trying. You have to give him that. He is.’ Kiki noted Jerome’s doubtful face. ‘Oh, I know he can be an almighty pain, but . . . I do like Howie, you know. I may not always show it, but – ’ ‘I know you do, Mom.’ ‘But will you promise that, about Levi? Spend some time with him – find out what’s up with him?’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  During the late sixties, early seventies, I was principally a student who wrote poetry. A Ph.D. candidate in eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia, I also taught at City College of New York. I slogged back and forth from 116th Street and Broadway to 135th Street and Convent Avenue with a briefcase bursting with my students’ blue books for English literature from Chaucer to Pope and for freshman composition. I was overworked, underpaid and full of angst about my future. I had just been through the shattering experience of nursing my first love through a schizophrenic breakdown that finished our marriage. I wanted to be a writer but I had no idea how to begin. Between graduate courses and teaching, I wrote poems—poetry has proven to be my creative lifeline to this day—but I hardly had the time to start the novel I longed to write. Or perhaps I was just scared. If poems were read at all, it was by a tiny readership. A novel might really expose me to public view. I loved my students at CCNY, but I wasn’t sure the Ph.D. program at Columbia was right for me. I wanted to write my own books instead of reading other people’s books about books about books. I was too much a good girl and a compulsive student not to keep winning fellowships I didn’t really want, but I didn’t have the guts to break out of academe. Like all writers, I was terrified of walking down the street naked. Like all writers, I feared I was a fraud. Writing seemed risky. Teaching seemed practical. How could I know my life would prove the opposite true? I wanted to write the novel to end all novels, but I was afraid to fail, to fall, to fly. So I did what I always did those days when I was in a quandary. I fell in love with a man who I thought was offering escape. Escape—whether it takes the form of marriage or the Foreign Legion—is an illusion. We all know that we take ourselves along wherever we go. My second marriage to a young psychiatrist (after a schizophrenic, a psychiatrist seemed safe) may have seemed like a way of escape but it wound up plunging me back into myself. Though we hardly knew it publicly in 1966, the Vietnam War was already under way. My second husband was drafted in the first doctors’ draft since the Korean War. He chose to give the Army three years so he could go to Europe rather than ‘Nam—and I followed.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  she said, pitching her voice high and across the country to the opposite coast, ‘ and then she was like, and then he was like, and I was like, oh, my God . Repeat ad infinitum.’ Carl looked puzzled. ‘Your pops, the professor . . .’ he said slowly. ‘He white, right?’ ‘Howard. He’s English.’ ‘English!’ said Carl, revealing the chalky sclera of his eyes, and then a moment later, seeming to have taken the concept fully on board, ‘I ain’t never been to England, man. I’ve never been out of the States. So . . .’ He was doing a strange rhythmic clicking into his palm. ‘He be like a math professor or whatever.’ ‘My dad? No. Art History.’ ‘You get on with him, with your pops?’  the anatomy lesson Again Carl’s eyes wandered around the place. Again Zora’s paranoia got the better of her. She imagined for a moment that all these questions were a kind of verbal grooming that would later lead – by routes she didn’t pause to imagine – to her family home and her mother’s jewellery and the safe in the basement. She began to speak rather manically, as was her way when trying to disguise the fact that her mind was elsewhere. ‘Howard – he’s great. I mean’s he’s my dad , so sometimes, you know . . . but he’s cool – I mean, he just had this affair – yeah, I know, it all came out, it was with this other professor – so everything’s pretty fucked up at home right now. My mom’s freaking out . But I’m really like, hello, what kind of a sophisticated guy in his fifties doesn’t have an affair? It’s basically mandatory. Intellectual men are attracted to intellectual women – big fucking surprise. Plus my mom doesn’t do herself any favours – she’s like three hundred pounds or something . . .’ Carl looked down, apparently embarrassed for Zora. Zora blushed and pressed her stubby nails deep into the meat of her palms. ‘Fat ladies need love too,’ said Carl philosophically, and took a cigarette from inside his hoodie, where it had been tucked behind his ear. ‘You best be going, huh,’ he said and lit up. He seemed bored with her now. Zora was filled with the sad sense that something precious had escaped. Somehow with her blethering she had made Mozart vanish and his pal Sussawhatsit too. ‘People to see, places to go, sho’ nuff,’ he said. ‘Oh, no . . . I mean, I’ve just got a meeting. It’s not really – ’ ‘Important meeting,’ said Carl ruminatively, taking a moment to envision it. ‘Not really . . . more like a meeting about the future, I guess.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  An impulsive decision had propelled him out of the mega-store; now the consequences caught up with him, pressing their heavy hands to his shoulders, slowing his stride. Halfway down Newbury Street he stopped altogether. He leaned against the railings of a small churchyard. Two fat tears welled up; he stopped them in the hub of his palms. Fuck that. He took clean cold air into his lungs and put his chin on his chest. On the practical side this was very bad – it was a nightmare, at the best of times, getting a dollar out of either of his parents, but now? Zora said he was crazy to think this was divorce time, but what else was it when two people couldn’t even eat a meal together? And then you ask  the anatomy lesson one of them for five dollars and they tell you to go ask the other . . . Sometimes it was like: Are we rich or aren’t we? We live in this big ass house – why do I have to beg for ten dollars? A long green leaf, not yet crisp, hung near Levi at eye level. He pulled it down and began discreetly making a skeleton of it, pulling strips of flesh away from its spine. And but the thing was, if he didn’t get his measly thirty-five dollars a week, then there was no money to escape Wellington on a Saturday night, no chance to dance with all those kids, all those girls who didn’t give a fuck who the hell Gram-ski was or why whoever – Rem-bran – was no good. Sometimes he felt that those thirty-five dollars were the only thing that kept him half normal, half sane, half black . Levi held his leaf up to the light for a minute to admire his own handiwork. Then he screwed it into a damp green ball in his hand and dropped it to the floor. ‘Par don , par don , par don , par don .’ It was a gruff French accent coming from a tall skinny guy. He was edging Levi off his day-dreaming spot by the railings, and now there were half a dozen other guys or more, bustling, laying down huge bed sheets stuffed with goods and knotted at the top like plum puddings; now untying them, revealing CDs, DVDs, posters and, incongruously, handbags. Levi stepped off the sidewalk and watched them, at first absently and then with interest. One of them pressed play on a big boom-box, and summery hip-hop, out of place but welcome on this chill autumn day, blew up into the passing shoppers. Many people tutted; Levi smiled. It was a joint he knew and loved. Slipping effortlessly between the high hat and the drum or whatever machine it is that makes those noises these days, Levi began to nod his head and watch the activity of the men, itself a visual expression of the frantic bass line.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It is freezing and last night’s rain has made the streets glassy. They dress and go out for a walk. He holds her tightly, but anyway she keeps slipping. He admonishes her to “take small steps.” “As if my feet were bound,” she says. He doesn’t laugh. They walk along the Ile St. Louis and admire the architecture. They point out quaint stone carvings on the second stories of townhouses. They stop to watch three old men who are catching little wriggling fishes in the gray and swollen Seine. They eat two dozen oysters in an Alsatian restaurant and then have onion tarts and get drunk on wine. They walk the glassy streets again, holding on to each other for dear life. She wonders where she could go if she left him. The home she dreamed of last night comes back to her in snatches. She knows she can’t go there. She has nowhere to go. Nowhere. She holds him tightly. “I love you,” she says. When it gets darker they stop for bûche de Noël and coffee in a little restaurant facing Notre Dame from the Left Bank. Is he thinking of leaving her? She never knows what he’s thinking. They pretend it was a happy, carefree day. He never fails to hold her tightly around the waist as they cross the icy streets together. “Take small steps,” he keeps saying. “You’re going to break your neck and take me along with you.” “What would I do without you?” she says. He clears his throat nervously, but says nothing. The film would end there, on the note of his cough, perhaps. But I remember the events that followed: the car breaking down, and having to take the train back to Heidelberg; the four French soldiers who shared our second-class couchette compartment and belched and farted all the way back to Germany, almost as if they were powering the train; the precipitous drop from the highest couchette (which I occupied) to the floor. A sudden bout of diarrhea caused me to negotiate this drop no less than six times that night (and once I stepped right into the groin of the French soldier in the bottom couchette, who was extremely gracious about it, considering). And then the return to Heidelberg with Christmas over and having to face being in the army all over again. (On vacations we tried to pretend we were just an American couple living in Europe for the hell of it.) And then on New Year’s Day, there was the telegram—garbled as such messages often are, and coming on that dismal gray Saturday afternoon when the entire male population of Klein Amerika was engrossed in polishing the family car and the entire female population was walking around in hair rollers and the Germans on the other side of Goethestrasse were already breaking out the first bottle of Schnaps in preparation for the new year….

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I had never been happy with the bourgeois virtues of marriage, stability, and work above pleasure. I was too curious and adventurous not to chafe under those restrictions. But I also suffered from night terrors and attacks of panic at being alone. So I always wound up living with somebody or being married. Besides I really believed in pursuing a longstanding and deep relationship with one person. I could easily see the sterility of hopping from bed to bed and having shallow affairs with lots of shallow people. I had had the unutterably dismal experience of waking up in bed with a man I couldn’t bear to talk to—and that was certainly no liberation either. But still, there just didn’t seem to be any way to get the best of both exuberance and stability into your life. The fact that greater minds than mine had pondered these issues and come up with no very clear answers didn’t comfort me much either. It only made me feel that my concerns were banal and commonplace. If I were really an exceptional person, I thought, I wouldn’t spend hours worrying my head about marriage and adultery. I would just go out and snatch life with both hands and feel no remorse or guilt for anything. My guilt only showed how thoroughly bourgeois and contemptible I was. All my worrying this sad old bone only showed my ordinariness. — That evening the festivities began with a candidates’ party at a café in Grinzing. It was a highly inelegant affair. Great phallic knockwursts and sauerkraut were the Freudian main course. For entertainment the Viennese analytic candidates, who were hosting the party, sang choruses of “When the Analysts Come Marching In…” (to the tune of “When the Saints…”). The lyrics were in English, presumably—or at least in some language a Viennese candidate might regard as English. Everybody laughed and applauded heartily while I just sat there like Gulliver among the Yahoos. I was furrowing my brows and thinking of the end of the world. We would all go down to a nuclear hell while these clowns sat around singing about their analysts. Gloom. I didn’t see Adrian anywhere. Bennett was discussing training with another candidate from the London Institute and I eventually struck up a conversation with the guy across from me, a Chilean psychoanalyst studying in London. All I could think of when he said he was from Chile was Neruda. So we discussed Neruda. I got myself worked up into one of my enthusiastic snow jobs and told him how lucky he was to be South American at a time when all the greatest living writers were South American. I was thinking what a total fraud I was, but he was pleased. As if I’d really complimented him. The conversation went on in that absurd literary-chauvinist vein. We were discussing surrealism and its relation to South American politics—which I know nothing whatever about. But I know about surrealism.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Would either of us be anything without the incredible success of Fear of Flying ? Would I have the career I have today, writing for Vanity Fair and punditing, if my mother had not become famous from a book she wrote before I was born? It’s an impossible question to answer, but one that I come back to again and again: how much of my success is due to hers? Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night haunted by just how much of my life is tied to her and to this book. I became a writer because I thought that was what people did. As a kid, I don’t think I even knew there were any careers besides policewoman and writer of autobiographical novels—and possibly communist who went to jail due to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Maybe I wanted to become a writer to get her to pay attention to me or to respect me or to just be interested in me. I am not sure why I fell down this very-hard-to-maneuver rabbit hole, but the minute I became a writer (I published my first book in 2000), my entire life became inextricably bound to a novel written in 1973, when I was negative five. There are many, many women (and men, too) who found themselves in the story of Isadora Wing, but I am not one of those people. When I was growing up, women my mother’s age would stop us in stores and restaurants, look earnestly into her eyes and tell her how the book had changed their lives. It changed the trajectory of my life, too, just in a completely different way. I do not have a normal relationship with the book or the author. I think of this book as the reason I have a career today but also as the anvil my mother could never get out from under. So you can see why I found this assignment very intimidating. It’s just a book, I told myself, but it’s a book that means very different things to me than it does to anyone else. I was not inspired to find sexual freedom by reading about Isadora’s adventures! In fact, I felt deeply uncomfortable with the content—but that was probably pretty healthy, since Isadora was basically my mother. On top of that, I knew many of the people the characters were based on, which adds a truly disturbing dynamic to the experience of reading such an explicit book. Fear of Flying is one of those inescapable books that defines a very particular time in history. It’s a kind of time capsule transporting us back to the era before Roe, a time that is particularly relevant right now.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Aha, here we are. Miss Gold says Dolly’s tennis form is excellent to superb, even better than Linda Hall’s, but concentration and point-accumulation are just “poor to fair.” Miss Cormorant cannot decide whether Dolly has exceptional emotional control or none at all. Miss Horn reports she—I mean, Dolly—cannot verbalize her emotions, while according to Miss Cole Dolly’s metabolic efficiency is superfine. Miss Molar thinks Dolly is myopic and should see a good ophthalmologist, but Miss Redcock insists that the girl simulates eye- strain to get away with scholastic incompetence. And to conclude, Mr. Haze, our researchers are wondering about something really crucial. Now I want to ask you something. I want to know if your poor wife, or yourself, or anyone else in the family—I understand she has several aunts and a maternal grandfather in California?—oh, had!—I’m sorry—well, we all wonder if anybody in the family has instructed Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction. The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity. All right—fourteen. You see, Mr. Haze, Beardsley School does not believe in bees and blossoms, and storks and love birds, but it does believe very strongly in preparing its students for mutually satisfactory mating and successful child rearing. We feel Dolly could make excellent progress if only she would put her mind to her work. Miss Cormorant’s report is significant in that respect. Dolly is inclined to be, mildly speaking, impudent. But all feel that primo, you should have your family doctor tell her the facts of life and, secundo, that you allow her to enjoy the company of her schoolmates’ brothers at the Junior Club or in Dr. Rigger’s organization, or in the lovely homes of our parents.” “She may meet boys at her own lovely home,” I said. “I hope she will,” said Pratt buoyantly. “ ‘When we questioned her about her troubles, Dolly refused to discuss the home situation, but we have spoken to some of her friends and really—well, for example, we insist you un-veto her nonparticipation in the dramatic group. You just must allow her to take part in The Hunted Enchanters. She was such a perfect little nymph in the try-out, and sometime in spring the author will stay for a few days at Beardsley College and may attend a rehearsal or two in our new auditorium.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She laughed. “If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him, Dad.” “Did he ask where we were going?” “Oh, he knows that” (mocking me). “Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.” “Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you—Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.” It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we travelled on, unpursued. But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow—as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him. O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek. A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets—at half-past-four P.M. in a factory town—was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb. When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Can a diaphragm be considered an article of clothing? Pia and I debate this. “You do wear it,” she says. I maintain that she ought to send it to Boston as an antique and thus avoid all import duty. What if her erring boyfriend had to pay duty on her old diaphragm? Would that be adding expense to injury, insult to guilt? “Fuck him!” Pia says. “Let him pay import duty on it and be as embarrassed as possible.” And with that she labels the package: “1 Florentine leather bag—valuation $100.” Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties. F FOURTEEN Arabs & Other Animals I’m the sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep.... —from “The Shiek of Araby,” by Ted Snyder, Francis Wheeler, and Harry B. Smith rom Florence I took the rapido to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut. I was pretty panicky, as I recall—about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what that meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish—since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had forfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much—admittedly) by my terrible act of deception. I was also certain I’d caught the clap from all those uncircumcised Florentines. Oh, I have phobias about practically everything you can think of: plane crashes, clap, swallowing ground glass, botulism, Arabs, breast cancer, leukemia, Nazis, melanoma.... The thing about my clap phobia is that it doesn’t matter at all how well I feel, or how free of sores and lesions my cunt actually is. I look and look and look, and no matter how little I find, I’m still sure I have some silent asymptomatic form of the clap. Secretly, I know my Fallopian tubes are probably healing over with scar tissue and my ovaries are drying up like old seed pods. I imagine this in great visual detail. All my unborn babies drying up! Withering on the vine, as it were.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Isn’t it like heroin?” Chuck laughed. “No. Great stuff, Beattie tells me. Makes you happy. Good for sex. Good for listening to music. Come on down next Wednesday to the music room and we’ll blow some weed.” He snapped his fingers with a hard snap. But this was precisely the invitation to a lifelong addiction I’d always heard about, a fate so dire no one actually had ever had to warn me against it. Not that I’d met an addict, but I had seen movies in which a handsome musician—exactly!—sweated in a hotel room and vomited and pleaded with his girl friend to put him back on the needle or weed or whatever, but she refused him for his own sake, despite his hallucinations and writhings on the floor. Why had Mr. Beattie come to Eton? Perhaps he was so addicted to marijuana he could no longer afford to maintain his habit unless—that’s it—unless he also became a dealer to bored teens. In those days all drugs except alcohol, tobacco and diet pills and sedatives were unknown to conventional Americans. I wasn’t sure what I should do. I wanted to do the right thing. Chuck and the other guys in the Butt Club seemed hopeless to me. They would succumb to any temptation, I knew, but not if the temptation was removed. They valued nothing. One of them had lost an eye in a fight, but all he could say was, “So what? I’ve still got one left.” During my next session with Dr. O’Reilly I asked him for advice. He didn’t want to discuss my problems. He was telling me about his daughter’s latest escapade. While he had been addressing a parents’ group, she had gone into the best restaurant in town, been careful to identify herself as his daughter and then tried to set the place on fire. When I brought O’Reilly back to the subject, he snapped, “I can’t tell you what to do, you know that.” “Then give me some information. Is marijuana dangerous?” “Can be.” He was picking his nose in an elaborate way, examining his handkerchief for portents. “How?” “It can cause a psychotic break.” He had just received a shipment of Polynesian carvings, statues with real human hair and giant phalluses; three of these totems stood behind his chair, lending force to his opinions. “What’s a psychotic—” “Craziness.” “And does marijuana always lead to heroin?” “It can, if only because you start living in the drug world and you think you might as well try everything.” “What does it do, marijuana, to ordinary people?” “Makes them paranoid.” I thought I knew how my father must feel all the time: lonely and responsible. No one looked to my father for amusement. He was dull. He wasn’t fashionable. He was deliberate, but he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. He could always be counted on to do the right thing.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Three other men smiled and nodded at the truth of this. Everybody seemed satisfied. Howard also nodded and polished off the end of his bottle. It takes a lot of practice to ensure that a whole bottle of Cabernet and a pint of beer makes only a slight dent in your sobriety, but Howard felt he had reached this stage of accomplishment. All that happened these days was a pleasant imprecision that settled itself around him like a duvet, padding, protecting. He’d got what he needed. He went down the hall to use the phone opposite the loos. ‘Adam?’ ‘ Howard .’ Said in a tone of a man who can finally call off the search party. ‘Hi. Look, I’ve been separated from everyone . . . Have they called?’  On Beauty There was a silence at the end of the phone that Howard correctly identified as concern. ‘Howard . . . are you drunk?’ ‘I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. I’m trying to find Kiki. Is she with you?’ Adam sighed. ‘She’s looking for you. She left an address. She said to tell you they’re going to the wake.’ Howard rested his forehead on the wall next to the pinned-up list of minicabs. ‘Howard – I’m painting. I’m getting it all over the phone. Do you want the address?’ ‘No, no . . . I have it. Did she sound – ?’ ‘Yes, very . Howard, I’ve got to go. We’ll see you back at the house later.’ Howard ordered a minicab and went outside to wait for it. When it arrived, the driver’s door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: ‘ Is it you? ’ Howard stepped forward from the pub wall. ‘Yes, it’s me.’ ‘Where you go?’ ‘Queen’s Park, please,’ said Howard, and walked unsteadily round the car to get into the front seat. As soon as he sat down he realized that this was not the usual procedure. It was surely uncomfortable for a driver to have a passenger sitting so close to him, wasn’t it? Or was it? They drove in silence, a silence that Howard experienced as unbearably fraught with homoerotic, political and violent implications. He felt he must say something. ‘I’m not trouble, you know, I’m not one of those English thugs – I’m a bit pissed, that’s all.’ The young driver looked at him with a defensive, uncertain air. ‘You trying to be funny?’ he said in his thick accent, which yet possessed a fluency that made You trying to be funny? sound like a Turkish homily. ‘Sorry,’ said Howard, blushing. ‘Ignore me. Ignore me.’ He put his hands between his knees.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Reader, I did. I went up to the ex-semi-studio. Arms akimbo, I stood for a moment quite still and self-composed, surveying from the threshold the raped little table with its open drawer, a key hanging from the lock, four other household keys on the table top. I walked across the landing into the Humberts’ bedroom, and calmly removed my diary from under her pillow into my pocket. Then I started to walk downstairs, but stopped halfway: she was talking on the telephone which happened to be plugged just outside the door of the living room. I wanted to hear what she was saying: she canceled an order for something or other, and returned to the parlor. I rearranged my respiration and went through the hallway to the kitchen. There, I opened a bottle of Scotch. She could never resist Scotch. Then I walked into the dining room and from there, through the half-open door, contemplated Charlotte’s broad back. “You are ruining my life and yours,” I said quietly. “Let us be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers were put in by mere chance. Just because they came handy. Think it over. I shall bring you a drink.” She neither answered nor turned, but went on writing in a scorching scrawl whatever she was writing. A third letter, presumably (two in stamped envelopes were already laid out on the desk). I went back to the kitchen. I set out two glasses (to St. Algebra? to Lo?) and opened the refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice from its heart. Rewrite. Let her read it again. She will not recall details. Change, forge. Write a fragment and show it to her or leave it lying around. Why do faucets sometimes whine so horribly? A horrible situation, really. The little pillow-shaped blocks of ice—pillows for polar teddy bear, Lo—emitted rasping, crackling, tortured sounds as the warm water loosened them in their cells. I bumped down the glasses side by side. I poured in the whiskey and a dram of soda. She had tabooed my pin. Bark and bang went the icebox. Carrying the glasses, I walked through the dining room and spoke through the parlor door which was a fraction ajar, not quite space enough for my elbow. “I have made you a drink,” I said. She did not answer, the mad bitch, and I placed the glasses on the sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring. “Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson,” said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip at dawn. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you’d better come quick.” I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and sound, and still holding the receiver, I pushed open the door and said: “There’s this man saying you’ve been killed, Charlotte.” But there was no Charlotte in the living room.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  time and place; now hast thou occasion to work thy will, seeing that we are alone. And it is a common saying: ‘ Never known, never done.’ " This young man, troubled in his mind at so sudden an ill, although he abhorred to commit so great a crime, yet he would not be rashly stern to undo her yet more with a present denial, but warily paci- fied her mind with delay of promise. Wherefore with long speech he promised her to do all according to her desire: and in the mean season, he willed his mother to be of good cheer, and comfort herself and look to her health, till as he might find some con- venient time to come unto her, when his father was ridden forth : wherewithal he got him away from the pestilent sight of his stepdame. And knowing that this matter touching the ruin of all the whole house needed the counsel of wise and grave persons, he went incontinently to a sage old man, a tutor, and declared.the whole circumstance. The old man, after long deliberation, thought there was no better mean to avoid the storm of cruel fortune to come than to runaway. In the mean season this wicked woman, impatient of any delay how little soever, egged her husband to ride abroad to visit some far lands that he had: then she, maddened by the hope that had now (as she thought) grown rife, asked the young man the accomplishment of his promise; but he, to avoid the sight of her whom he hated, would find always excuses from appearing before her, till in the end she understood by the various colour of the messages which he sent her that he nothing regarded her. Then she, in her fickle mood, by how much she wickedly loved him before, by so much and more she hated him now. And by and by she called one of her servants who had come with her among her 479 LUCIUS APULEIUS et ad omne facinus emancipato quodam dotali servulo perfidiae suae consilia communicat: nec quicquam melius videtur quam vita miserum privare iuvenem. Ergo missus continuo furcifer venenum praesentarium comparat, idque vino diligenter dilutum insontis pri- vigni praeparat exitio.