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 Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  They put the tadpoles in glass jars to watch them become frogs. The ditches attracted boys in packs of four or five, as did any empty lot where there was enough room to dig. One boy died when the fort he made of scrap lumber and dirt collapsed on him. Another boy drowned in a flooded sump. 77 Forty-five percent of the new suburb’s population was less than nineteen years of age in 1953. Twenty-five percent was less than ten years old. Some property owners worried about living among so many children. Parents wondered what would happen when their neighborhoods had thirty thousand teenagers. They talked about the “juvenile crime problem,” and wanted more parks built. 78 The houses in my neighborhood touch the ground lightly. There is no basement. Foundations are hardly more than a foot deep. It took a bucket excavator only fifteen minutes to dig each one. Carpenters followed and nailed up three-foot foundation forms as quickly as possible. Workmen poured the concrete quickly, too. The crews poured 2,113 foundations in a hundred days. For every ten houses, they wasted enough concrete for the foundation of an eleventh. The raised foundation of each house leaves an eighteen-inch crawl space beneath the floor. My father went under there occasionally, to move an electrical outlet without the benefit of a city building permit. The crawl space is partly lighted by vents in the foundation. From association, the pale wood of the joists beneath the floor has become the same gray color as the dirt. 79 The attic is different. At the ridge board, where the rafters join, there is just enough space for a grown man to stand slightly hunched. My father rigged a light there, over the attic hatch in the hallway ceiling. Before you climb into the attic, you can turn the light on by reaching up and pulling a string tied to the socket chain. In this light, the wood seems new. It still smells of sawn lumber. My parents filled the attic with things we used every year, but only once a year—the aluminum Christmas tree, ornaments and lights, plastic houses for the train set, winter clothes, and vacation luggage. The attic held things that were no longer used—my father’s Navy uniforms, the love letters my mother sent him during the war, and the notebook he kept when he belonged to a Catholic religious order. Despite the light, the attic is threatening to walk in, because only a few loose planks lie across the joists. A bad step will put your foot through a bedroom ceiling. 80 My house is largely a void. The emptiness is not just in the span of the rooms or in the attic and foundation spaces. All the walls are hollow, too. Houses in Southern California are built as sketchily as possible, while still able to shed rain. Walls are a thin, cement skin over absence. Roofs are important here, but only when it rains. The rest is for modesty.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One of these, her partner, while changing sides, jocosely slapped her on her behind with his racket. He had a remarkably round head and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary flurry—he saw me, and throwing away his racket—mine!—scuttled up the slope. He waved his wrists and elbows in would-be comical imitation of rudimentary wings, as he climbed, bow-legged, to the street, where his gray car awaited him. Next moment he and the grayness were gone. When I came down, the remaining trio were collecting and sorting out the balls . “Mr. Mead, who was that person?” Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads. That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double, hadn’t he, Dolly? Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm. Before returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a little alley half-smothered in fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and was about to burst into ripe sobs and plead with her imperturbed dream in the most abject manner for clarification, no matter how meretricious, of the slow awfulness enveloping me, when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome—assorted people, you know, meeting among idyllic settings in old comedies. Bill and Fay were both weak with laughter—we had come at the end of their private joke. It did not really matter. Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming, apparently, that life was automatically rolling on with all its routine pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her bathing things, and spend the rest of the afternoon at the swimming pool. It was a gorgeous day. Lolita! 21 “Lo! Lola! Lolita!” I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun, with the acoustics of time, domed time, endowing my call and its tell-tale hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain that really it would have been instrumental in wrenching open the zipper of her nylon shroud had she been dead. Lolita! In the middle of a trim turfed terrace I found her at last—she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red ball; he took rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf, and then would bounce away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not swim with my heart in that state, but who cared—and there she was, and there was I, in my robe—and so I stopped calling; but suddenly something in the pattern of her motions, as she dashed this way and that in her Aztec Red bathing briefs and bra, struck me … there was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed puzzled by the extravagance of her reactions.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Sheltering behind the old prison walls, Gil was unable to watch the scenes at dusk and dawn"'that went on outside, but the sounds of banging, the shouts from the naval shipyards came filtering through the stones and conjured up some pleasant images in Gil's mind. Within the young man imprisoned by those walls, by his guilt, and by his adolescence, almost stifled by anguish and by the all-pervasive smell of tar, the powers of imagination began to unfold with extraordinary vigor. They struggled bravely with all the aforementioned obstacles, and in that battle they grew strong. Listening, Gil could pick out the particular squeak and grind of cranes and pulley blocks. His work gang had not been stationed in Brest for very long, and thus he had not yet become impervious to the vivid scenery of the naval shipyards. He had taken in those clear, incisive noises that corresponded to a sunbeam striking a brass rail, a splinter of glass, to a decorated launch flashing by with its load of very upright, gilded officers, to a sail out in the Roads, to the slow maneuvering of a cruiser, to the naval cadets' businesslike yet puerile rigging drill. In the prisoner, each one of these noises released an image a thousand times more exciting than their 174 I JEAN GENET actual origin. As the sea is our natural symbol for freedom, any visual image including it is charged with that symbolic power, becomes a metaphor of freedom; and in the captive's soul each one of those images left a wound, made even more painful by the very banality of the real things corresponding to it. The spontaneous apparition of a great steamer in mid-ocean would cause an instant crisis of yearning in any child's mind, but Gil's consciousness was no longer so easily invaded by steamer and ocean; rather, it was the characteristic noise of a chain ( and can it be that the screeching of a chain releases the mechanism of yearning? A simple chain, its links rusting away from the inside? ) . . . Without being aware of it, Gil was serving a dolorous apprenticeship as a poet. The image of the chain cut across some fibers of his awareness, and then the cut widened and became wide enough to let in that ship, and the ocean, and the world, and on to the final destruction of Gil who had gone out of himself and had found tha_t his only true existense was in this world which had just stabbed him, run him through, annihilated him. Squatting most of the day behind the same big

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovitch Vronsky, and one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg. I made his acquaintance in Tver when I was there on official business, and he came there for the levy of recruits. Fearfully rich, handsome, great connections, an aide-de-camp, and with all that a very nice, good-natured fellow. But he’s more than simply a good-natured fellow, as I’ve found out here—he’s a cultivated man, too, and very intelligent; he’s a man who’ll make his mark.” Levin scowled and was dumb. “Well, he turned up here soon after you’d gone, and as I can see, he’s over head and ears in love with Kitty, and you know that her mother....” “Excuse me, but I know nothing,” said Levin, frowning gloomily. And immediately he recollected his brother Nikolay and how hateful he was to have been able to forget him. “You wait a bit, wait a bit,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling and touching his hand. “I’ve told you what I know, and I repeat that in this delicate and tender matter, as far as one can conjecture, I believe the chances are in your favor.” Levin dropped back in his chair; his face was pale. “But I would advise you to settle the thing as soon as may be,” pursued Oblonsky, filling up his glass. “No, thanks, I can’t drink any more,” said Levin, pushing away his glass. “I shall be drunk.... Come, tell me how are you getting on?” he went on, obviously anxious to change the conversation. “One word more: in any case I advise you to settle the question soon. Tonight I don’t advise you to speak,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Go round tomorrow morning, make an offer in due form, and God bless you....” “Oh, do you still think of coming to me for some shooting? Come next spring, do,” said Levin. Now his whole soul was full of remorse that he had begun this conversation with Stepan Arkadyevitch. A feeling such as his was profaned by talk of the rivalry of some Petersburg officer, of the suppositions and the counsels of Stepan Arkadyevitch. Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. He knew what was passing in Levin’s soul. “I’ll come some day,” he said. “But women, my boy, they’re the pivot everything turns upon. Things are in a bad way with me, very bad. And it’s all through women. Tell me frankly now,” he pursued, picking up a cigar and keeping one hand on his glass; “give me your advice.” “Why, what is it?” “I’ll tell you. Suppose you’re married, you love your wife, but you’re fascinated by another woman....” “Excuse me, but I’m absolutely unable to comprehend how ... just as I can’t comprehend how I could now, after my dinner, go straight to a baker’s shop and steal a roll.” Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes sparkled more than usual. “Why not? A roll will sometimes smell so good one can’t resist it.” “Himmlisch ist’s, wenn ich bezwungen

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But of late new inner relations had arisen between him and her, which frightened Vronsky by their indefiniteness. Only the day before she had told him that she was with child. And he felt that this fact and what she expected of him called for something not fully defined in that code of principles by which he had hitherto steered his course in life. And he had been indeed caught unawares, and at the first moment when she spoke to him of her position, his heart had prompted him to beg her to leave her husband. He had said that, but now thinking things over he saw clearly that it would be better to manage to avoid that; and at the same time, as he told himself so, he was afraid whether it was not wrong. “If I told her to leave her husband, that must mean uniting her life with mine; am I prepared for that? How can I take her away now, when I have no money? Supposing I could arrange.... But how can I take her away while I’m in the service? If I say that—I ought to be prepared to do it, that is, I ought to have the money and to retire from the army.” And he grew thoughtful. The question whether to retire from the service or not brought him to the other and perhaps the chief though hidden interest of his life, of which none knew but he.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  From her room Lo yelled she had it. We are quite a lending library in this house, thunder of God. Friday . I wonder what my academic publishers would say if I were to quote in my textbook Ronsard’s “ la vermeillette fente ” or Remy Belleau’s “ un petit mont feutré de mousse délicate, tracé sur le milieu d’un fillet escarlatte ” and so forth. I shall probably have another breakdown if I stay any longer in this house, under the strain of this intolerable temptation, by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride. Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche? Bloated feeling. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the roof. Grandma is visiting. “Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls’ magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there.” The tiny madman in his padded cell. Incidentally: if I ever commit a serious murder … Mark the “if.” The urge should be something more than the kind of thing that happened to me with Valeria. Carefully mark that then I was rather inept. If and when you wish to sizzle me to death, remember that only a spell of insanity could ever give me the simple energy to be a brute (all this amended, perhaps). Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? For instance I hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my only thought is to conceal the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed. At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to grow): “Better don’t, if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty.” Instantly Lo pushed her plate of boiled fish away, all but knocking her milk over, and bounced out of the dining room. “Would it bore you very much,” quoth Haze, “to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?” Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming from quaking caverns where the two rivals were having a ripping row. She has not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been fun.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And slipping her into a pair of high black leather boots he told her to stand in them while he bent to lace them tightly to her knees and then smooth the leather around her ankles until it was cleaving like a glove there. Not until Beauty lifted her foot did she realize each boot was fitted at the toe and heel with a horseshoe. And the tops were hard and strong so that nothing could hurt her toes. "But what is happening, what is the Bridle Path?" she asked in a great fluster. "Shhhhh..." Leon said, pinching and prodding her breasts to give them as he said, "some color." He then glossed Beauty's eyelids and eyelashes with oil and smoothed a little rouge into her lips and into her nipples. Beauty drew back instinctively but his touch was sure and quick and he took no notice of her. But what bothered her most was that her body felt cool and vulnerable. She could feel the sheathing of leather against her calves, and all the rest of her felt worse than naked. It was more terrible than any of the smaller adornments. "What is going to take place?" she asked again, but Leon had thrust her over the end of the table and now oiled her buttocks vigorously. "Well healed," he said. "The Prince must have guessed last night you would run tonight and he spared you." Beauty felt his strong fingers plying her flesh and a dread came over her. So they would spank her, but they always did. Only it would be in the presence of many others? Every humiliating spank she had received before the eyes of others had cost her dearly, though she knew now she would suffer any amount of paddling for the Prince, but she had not really been given a hard, thorough spanking for the pleasure of others since the Inn on the road where the Innkeeper's daughter had spanked her for the soldiers and the common people at the windows. "But it must come," she thought. And a vision of the Court watching it as some ritual caused her to feel an undeniable curiosity that soon enough gave way to panic. "My Lord, please tell me..." Amid the crowd about her, she saw other girls with braided hair and boots. So she was not alone. And there were Princes being fitted with boots also.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Look, it's this way. Let me explain. Don't get me wrong now, I'm not saying that they'll get you, I'm sure they won't. But you never know. And if they did, it would be better for you, if you weren't carrying a gun." Querelle's private reasoning went as follows : if he starts shooting at the cops, the cops'll shoot right back. They'll either kill him, or they'll take him alive. If they arrest him, theill find out, either from a Gil weakened by his wounds, or by conducting an intensive investigation, that this revolver used to belong to Lieutenant Seblon, and then what else could that poor sod do but put the finger on his steward. In trying to follow the movements in our protagonists' souls, we are also trying to cast some light on our own. Feel free to notice that the attitude we would have liked to adopt-with a view to, or perhaps, with a foreknowledge of the desired end of the story-has led us to the discovery of a given psychological world that supports the idea of freedom of choice; but as soon as the progression of the story tequ.ires one or the other of its main characters to pronounce a judgment, to take thought, we are immediately confronted by the arbitrary: the character escapes from its author, becoming 251 I QUERELLE its own, singular being. Thus we have to admit that the author is able to reveal certain traits of this character only after the fact. Now in the case of Querelle, if an explanation is needed, let us try this one, no better, no more despicable than any other: his lack of imagination being of the same order as his lack of feelings, he misjudged the officer. Seblon's diary bears witness to the fact that rather than denounce Querelle he would have taken the blame on himself. It is true that in one entry the Lieutenant expressed a desire to point out Querelle as the murderer, but we shall see what sublime use he then made of this desire. Gil thought he was losing his mind. He could not for the life of him comprehend his friend's intentions. He heard himself say : "So that's it, I'll have to go out there naked, stark naked.'' Querelle had just collected the sailor clothes. He couldn't afford to leave Gil anything that might incriminate him. "Shut up, you little runt, you won't have to go naked." That particularly wounding remark subjugated Gil, who had, gradually incited to it by Querelle's gentle yet a little remote behavior, reached the point of rebellion. Querelle knew admirablv .

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Airline passengers usually look like where they’re going—business suits to Washington, D.C., jeans to L.A.—but I can’t imagine a convention of such unconventional visitors in Rapid City. It’s the kind of town where people still angle-park their cars in front of the movie palace. My bearded seatmate is asleep in his studded jacket and nose ring, so I just accept one more mystery of the road. At the airport, I meet five friends from different parts of the country. We are a diverse group of women—a Cherokee activist and her grown-up daughter, two African American writers and one musician, and me. We’ve been invited to a Lakota Sioux powwow celebrating the powerful place that women held before patriarchy arrived from Europe, and efforts now to restore that place. As we drive toward the Badlands, we see an acre of motorcycles around each isolated diner and motel. This solves the mystery of the leather and chains, but creates another. When we stop for coffee, our waitress can’t believe we don’t know. Every August since 1938, bikers from all over the world have come here for a rally named after Sturgis, a town that’s just a wide place in the road. They are drawn by this sparsely populated space of forests, mountains, and a grid of highways so straight that it is recognizable from outer space. Right now about 250,000 bikers are filling every motel and campground within five hundred miles. Our band of six strong women takes note. The truth is we are a little afraid of so many bikers in one place. How could we not be? We have all learned from movies that bikers travel in packs, treat their women like possessions, and may see other women as sexual fair game. But we don’t run into the bikers because we spend our days traveling down unmarked roads, past the last stand of trees, in Indian Country. We eat home-cooked food brought in trucks, sit on blankets around powwow grounds where dancers follow the heartbeat of drums, and watch Indian ponies as decorated as the dancers. When it rains, a rainbow stretches from can’t-see to can’t-see, and fields of wet sweet grass become as fragrant as gigantic flowers. Only when we return late each night to our cabins do we see motorcycles in the parking lot. While walking in Rapid City, I hear a biker say to his tattooed woman partner, “Honey, shop as long as you want—I’ll meet you at the cappuccino place.” I assume this is an aberration. On our last morning, I enter the lodge alone for an early breakfast, trying to remain both inconspicuous and open-minded. Still, I’m hyperconscious of a room full of knife sheaths, jackboots, and very few women. In the booth next to me, a man with chains around his muscles and a woman in leather pants and an improbable hairdo are taking note of my presence. Finally, the woman comes over to talk.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters! D EAR M UMMY AND H UMMY , Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time. Love. D OLLY “The dumb child,” said Mrs. Humbert, “has left out a word before ‘time.’ That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me.” 20 There was a woodlake ( Hourglass Lake—not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning. We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip “in the ebony” (as John had quipped) at five o’clock in the morning last Sunday. “The water,” I said, “must have been quite cold.” “That is not the point,” said the logical doomed dear. “He is subnormal, you see. And,” she continued (in that carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), “I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that moron.” Feeling. “We feel Dolly is not doing as well” etc. (from an old school report). The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed. “Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream,” pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head—shy of that dream—and communing with the tawny ground. “I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like that German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house.” “No room,” I said. “Come,” she said with her quizzical smile, “surely, chéri , you underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would put her in Lo’s room.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Would you send Princess Beauty to the village if you felt she deserved it?" "Of course I would," said the Prince. But he did not sound convincing. "I would do it in an instant." "O, but you couldn't!" Lady Juliana protested. "She doesn't deserve it, so it does not matter," the Prince insisted. "But we are talking about Prince Tristan, and Prince Tristan, for all the abuse and punishments he has endured, remains a mystery to everyone. He needs the rigors of the village just as Prince Alexi once needed the kitchen to teach him humility." Lord Stefan was deeply troubled, and the words rigor and humility seemed to pierce him. He rose and begged the Prince to come with him and make a better judgment of it. "They go tomorrow. The weather is already very warm and the villagers are already preparing for the auction. I've sent him to the prisoners' yard to wait there." "Come, Beauty," the Prince said, rising. "It will be good for you to see this and come to understand it." Beauty was intrigued and followed eagerly. But the Prince's coldness and sternness made her uneasy. She tried to remain close to Lady Juliana as they proceeded along a pathway, out of the gardens, past the kitchen and stables to a plain dirty yard in which she saw a great cart, without its horse, standing on four wheels against the walls that surrounded the castle. There were common soldiers here, menials. She felt her nakedness as she was made to follow the brightly dressed trio. Her welts and cuts smarted anew and fearfully she looked up to see a small pen, fenced in crude sticks, in which a gaggle of naked Princes and Princesses stood with their hands bound to the backs of their necks, milling as if it were less exhausting to walk than to stand by the hour. A common soldier dealt a blow now and then through the fence with a heavy leather belt that sent a squealing Princess towards the middle of the group for cover. And, catching other naked buttocks, he walloped them as well, producing a groan from a young Prince who turned to him resentfully. It infuriated Beauty to see this lowly soldier abusing such lovely white legs and bottoms. Yet she could not keep her eyes off the slaves who backed away from the fence only to be tormented from the other side by another idle, devilish boy who struck much harder and with much more deliberation. But now the soldiers saw the Prince and bowed at once, showing him the strictest attention. And it seemed at that same moment the slaves saw the little group approaching.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She could not hear the Prince's angry voice, but she could not make out the words, and when let down again at his feet, she ran again so that two Pages came pounding after her. She struggled as she was gagged and bound, and she did not know where she was being taken. It was dark and they were descending stairs, and she knew an appalling moment of regret and panic. They would hand her in the Hall of Punishments and if she could not endure even that, how would she endure the village? But a strange calm came over her even before her captors had reached the Slaves' Hall, and when she was thrust in a dark cell to lie on the cold stone floor with her bonds cutting into her flesh, she knew a quiet exhilaration. Yet she continued to weep, her sex pulsing it seemed with her sobs and there was only silence around her. It was almost morning when she was roused. Lord Gregory snapped his fingers as the Pages undid her fetters and lifted her to her feet on legs that were weak and unsteady. She felt the wallop of Lord Gregory's belt. "Spoilt, disgraceful Princess!" he hissed between his teeth, but she was drowsy, softened with desire and dreaming of the village. She gave a little cry as she felt his angry blows, but she realized with wonder that the Pages were gagging her again and binding her hands to the back of her neck roughly. She was going to the village! "O Beauty, Beauty," came Lady Juliana's voice crying beside her. "Why did you become afraid, why did you try to run, you had been so good and strong, my darling." "Spoilt, arrogant one," Lord Gregory cursed her again as she was driven towards the open doorway. She could see the morning sky over the treetops. "You did it deliberately!" Lord Gregory whispered in her ear as he whipped her onto the garden path. "Well, you shall rue the day, and how bitterly you will weep and there will be no one there to hear you." Beauty struggled to keep from smiling. But could they have seen a smile behind the cruel leather bit in her teeth? It did not matter. She was running fast, with her knees lifted, around the side of the castle as Lord Gregory pointed the way, his blows quick and smarting, and Lady Juliana wept as she ran along, too. "O, Beauty, I can't bear it." The stars were not yet faded away, yet the air was already warm and caressing. They crossed the empty prison yard, entering the courtyard between the great doors, and lowered drawbridge of the castle. And there stood the huge cart of slaves, already tethered to the heavy white mares who would pull it down to the village. For one moment Beauty knew terror.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Gil started to work in the shipyard than the mason had showered him with his attentions, favors which sometimes were real masterpieces of subtlety. He also bought Gil glasses of the syrupy white wine in the bistros of Recouvrance. But within that steely hand slapping him on the back in the bar Gil sensed-and trembled at sensing-the presence of another, softer hand. The one wanted to subjugate him, so that the other could then caress him. The last couple of days Theo had been trying to make him angry. It riled him that he had not yet had his way with the younger man. In the ·shipyard Gil would sometimes look across at him : it was rare not to find Theo's gaze fixed on him. Theo was a scrupulous workman, regarded as exemplary by all his mates. Before placing it in its bed of cement, his hands caressed each stone, turned it over, chose the best-looking surface, and always fitted it so that the best side faced outward. Gil raised his hand, stopped stroking the cat. He put it down gently, next to the stove, on a soft spot covered with shavings. Thus he perhaps made his companions believe that he was a very sweet-tempered man. He even wanted his gentleness to be provoking. Finally, for his own benefit, he had to give the appearance of wishing to distance himself from any excessive reaction induced by Theo's insult. He went to the table, sat down at his place. Theo did not look at him. Gil saw his thick mop of hair and thick neck bent over the white china bowl. He was talking and laughing heartily with one of his friends. The overall sound was one of mouths lapping up spoonfuls of thick soup. Once the meal was finished, Gil was the first one to get up; he took off his sweater and went to work on the dirty dishes. For a few minutes, his shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up above elbows, his face reddened and damp from the steam, his bare arms plunging into the greasy dishwater, he looked like a young female kitchen worker in some restaurant. He knew, all of a sudden, that he was no longer just an ordinary workman. For several minutes he felt he had turned into a strange and ambiguous being: a young man 43 I QUERELLE

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she added: “Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again” (Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in minus time-space or plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthesis included). And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita. 25 One might suppose that with all blocks removed and a prospect of delirious and unlimited delights before me, I would have mentally sunk back, heaving a sigh of delicious relief. Eh bien, pas du tout! Instead of basking in the beams of smiling Chance, I was obsessed by all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears. For instance: might it not surprise people that Lo was so consistently debarred from attending festive and funeral functions in her immediate family? You remember—we had not had her at our wedding. Or another thing: granted it was the long hairy arm of Coincidence that had reached out to remove an innocent woman, might Coincidence not ignore in a heathen moment what its twin lamb had done and hand Lo a premature note of commiseration? True, the accident had been reported only by the Ramsdale Journal —not by the Parkington Recorder or the Climax Herald , Camp Q being in another state, and local deaths having no federal news interest; but I could not help fancying that somehow Dolly Haze had been informed already, and that at the very time I was on my way to fetch her, she was being driven to Ramsdale by friends unknown to me. Still more disquieting than all these conjectures and worries, was the fact that Humbert Humbert, a brand-new American citizen of obscure European origin, had taken no steps toward becoming the legal guardian of his dead wife’s daughter (twelve years and seven months old). Would I ever dare take those steps? I could not repress a shiver whenever I imagined my nudity hemmed in by mysterious statutes in the merciless glare of the Common Law.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  The most frustrating friends are the ones who are gambles. When you dine with them, you spend the entire evening working up the nerve to ask whether they’ll walk you home. Sometimes it’s yes; sometimes it’s no. You never know which it will be, so you’re distracted while they chatter over nachos; you hear only the ticking of an internal timer, counting the minutes until you must leave the restaurant. It reverberates in your chest. Maybe your friend will escort you home one time, but the next time you make late dinner plans, that timer will wind up again. You will feel its tension in your palms as you eat ceviche. The timer exists for that final moment: the moment you reach your door safely. At that moment: ping! You feel a calm so thick that it startles you. Two Weeks After I wrote about the masturbator. I wrote about him because jokes are antidotes—they suck the power out of memories, right? So I posted a Facebook note. I wrote that masturbation, in my world, was only supposed to happen in American Pie, or behind the twin veils of locked doors and Catholic guilt. I joked about my clammy 911 call. I joked about the hoodie, the sweatpants, the sturdy legs. Then I waited for closure. For praise. For high fives and quick relief. For a certificate to arrive in my mailbox that said, “You Are Tough and Self-Aware.” No certificate arrived. Instead, concern. Other women messaged me. They asked if I was okay. I told them yes but meant no. Some were women I knew well; others were women I barely knew at all. “It happened to me too,” some of these women said. A man looking through a bedroom window. A stranger masturbating on the train in London. “He was right there, on the seat across from me,” that woman said. “I was terrified. I just moved to a different seat and waited until the next stop.” One story. Two stories. Three. Women in my life lit up like coordinates on a secret map. There was an unrequested camaraderie in it: a sense of uneasy companionship. We had all been touched without being touched. We shared something we’d never asked for. Part of the terror of my encounter, I realized, was this: it was unexceptional. In a way, I even felt lucky. I did not like feeling lucky. But there was sinister comfort in the sentiment: “It could have been worse.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Now kneel up, fold your arms behind your back to show your exquisite breasts, that's it, and arch your back more becomingly. Her hair, Felix, brush it." And as the Page hastened to obey, gently untangling Beauty's long locks down her back, Beauty saw the Lady Juliana take from a chest nearby a long oval paddle. It was very like the paddle used on the Bridle Path, but nothing as big or as heavy. In fact it was so flexible that Lady Juliana, setting down her basket of flowers, could make it vibrate when she pressed the tip of it with her thumb. It was white, smooth, and limber. It will sting, Beauty realized, but it will not truly hurt as badly as the Queen's hand, and it will hurt nothing as badly as that weapon on the Bridle Path, yet she realized her buttocks were so thoroughly welted that each light blow would enkindle a certain amount of pain in her. Lady Juliana, laughing, whispering with the Queen in her girlish manner, turned back as Felix finished. Beauty knelt waiting. "And so our gracious Sovereign spanked you over her lap, did she? And you have had the Bridle Path, and you have learned something of grooming. And then there has been your Lord and Master's temper and demands, and now and then a little routine smacking from your groom or Lord Gregory." "My groom has never smacked me," Beauty thought crossly, but she merely replied, "Yes, my Lady..." as was expected. "But now you shall learn some actual discipline, for in the little game I devise your will to please is direly tested. And don't think you shan't profit from it. Now..." She lifted a handful of roses from the basket. "I shall scatter these about the room, and do you know what you shall do, my precious girl, you shall run very fast to gather each one in your teeth and place in the lap of your Sovereign. And when she has quite finished with you, you shall go fetch another, and another, and another. And you shall do that as fast as you can, and do you know why, because you are commanded to do so, and you shall be much punished if you do not rush to obey as we command you." She raised her eyebrows, smiling at Beauty. "Yes, my Lady," Beauty replied, unable to think, though the thought of having to hurry to obey struck a strange new note of apprehension in her. Gracelessness. She dreaded it.

• From Querelle (1953)

  30 I JEAN GENET trimmed "American style," was undoubtedly a souvenir of 1918. Thanks to those doughboys, to the Black Market, and to the traffic in women he had been able to get rich quick and to purchase La Feria. His long boat trips and fishing parties had tanned his skin. His features were hard, the bridge of his nose finn, the eyes small and lively, the pate bald. "What time d'you think you'll get here?'' "I'll have to get organized. Have to get the bag out of there. No problem, though. I've got it figured out." With a flicker of suspicion, glass in hand, the boss looked at Querelle. "Yeah? But, make no mistake, you're on your own. It's none of my business . " Mario remained motionless, almost absent: he was leaning against the counter with his back reflected in the mirror behind him. Without a word he removed his elbows from the counter, thus changing his interesting posture, and went to the big mirror next to the proprietor: now it looked as if he were lean ing against himself. And now, faced with both men, Querelle experienced a sudden malaise, a sinking of the heart, su ch as killers know. Mario's calmness and good looks disconcerted him. They were on too grand a scale. The brothelkeeper, Norbert, was far too powerful-looking. So was Mario. The outlines of their two bodies met to form one continuous pat tern, and this seemed to blur and blend their muscular bodies as well as their faces. It was impossible, the boss couldn't be an informer; but then it seemed equally out of the question for Mario to be anything but a cop. Within himself, Quere11e felt a trembling, a vacillation, almost to the point of losing himself, by vomiting it all out, ail that he reaUy was. Seized by vertigo in the presence of these powerful muscles and nerves that he perceived as towering above him-as one might when throwing one's head back to appraise the height of a giant pine tree-that kept on doubling and merging again, crowned by Mario's beauty, but dominated by Norbert's bald head and buUish neck,

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, perhaps, too, she didn’t like it when I gave him the rug. It was all so simple, but he took it so awkwardly, and was so long thanking me, that I felt awkward too. And then that portrait of me he did so well. And most of all that look of confusion and tenderness! Yes, yes, that’s it!” Kitty repeated to herself with horror. “No, it can’t be, it oughtn’t to be! He’s so much to be pitied!” she said to herself directly after. This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life. Chapter 34 Before the end of the course of drinking the waters, Prince Shtcherbatsky, who had gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to Russian friends—to get a breath of Russian air, as he said—came back to his wife and daughter. The views of the prince and of the princess on life abroad were completely opposed. The princess thought everything delightful, and in spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not—for the simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she was affected, which did not altogether suit her. The prince, on the contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself abroad less European than he was in reality. The prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags on his cheeks, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good humor was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of Kitty’s friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the reports the princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed in Kitty, troubled the prince and aroused his habitual feeling of jealousy of everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a dread that his daughter might have got out of the reach of his influence into regions inaccessible to him. But these unpleasant matters were all drowned in the sea of kindliness and good humor which was always within him, and more so than ever since his course of Carlsbad waters. The day after his arrival the prince, in his long overcoat, with his Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set off with his daughter to the spring in the greatest good humor.

• From Querelle (1953)

  already encountered in Querelle was equally apparent in his brother Robert who let himself be loved by Madame Lysiane, sinking into the wraps of her tough and tender maternal femininity. He enjoyed floating around in it and was sometimes even tempted to forget himself. As for the Madam, she had at long last found a chance to revolve round an axle and to accomplish a "true marriage of mast and sail." In bed, she worshipped at the blase altar of her lover's outstretched body by rubbing her face and her heavy boobs all over it. During Robert's languorous arousal, Madame Lysiane enjoyed the foreplay, starting out with a mock version of it: after pecking at the base of her lover's nose, she would suddenly and greedily pop that entire organ into her mouth. Sensitive to all tickling, Robert would then snort, withdraw his nose from the hot wet mouth and wipe off the saliva. As she looked up and saw him come through the parlor door, Querelle's face gave her the same shock she had experienced when she first saw the two brothers together, with their look-alike faces. Quite often since that day a pang of anxiety flashed through the gentle and regular progression of her placid mind, and this made her aware of the undercurrent that would alter the course of her life. So great was Querelle's resemblance to her lover that for a moment she even thought (not really believing it) that it had to be Robert, dressed up as a sailor. Querelle's face, advancing toward her with a smile, both annoyed and completely fascinated her. "So what? They're brothers, so it's quite natural," she reassured herself. But she became obsessed with the monstrousness of this so perfect resemblance. I am a repulsive object I have loved him too much, and excess . of love makes you weak. Too strong a love upsets the organism in all its depths-and what rises up to the surface is merely nauseating. 0 0 118 I JEAN GENET Your faces are cymbals that never strike each other, but glide in silence over each other's waters. Querelle's murders multiplied his personality, each one creating a new one that did not forget its predecessors. The last murderer born of the last murder lived -in the company of his noblest friends, those who had preceded him and whom he now surpassed. And so he convened them in that ceremony the bandits of yore called blood marriage: all the participants stuck their knives into the same victim, a ceremony essentially similar to the one of which we have this description : "Rosa said to Nucor: " 'This is a real man. You may take off your socks and serve the kirsch.'

• From Querelle (1953)

  Now, all of a sudden, two steps and yet very far away from her, the brothers reunited by an unknown youngster who naturally became the personification of that brotherly love her anguish labored over. But as soon as she had admitted this to herself she felt that she was being ridiculous. She wanted to turn her attention to the clients and whores, but was unable to forget the brothers, to whom she was now turning her back. She hesitated, then chose the pretext of talking to Robert about an expected delivery of liquor, to go over and take a look at the kid. He was adorable. He was worthy of the two lovers. She sized him up. " . . . and when the Cinzano man comes, teJl him to wait for me." She made as if to leave the parlor, but turning back immediately, smiling, she pointed at Roger: And, smiling even more : "You know, this could get me into trouble. And I'm not joking." Robert, trying to look indifferent, asked Querelle : "\Vho is he?" "He's the kid brother of a girl I know. A little chickie I'm after." Quite ignorant of the love between men, Robert thought that the boy had to be another one of his brother's fairy lovers. 268 I JEAN GENET He didn't dare look at him. Madame Lysiane was in the ladies' room, masturbating. Like her, Roger was very excited by it all, and when he left La Feria and went on to the old prison, he was in such a vulnerable frame of mind that (to use a hideous but appropriate expression ) Gil had no difficulty in breaking him in. If Querelle, as she had said to him a little sadly, didn't have such great powers of erection, his rod at least was no disappointment, it had been worth dreaming about. It was a · heavy, thick, rather massive cock, not elegant, but potentially vigorous. At long last Madame Lysiane found a little peace of mind, in that Querelle's member r�lly was different from Robert's. There, at least, one could tell one from the other. At first Querelle accepted the patronne's advances rather nonchalantly, but as soon as he discovered that this could be a way of taking revenge on his brother for the humiliation he had caused him, he decided to speed up the affair. The first time, while he was taking off his clothes, his fury-revenge drawing near!made him move with such alacrity that Madame Lysiane imagined him to be in the clutches of wild desire. In reality, Querelle was entering this bout with his body on the defensive. His amorous submission to a real cop had liberated him. He was at peace. Whenever he met Nono with whom he no longer wished to enter into secret frolics, he was not surprised to find that Nono seemed in no hurry to remind him of them, either.