Anxiety

Passages

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

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I can't quite decide. The first day's bound to be a little anxious, perhaps." I grinned at Helene, who smiled capably back, and then looked down. "Do you want to go out for a drink?" It was the sort of offer she didn't regularly get, and she showed a shy person's brave readiness to take it up. She was holding a bag that contained the day's slim takings and I waited while she ran upstairs to the safe with it. In the corners of the hall, and in the shuttered room of family portraits beyond, the red spots of the alarm-beams blinked on and off with vigilant intermittence. When Helene came down she activated them from a panel in a cupboard, and we had thirty seconds to get out, which gave us a suspiciously hasty look. "Do you know somewhere round here?" I said, not keen on a long walk before my drink. She frowned at me humorously. "There's nowhere here," she said. "But if it's urgent, I've got a car." I weighed it up quickly and chose the Golden Calf. She drove us there in a yawing 2CV which had various things wrong with it. I chatted in the forced informal way of a passenger in a virtual stranger's car, whilst she frowned through the windscreen and stamped on the pedals alternately. She seemed disconcerted by the bar, by its high brown gloom and inartistic decor, which were wonderful to me and a relief from everything else. We sat down beside a pair of arthritic domino-players, and when the old waiter came I ordered a large beer and she asked—with a certain polite democratic negligence—for a coffee and a glass of sparkling water. I watched her watch the waiter's retreat, the impatient haste with which he denied or overrode some deformity of his foot. "Is this where you normally come?" "I come here from time to time, as a change from the other bar I go to, where I know a lot of people, who would be a distraction from talking to you, which is what I wanted to do. At the Cassette there's a juke-box, and great scrums of young people shouting their heads off. Here there's no music and everyone's over ninety and they don't talk to you or even quite approve of you and it's all rather restful." "Yes, I've been to the Cassette," she said. "Jan, my fiancé, has got several gay friends, who used to go there all the time." "I see." "It's quite good fun, isn't it, but there are so many handsome young men and I know the last thing they are interested in is me! But perhaps, as you say, that is rather restful." And she blushed at the sudden shift of level and the mimicking airiness with which she brought out the last words. "Did you know I was gay the first time we met?" I asked.

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

  When I’m consulted on what to do about custody of babies I advocate creating a postdivorce environment that’s as close as possible to life in a good intact home. The baby should have a chance to form his earliest relationships within a stable environment, to have a sense of a solid routine and predictable care. If the parents can work this out, they can surely consider overnights in the two houses and carefully observe the child’s response. Parents often need help in overcoming their fear that the baby will not be safe in the care of the other parent. Babies vary greatly in their capacity to deal with change. As the child grows older, parents can increase the time he spends in each home. The child who is happily attached to one parent is able to deal more happily and easily with the other parent and with other caregivers. Putting the child’s best interests forward and honoring what is best for the child is extremely hard to do in many postdivorce families. It requires parents to stand apart from their raw, hurt, jealous, competetive feelings and take an objective, compassionate look at what life will be like for their child. Not every parent can do that, but surely the job of the court is to give priority to the helpless child over the demands of the parent. How Older Children Cope with Joint CustodyWHAT ABOUT THE school-aged child? Can all children handle living in two homes? Can everyone deal with two sets of friends and the need to engage in activities that don’t conflict with their parents’ schedules? Obviously there are differences among children that affect their capacity to deal flexibly with changes in daily life. The chief job of the school-age child is to learn at school and to develop socially. For this reason, the child’s personality and temperament need to be carefully considered in making custody plans. People are born with different levels of reactivity and arousal, a basic difference in neurological “hard wiring” stays with us through our lives. Some children adjust easily to change and transition, indeed, some seek it out and thrive on it. Others have a much harder time accepting change. It stresses their neurological system and it takes them longer to get used to it. Translating these basic differences into the school and social arenas of children, it follows that kids for whom transition is harder need more protection so that transitions don’t interfere with learning and making friends. Some children can spend the weekend with one parent and be dropped off at school Monday morning without missing a beat. Other kids with more sensitive temperaments are not able to do any of this unless they’ve had a day or at least an evening to readjust. Without a transitional day for reentry they fall behind in school and in play.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  the locker room. “Did you bring your wraps?” “Wraps?” I had no idea what he was talking about. “Never mind. Here, use these.” He handed me two rolls of cotton material. “This is Ness, your trainer.” Ness was big—bigger than Oscar, who’s only five ten and a welterweight (147 pounds). This guy looked like Tyson, a real heavyweight. His arms were massive hammers, and his navy T-shirt strained against his chest, the white Blue Velvet logo taut between his pecs. “Hey, what’s your name again?” he asked as Geno walked away. “Charles.” “How ’bout I call you ‘C’?” “Sure.” I thought, Whatever. “And you, your name ...” “Ness, as in Eliot.” He walked me to an empty area in front of a huge mirror that covered almost the entire wall. Off to my right was a Latino guy who looked about fifteen. He was boxing his re flection, moving and throwing punches to the beat pulsing from the speakers in the corners of the gym. “First, you gotta warm up,” Ness instructed as he led me through a series of squats and jumping jacks. Then he handed me a jump rope. “Do two rounds of rope, and then we’ll put on some gloves.” My first thought was, This is the test for fags. Ness turned away, and I looked above the mirror at the wall, where the owner had painted all things are possible. I took a deep breath and threw the rope over my head. I tried to sort of run in place and not skip to Whitney Houston, who was belting out “I’m Every Woman.” I managed to keep the rope moving for about five or six rotations—with girlish double-dutch chants going through my head—before I tripped myself. Ness was talking to Geno and pointed to a ringside box with three lights—green, yellow, red. The Bell. I soon learned that The Bell runs continuously whenever the gym is open. Like a traf fic cop, The Bell dictates the gym’s movements: three minutes of action (green), one minute rest (red). (Yellow means thirty seconds left: better throw your punch!) After two rounds of rope, I nodded to Ness, who sat me down and said, “Give me your hand.” I held out my right hand; he took it and then spread my fin gers apart. He unfurled one of the cotton rolls Geno had given me and began to wrap my hand. It felt odd to have his big brown hand take my pale pink one and gently wrap the mate rial—stronger than gauze, more like swaddling—between my fingers and around my wrist and across my palm. Ness ex plained that wrapping hands is crucial to protect the knuckles. As he wove the cloth between my fingers, stopping occasion ally to test the tightness of the layers, I felt shy, as if we were on a first date.

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

  He put the gangs and violence of South Central behind him and showed remarkable progress. But within a year, California probation authorities ordered him to return to Los Angeles because he was on probation following his adjudication as a ward of the court for a prior offense. In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity. The random stops, questioning, and harassment dramatically increase the risk of arrest for petty crimes. Many of these children develop criminal records for behavior that more affluent children engage in with impunity. Forced back to South Central, blocks from where his brother was murdered, Antonio struggled. A court later found that “[l]iving just blocks from where he was shot and his brother was killed, Nuñez suffered trauma symptoms, including flashbacks, an urgent need to avoid the area, a heightened awareness of potential threats, and an intensified need to protect himself from real or perceived threats.” He got his hands on a gun for self-defense but was quickly arrested for it and placed in a juvenile camp where supervisors reported that he eagerly participated in and positively responded to the structured environment and guidance of staff members. After returning from the camp, Antonio was invited to a party where two men twice Antonio’s age told him that they were planning to fake a kidnapping to get money from a relative who would pay the ransom. They insisted that Antonio join them. Fourteen-year-old Antonio got in a car with the men to pick up the ransom money. The pretend victim sat in the backseat, while Juan Perez drove and Antonio sat in the passenger seat. Before they arrived at their Orange County destination to retrieve the money, they found themselves being followed—and then chased—by two Latino men in a gray van. At some point, Perez and the other man gave Antonio a gun and told him to shoot at the van, and a dangerous high-speed shoot-out unfolded. The men chasing them were undercover police officers—but Antonio didn’t know that when he fired. When a marked police car joined the pursuit, Antonio dropped the gun just before the car crashed into some trees. No one was injured, but Antonio and Perez were charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted murder of the police officers. Antonio and his twenty-seven-year-old co-defendant were tried together in a joint trial, and both were found guilty. Under California law, a juvenile has to be at least sixteen to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for murder.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Skipper still had a few things around, old boots, fishing gear, a stack of car magazines, but my Scout uniform hanging in the closet was the only sign that I had ever lived there. I went to Dwight’s room. Even though I knew he was gone I held my breath and turned the doorknob slowly, then threw the door open. The bed was unmade. The air smelled sour. I turned on the light and poked around. In one of the dresser drawers I found a carton of Camels from which I shook two packs. I also found a stack of official Scout forms, including those that Scoutmasters sent to headquarters to report their boys’ completion of the requirements for various ranks and badges. I took a few of these. If Dwight wouldn’t promote me to Eagle, I’d just have to promote myself. I went to the kitchen, rinsed out the glass, put it back in the cupboard. Then I turned off all the lights in the house and carried a couple of target rifles out to the car. Chuck came around to open the trunk and started hissing at me. What the fuck was I doing, where the fuck had I been? I could see he was beside himself, so I didn’t try to answer. I went back in the house and got the two shotguns. Then I got the Marlin and the Garand. On my last trip I rounded up the Zeiss binoculars and the Puma hunting knife and a tooled leather scabbard Dwight had bought for the Marlin. He’d planned to use it when he went elk hunting by horseback, something he had never gotten around to doing. Chuck arranged these things in the trunk and covered them with the sandbags he carried for traction when it snowed. Then we cleared out. Chuck was still browned off at me, but too rattled to say anything. He kept to the speed limit again and drove with histrionic correctness. Our big fear was getting stopped. The possibility made us edgy and silent. We smoked. We listened to the radio, the songs blaring and fading as mountain gave way to field and field to mountain. We looked out the window at the looming purple shapes of the mountains, at the river, at the deserted winding road. Whenever we met another car Chuck reflexively dimmed the lights and slowed down as if he’d been speeding. He drove so fussily that any competent patrolman would have pulled us over on the spot. But we were lucky. We made it home, pushed the car down the drive, went to bed and caught ourselves a few hours sleep before Mr. Bolger had one of the girls come down to fetch us for breakfast. Mr. Bolger was in good humor. He had reason to be. The morning was fresh, Chuck was still free and single, and in another couple of weeks I would be on my way to California.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Not so long ago, the desire to feel passionate about one’s husband would have been considered a contradiction in terms. Historically, these two realms of life were organized separately—marriage on one side and passion most likely somewhere else, if anywhere at all. The concept of romantic love, which came about toward the end of the nineteenth century, brought them together for the first time. The central place of sex in marriage, and the heightened expectations surrounding it, took decades more to arrive. The social and cultural transformations of the past fifty years have redefined modern coupledom. Alan and Adele are beneficiaries of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women’s liberation, the availability of birth control pills, and the emergence of the gay movement. With the widespread use of the pill, sex became liberated from reproduction. Feminism and gay pride fought to define sexual expression as an inalienable right. Anthony Giddens describes this transition in The Transformation of Intimacy when he explains that sexuality became a property of the self, one that we develop, define, and renegotiate throughout our lives. Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do. It has become a central feature of intimate relationships, and sexual satisfaction, we believe, is our due. The era of pleasure has arrived. These developments, in conjunction with postwar economic prosperity, have contributed to a period of unmatched freedom and individualism. People today are encouraged to pursue personal fulfillment and sexual gratification, and to break free of the constraints of a social and family life heretofore defined by duty and obligation. But trailing in the shadow of this manifest extravagance lies a new kind of gnawing insecurity. The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious. We bring to our love relationships this free-floating anxiety. Love, beyond providing emotional sustenance, compassion, and companionship, is now expected to act as a panacea for existential aloneness as well. We look to our partner as a bulwark against the vicissitudes of modern life. It is not that our human insecurity is greater today than in earlier times. In fact, quite the contrary may be true. What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  It is inherently vulnerable. We tend to assuage our anxieties through control. We feel safer if we can contract the distance between us, maximize the certainty, minimize the threats, and contain the unknown. Yet some of us defend against the uncertainties of love with such zeal that we cut ourselves off from its richness. There’s a powerful tendency in long-term relationships to favor the predictable over the unpredictable. Yet eroticism thrives on the unpredictable. Desire butts heads with habit and repetition. It is unruly, and it defies our attempts at control. So where does that leave us? We don’t want to throw away the security, because our relationship depends on it. A sense of physical and emotional safety is basic to healthy pleasure and connection. Yet without an element of uncertainty there is no longing, no anticipation, no frisson. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins put it succinctly when he explained that passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate. Having New Eyes How are we to introduce this uncertainty into our intimate relationships? How are we to create this gentle imbalance? In truth, it is already there. Eastern philosophers have long known that impermanence is the only constant. Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed. As the adage says: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Yet with blind faith we forge ahead. As loyal citizens of the modern world we believe in our own efficacy. We liken the passion of the beginning to adolescent intoxication—both transient and unrealistic. The consolation for giving it up is the security that waits on the other side. Yet when we trade passion for stability, are we not merely swapping one fantasy for another? As Stephen Mitchell points out, the fantasy of permanence may trump the fantasy of passion, but both are products of our imagination. We long for constancy, we may labor for it, but it is never guaranteed. When we love we always risk the possibility of loss—by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death—regardless of how hard we try to defend against it. Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner. I point out to Adele that if we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Adele recalls a moment when she experienced just this kind of perceptual shift. “Let me tell you what happened two weeks ago,” she says. “It is so rare that I even remember the moment.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I went up over the common with my mother next morning. It was grey and blowy and our macs were stippled once or twice with flung raindrops, threats of a storm we saw stagger aside and discharge in a slanting fume a mile away. She had the disconcerting habit of talking indignantly about something other than the obvious subject of concern: in this case my elder brother and whether she could afford to visit him in Melbourne. She felt very keenly that Charlie's wife had stolen him away from her, that she had set out deliberately to break the mother's bond with her son . . . They were married within a year of my father's death, so grief and joy were followed again by grief when Lisanne ("Always a calculating cow," said Edie) abruptly cancelled visits, in due course kept the children from their grandma and finally persuaded Charlie (who was an electronics boffin) to go for a job almost as far away as it was possible to go. My mother pined for him and the two little girls terribly; they were twelve and fourteen now, they wouldn't recognise her, she said. Charlie promised they would fly her out for a lovely long visit. Then Lisanne had written to say they couldn't afford it this year, Charlie wasn't doing so well . . . "Charlie's so weak," my mother said, and gripped my forearm as we started on the steep top path to the trig-point. She seemed somehow grateful that I at least would not get married, and so would spare her this particular pain. I remembered how at five or six I had said that I only wanted to marry her. We reached the top and turned briskly to look in each direction, as was the habit, saying "Yes. . . Yes,. . . Yes" as we checked off the different views. The church-tower was clad in grey polythene. The nearby belt of trees, referred to as Condom Copse in a recent letter to the Knowledge, was almost leafless, its secret underwoods laid bare. "Fall, Winter, fall," I said flatly, not really wanting my mother to hear. "You won't have any hills like this where you are," she said. "No," I said, and breathed in heartily. "You've made some friends, though?"—as if the two might be obscurely related. "Masses!" The thought of them was too agitating, a flare that made me clench my face for a second. "Paul Echevin, who I work for at the Museum some days, is frightfully nice, he's rather taken care of me and had me round for meals." For a moment I just wanted to tell her I was in love with Luc, give her the whole stupid thing and watch her grasp it. There had been spells of candour before, and she rose to them pluckily; but I knew she would rather not know.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It wasn't easy to keep watch, with the dark and the rain and the pearling of our own heat and breath on the car windows. I felt rather fatuous—I hadn't found the tempo of it yet, I expected something to happen straight away and sat forward, staring vaguely. When it rained, the view was rapidly obliterated; the dark bulk of the building, with the glare of the lobby and one or two chinks of shuttered light above, was puddled and smeared by the water on our windscreen, streaming in its own multiple faint refractions of the street-lamps. Then I would start the engine and swill the rain off with a couple of sweeps of the wipers. Everything took on a new clarity—it was like putting on my glasses and catching the world as it came to attention, legible and commonplace. Then the corner of a window wobbled and ran, the concrete canopy of the porch twitched and melted. Marcel was easily bored and easily scared, but he took to the long tedium of the stake-out better than I did. He said it reminded him of a scene in a film where Eddie Murphy was being watched in a hotel by two incompetent cops in a car; he had it on video and gave me verbatim, twice, the sequence where Murphy, who in fact has come and gone as he pleases, surprises his guards with a tray of coffee and rous. I winced to think how far away the morning was. I falled to rise to his little performance, too taken up with my own memories of waiting and watching, the involuntary predator. "I'm sorry about Luc bullying you," I said, almost taking responsibility for him, swallowing at the memory of his softly interrogative kisses, seeing in the blurred glass a weird and displaced image of his naked body rinsed with my sweat. "It doesn't matter," Marcel said, sounding weary of indignities. "I don't suppose he could help it." I gave a snuffly little laugh. "Well, anyone can help builying, surely?" Marcel nodded from side to side, as if weighing up long experience. An approaching car washed us with light, like a couple in front of a television, then left us in shadow. "He was, you know, very mad. A lot of people at school were not friends of his. Then Dr Boesmans used to come and see him." "Oh yes. You mean my landlord in St Alban Street?" Marcel nodded. "And what did Dr Boesmans say?" "I don't know. It's confidential. He used to see some of the boys in the sick-room after school—if they had problems. . ."—and he tapped his temple with his forefinger. "You mean he's a psychiatrist. I thought he was just . . . an ordinary doctor." "He's a very famous psychiatrist," Marcel said quietly.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I'm afraid there was no time." Had he sensed the clumsy semi-panic of my sudden stride across the square? "I was with my friends." Oh his friends . . . I thought of that well-favoured, self-admiring trio and of the trite intimacy of the shorter, darker boy and girl with my Luc, and was almost on the point of telling him about my friends. He mustn't see me as this lonesome crackpot. My heart was thudding, my own upper lip was dry, curled and stuck somehow to my teeth in a nervous rictus; I felt very warm. We were in the dining-room again, not face to face as for the first interview, with its air of overdrafts, but corner wise at the end of the table. I foresaw our legs touching, the pulse of a crossed leg gently knocking at the other's calf, if by the end of the hour we had pushed back chairs and talked. I had barely thought about it, but I had the light behind me, the rinsed light of the flatlands which illuminated Luc and made him frown when once or twice the sun unveiled and struck across the sheen of walnut into those narrow, frankly unromantic eyes. I didn't see how he could be unaware of my feelings, which seemed to blunder and rebound around the room, hardly daring to fix upon their object. Surely I was behaving extraordinarily? His mother came in with the two cups of coffee on their gilt papiermâché tray, and they seemed a comforting little emblem of Luc's and my life together, tokens of its domestic normality that I saw repeated down the gallery of the coming months like the dwindling and vanishing servant on a bottle of Camp. She sampled our jerky conversation for a minute and retreated as if not quite happy with its colour and seasoning. When she'd gone I jumped up to get the sugar from the sideboard, alert now to her dogmatic little campaign that I should lose weight, and so made to seem defiantly flabby and rotten-toothed. But what the hell. I found myself reflected in the slanted glass of one of the blacker Altidore portraits, and I didn't look too bad: it was only in dreams sometimes that I turned out to be a true, short-winded fatso. I turned to offer sugar to Luc, who rejected it with a note of sleepy disdain; there was no spare flesh on him. I imagined him wanking in bed, perhaps half an hour ago, an intake of breath, the soft pearls tumbled at last in his pubic hair. I put the sugar-dredger carefully back beside the silver cruet, the grotesque epergne and the tantalus with its golden inch of cognac. "So tell me about your friends." "Well, there is not too much to say." "I expect you have a large number of friends."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I grinned and changed gear. ‘Hi, Phil!’ I went towards him with one arm extended, and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Hi,’ he replied. A smile fled across his face. It was clear enough that he had been waiting for me but there was a childlike wariness to our greeting, like that of schoolboys introduced to each other by their parents. ‘How have you been? I didn’t see you downstairs.’ ‘Oh, I was there,’ he said. ‘Earlier on.’ He picked up his bag. It was impossible for either of us to say ‘Well, is this it, then?’; instead we found ourselves going towards the door together. A close follower of Corry form might have seen it as an interesting development—a suspicion confirmed by Michael, at the reception-desk, who said, ‘Goodnight, gentlemen’ in a tone of bitter reproach. It was about 8.30 and in the winter ‘Goodnight’ would have been the instinctive word; but Phil and I strolled out on to the street to find the sky still bright, the pavements and the buildings warm. The slow, late expanses of a high summer evening were before us. I carried on talking and, without hesitating turned not towards the station but in the direction of the Queensberry Hotel. We reacted differently to the slight panic of the occasion, he shutting up completely and looking very serious, whilst I carried on with unnatural brightness and ease. ‘Mm, it’s good to be out in the open air,’ I said. ‘What a beautiful evening!’ He seemed unable to find a reply to this. ‘It gets so crowded in there,’ I expanded. ‘Oh—yes …’ he said, catching and letting go the conversational straw. We walked on, and I came very close to him for a step or two, as one does walking with a friend: our upper arms brushed and then parted once, twice, with a gentle lurch in my stride. When we had started touching, everything would be all right, I told myself. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘it can get very crowded.’ I turned towards him with a broad, calculated grin. ‘That’s because chaps like you hog the weights all the time.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Because I was in a state I knew I might give any contact a disconcerting charge of feeling and talked to him deliberately about his work. He played in a period-instrument band that met three or four times a week and gave regular concerts in the Cathedral and in other places across Flanders—I'd seen him come in a few nights before with the discreetly odd black case that housed his bombard, though it suggested a surgical device of the most specialized kind. They were called the Guenther van der Musycke—a name no more arthritic than most such consorts—and comprised singers as well as instrumentalists. Sometimes he brought one or two of them to the Cassette, but they sat apart, made childish jokes and left early. Gerard told me they had a record coming out soon and spoke about the ancient religious music of the town with such enthusiasm that I almost came to believe in his high estimate of the various masses and motets and other attainments of primitive polyphony that he was describing. A couple of drinks later he was still holding forth on late medieval life there, the unceasing round of ritual and worship, chants and processions, the festive days and offices. I drifted in and out of it; I felt he could be speaking to anyone. The image of Luc's back flared up again and again and made me gulp my beer down. Gerard spoke of the forever progressing Burgundian court. Sometimes brief highlights from Obrecht and Dufay were provided in the cracked croon that you hear on rehearsal records by elderly conductors. It seemed in May this year the Ghezellen had played their shawms and sackbuts in the procession of the Holy Cross and created some bad feeling among the conventional members of the town band. At Christmas they planned a recreation of the festivities at the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, in which the supper music was all performed by players disguised as animals: Gerard himself was to be a hare, and his colleagues would be lions, goats, bears and wolves. Seven monkeys would do a morris-dance. Apparently there had been a dromedary present at the original event, though it did not actually play. I looked over his shoulder to where the dusk was falling in the deserted street and in all the silent streets and courts beyond. I could picture my walk home, through the back lane called the Blind Fox and out into the floodlit square.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Young Echevin came to see me after lunch: he was late, couldn't find the place, had disturbed the doctor's difficult old housekeeper (who asked rather pointedly that it shouldn't happen again), and sat pink and wheezing through the scheduled hour of our conversation. He was a severe asthmatic, as I knew from his father's letter, and had been absent from school for much of the previous year, gazing out from a dustless sanatorium near Brussels. I felt a twinge of pity for him, and remembered schoolfellows obscurely stigmatised by diabetes or inhibiting allergies. The same involuntary unlovely quality hung about Marcel; plus he was fat and anxious and maladroit. His asthma provided the main topic of discussion, and gave me glimpses of the boy's tame, glass-cabined world; it had limited his experience cruelly. Several staples of these lessons—sport, nature, what we had done in the pollinous summer holidays—were almost inaccessible to him; his own august had been spent playing video games (and for a minute his vocabulary took on an impenetrable self-confidence). A new drug had been his salvation—that and television, which had given him a certain scrambled knowledge of current affairs that he was too incurious and short-winded to make sense of. Our primary rule—that we spoke only in English—was frequently broken; "I do not know, I do not understand" was his timid refrain. And I was recollecting my tutorial manner, out of the vacant social politeness that our chit-chat parodied, and a sudden pedantry or loss of patience which alarmed him and brought him close to tears. Of course his other tutors, for maths and history and so on, all talked to him in friendly Flemish, they were local people who shared his world of reference. It took me a moment to see how alien I was—I felt myself being dreaded, in what I hoped was an unusual way, and not being sure whether to live up to it or try to soften it down. Marcel wore bright-coloured kids' leisure-wear, as though he was usually out on a bike or a skateboard, and had a huge wristwatch with various rotating bezels and inset dials that might have been of use to a sports coach, deep-sea diver or trader on the international markets. He looked at it with disarming frequency, so that I began to ask him each time how long was left. I was as keen as he was for the hour to be up. The shock came towards the end, when I asked him how long he'd suffered from asthma, and if he knew why he had it, a two-part question which I felt was unwise with a beginner, it might fluster him and only one half would get answered. He looked away and I saw a change in the colour of his unhappiness. "Yes, I can tell why," he said. "And when."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Over to the right from one of the high barred windows of that institutional building which had so far remained silent and dark, three boys were peeing into the canal. They stood up on the windowsill, pressed against the bars, and directed their dying arcs up and out—presumably in a contest to see who could reach the furthest. I watched them finish and stand down whilst the shaving-foam thinned in an almost noiseless crepitation over my stubble. In a moment or two another trio took up their positions, we heard a command quite strictly barked inside, and the one on the left was away already. It must almost have been a false start. The other two followed a few seconds later, first in hesitant spurts and tinkles, but growing in confidence until for a while all three were at full cock, like a guard of honour. I don't think any of them reached our side of the canal, but number one made the finest impression and had the greatest capacity: he was still going strong as the other two's offerings dwindled and trailed home across the water and a breeze caught them and frayed their thinning plumes. I understood for the first time that this patched-up brick barracks of a place was the school of St Narcissus itself and that today being the rentrée the young gentlemen were reasserting some immemorial right. Cherif and I watched a couple more rounds, until the novelty began to wear off and a hand-bell was heard tolling. Then I realised that there would be this new element in my life, and that across the little lost garden below, where nothing but a blackbird ever stirred among the leaves, there would come week in week out the noises of a school: the bells, the blurred unison of lessons and chapel, the scraping back of a hundred chairs, the abrupt silences and eruptions of racket. It was clear on the streets, too, as I walked over to the Altidores', that things had changed: a flat-footed straggler with his shirt-tails hanging out came panting past me and stopped, wincing with the stitch; two truants tugged off their ties before slipping into a video shop; in a sudden sally from a side-street a games-kitted crocodile lurched at a run into my path, headed by a manic bald master. It was the first day and there were the children caught up already in the severe rhythms of school, and looking back, like conscripts on a ship, to the lazy shore of home. For a moment I shared the truants' defiance and guilt and my heart raced with a long-forgotten panicky anticipation: I had to assert myself against the obscure medicinal hollowness of school. And of course my first assignation with Luc loomed and made me feel half master and half victim.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Echevin was a late father, a handsome man in his sixties, pleasantly bald, and without the moustache I for some reason expected him to wear, so that his face had a sensitive, surprised look of some charm. His eyes were large, with oaky flecks in their pale blue pupils. He had on the grey suiting of a business man, but with unusual tucks and vents, which seemed to hint at his role in the arts. The housekeeper came back with a jug of punch (Mrs Vivier, Mrs Vivier) and he offered me a glass with a little murmur, as if he hadn't yet decided if we were going to be friends. I was hot and on edge and gabbled about Rubens and the charm of old brick in my most ingratiating manner, to which his answers, in rapid, unselfconscious English, were polite but brief. I told myself he didn't need to hear all this, but I was shy of bringing the interview round to the question of Marcel; in the end all he said was that the boy had never known the brief glad hours of childhood, or some such phrase, perhaps a quotation. Paternal love, watchful and removed, as I had known it and lost it myself, showed through for a moment. He saw he didn't need to tell me my behaviour had been ill judged and over-severe—I made an unsolicited promise to be kind to Marcel, and over supper beamed at him and joked in a way he seemed to find quite sinister after my earlier toughness. I didn't know if it was quite tactful to say to Echevin: "Marcel tells me he's not an admirer of Orst's work." It might have been a matter of contention between them. "No," he replied crisply. "But there are other things in life than the works of Orst. And besides, they are not calculated to appeal to children. A taste for the femme fatale comes later; if at all." Over the course of the meal a mild counter-argument to the effect that a boy of sixteen was no longer a child had been forming in my mind, and when I ran back to the romantic poseur I had been at the same age I thought I saw someone who would have revelled in Orst's private purgatory. "I think they're really depressing," said Marcel with a grin which showed this was a permitted house-heresy. After supper, which left me feeling stuffed and clumsy, Echevin called me through to his workroom, while Marcel, to emphasise how they were keeping their side of the bargain, was sent to study his verbs. The poor kid came tolerantly in with Knowles's English Grammar, which he stuck under my nose and tapped before climbing on to the sofa and mouthing vacantly to himself, like a tiny child rehearsing imaginary friends. When we came back twenty minutes later he was leaning sideways and wheezily asleep.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A string of modest villas, bungalows with lawns running down to the dunes. An air of mild neglect—scabbing stucco, rusted house names, woody buddleia breaking through the garden fences. An air of between-the-wars, of chic whiteness and empty space and cocktails on the glassy-screened terraces with sunset views across the Channel. And of being in a place now forlornly unchic, a little colony half-abandoned to encroachments of sand and wiry grass. We pottered along past the ten or twelve houses to the end of the road, where there was a small concrete car-park looking out over the sands like a gun-emplacement. A few new vehicles were waiting there beside a derelict and plundered Ami, and down the beach a few figures could be seen. Were the Three amongst them, intimately corralled in one of those striped wind-breaks, or careering down to the shock of the sea? We turned again, and drove back, and it was only going this way that I caught sight of KYF, tucked in a rose-tangled carport, the carport of. . . Les Goélands. I was now virtually on the floor of Matt's jeep and urged him to go on. He pulled up in the next entrance-way and asked me just what it was I wanted to do and why we were here. He wasn't angry but he was used to getting results; he wasn't imaginative; he wasn't shocked by the whims and oddities of others—the odder the better, as I was coming to realise—but he needed an objective. It was hard to explain that I just wanted to be here, just wanted to see the house. "So we're going to spy on them." "Well, how can we? If I go on the beach I'll be recognised." Matt disregarded this. "But you want to see him stripped out. You want to know what's going on with Les Trois"—he took on my term without a flutter—"and whether your kid's fucking with the girl or the boy. Or both." "Or neither." It was not unhumbling to have it so spelt out. "You must remember I've never seen any of these guys. They'd better be good." I sat feeling wretched for a while, bruised by my alliance with someone so alien and unsuitable as Matt. Then he turned off the engine and jumped out. The entrance-way we were in was overhung with sprawling trees; the gate, meshed against dogs, sagged under a heavy chain. Inside, clumps of cupressus had been allowed to grow and grow, and obscured the house; their young tops swayed in the breeze. I watched Matt leaning at the gate, his polo-shirt hanging out. Then he scrambled over smartly, showing a white quarter of naked back, and disappeared down the driveway. I stayed where I was, at last confident of disaster.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "actually I think it may have been a mistake—or he was arrested and died anyway. He was old and I think extremely ill. It was just before we were liberated," she said with a somehow comically offhand identification with that earlier generation and that deep event: "Paul would have been about eighteen." I thought, if this was the Second World War, what would Luc be doing? I didn't know yet if he was merely a follower, subtly institutionalised by his St Narcissus training, or if his breaking away showed some more decisive and unstable quality, the inexplicable gift of shaping his own life, as he was shaping mine. When Paul took up with the blind old painter, he was a boy, he might have been someone that someone like me might have taught; and he was making a life-decision—no one knew at the time, perhaps it was mildly worrying to his parents who condoned the charitable impulse but regarded the artist in his eccentric villa with superstitious unease. Who could say? But if he hadn't recognised that necessity, well, I wouldn't have been perched on this canal-side railing now. It was an oddly satisfying few minutes, under the great wrecked chestnuts, looking back at the gables and towers and the evening lamps, and seeing how Paul's altruism and Luc's wild truancy fed into the empty vortex of my own life. "I'm quite envious of you working upstairs," Helene said, with a little gasped laugh at her own candour. "I won't always, you know. When you're not there I'm going to be on the front desk, with the Meredith." "Well, we'll see." "It would be nice if we could both be upstairs," I said courteously, masking my new sense of disquiet that I might have taken a job from her and that this little stroll was being used by her to let me know. "You know so much more about it all than me." "Well, I wouldn't be useless. It's not that I really warm to the paintings themselves, just that I seem to have known them all my life. It's Paul's direct connection with them—it makes me a little proprietorial about them in my turn." She stood off a pace or two and we went on, through an archway under a lamp that gave it the look of a convent or a hospital and through a chain of silent courtyards so obliquely linked with dog-leg alleys that in each one it seemed we had gone wrong and had come to the end. "What did you think of Orst's pictures when you were a girl?" I said, quick-marching for a moment to keep up.

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

  Courts have ordered infants into several weeklong stays away from the primary parent. Over the first year of life the baby needs access to the primary care-giver, whether mother or father, as often as possible, especially at times of stress, which is often during the night when she wakes with a tummy-ache, or because she is hungry, or because of the many complicated parts of the child’s environment to which the baby needs to adjust. The role of the primary caregiver is to provide a steady base of security by consistently and predictably responding to the baby’s needs. During the second year, a toddler relying on this solid base of security is ready to venture out and explore the world. It’s okay to try the playground slide because the safest lap you know is waiting at the bottom to catch you. The child’s interest in the world, her capacity for learning, and her cognitive, emotional, and social development rest on her sense of a solid base. Very few studies have looked at infants and toddlers who visit overnight in the other parent’s home. One very important study at our center carried out by Dr. Judith Soloman shows that these very young children are exquisitely sensitive to the relationship between their divorced parents. 8 If the parents are angry or unable to cooperate or communicate well with each other, the children show disorganized attachment to both, meaning that they don’t trust either mommy or daddy as protective figures. They feel insecure everywhere. If the parents are able to cooperate, talk about the child’s care together and to exchange the baby peaceably, the baby may thrive. But even though some parents may try to ease the young child into feeling comfortable in two homes, let’s face a hard truth. When a marriage fails in the last trimester of pregnancy or a few months after the birth of a child, the man and woman are likely to be hurt and angry. When a court orders overnight visits in these situations, I doubt very much that many parents are able to cooperate about the details of the child’s feeding or sleeping or what to do about colic. They are very distressed, sometimes distraught people. When I’m consulted on what to do about custody of babies I advocate creating a postdivorce environment that’s as close as possible to life in a good intact home. The baby should have a chance to form his earliest relationships within a stable environment, to have a sense of a solid routine and predictable care. If the parents can work this out, they can surely consider overnights in the two houses and carefully observe the child’s response. Parents often need help in overcoming their fear that the baby will not be safe in the care of the other parent.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There had also been the hope originally, since CORE is by now a dirty word in Tallahassee, of getting broader commu nity support by asking the ministers of all faiths to give the news to their congregations and urge them to join the stu dents. It was possible to gauge the depth of official hostility and community apathy by the discussion this suggestion pre cipitated. OTHER ESSAYS One of the Negro students suggested that not all the min isters were to be trusted; one of them would surely tccl it his duty to warn the police. A white coed student protested this vehemently, it being her view that there was no possible harm in an open prayer meeting-"lt's just a y'all-come prayer meeting!"-and refused to believe that the police would not protect such spectacular piety. And this brought up the whole question of strategy: If the police were not warned, then the prayer meeting would have to be described as spontaneous. "But you can't," said a Negro coed, "decide to have a spon taneous prayer meeting. Especially not on the steps of the Capitol on Thursday at one o'clock." "Oh, it'll be sponta neous enough," said another student-my notes do not in dicate his color-"by the time we start praying." D., a white coed, was against informing the police: "We love them dearly," she said with rather heavy sarcasm, "but I don't want them to get the impression that I'm asking their permission to do anything." "We're not asking their permission," said another white student. "We have every right to have prayer meeting and we're just informing them of it." "There's no reason," said the girl who felt that the police would not pos sibly do anything to peacefully praying people, "for them not to treat us just like they'd treat any other group of citizens." This led to rather cynical laughter and someone, looking around the room, otlcred to name "oh, about twenty-five multicolored reasons." In all this there was no question of tear of the police; there was simply no belief whatever that they would act impartially or "that they might turn out," as Reverend Steele unconvincingly suggested, "to protect us." It is significant, I think, that none of the students, except for one lone girl-who turned out to be the daughter of a seg regationist and who was therct(>re in a way defending her futher against the imputation of villainy-believed that they could call on the police tor protection. It was t< >r this reason that it was decided not to ask the city's ministers to invite their congregations.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was nearly two o’clock. A taxi came slowly past, its yellow light burning—and then just behind it a yellow Cortina, with tinted windows and the wheel-arches flared out over gigantic customised tyres. It came almost to a stop at the entrance to the Club and as I walked up quite fast a thick-set black man stepped out from the pink glow of the doorway, the car’s rear door was flung open for him as a voice inside said, ‘Come on, Harold.’ Then the door slammed, and the car surged away past me and down the street. I saw its bank of rear lights glare on as it braked at the crossroads, and then it swung to the right and was gone. Perhaps only the drink enabled me to sleep, tucked in behind Phil, my hand on his heart. I woke feeling cold, even so, pulled a sheet over us without waking him, and curled back again into the same body-warmed space. But I couldn’t sleep now, and as the incident with Arthur flared up over and over in my mind my heart would race and thump against Phil’s back in panicky counterpoint to the dreamless slowness of his own pulse. I got up about six and moped around in my dressing-gown, the very dressing-gown that Arthur had liked to wear, maroon, full-length, shabby, stained and cordless after its school career, and which had hung so poignantly, threadbare and exclusive with memory, on his young shoulders or tumbled open about his sprawling thighs. I had the feeling I was imitating him as I made tea: it was something he was always doing, the only domestic thing he could do. He had made tea as if it were instinctual to him, unasked, uncomplaining … I took a mug of it to the drawing-room and lay on the sofa with my eyes open, thinking. There was a section of Charles’s diary I had been reading, and I picked it off the floor and made myself concentrate on it again. May 26, 1926: At Talodi there were complaints, a dispute over two water jars (both parties seemed equally implausible, so it was a doubtful decision, I fear) & a girl with a septic foot. There are many more of these medical problems this time, several shot-gun wounds in the legs, mysteriously—but the Nuba will hang on to their ancient firearms, & there seems little we can do about it. After what has been done to them they deserve some means of self-defence. Today those things in Palme’s book were constantly in my mind, the terrible stories of slavery, mutilation, castration: how they weighed the boys down with sandbags, razored off their balls & patched them up with—melted butter, I think it was.