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.

Page 344 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Eddie speeds up. A vein in his throat pops out and he is looking down, down to the place where their bodies are joined. With a gasp and a grunt, he collapses on top of her. Jennie can feel his heart through her chest. Eddie Fish’s heart! She will remember this moment, she promises herself: the faded blue summer sky, the worm inching along the edge of a pale yellow leaf, the soft smell of dirt. She will color it with a patina of great beauty. She thinks about Eddie’s question—Are you using anything?—and her fingers grow icy. She wonders if i't can happen the first time, if the grassy mess oozing between their legs can grow into something more complicated—a pun ishment, a life sentence. She closes her eyes and prays: Just this once, never again, please not notv, a jumble of wishes. “What?” asks Eddie, looking down at her. “Sorry?” “Your lips were moving.” “Oh, it’s nothing.” “You’re not getting weird on me, Jen, are you?” She doesn’t answer. Getting weird. Eddie’s words echo and bounce through her skull. She twists her neck once again, her cheek resting on the cool earth, and stares at the empty heart carved into the base of the tree. She imagines her own initial there and then, like a stack of cards flipping through the wind, a hallucination, she sees the initials of every man who will ever become her lover. There are so many—perhaps dozens! More than she can possibly imagine. She is filled with the knowl edge of what she does not know. Eddie kisses her throat, his lips dry and papery, then jumps up and rummages for his briefs beneath a pile of fallen leaves. He looks down at Jennie and she squints at him, blinded by the sunlight behind his shoulder. From where she lies, he seems like a giant. “I—I didn’t use anything, Eddie,” she falters. He stumbles on one leg, awkward as he pulls on his under pants. “What did you say?” he asks, stopping. “I’m sorry—I didn’t use anything,” she says, this time with greater conviction. “Jesus, Jennie!” He punches the air. “How could you—” “I didn’t know.” “But I thought you were—” Tears stream down her face. The light, the woods, are re fracted, kaleidoscopic. Eddie Fish’s face becomes a blur. “You bitch!” she hears, as if from a great distance. He is walking away from her, heels crunching against the leaves. “If anything happens, it’s not my problem, do you hear me?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But it was once these practical measures had been taken that the impractical day after day of Arthur and me in the flat began. The only thing to do was nothing. Life this week was a black parody of life the week before. Then we had stayed in for pleasure; now we could not risk going out. I was free, but Arthur did not dare go out, and was nervous to be left alone. If the phone rang he looked ill with anxiety. Ordinary sounds, such as distant police sirens in Holland Park Avenue, took on for both of us a retributory grimness. I was shocked to find that my heart raced when I heard them, and the look we exchanged as they died away must have told him how frightened I was. It had been wonderful after three days of this to go to the Corry, and when I got back I made no mention of Lord Nantwich and my own adventures. I saw at once that their secrecy would be essential to me. They were my right to a privacy outside this forced sharing of my home. Stepping into the roasting heat of the flat I found Arthur restive and relieved to see me. He came up and held me. He had altered his appearance in my absence, and undone his braids, though his hair still retained much of its former tightly combed and twisted nature and jutted out in wild spirals. The swelling of his face was going down and he had begun to look beautiful again, the protective dressing on his cheek almost decorative. Yet as he stood there in my old red jersey and my army surplus fatigues I felt a kind of hatred for him and his need to disguise himself in my things. There was a pretty bad half-hour after that, when I was not in control of myself. I poured myself a drink, though I did not give him one—and he didn’t seem to mind. My whole wish was to throw things around, make a storm to dispel the stagnant heat, assert myself. Yet I found myself fastidiously tidying up, tight-lipped, not looking at him. He followed me helplessly around, at first retailing jokes from the television, dialogue from Star Trek, but then falling silent. He was confused, wanted to be ready to do what I wanted, but found he could only annoy me further. Then I hurled the stack of newspapers I was collecting across the floor and went for him—pulled the trousers down over his narrow hips without undoing them, somehow tackled him onto the carpet, and after a few seconds’ brutal fumbling fucked him cruelly. He let out little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back. Afterwards I left him groaning on the floor and went into the bathroom. I remember looking at myself, pink, excited, horrified, in the mirror.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It wasn't a big town, and its great monuments, like the pinnacled elevations jostling on the map, were out of all proportion to the streets, courtyards and canals beneath them. The tapering, windowless monolith of the tower of St John's and the ugly green spirelets with which a turn-of-the-century surveyor had capped the ancient tower of the Cathedral were mere satellites to the legendary altitudes of the Belfry. From far off, in Ostend, when we had cleared the cranes and the edge of town, these three appeared across the plain as a mysterious trinity, with the Belfry, growing epoch by epoch in battlemented stages towards its octagonal crown, the most doggedly heaven-storming of all. Today the sky was low and the air fenlike and damp when I crossed the Grote Markt and saw the maestro of the famous carillon—a shovel-bearded young man in corduroy jacket and knee-breeches like a figure from some ingenious Flemish clock—unlock the gate and start to climb the two hundred stairs to his console in the clouds. Even in the Grote Markt, beneath the stepped gables of the best restaurants and the gilded angels who had paused on top of the Town Hall and raised their trumpets high over taxi-ranks and bus-stands, there was nothing happening. A few visitors wandered out of the glassed-in arcade of the Tourist Office, but the school holidays were almost over and the visitors were studious couples. A few women clambered with supermarket bags into one or other of the waiting buses that showed the names of outlying villages. Sometimes the silent tram came through. These were the days and weeks of a ceremonial square. And then the carillon banged out its lifeless rendering of a folksong or hymn. It was the silence that followed that was most challenging. As I went round with my list of addresses the stillness of the town fused with my new suspicion of being watched, of something calculating in the mid-morning emptiness. I found myself coming back with relief to those two or three streets lined with ordinary shops, red flashes of special offers on sausage or coffee on the windows, outfitters and stationers cheerful with skirts, satchels and coloured pens for the rentree. And among the red-nosed Brueghel boys with bicycles there were others who looked bored and stylish and desirable. I found myself marvelling that they lived here.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I'd no idea. I said, "Thousands of young people do leave home, and nobody knows why." The bewildered parents were filmed in their well-appointed homes, numbly repeating how happy everything had been. They always seemed to me to offer proof of the stark unknowability of others, of a lurking violence, touched off by some invisible pressure into damage and self-destruction; it was what love sought to tame, and lived in half-excited fear of. "I just wondered", said Patrick, "what happened that night, after we left you in the bar." I saw how subtly and yet unforgivingly he had brought the little interview round. "Well, nothing much that I can remember," I said, almost languidly. "Luc did say how unhappy he was, but never quite told me why. We chatted with other friends of mine." I remembered the little stings of his pillow-talk—the bet the three youngsters had had about me, Sibylle's jealous intuition of my feelings. And yet she had left me with him. But then Luc himself had deplored the strained talk of that evening—the eerie politesse that masked the break-up of the Three, and acknowledged it. I went on carefully: "I said Luc must get home to bed, as we had a lesson first thing in the morning." "Yeah, yeah," Patrick broke in. I wondered what he knew. I found I was longing for his confidence: I wanted to step in and take the place of the absent friends, soothe the unacknowledged bereavements of his awkward time of life. I thought how pained and creepy I might seem to him—both predatory and vicarious. "I wish I could have helped him more," I said. But he was reasonable: "You did what you could. You've been all around the place on that merry goose hunt!" He slapped the table to mark his pleasure in knowing this imaginary idiom, and frowned in slightly forced exasperation. "He's a bloody nuisance!" he said, and ran on quickly, "Do you think he might be dead?" I hushed the idea away, and as I did so saw Orst's simple panel of the beach and the sea and the dusk sky. Chapter 21

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  out chick,” the deejay punned. “Rapping with you’s like taking a hit of acid with a sinsemilla chaser!” Anya’s voice deepened, thickened like stormclouds. “Drugs and cigarettes burn holes in your aura,” she declared. “Holes where demons burrow!” I was smoking two packs of Merits a day and lots of grass, and then there were those mushrooms my roommate brought back from Mexico, and the blotter acid I dropped before the Sarah Vaughn concert and the MD AI took by mistake... my poor astral body! Punctured and ravaged as a slab of charred Swiss cheese! I felt light-headed, lightened by decay, invisible claws caressed my throat, invisible lips whispered sinful seductions. I grabbed the radio for support, its antenna quivered in the chilly, deathly still air. “Before you know it,” continued Anya, “you’re a nympho maniac food-junkie alcoholic druggie, feeding the ravenous de sires that keep demons clinging to our planet.” Oh no! I took one last drag and threw my cigarette out the window. It spun like a falling star to the playground below. I pulled One Touch of Venus out from under my pillow and looked up “demons” in the index. There was a column and a half of entries! Demons, auras: Demons wear binoculars around their necks to spot new holes in your aura, will use every trick in the book money flesh cares of this world persecution to get their fix. Demons, interruptions: They drizzle sand on your head as you read inspirational texts, tickle the feet of ba bies to make them scream during spiritual lectures WAAAH! Straight to hell you’ll go on an elevator, a demon’s blazing fin ger pushing the buttons. Demons, language: The vilest grunts vomit from their mouths, snarls too obscene to be translated into English—imagine construction workers’ mouths raised to the highest power—every word in the demon’s lexicon is obscene, as is their grammar, their punctuation, their dingbats, their typography, which is now your druggie lexicon your ciga rette grammar your punctuation your dingbats. Every excla mation point is a rape-fuck!!!!!! Demon-sprache is blotched with underlines italics outline roman bold, putrid indecipher able swirls and stars—demons slap their foreheads, bug or scrunch their eyes, point to their temples and stick out their tongues; excretions bubble forth. A4/1N OH MAN @#!!!** HEY WOW! Pod-shaped bodies, waddling blobs of emo tional cacophony, “AWK!” when the Devil chastises one, he clenches the edge of a paragraph, hands and feet poking into the margin, toes crimped under like odious question marks, halo of sweat, jack-o’-lantern mouth ripped open, “GULP OHHH NOOO A1EEEEE!” Arms scrawny and naked as plucked chickens.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  After the abortion I started going to a holistic therapist named Donna, a cute woman with shiny brown shoulder- length hair and a chipper smile. She was older than I but still not very old. These are some of the things I never told her about: Steven my fear of being locked in public restrooms trapped alive Anya my terror of falling asleep of turtleneck sweaters of pot lucks of salt shakers and sugar jars in restau rants of people on drugs of catching their highs and what if my hands took on a will of their own. My elevator phobia: I would arrive fifteen minutes early, trudge up the six flights to her of fice, dawdle in the hall until I quit panting. “You look so exotic in those blue earrings,” she’d coo. “What adventures has life brought you this week?” “Oh nothing in particular.” “Noth ing?” Deeper and deeper did I hunch into the white wicker armchair with its cheerful floral cushion, tainted and abject, my lips a trembling wall of nondisclosure. My eyes traced the arabesques of the Oriental rug on the floor. Donna stared at me, her face pleasant and blank until I finally blurted out, “I throw up.” “Throw up?” “Yes.” “I’m all ears,” she chirped. I babbled on about how I was vomiting at least twice a day and it had been over a year—the weight loss was great, I felt intense and sexy, like Joan Jett—but I read about all these women with rotting teeth. She listened, therapeutically silent, then cocked her head and said, “What sign are you?” “Aquarius.” Her head shot erect, shiny brown hair jiggling against the lace collar of her blouse: “Yes.” Some planet was imminently moving into some house. “So you see,” she chimed, “when you’re ready to give it up, your bulimia will drop away.” We decided to focus on something positive. Donna hypnotized me and we found a safe spot on my thigh that I could touch whenever I felt afraid.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He had a fine Piranesi—all tumbled masonry and sprouting bushes—that he had bought years ago in a sale but had never framed. It was propped, sagging in its mount, on the mantelpiece, above the dusty and ornate black ironwork of the blocked-off grate. There were comfortable, nondescript armchairs, and a heavyweight stereo system. He was obsessed with Shostakovich and had innumerable records of baleful quartets and sarcastic little songs. They put me into a gloom and a fidget within seconds but I think their bleakness met some otherwise inarticulate inner compulsion of his own, of a piece perhaps with the featurelessness of the apartment and his fatalistic disdain of possessions. I heated up some coffee in the kitchen. James’s life—like Phil’s in a way—followed such awkward and demanding patterns, was so thrown out for the service of others, that ordinary things like mealtimes and provisions obeyed a quite different logic. Often he would live for weeks on three-minute snacks, and he was used to breakfasting at five in the morning or lunching at five in the afternoon. The fridge and cupboards were always full of little items to eat, many of them bought from the local Japanese supermarket. I riffled through packets of seaweed, red-hot crackers and the sprouts of various beans before deciding that coffee alone, perhaps, would be the thing. There were two kinds of specialist publication James took. As I sat on a stool and leafed through to the end of the Guardian , I was alarmed to find one of them underneath, lying on the kitchen work-top. This was Update , a medical monthly that kept GPs abreast of the latest in sores, goitres, growths and malformations of all kinds. The articles were sober to a fault, and cast an assumption of disturbing normality over conditions which the accompanying photographs showed to be quite revoltingly unusual. This effect was worsened by the colour spectrum used, a flashlight glare which lent to the contorted limbs, the misted-over eyes and weeping wounds the high tonality of well-hung game. It was hard to imagine looking forward to the arrival of Update as one might to that of Autocar or Hampshire Life. The other mags were not left lying about. The fact that even in his own home he kept them neatly hidden away (under some jerseys in the second drawer of his dressing-table) showed I suppose the secret and illicit power they still had for him. I hauled them out to see if there was anything new—though it was actually hard to remember. He dealt largely in material put out from Chicago by the Third World Press—a title which might have been thought to chasten rather than excite the exploitative urge, though James was clearly unabashed.

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

  It gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of their divorce.” She leaned forward so that she was almost doubled at the waist, as if holding herself in one piece. “Gavin teases me all the time about being afraid of change. But I think I’ve learned how to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy.” She paused to think about what she meant. “But it never really goes away, never.” On hearing her story, I realized that Karen’s journey into full adulthood required several more steps. Leaving her first serious relationship was only an overture. The Karen who graduated in public health and who had helped establish a successful regional program to help crippled children was a different person altogether. She had acquired a new identity as a competent and proud young woman who could if necessary manage by herself. Over and beyond her professional achievements, Karen was finally able to relinquish her role as the person responsible for her parents and siblings. This was a slow and painful process. The turning point was her realization that her brother and sister were adults who were exploiting her generosity. “I had to move on,” she said. “I’d done enough.” With that she closed the door, a free woman. Having achieved intellectual and emotional growth, she was ready to be the partner of an adult man who wanted a lover and a wife, not a caregiver. In loving a man who loved her and treated her as an equal, she felt safe for the first time in her life and was able to vanquish her fears. Although residues of her early fears did not disappear, they faded into the background. Within this relationship, Karen completed her struggle to reach adulthood. In hearing story after story like Karen’s about how difficult life was during their twenties, I realized that compared to children from intact families, children of divorce follow a different trajectory for growing up. It takes them longer. Their adolescence is protracted and their entry into adulthood is delayed. Children of divorce need more time to grow up because they have to accomplish more: they must simultaneously let go of the past and create mental models for where they are headed, carving their own way. Those who succeed deserve gold medals for integrity and perseverance. Having rejected their parents as role models, they have to invent who they want to be and what they want to achieve in adult life.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I tried to repress my eagerness and anxiety: to think of him being so close to here … ‘I saw him walking along the road first of all, and I thought it was him, so I followed him.’ ‘Good boy! Now what did he have on?’ ‘Um—trousers. And a shirt.’ ‘Terrific.’ I wanted to know if his tight cords cut into the crack of his bum, if you could make out his nipples through his T-shirt; but I made do with the more general answer. ‘Go on.’ ‘Well, he went along our road, and then turned right, and when I went round the corner he was coming back again. So I went into a house and hid behind the hedge, I was pretending that it was my house, you see. I’m sure he didn’t recognise me. Then he shouted when he was just outside the hedge, and there was another man.’ ‘Did you see him?’ ‘I saw his legs and hands. He was a black man too, and I think he was called Harold.’ ‘Harold, yes, that’s Arthur’s big brother. Arthur sort of works for him sometimes.’ ‘I think he was very cross. He said he was going to give him a smack.’ ‘The idea!’ I exclaimed, as the real idea—which I had never seriously been able to disallow—seeped inexorably through my system. ‘It was so funny being where I was, because he had something hidden in his sock, all wrapped up in silver paper, and when he got it out he didn’t know I was there!’ Rupert sounded very excited by this bit. ‘What was in the paper?’ he asked, a shade cautious now. ‘I wouldn’t know, old boy.’ His silence told of his disappointment. ‘Did they say anything else?’ ‘Yes. Arthur said, “Where’s fucking Tony?” ’ He giggled. ‘Mm—there’s no need to do the accent and everything.’ ‘And Harold said, “He’s in the car,” or something, I can’t quite remember … And Arthur said something about “That Tony was lucky to be alive” and Harold said “Watch your—um—lip”—does that mean mind your ps and qs?’ ‘Yup, more or less. That’s very interesting, Roops.” I pictured Arthur’s lips, and imagined Tony, and wondered if it could possibly be the same one. ‘You didn’t get to see Tony, then?’ ‘No, he was in the car. Actually, they walked down the street a bit, and then there was a car going parp, parp. When I came out again they were just climbing into the car.’ ‘Was it a big yellow car?’ ‘It was a quite big yellow car—and all the windows were black.’ ‘That’s the one. Darling, you are a great genius. One day I shall have to give you a medal.’ ‘Well, I promised I’d tell you.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I’m sure you’ll get more out of it than I will.’ I started reading it on the Underground, rattling out eastward in an almost empty mid-afternoon carriage, the sun, once we had emerged from the tunnels, burning the back of my neck. The book was beautifully designed, refined but without pretension, with restfully little of the brilliant text on each thick, wide-margined page. It was a treasure, and I could not decide whether to keep it for myself or to give it to James. Imagining his pleasure at receiving it, and then feeling apprehensive about Arthur, I looked out of the window at the widening suburbs, the housing estates, the distant gasometers, the mysterious empty tracts of fenced-in waste land, grass and gravelly pools and bursts of purple foxgloves. Modern warehouses abutted on the line, and often the train ran on a high embankment at the level of bedroom windows or above shallow terrace gardens with wooden huts, a swing or a blown-up paddling pool. Everywhere the impression was of desertion, as if on this spacious summer day just touched, high up, with tiny flecks of motionless cloud, the people had made off. It was a false impression, as I found when my stop came and, slipping the book into my jacket pocket and taking up my bag, I went out onto a busy platform and then into a crowded modern high street with mothers shopping, babies in push-chairs blocking the way, traffic lights, delivery vans, the alarming bleep of pedestrian crossings. It was like an anonymous, exemplary street, with a range of nameable activities, drawn to teach vocabulary in a foreign language. I was amazed to think it was in the city where I lived, and consulted my A-Z surreptitiously so as not to set off with faked familiarity in the wrong direction. The culture shock was compounded as a single-decker bus approached showing the destination ‘Victoria and Albert Docks’. Victoria and Albert Docks! To the people here the V and A was not, as it was in the slippered west, a vast terracotta-encrusted edifice, whose echoing interiors held ancient tapestries, miniatures of people copulating, dusty baroque sculpture and sequences of dead and spotlit rooms taken wholesale from the houses of the past. How different my childhood Sunday afternoons would have been if, instead of showing me the Raphael Cartoons (which had killed Raphael for me ever since), my father had sent me to the docks, to talk with stevedores and have them tell me, with much pumping and flexing, the stories of their tattoos. I soon saw where I was going, three squat towers which rose above the rooftops of the street: they were some distance away and the shops had turned to curtained terraces by the time I branched off. At the end of a short side-street a narrow ginnel with concrete bollards led into the surprisingly wide area in which the blocks of flats stood.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was with a mind worried by the gloom and misfortune of my friends and with my appearance newly toughened, Marine-style, by Mr Bandini that I went that evening to the view of Ronald Staines’s little exhibition. Normally I would have kept away, but James’s news made me realise I must put in an appearance. I had had to go through the rubbish bin to find the invitation again, a purple card with, scrawled on the back in white ink, the note ‘Sorry to lose you so soon the other evening—Ronnie’. I could quite happily have remained lost, but I needed to keep in with him and to secure from him those moody but surely incriminating photographs of Colin. The exhibition was called Martyrs, and was hung at the Sigma Gallery in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a home, or at least a stopping place, for many ‘alternative’ figures. Founded in the Thirties by Rycote Prideaux, it had catered in its earlier days for left-wing artists, and Prideaux’s Sigma Pamphlets had been launched there with readings and exhibitions. In my lifetime, though, it had been run by Prideaux’s much younger friend Simon Sims, who had diluted his late mentor’s style, showed a lot of banal mystical art interspersed with often embarrassing gay and ethnic shows, and opened an austere vegan café, with harpsichord music and wooden plates, in the basement. The whole establishment was tinged with a mood of high-principled disappointment. Through the front window I saw the few early arrivals, clutching wine glasses, frowning selfconsciously at the pictures. To one side Staines, dressed in black and white, was talking to a man with a notebook. He had that look of insincere good behaviour that people have when they are working on their own public relations. As I came in the coppery clack of the shop-bell had all heads turning—it was like the showers at the Corry—and Staines twisted round to smile at me and give me a presumptuous wink before carrying on with his interview. I signed the book and made for the drinks table. I wasn’t warmly disposed towards the pictures, but knowing about their background I felt a slight anxiety on their behalf, as I do when I see a friend on stage. I hoped that their tawdry Smithfield muses would be sufficiently glamorised by Staines’s lens and the finery of the studio. By and large, I should not have worried. The photographs were intensely professional, the lighting and tonality were beautiful, and the silkiest of purses had been made from even the hairiest of sows’ ears. I spotted young Aldo at once, in his role of the Baptist, his naked torso broadening into brightness, his stiff little pennant at an angle over his head, an expression of faint surprise about his sleepy dark eyes and stubble-roughened jaw.

• 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.