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 Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one’s say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt, these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. —Rollo May Y 17 Seize the Historical Moment The Law of Generational Myopia ou are born into a generation that defines who you are more than you can imagine. Your generation wants to separate itself from the previous one and set a new tone for the world. In the process, it forms certain tastes, values, and ways of thinking that you as an individual internalize. As you get older, these generational values and ideas tend to close you off from other points of view, constraining your mind. Your task is to understand as deeply as possible this powerful influence on who you are and how you see the world. Knowing in depth the spirit of your generation and the times you live in, you will be better able to exploit the zeitgeist. You will be the one to anticipate and set the trends that your generation hungers for. You will free your mind from the mental constraints placed on you by your generation, and you will become more of the individual you imagine yourself to be, with all the power that freedom will bring you. The Rising Tide On May 10, 1774, sixty-four-year-old King Louis XV of France died, and though the country went into the requisite mourning for its king, many French people felt a sense of relief. He had ruled France for over fifty years. He left a country that was prosperous, the preeminent power in Europe, but things were changing—the expanding middle class craved power, the peasantry was restless, and people in general yearned for a new direction. And so it was with great hope and affection that the French people turned to their new ruler, King Louis XVI, the grandson of the deceased king, who was a mere twenty years old at the time. He and his young wife, Marie Antoinette, represented a new generation that would certainly revitalize the country and the monarchy itself. The young king, however, did not share the optimism of his subjects. In fact, at moments he was on the verge of panic. Ever since he was a boy, he had dreaded the possibility that he might become king. Compared with his affable grandfather, Louis was quite shy around people; he was an awkward young man, always uncertain and fearful of making mistakes. He felt the august role of French king to be beyond his capacities. Now, having ascended the throne, he could no longer disguise his insecurities from the court and from the French people.

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

  Of course, when Adele describes the state of her marriage she isn’t thinking about contemporary angst. But I believe that the perils of love are heightened by the particular modern pangs we bring to it. We live miles away from our families, no longer know our childhood friends, and are regularly uprooted and transplanted. All this discontinuity has a cumulative effect. We bring to our romantic relationships an almost unbearable existential vulnerability—as if love itself weren’t dangerous enough. A Modern Love Story: The Short Version You meet someone through a potent alchemy of attraction. It is a sweet reaction and it’s always a surprise. You’re filled with a sense of possibility, of hope, of being lifted out of the mundane and into a world of emotion and enthrallment. Love grabs you, and you feel powerful. You cherish the rush, and you want to hold on to the feeling. You’re also scared. The more you become attached, the more you have to lose. So you set out to make love more secure. You seek to fix it, to make it dependable. You make your first commitments, and happily give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for a little bit of stability. You create comfort through devices—habit, ritual, pet names—that bring reassurance. But the excitement was bound to a certain measure of insecurity. Your high resulted from the uncertainty, and now, by seeking to harness it, you wind up draining the vitality out of the relationship. You enjoy the comfort, but complain that you feel constrained. You miss the spontaneity. In your attempt to control the risks of passion, you have tamed it out of existence. Marital boredom is born. While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person. 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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Our minds drift to the future, where all our hopes and wishes will be fulfilled. If we have a plan or a goal, we find it hard to commit to it with a lot of energy. We’ll get to it tomorrow, we tell ourselves. Perhaps we are tempted in the present to work on another goal or plan—they all seem so inviting and different, so how can we commit fully to one or another? We experience a generalized anxiety, as we sense the need to get things done, but we are always postponing and scattering our forces. Then, if a deadline is forced upon us on a particular project, that dreamlike relationship to time is shattered and for some mysterious reason we find the focus to get done in days what would have taken weeks or months. The change imposed upon us by the deadline has a physical component: our adrenaline is pumping, filling us with energy and concentrating the mind, making it more creative. It is invigorating to feel the total commitment of mind and body to a single purpose, something we rarely experience in the world today, in our distracted state. We must think of our mortality as a kind of continual deadline, giving a similar effect as described above to all our actions in life. We must stop fooling ourselves: we could die tomorrow, and even if we live for another eighty years, it is but a drop in the ocean of the vastness of time, and it passes always more quickly than we imagine. We have to awaken to this reality and make it a continual meditation. This meditation might lead some people to think, “Why bother to try anything? What’s the point of so much effort, when in the end we just die? Better to live for the pleasures of the moment.” This is not, however, a realistic assessment but merely another form of evasion. To devote ourselves to pleasures and distractions is to avoid the thought of their costs and to imagine we can fool death by drowning out the thought. In devoting ourselves to pleasures, we must always look for new diversions to keep boredom at bay, and it’s exhausting. We must also see our needs and desires as more important than anything else. This starts to feel soulless over time, and our ego becomes particularly prickly if we don’t get our way. As the years go by, we become increasingly bitter and resentful, haunted with the sense we have accomplished nothing and wasted our potential. As William Hazlitt observed, “Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.” Let the awareness of the shortness of life clarify our daily actions. We have goals to reach, projects to get done, relationships to improve. This could be our last such project, our last battle on earth, given the uncertainties of life, and we must commit completely to

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

  Play and inventiveness have no place there. Words feel safer than gesture and movements, and these people take refuge in speech. When reaching out to others, they prefer the verbal route. Then there are those for whom the body is like a playground, a place where they feel free and unrestricted. They retain the child’s capacity to fully inhabit their bodies. In the physical realm, they can let go; they don’t have to be responsible. They are often the partner in the relationship who wants more physical intimacy. It is especially during lovemaking that they are able to escape their inner rumblings. For them, sex is a relief that puts a halt to their anxiety; for their more verbal partners, sex turns out to be a source of anxiety. As a therapist, I seek to make each partner more fluent in the language of the other. Laura’s experience has robbed her of the capacity to recognize the body’s vocabulary. Like many women, she battles the age-old repressions of female sexuality that have trapped women in passivity and made us dependent on men to seduce and initiate us into sexuality. Economic and professional independence notwithstanding, Laura remains sexually dependent. She leaves it to Mitch to figure out what she wants. Together, we explore the tortuous conflicts between desire and denial, wanting and not having, gratification and repression. I invite Laura to engage with her fantasies, to own her wanting, and to take responsibility for her sexual fulfillment. I steer her attention to her physical self, and challenge her to break through the vigilance, the guilt, and the disavowal that surround her sexuality. Can she look her mother straight in the eye and still maintain a sense of herself as a sensual being? Can she indulge in her own eroticism and declare the “nice girl” officially void? When I suggest to Mitch and Laura that they’re trapped in a language with too little imagination, an alphabet too limited to contain their erotic life, Mitch bursts into tears. “I’m not angry,” he says of all the times that his frustration has led to mean, hurtful words; “I’m heartbroken.” I ask Laura to just hold him and I leave the room for a few minutes to give them the chance to connect through the purity of physical touch. When I return, they’re practically falling off opposite ends of the couch, a yawning gulf between them. When I ask what happened, they immediately backslide to the tried and true mutual blame that got them here in the first place. “I tried, but he...” “I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t...” I realize that my intervention was more an expression of my own hope than any intention on their part.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  But if the person makes an effort to leave or contact the group or leader, nothing can be done to physically restrain him or her. Ultimately all that can be done is moral suasion. This means family and other concerned parties may plead as persuasively as possible that whatever allotment of time and constrained communication were agreed on should be honored. The importance of the suggested close supervision simply allows those involved an opportunity to present their objections and remind the individual of their commitment when, or if, he or she tries to violate the agreement. During the preparation process what must be emphasized is how important it is to consistently follow and maintain the rules, boundaries, and roles previously outlined and discussed. Starting Out Often families and others involved in intervention efforts are most concerned and nervous about the initial introduction and first few minutes. They must understand that such interventions, including substance abuse interventions, occur as a complete surprise. This is usually an imperative that is most especially necessary due to concerns about interference from the group or leader. Because of the unexpected nature of the intervention, participants frequently worry about the initial introduction. That is, how should they introduce an intervention specialist and explain the situation? The introduction and explanation should be presented as simply and succinctly as possible. For example, they can say, “We are worried about you, and we want to have an open discussion about our concerns.” Then they can add, “Frankly we feel a bit overwhelmed, and so we asked someone knowledgeable to help us.” At this point the family members or those involved specifically introduce the cult-intervention specialist by name. Simply a first name is at least initially sufficient and nonthreatening. At this juncture an intervention specialist or leader assumes the role of facilitator. In other words the primary responsibility for the intervention has now shifted from the family and others attending the intervention to the designated facilitator or specialist. Going over this point and understanding each specific piece of the intervention process in detail are important steps during preparation and specifically during the preparation meeting. The first day usually begins in the morning to allow the maximum amount of time before ending the first day of discussion; it then typically ends in the late afternoon or early evening. Explaining the goals for the first day is important. At the end of the first day, it is unlikely that the cult-involved person will demonstrate particular progress or sudden new insights. The goal of the first day is simply to build a foundation and gain a commitment to continue to the second day. If that agreement, with the aforementioned prohibition regarding communication with the cultic group or leader, is achieved, then the first day is a success. Most failed interventions end on the first day.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  He returned at last, carrying a small container. Once again he positioned himself at the foot of the table. She waited breathlessly while her husband prepared the next course of discipline for her. All at once she felt a cold sensation creeping into her body. Frantically she tried to move away from it, but Bluebeard quieted her, holding her firmly with his free hand. Something was piercing her! Something unbearably cold! She slowly realized that it must be some kind of large object made up of frozen liquid, for she could feel the sharp cold penetrating her, and the subsequent wetness as it slowly melted. The cold awakened her senses, making them more acute, so that the longing she felt was quickly becoming painful. Yet before the pain yielded into pleasure, the object melted away to nothing. She whimpered as her husband slowly repeated the process, again and yet again, laughing occasionally over her obvious distress. But she was aware of nothing aside from the delightful torture between her legs. This continued until Bluebeard’s wife was feverish and trembling. Seeing her thus, Bluebeard abruptly stopped the agonizing procedure and once again left his wife alone in the room. She moaned softly. There was an excruciating ache pulsating throughout her body that her position made it impossible to recover from. It throbbed painfully at the juncture between her legs, slowly rippling into her torso and limbs. She knew that she would have to wait until her husband chose to relieve her. And she waited. At last Bluebeard came back into the little room, bringing with him another small container. She held her breath again as her husband resumed his position. This time it was Bluebeard’s hands that she felt, gently caressing her. She moaned in pleasure, but a few seconds later she felt a searing heat where he rubbed, and she cried out in frustration. Bluebeard again quieted her and held her still, but the movement of his hand became more brutal, furiously probing her until she was aware of nothing but the scorching place where he rubbed. But this pain, too, soon gave way to pleasure, and she meandered between screams and moans, one moment shaking her hips furiously in an attempt to escape his tormenting caress and the very next moment working her hips against his hands to enhance the pleasure. But always he stopped when he perceived her pleasure and, scooping up more of the mysterious ointment, he once again began the process, spreading her apart and mercilessly forcing the heat deep inside her. Finally, the poor lady had endured all she could and she began to weep miserably. Not liking to see his wife so unhappy, and thinking she had been punished enough, Bluebeard quickly unfastened her limbs and lifted her from the table. He held her tightly in his arms and kissed her wet face repeatedly, all the while comforting her with words of love. But she continued to sob.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Accordingly, having set all his affairs in order, he betook himself with one only servant to Ancona and transporting all his good thither, despatched it to Florence to a friend of the Anconese his partner, whilst he himself, in the disguise of a pilgrim returning from the Holy Sepulchre, followed secretly after with his servant and coming to Florence, put up at a little hostelry kept by two brothers, in the neighbourhood of his mistress's house, whereto he repaired first of all, to see her, an he might. However, he found the windows and doors and all else closed, wherefore his heart misgave him she was dead or had removed thence and he betook himself, in great concern, to the house of his brethren, before which he saw four of the latter clad all in black. At this he marvelled exceedingly and knowing himself so changed both in habit and person from that which he was used to be, whenas he departed thence, that he might not lightly be recognized, he boldly accosted a cordwainer hard by and asked him why they were clad in black; whereto he answered, 'Yonder men are clad in black for that it is not yet a fortnight since a brother of theirs, who had not been here this great while, was murdered, and I understand they have proved to the court that one Aldobrandino Palermini, who is in prison, slew him, for that he was a well-wisher of his wife and had returned hither unknown to be with her.'

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

  If someone is counting on children to bring them peace of mind, self-confidence, or a steady sense of happiness, they are in for a bad shock. What children do is complicate, implicate, give plot lines to the story, color to the picture, darken everything, bring fear as never before, suggest the holy, explain the ferocity of the human mind, undo or redo some of the past while casting shadows into the future. There is no boredom with children in the home. The risks are high. The voltage crackling. —Anne Roiphe, Married SEX MAKES BABIES. SO IT is ironic that the child, the embodiment of the couple’s love, so often threatens the very romance that brought that child into being. Sex, which set the entire enterprise in motion, is often abandoned once children enter the picture. Even when children come by a different route, their impact on the sex life of the couple is no less dramatic. Many of the couples I see trace the demise of their erotic life back to the arrival of the first child. Why does parenthood so often deliver a fatal blow? The transition from two to three is one of the most profound challenges a couple will ever face. It takes time—time measured in years, not weeks—to find our bearings in this brave new world. Having a baby is a psychological revolution that changes our relation to almost everything and everyone, from our sense of self and identity to our relations with our partners, friends, parents, and in-laws. Our bodies change. So do our finances and work lives. Priorities shift, roles are redefined, and the balance between freedom and responsibility undergoes a massive overhaul. We literally fall in love with our babies and, as we once understood with our mates, falling in love is an all-consuming affair that pushes everything else aside. The making of a family calls for a redistribution of resources and, for a while, there seems to be less for the couple: less time, less communication, less sleep, less money, less freedom, less touch, less intimacy, less privacy. Even though couples talk about how happy they are as a growing family and how fulfilled they are individually, they nevertheless describe these shifts as taxing to their relationship. Eventually, most of us come to recognize ourselves again within this new context of family. At best, we become more adept at the basic skills of caretaking. We establish the support we need. We lay out a division of labor, both domestically and professionally, that everyone can live with. We arrange for child care; we bond with other parents; we steal time in bits and pieces and get brief intermissions for ourselves. With any luck, we sleep through the night. We start going to the gym again, we finish a magazine before the next issue arrives in the mail, and we manage to create some space where we can connect with each other as adults.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  From where I stood now I could see the path we had taken, my friend and I, and I remembered too how he had pointed to this beach, telling me that in summer very late at night you could find men here, that there were sheltered places in the rocks where you could go with them. I wondered if I would want that now, if there were men to be had. Shortly after R. had told me he wanted to end things I had gone to the city center, seeking I don’t know what. For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn’t been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had thought in precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love, edno i sushto, one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here. My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe. Almost immediately a man stepped up next to me, nineteen or twenty perhaps, very beautiful, his large cock already hard. Possibly he was a hustler, he was so eager, though he didn’t make any demands as I reached over and took him in my hand, feeling the thick warmth of him as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to discern what I wanted, knowing how easy it would be to take him into the neighboring room with its stalls. I heard him whisper Iskash li, do you want it, and though I did want it I let him go, I hid away my own hardness and fled.

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

  The trouble with me was, I thought other people couldn’t tell what I was thinking. The trouble with me was, I didn’t think. Another trouble with me was that I had too much free time. Dwight fixed that. He arranged for me to take over the local paper route. He had me join the Boy Scouts. He gave me a heavy load of chores, and encouraged Pearl to watch me and let him know if I was laggard or sloppy. Some of the chores were reasonable, some unreasonable, some bizarre as the meanest whims of a gnome setting tasks to a treasure seeker. After Thanksgiving, once he knew I’d be coming to live with him, Dwight had filled several boxes with horse chestnuts from a stand of trees in front of the house, and now I was given the job of husking them. When Pearl and I finished the dinner dishes, Dwight would dump a pile of nuts on the floor of the utility room and put me to work with a knife and a pair of pliers until he judged that I’d done enough for the night. The husks were hard and covered with sharp spines. At first I wore gloves, but Dwight thought gloves were effeminate. He said that I needed bare hands to get a good grip on the husks, and on this point he was right, though he was wrong when he told me the spines weren’t sharp enough to break skin. My fingers were crazed with cuts and scratches. Even worse, the broken husks bled a juice that made my hands stink and turned them orange. No amount of borax could get it off. Except when Dwight had other plans for me I shucked horse chestnuts nearly every night, chipping away at them through most of the winter. I could have finished them off earlier but I slipped into daydreams and sat frozen like a kitchen boy in a spellbound castle, a nut in one hand, a tool in the other, until the sound of approaching footsteps woke me up and plunged me, blinking and confused, back into time. The utility room lay just inside the front door. Utility room was Dwight’s name for it; in other houses it was called the mud room. Everyone had to step around me and the horse chestnuts when leaving or entering the house, and on their way to the bathroom. Skipper nodded soberly each time he passed. Norma gave me sympathetic looks, and sometimes stopped for a moment to make insincere offers of help. Both of them let Dwight know they thought he was overdoing it. He told them to mind their own business. I kept hoping they’d really go to bat for me, but they had other things on their minds. Skipper was customizing his car. Norma was in love with Bobby Crow, an Indian boy from Marblemount who drove up almost every night to see her.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Do people take care of each other in America, he said then, the first question he had asked me though he didn’t want an answer, he went on right away, I know they do, he said, I’ve never been to America but I have the idea that you care for each other there. We were still stopped in traffic, he shifted anxiously in his seat. That’s good about the protests, maybe, he said, they show that people believe in solidarity, the young people, we’ve forgotten but to them it’s still important. Mozhe bi , he said again, maybe, I don’t know. He took his pack of cigarettes from a cupholder in the center console and knocked one into his palm. Well, he said, lighting it, buddy, priyatelyu , this traffic isn’t going to move anytime soon. He suggested I get out and walk, that way he could take the next exit and head back to Mladost. We settled up then, I grabbed my backpack from between my legs and hooked my fingers through the latch of the door. Blagodarya , I said, hesitating a moment before leaving the little intimacy his speech had made, and he held out his hand. Uspeh , he said as I took it, good luck, and then he released it to fiddle with the radio, dismissing me with a blast of American rock. It was a bit of a walk to the gathering point, which was in front of the Archaeological Museum, on a stretch that featured the city’s most impressive architecture, its public face: the huge cathedral, with its domes and bells, and state buildings, the university and National Assembly, august and classical. It was an architecture of aspiration, a new nation declaring its ideals. Much of the protesters’ anger had converged here, at the Assembly especially, where there had been a dramatic moment in an earlier wave of protests, a couple of months before. It had been late, almost midnight, and the representatives were huddling inside, waiting for the protesters to leave, as they always did, once they had spent their anger in shouting. But something happened that evening, there was a shift, the anger didn’t disperse but grew ominous, dense and pressured. With every representative who left the protesters had grown angrier, their insults more virulent, their chants more raucous, to the point that the politicians who remained were too frightened to leave, the police had to intervene, they brought in a bus to evacuate them.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The summer I turned fourteen I got my first job working tobacco on a farm outside Hartford. Most people don’t realize tobacco can grow this far north—but put anything near water and it’ll green itself to the height of a small army. Still, it’s strange how some things come into practice. First cultivated by the Agawam, broadleaf tobacco was soon planted by white settlers as a cash crop after they drove the Natives off the land. And now it’s harvested mostly by undocumented immigrants. I knew you wouldn’t let me ride my bike the eight and a half miles out into the country, so I told you I was doing yard work for a church garden on the city outskirts. According to the flyer outside the local YMCA, the job paid nine dollars an hour, which was almost two dollars above minimum wage at the time. And because I was still too young to be legally employed, I was paid under the table, in cash. It was the summer of 2003, which meant Bush had already declared war on Iraq, citing weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, when the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” played on every radio station but especially on PWR 98.6, and you could hear the song from nearly every car on the block if you slept with the windows open, its beats punctuated by the sound of beer bottles bursting on the basketball court across the street, the crackheads lobbing the empties up in the sky, just to see how the streetlights make broken things seem touched by magic, glass sprinkled like glitter on the pavement come morning. It was the summer Tiger Woods would go on to receive the PGA Player of the Year for the fifth time in a row and the Marlins would upset the Yankees (not that I cared or understood), it was two years before Facebook and four before the first iPhone, Steve Jobs was still alive, and your nightmares had just started getting worse, and I’d find you at the kitchen table at some god-awful hour, butt naked, sweating, and counting your tips in order to buy “a secret bunker” just in case, you said, a terrorist attack happened in Hartford. It was the year the Pioneer 10 spacecraft sent its last signal to NASA before losing contact forever 7.6 billion miles from Earth.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I took my glass from the table and with a grimace drank what was left. The same song was still playing, only a couple of minutes had passed. As soon as I set my glass down Z. was filling it, gallant again, and then N. was back from the bathroom, lifting his own glass expectantly, so Z. filled it, too, and then his own, and once more we were toasting one another. I glanced around, aware that everything I had felt would have been obvious to anyone watching us, but no one was watching us; in the dim light I could see the other tables and beyond them the crowded floor unchanged. I put my arm around N.’s shoulders, friendly, trying to normalize touch, and he and I danced a little. Another song had come on, one I didn’t know but that didn’t matter, you can always dance to chalga , that’s the whole point of it, its single virtue. I had turned away from Z. to dance with N., who wasn’t a good dancer at all, he didn’t even try to dance well: he made all his movements ironic, self-deprecating, an extension of the persona he had taken on in class, which was endearing but also a product of uncertainty or doubt, a kind of abnegation. I wanted him to grow out of it but now I played along, laughing, dancing in the same way, our motions silly and shuffling, a game that was in a way the opposite of eros and so a relief to me. I had only lost track of him for a minute or two, but when I looked over again Z. had disappeared. He must have gone to the bathroom, I thought, and immediately I stopped dancing. I shouted to N. that I was going to piss, at which he nodded, and I left him without a thought for how odd it was, to leave him there alone, how transparent it must have been, I would think of it only later. I moved as quickly as I could, twisting through the crowd, finding openings between the groups of drinkers; I wasn’t so drunk, I thought. I had almost reached an open space near the entrance when I stumbled into a man’s back. He turned quickly, muscular and affronted, but smiled when I held up both hands in apology, Izvinyavaite , pardon me, suzhalyavam , I’m sorry, and he put a large hand on my shoulder and squeezed, friendly and forgiving, welcoming me into the camaraderie of happy drinking. And then in the dimness ahead there was a sudden rectangle of porcelain light as a door opened and I was in a large bright room, tiled and clean. There were three urinals along one wall, and a man was stepping away from one of them, zipping himself up.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Well, let me go back once again to the very beginning, to the night you entered the emergency room. Let me tell you my side of it. At about four in the morning, I received a call from the emergency room physician describing a patient in a state of great panic touched off by a nightmare. I told the physician to start you on medication for the panic and arranged to meet with you two hours later, at six. When we met you could recall neither the nightmare nor any of the events of the previous evening. In other words, I had no content, nothing to go on.” “That’s the way it was; everything about that evening remains a blackout.” “And so I’ve tried to work around it, and I agree with you—we’ve made little headway. But in our three hours together, I’ve been struck by your general remoteness from others, from me, possibly from yourself. I believe this remoteness, and your discomfort about my challenging it, is the major factor motivating your wish to terminate. “Let me share a second observation: I’m struck by your lack of curiosity about yourself. I feel that I have to supply the curiosity for both of us—that I alone must carry the entire burden of our work.” “I’m not deliberately concealing anything from you, Doctor. Why would I do that intentionally? That is just the way I am,” Halston repeated in his wooden way. “Let’s try one last time, Halston. Humor me. I want you to review again the events of the day preceding the evening of the nightmare. Let’s go over it with a fine-tooth comb.” “As I told you, a normal day at the bank, and that night a horrible nightmare, which I’ve forgotten—the drive to the emergency room—” “No, no, we’ve done that. Let’s try another approach. Get your date book out. Let’s see,” Ernest checked his calendar, “our first meeting was May 9. Go over your appointments the day before. Start with the morning of May 8.” Halston took out his week-at-a-glance date book, turned to May 8, and squinted. “Mill Valley,” he said, “now why on earth was I in Mill Valley? Oh, right—my sister. I remember now. I wasn’t in the bank that morning after all. I was investigating Mill Valley.” “What do you mean, ‘investigating’?” “My sister lives in Miami, and her firm is transferring her to the Bay area. She’s considering a house in Mill Valley, and I offered to reconnoiter the town for her—you know, morning traffic patterns, parking, shopping, the best residential areas.” “Good. Excellent start. Now take me through the rest of the day.” “Everything is strangely hazy—it’s almost eerie. I can’t recall anything.” “You live in San Francisco—do you remember driving to Mill Valley across the Golden Gate Bridge? What time?” “Early, I think. Before the traffic. Maybe seven.”

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I took my glass from the table and with a grimace drank what was left. The same song was still playing, only a couple of minutes had passed. As soon as I set my glass down Z. was filling it, gallant again, and then N. was back from the bathroom, lifting his own glass expectantly, so Z. filled it, too, and then his own, and once more we were toasting one another. I glanced around, aware that everything I had felt would have been obvious to anyone watching us, but no one was watching us; in the dim light I could see the other tables and beyond them the crowded floor unchanged. I put my arm around N.’s shoulders, friendly, trying to normalize touch, and he and I danced a little. Another song had come on, one I didn’t know but that didn’t matter, you can always dance to chalga , that’s the whole point of it, its single virtue. I had turned away from Z. to dance with N., who wasn’t a good dancer at all, he didn’t even try to dance well: he made all his movements ironic, self-deprecating, an extension of the persona he had taken on in class, which was endearing but also a product of uncertainty or doubt, a kind of abnegation. I wanted him to grow out of it but now I played along, laughing, dancing in the same way, our motions silly and shuffling, a game that was in a way the opposite of eros and so a relief to me. I had only lost track of him for a minute or two, but when I looked over again Z. had disappeared. He must have gone to the bathroom, I thought, and immediately I stopped dancing. I shouted to N. that I was going to piss, at which he nodded, and I left him without a thought for how odd it was, to leave him there alone, how transparent it must have been, I would think of it only later. I moved as quickly as I could, twisting through the crowd, finding openings between the groups of drinkers; I wasn’t so drunk, I thought. I had almost reached an open space near the entrance when I stumbled into a man’s back. He turned quickly, muscular and affronted, but smiled when I held up both hands in apology, Izvinyavaite , pardon me, suzhalyavam , I’m sorry, and he put a large hand on my shoulder and squeezed, friendly and forgiving, welcoming me into the camaraderie of happy drinking. And then in the dimness ahead there was a sudden rectangle of porcelain light as a door opened and I was in a large bright room, tiled and clean. There were three urinals along one wall, and a man was stepping away from one of them, zipping himself up.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was a comfortless room. There was an armoire of some sort, a table, a plush chair, all from an earlier era. These spaces are passed from generation to generation; people can spend their whole lives amid the same objects and their evidence of other lives, as almost never happens in my own country, or never anymore. And yet it was impossible to imagine friends or family gathering there. I stood for a moment just in front of the door, and then the man told me to kneel. I could feel him looking at me in the clinical light, inspecting or evaluating me, and when he spoke it was as if with distaste. Mnogo si debel, he said, you’re very fat, and I looked down at myself, at my thighs and the flesh folded over them, the flesh I have hated my entire life, and though I remained silent, I thought Not so very fat. It was part of our contract, that he could say such things and I would endure them. I wasn’t as fat as he was, anyway: he was larger in person than in the photos he had sent, as you come to expect, larger and older, too; he was as old as my father, or almost, anyway nearer to him than to me. But he stood there as though free of both vanity and shame, with an indifference that seemed absolute and, in my experience of such things, unique. Even very beautiful men are eager to be admired, wherever you touch them they harden their muscles, turning their best angles to the light; but he seemed to feel no concern at all for my response to him, and it was then that I felt the first stirrings of unease. He neither spoke nor gestured, and the longer he appraised me, the more I feared that having come all this way I would be told to leave. It wasn’t the lost time I would resent, but the waste of the anticipation that had mounted in me over the several days I had chatted with him online, an anticipation that wasn’t exactly desire, as it wasn’t desire that I felt now, though I was hard, though I had been hard even as I climbed the stairs, even in the taxi that had brought me there. He was an unhandsome man, though in the way of some older men he seemed solid in his corpulence, thick through the chest and arms. His face was blunt-featured, generic somehow; it was clear that he had never been attractive, or rather that his primary attraction had always been the bearing he had either been born with or had cultivated, the pose of uncaring that seemed to draw all value into itself, that seemed entirely self-sufficient. He would never be called a faggot, I thought, whatever the nature of his desires.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  She was gracious, too, and she had thanked me once for my influence, as she put it; You are the only teacher he works hard for, she said, this is the only class he likes. He isn’t a stupid boy, she said, as she always did when we discussed his poor grades, his late or missing assignments, but oh, he is so lazy. But this time I demurred, It isn’t exactly that he’s lazy, I said. I saw her face tighten slightly with the wariness I often saw in parents when I began to speak about their children, a knitting of the brow that might have meant a special kind of attention but was usually the opposite, was usually their attention shutting down. When N. is interested he will work, I said, if it’s something he likes—and here she turned her head to the side, she made a thick sound with her tongue in the back of her throat. Please, N.’s mother said, turning back to me, her tone at once dismissive and imploring, please, if he likes it? What will he do when he has a job, he can’t only work when he wants to. I nodded and started to speak but she went on, Please, she said, I know what you will say, N. has told me many times, you tell them they should do what they love, it’s beautiful what you tell them. I see why they like you so much, she said, with a tight, conciliatory smile. I do tell them that, I said, I believe it. I took a breath. He has a talent, I said, I think he’s lucky to have found it, and yes, I think he should follow what he loves and build his life around it. I paused. I had been wringing my hands beneath the table, knitting and unknitting my fingers, and now I laid them flat on top of it. I worry about N. in law school, I said, I worry that he will keep doing badly. I think, and here I tried to make my voice lighter somehow, I think he should do what he feels called to do, I think he should study what he wants. She sat very still as I spoke, her tight smile unchanging. Yes, she said again, it’s very beautiful what you say, very inspiring. And what does he do then, she said, after he studies what he wants, what does he do when he has to get a job? Things are different here, Gospodine , maybe in America what you say is true; you try something there and if you fail it is no problem, you try something else, Americans love starting over, you say it’s never too late.

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

  His long face was sunburned, making his teeth look strangely prominent. “Let’s ask the big fella,” he said. “What say, big fella? You want to watch the fun from my place?” He pointed at a large brick house on the edge of the park. I ignored him. “Mom,” I said. “I’m hungry.” “He hasn’t had lunch yet,” my mother said. “Lunch,” the man said. “That’s no problem. What do you like?” he asked me. “What’s your absolute favorite thing to have for lunch?” I looked at my mother. She was in high spirits and that made me even grimmer, because I knew they were not due to my influence. “He likes hamburgers,” she told him. “You got it,” he said. He took my mother’s elbow and led her across the park toward the house. I was left to follow along with the other man, who seemed to find me interesting. He wanted to know my name, where I went to school, where I lived, my mother’s name, the whereabouts of my father. I was a sucker for any grown-up who asked me questions. By the time we reached the house I had forgotten to be sullen and told him everything about us. The house was cavernous inside, hushed and cool. The windows had stained-glass medallions set within their mullioned panes. They were arched, and so were the heavy doors. The living room ceiling, ribbed with beams, curved to an arch high overhead. I sat down on the couch. The coffee table in front of me was crowded with empty beer bottles. My mother went to the open windows on the harbor side of the room. “Boy!” she said. “What a view!” The sunburned man said, “Judd, take care of our friend.” “Come on, Bub,” said the man I’d been talking to. “I’ll rustle you up something to eat.” I followed him to the kitchen and sat at a counter while Judd pulled things out of the refrigerator. He slapped together a baloney sandwich and set it in front of me. He seemed to have forgotten about the hamburger. I would have said something, but I had a pretty good idea that even if I did there still wasn’t going to be any hamburger. When we came back to the living room, my mother was looking out the window through the binoculars. The sunburned man stood beside her, his head bent close to hers, one hand resting on her shoulder as he gestured with his beer bottle at some point of interest. He turned as we came in and grinned at us. “There’s our guy,” he said. “How’s it going? You get some lunch? Judd, did you get this man some lunch?” “Yes sir.” “Great! That’s the ticket! Have a seat, Rosemary. Right over here. Sit down, Jack, that’s the boy. You like peanuts? Great! Judd, bring him some peanuts.

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

  advice and squeezed my mind around them so they would sink in deep and change my game. Bobby had a very soft voice, and this made what he said seem confidential, even a little shady. I PLAYED MY first game in street shoes against Van Horn. Bobby and Norma let me off outside the school and drove away. They had been glum and prickly with each other on the way down. In a few months they’d be graduating, and their plans didn’t agree. I knew I was in trouble as soon as we started our lay-up drills. The shoes were heavy and squarish, chosen by Dwight to go with both my school clothes and my Scout uniform. They clomped loudly as I ran and the slick new soles slipped like skates on the profoundly varnished floor. I fell down twice before the game began. By tip-off the kids from the other school were already hooting at me. I didn’t want to play, but only five of us had shown up that night so I had no choice. My shoes clomped as I ran blindly up and down the court. Sometimes the ball came at me. I dribbled it once or twice and threw it at someone else in red. Jumped when I saw everyone else jumping. Ran back and forth. Fell down whenever I tried to stop too fast. In the din of voices I heard one in particular, a woman’s, shrieking high above the rest. It was like the crazy voice on laugh tracks. Once I picked it up I couldn’t stop listening for it. It distressed me and made me even clumsier. Every time I slipped or fell down she shrieked higher and louder, and then there came a time when she didn’t stop between falls but kept on shrieking in a breathless, broken voice that had no trace of laughter. I wasn’t the only one to notice. The gym grew quiet. Eventually hers was the only voice to be heard. She didn’t stop. Our coach called time-out, and we went to the sidelines to towel off and slake our thirst. People were turning in their seats to look up at her. She was standing in the top row of the bleachers, a woman I’d never seen before, a huge broad- shouldered woman wearing curlers and toreador pants. She had her hands over her face. Her shoulders jerked as muffled barking sounds escaped her. A short man with scarlet cheeks and downcast eyes was leading her by the elbow. They passed along their row and down the steps, then across the gym floor to the exit, the woman barking convulsively through her fingers. The game resumed, but with a difference. The crowd was quieter now, almost hushed. When the other team had the ball, a few scattered voices called polite

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

  She looked me up and down. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “A scarf.” “Something in navy,” Mr. Howard said. She shook her head. “He’d look like an undertaker. Claret.” Franz gave her a choice of three scarves. She moved her hand over them, wiggling her fingers like someone deciding on a chocolate, then picked one up and draped it around my neck. It had the same silky texture as the overcoat. Mrs. Howard arranged the scarf so it hung casually between the lapels of the overcoat. She glanced at me again and then stepped back so that I was alone before the mirror. The elegant stranger in the glass regarded me with a doubtful, almost haunted expression. Now that he had been called into existence, he seemed to be looking for some sign of what lay in store for him. He studied me as if I held the answer. Luckily for him, he was no judge of men. If he had seen the fissures in my character he might have known what he was in for. He might have known that he was headed for all kinds of trouble, and, knowing this, he might have lost heart before the game even got started. But he saw nothing to alarm him. He took a step forward, stuck his hands in his pockets, threw back his shoulders and cocked his head. There was a dash of swagger in his pose, something of the stage cavalier, but his smile was friendly and hopeful. Chuck had spent the afternoon at a double feature. I met him outside the theater and we drove over to Pioneer Square. I had kept him waiting for more than an an hour, and he was worried about the business still ahead of us, so he didn’t say much. I could tell he was at the end of his rope where I was concerned. His mouth was set in a line. He lit one cigarette off another. He drove with dowdy rectitude, now and then sighing heavily. I went into three pawnshops before I found anyone who would give me the time of day. The third shop was run by a woman. She was as tall as I was, and had the stiff blond hair, spiky eyelashes and smooth, waxy face of a doll. When I said I had some things to sell she busied herself with the merchandise on the back shelf. Her hands were red and big and covered with turquoise jewelry. She didn’t look at me, not then or at any other time while I was in her shop. What kinds of things, she wanted to know. Her voice was low and flat. Four rifles, I told her. Also two shotguns. A couple of other items. “Where’d you get them?” “My father left them to me,” I said. “After he died.” When she didn’t say anything, I added, “My mom needs the money.” She grunted.