Confusion

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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  If those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if the tablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a different topic of conversation that September day, I would’ve met a different end—or at least a different middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas. Hundreds of voices were shouting over one another in the cafeteria, so that the conversation became mere sound, the rushing of a river over rocks. And as I sat beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard. I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and drinking a Dr Pepper. To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals and then shoving them down my esophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it. Across the table from me, Mychal Turner was scribbling in a yellow- paper notebook. Our lunch table was like a long-running play on Broadway: The cast changed over the years, but the roles never did. Mychal was The Artsy One. He was talking with Daisy Ramirez, who’d played the role of my Best and Most Fearless Friend since elementary school, but I couldn’t follow their conversation over the noise of all the others. What was my part in this play? The Sidekick. I was Daisy’s Friend, or Ms. Holmes’s Daughter. I was somebody’s something. I felt my stomach begin to work on the sandwich, and even over everybody’s talking, I could hear it digesting, all the bacteria chewing the slime of peanut butter—the students inside of me eating at my internal cafeteria. A shiver convulsed through me. “Didn’t you go to camp with him?” Daisy asked me. “With who?” “Davis Pickett,” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “Why?” “Aren’t you listening?” Daisy asked. I am listening, I thought, to the cacophony of my digestive tract. Of course I’d long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn’t much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Amy and Patrick nodded, listening carefully. Patrick had touched Amy a few times now, in ways that Amy wasn’t sure how to interpret. Once Patrick held up a dress against Amy’s body and said, “This would look nice on you,” then ran a hand down Amy’s side, pressing the dress against it. A contrail of unease followed Patrick’s touch, but she refused to let anything like that ruin the moment. A vague euphoria wafted over Amy. Here they were: a bunch of girls talking clothes. Initially, she glanced at Jen frequently; worried that Jen might be annoyed by their excitement or laughing at them. But no, she judged Jen’s friendliness as genuine. It had to be boring to work in a place where you have to carefully avoid eye contact so often, like with that golfer. Maybe hers and Patrick’s excitement made them better customers. Amy had read about transsexuals online. She’d even taken a test— the COGIATI (Combined Gender Identity and Transsexuality Inventory), developed by some transsexual woman and based on DSM psychological models to determine if the test takers were true transsexuals who needed to transition, or merely transgenderists— that is, male fetishists for whom transition would be a tragic mistake. She’d read whatever psychology about trans people she could find at her college library and on the Internet. Most of it was decades old. According to what she’d found online, there were two types of male- to-female transsexuals. Those people who had always been girls, who had played with dolls, were attracted to men, and hated their penises. The second kind, the autogynephiles, were men who got turned on by the idea of themselves as women. These were the fetishistic cross-dressers, who conformed to all sorts of male stereotypes, loved their penises, and got turned on wearing women’s clothing. They ought not transition, the psychologists said—they weren't really women, they were fetishists who took their indulgence too far. Amy caught the whiff of moralism in this assessment and understood what it meant. There was something bad and immoral about autogynephilia. In the comments below the psychology articles, a number of trans women irate at this psychology always posted rebuttals. They called the idea of autogynephilia transphobic. They called the psychologists who came up with it chasers.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  general rule—that we could not predict—had no effect on our confidence in individual cases. I can see now that our reaction was similar to that of Nisbett and Borgida’s students when they were told that most people did not help a stranger suffering a seizure. They certainly believed the statistics they were shown, but the base rates did not influence their judgment of whether an individual they saw on the video would or would not help a stranger. Just as Nisbett and Borgida showed, people are often reluctant to infer the particular from the general. Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. The Illusion of Stock-Picking Skill In 1984, Amos and I and our friend Richard Thaler visited a Wall Street firm. Our host, a senior investment manager, had invited us to discuss the role of judgment biases in investing. I knew so little about finance that I did not even know what to ask him, but I remember one exchange. “When you sell a stock,” I asked, “who buys it?” He answered with a wave in the vague direction of the window, indicating that he expected the buyer to be someone else very much like him. That was odd: What made one person buy and the other sell? What did the sellers think they knew that the buyers did not? Since then, my questions about the stock market have hardened into a larger puzzle: a major industry appears to be built largely on an illusion of skill. Billions of shares are traded every day, with many people buying each stock and others selling it to them. It is not unusual for more than 100 million shares of a single stock to change hands in one day. Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion. In its broad outlines, the standard theory of how the stock market works is accepted by all the participants in the industry. Everybody in the investment business has read Burton Malkiel’s wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He rotates the printouts, there’s a list of test results, but he can’t make sense of them. His brain shorts out when he cross-references the data that they clearly show—he is a father-to-be—with the data he stores in his heart: He should not be a father. Three years have passed since Ames stopped taking estrogen. He injected his last dose on Reese’s thirty-second birthday. Reese, his ex, still lives in New York. They haven’t spoken in two years, although he sent her a birthday card last year. He received no response. Throughout their relationship, she had always talked assuredly about how she’d have a kid by age thirty-five. As far as he knows, that hasn’t happened. It is only now, three years after their breakup, that Ames is able to talk about Reese casually, calling her “my ex” and moving the conversation along without dwelling. Because in truth, he still misses her in a way that talking about her, thinking about her, remains dangerous to indulge in—as an alcoholic can’t think too much about how much she'd really like just one drink. When Ames thinks hard about Reese, he feels abandoned and grows angry, morose, and worst of all, ashamed. Because he has trouble explaining exactly what he still wants from her. For a while he thought it was romance, but his desire has lost any kind of sexual edge. Instead, he misses her in a familial way, in the way he missed and felt betrayed by his birth family when they cut off contact in the early years of his transition. His sense of abandonment plucked at a nerve deeper, more adolescent than that of jilted adult romantic love. Reese hadn’t just been his lover, she’d been something like his mother. She had taught him to be a woman...or he’d learned to be a woman with her. She had found him in a plastic state of early development, a second puberty, and she’d molded him to her tastes. And now she was gone, but the imprint of her hands remained, so that he could never forget her. He hadn’t understood how little sense he made as a person without Reese until after she began to detach from him, until the lack of her became so painful that he started to once again want the armor of masculinity and, somewhat haphazardly, detransitioned to fully suit up in it. So now, three years have passed living once again in a testosterone-dependent body. Yet even without the shots or pills, Ames had believed that he’d been on androgen-blockers long enough to have atrophied his testicles into permanent sterility. That’s what he told Katrina when they hooked up the first time, the night of the agency’s annual Easter Keg Hunt. He told her that he was sterile— not that he’d been a transsexual woman with atrophied balls.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  After an appropriate period of chitchat, she asked her standard opening question: “So tell me about your previous experience with trans girls.” “T’ve always liked trans girls, but my experience has just been escorts,” he replied, then paused. “I’ve had ongoing things with escorts, but in the end, those always made me feel bad.” “Because you don’t like paying for sex?” He blinked. “No, I don’t mind paying for sex.” Then without affect, so she couldn’t tell if it was a joke, he added, “What do you think this dinner is?” Without seeming to register her aghast face, he continued, “The problem for me with trans escorts is that they all want vaginas. Most of the ones I met were doing it to make money until they could get one. It made me feel bad. I want to see that little bulge, and they all wanted to get rid of it. That’s why I went to that site. I figured anyone calling themselves a sissy or tranny had probably come to terms with her cock.” He broke a piece of bread with his hands and popped it into his mouth. Reese continued to stare, unable to formulate a response. He said, “Come on, you asked me a blunt question about my sexual past and sexuality. I gave you a blunt answer. It’s your turn. Don’t act demure now. Do you want a vagina?” He had blue eyes in a big bland face, shaggy hair, and was dressed like he planned to be photographed for a lifestyle magazine for wealthy understated men interested in bird-watching or some other non-vigorous outdoor activity, in a waxed canvas Barbour jacket with many pockets and a heavily cabled turtleneck. When they met on the street, she joked that she was expecting a Wall Street guy in a suit. “Those are the sellers. The bankers. Guys who want money,” he said dismissively. “I represent the buyers. The guys who already have money. I could show up to work in my swim trunks.” Even Reese knew enough about finance to recognize this as a_ suspect oversimplification, but it sounded so much like a line from Glengarry Glen Ross that Reese merely said, “Wow.” And even she was unsure if that wow was because he had impressed her with his confidence or because she had never heard such a clichéd performance delivered with so little irony so soon after an introduction.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And we tried to resurrect the conversation that last night as best we could for Takumi, but neither of us remembered it terribly well, partly because the Colonel was drunk and I wasn’t paying attention until she brought up Truth or Dare. And, anyway, we didn’t know how much it might mean. Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die. “I mean,” the Colonel said, “I think she and I were talking about how much I adored skateboarding on the computer but how it would never even occur to me to try and step on a skateboard in real life, and then she said, ‘Let’s play Truth or Dare’ and then you fucked her.” “Wait, you fucked her? In front of the Colonel? ” Takumi cried. “I didn’t fuck her.” “Calm down, guys,” the Colonel said, throwing up his hands. “It’s a euphemism.” “For what?” Takumi asked. “Kissing.” “Brilliant euphemism.” Takumi rolled his eyes. “Am I the only one who thinks that might be significant?” “Yeah, that never occurred to me before,” I deadpanned. “But now I don’t know. She didn’t tell Jake. It couldn’t have been that important.” “Maybe she was racked with guilt,” he said. “Jake said she seemed normal on the phone before she freaked out,” the Colonel said. “But it must have been that phone call. Something happened that we aren’t seeing.” The Colonel ran his hands through his thick hair, frustrated. “Christ, something. Something inside of her. And now we just have to figure out what that was.” “So we just have to read the mind of a dead person,” Takumi said. “Easy enough.” “Precisely. Want to get shitfaced?” the Colonel asked. “I don’t feel like drinking,” I said. The Colonel reached into the foam recesses of the couch and pulled out Takumi’s Gatorade bottle. Takumi didn’t want any either, but the Colonel just smirked and said, “More for me,” and chugged. thirty-seven days after THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, I ran into Lara after religion class—literally. I’d seen her, of course. I’d seen her almost every day—in English or sitting in the library whispering to her roommate, Katie. I saw her at lunch and dinner at the cafeteria, and I probably would have seen her at breakfast, if I’d ever gotten up for it. And surely, she saw me as well, but we hadn’t, until that morning, looked at each other simultaneously. By now, I assumed she’d forgotten me. After all, we only dated for about a day, albeit an eventful one. But when I plowed right into her left shoulder as I hustled toward precalc, she spun around and looked up at me. Angry, and not because of the bump. “I’m sorry,” I blurted out, and she just squinted at me like someone about to either fight or cry, and disappeared silently into a classroom. First two words I’d said to her in a month. I wanted to want to talk to her.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  He stopped visiting my mother’s house and bought another ranch about an hour and a half away. No one, including my mother, knew where it was located. There was just one problem: getting my mother and sisters to the ranch without revealing its whereabouts. I wasn’t along for these outings, but my sisters recount the experience from time to time at family gatherings: Brother Terrell is behind the wheel of his dark green Mercedes with Mama beside him in the passenger seat. My sisters are in back. They rock along some gravel farm-to-market road with Brother Terrell hitting the brake and the gas pedal, the brake and the gas pedal. They pass some rancher poking along in the opposite direction, raising his hand at every vehicle that passes, howdy-howdy (pronounced “hidy” in Texas). The sun in his eye makes him question what he saw. What’s a Mer-say-dees doin’ out here? And that woman on the passenger’s side, what was that white thing over her eyes? Somethin’ over the kids’ eyes too.Brother Terrell wrapped blessed handkerchiefs the size of bandanas around the eyes of my mother and sisters, trying without success to avoid tangling strands of his daughters’ fine blond hair in the double knots he tied at the backs of their heads. Just another happy family out for a Sunday drive, mother and kids blindfolded. The trips to the ranch were plagued by bouts of motion sickness, forcing Brother Terrell to pull over and let one or all of the girls heave, blindfolds lifted just enough to let them see, and miss, their feet. When the car finally stopped, my sisters found themselves in the middle of a seven-hundred-plus-acre ranch with a guitar-shaped swimming pool. The pool was modeled on the one Elvis had put in at his Memphis house. My sisters thought of the ranch as a mysterious place. They parked their bikes in one place when they left and found them in another when they returned. Their toys, too, seemed to have a life of their own and were always someplace other than where they had left them. When the girls asked their dad what was up with the toys, he said they had most likely forgotten where they had left them or that the cleaning people had probably put a few items back in the wrong place. The truth was more surreal. Brother Terrell had another secret family he brought to the ranch between my mom’s and sisters’ visits. He had become involved with a woman preacher who traveled with him, and they had a daughter together who was the same age as the twins. They kept the girl’s parentage a secret by telling her and everyone in the ministry that she was adopted. To complicate matters, Brother Terrell had adopted a young boy from Mexico around the same time, and he and the girl grew up as adopted siblings.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Confuse Desire and Reality— The Perfect Illusion • 307 Symbol: Shangri-La. Everyone has a vision in their mind of a perfect place where people are kind and noble, where their dreams can be realized and their wishes fulfilled, where life is full of adventure and romance. Lead the target on a journey there, give them a glimpse of Shangri-La through the mists on the mountain, and they will fall in love. Reversal There is no reversal to this chapter. No seduction can proceed without creating illusion, the sense of a world that is real but separate from reality. Isolate the Victim An iso- lated person is weak. By slowly isolating your vic- tims, you make them more vul- nerable to your influence. Their isolation may be psychological: by filling their field of vision through the pleasurable attention you pay them, you crowd out every- thing else in their mind. They see and think only of you. The isolation may also be physi- cal: you take them away from their normal mi- lieu, friends, family, home. Give them the sense of being marginalized, in limbo— they are leaving one world behind and entering another. Once isolated like this, they have no outside support, and in their confu- sion they are easily led astray. Lure the seduced into your lair, where nothing is familiar. Isolation—the Exotic Effect In the early fifth century B.C., Fu Chai, the Chinese king of Wu, defeated his great enemy, Kou Chien, the king of Yueh, in a series of battles. Kou Chien was captured and forced to serve as a groom in Fu Chai's stables. He was finally allowed to return home, but every year he had to pay a large tribute of money and gifts to Fu Chai. Over the years, this tribute added up, so that the kingdom of Wu prospered and Fu Chai grew wealthy One year Kou Chien sent a delegation to Fu Chai: they wanted to In the state of Wu great know if he would accept a gift of two beautiful maidens as part of the trib- preparations had been made for the reception of ute. Fu Chai was curious, and accepted the offer. The women arrived a few the two beauties. The king days later, amid much anticipation, and the king received them in his received them in audience palace. The two approached the throne—their hair was magnificently coif- surrounded by his ministers and all his court. As they fured, in what was called "the cloud-cluster" style, ornamented with pearl approached him the jade ornaments and kingfisher feathers. As they walked, jade pendants hanging pendants attached to their from their girdles made the most delicate sound. The air was full of some girdles made a musical sound and the air was

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  When Ames is finally done, Jon says, “Okay, I can’t say I get this whole thing emotionally. ’m trying to follow you at least intellectually. I think you kind of just need to be honest with the women in your life about what you want. But that’s what I don’t understand either: Do you want a kid or not? Alexander is about to turn seven. And at some point, I have to realize that my kid is his own person; he doesn’t make me who I am. That’s trite, but if I get my sense of self through Alexander, I’m going to end up being one of those dads who ends up in a brawl with the referee and a bunch of other dads at his Little League hockey games. It kind of sounds to me like you’re doing the gay version of that.” “Tm not even at the stage of getting my sense of self through my kid’s accomplishments,” Ames corrects him. “I’m at the stage where my sense of self would be changed by the very existence of a child.” Jon grazes a hand over his head. “Okay. Putting the women aside, do you want to raise a kid or not?” “T don’t know. That’s the problem. I just feel blank. I have for a while.” Jon shrugs at Ames. “Have you ever tried to make somatic decisions?” Ames laughs, which Jon takes for incomprehension. “It’s this thing that Greta does,” Jon explains, “where you take two options, and you say them aloud and you see how each feels in your body. Sometimes your body knows what your mind doesn’t.” “Yeah, I know what somatic exercises are,” Ames says. “I just didn’t expect you to know.” “Why not?” Jon asks, affronted. “I’m very sensitive.” Then he suggests that as a somatic exercise, they drive to the batting cages and work out some aggression, like they did in college. Maybe that will shake something loose in Ames. Jon refuses to pay the outrageous prices for parking at the batting cages at Chelsea Piers, so he finds, on his phone, a warehouse with batting cages way out in Queens. Aging major league paraphernalia hangs beside local Little League team flyers all over the walls of the entranceway. Inside, old-school pitching machines shoot out balls with a satisfying chunck. The building’s interior is separated into lanes by heavy cargo nets and the lanes are occupied either by guys in their twenties who have the look of ex-athletes and smack consistent line drives at the pitching machine, or dads coaching their sons.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “T don’t know.” Katrina pauses a moment to find the correct words. “I suppose I thought there were rules. I Googled what to do if you think that you have outed a trans person. I read a bunch of feminism blogs on it. There are strict rules. Apparently number one is don’t out trans people in the first place.” “Yes,” Iris says, “that is a good rule.” “Right, so I thought ’d come over and confess what I did, and you”—she indicates Reese with a little thrust of her chin—“would tell me what to do.” The word “confess” startles Reese. “I’m not a priest, Katrina! ’'m not going to tell you to recite, like, ten Hail Transgender Marys and absolve your sins.” This is what happens when the only trans voices out there are the loudest, shrillest trans girls constantly publishing dogmatic Trans 101 hot takes to rebuke the larger cis public. You get people thinking that in order to avoid offending trans people, you must locate and follow a secret guidebook filled with arcane rites, instead of just thinking about them decently, as you would anything else. You get one lady assembling an impromptu transgender focus group to assess how she should take the kind of basic responsibility that she clearly knows how to take in the non-trans-populated situations of her life, while another lady is going around gender- neutralizing bathrooms because she doesn’t dare ask Ames what he prefers in a direct, respectful manner. “Right, obviously not,” Katrina says. “I was being a little facetious. So in all earnestness: Does detransition count the same as transition in terms of the respect it has to be given?” This is a topic of fierce debate among the three trans women. Iris maintains a “yes, absolutely.” Thalia agrees, but adds that everyone deludes themselves, including cis people, and the only way to force anyone to actively consider their gender is to equally disrespect all genders. In the abstract, Reese agrees on this principle of equality, but the fact is that Reese respects many genders, but doesn’t respect Ames’s current gender at all. In her heart, she doesn’t think Ames is a man. She just can’t believe Amy’s detransition is what it seems. How many times had she seen the way that Amy, even before detransition, used masculinity as a defensive cocoon? She’d learned to gauge it early in their relationship—Reese could tell how insecure Amy felt in any situation by how many traces of her days as a college bro she pulled to the surface. In those moments, the vitality of Amy’s presence receded, and Reese knew that a certain level of numbing male armor had come over her.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  When Ames is finally done, Jon says, “Okay, I can’t say I get this whole thing emotionally. ’m trying to follow you at least intellectually. I think you kind of just need to be honest with the women in your life about what you want. But that’s what I don’t understand either: Do you want a kid or not? Alexander is about to turn seven. And at some point, I have to realize that my kid is his own person; he doesn’t make me who I am. That’s trite, but if I get my sense of self through Alexander, I’m going to end up being one of those dads who ends up in a brawl with the referee and a bunch of other dads at his Little League hockey games. It kind of sounds to me like you’re doing the gay version of that.” “Tm not even at the stage of getting my sense of self through my kid’s accomplishments,” Ames corrects him. “I’m at the stage where my sense of self would be changed by the very existence of a child.” Jon grazes a hand over his head. “Okay. Putting the women aside, do you want to raise a kid or not?” “T don’t know. That’s the problem. I just feel blank. I have for a while.” Jon shrugs at Ames. “Have you ever tried to make somatic decisions?” Ames laughs, which Jon takes for incomprehension. “It’s this thing that Greta does,” Jon explains, “where you take two options, and you say them aloud and you see how each feels in your body. Sometimes your body knows what your mind doesn’t.” “Yeah, I know what somatic exercises are,” Ames says. “I just didn’t expect you to know.” “Why not?” Jon asks, affronted. “I’m very sensitive.” Then he suggests that as a somatic exercise, they drive to the batting cages and work out some aggression, like they did in college. Maybe that will shake something loose in Ames. Jon refuses to pay the outrageous prices for parking at the batting cages at Chelsea Piers, so he finds, on his phone, a warehouse with batting cages way out in Queens. Aging major league paraphernalia hangs beside local Little League team flyers all over the walls of the entranceway. Inside, old-school pitching machines shoot out balls with a satisfying chunck. The building’s interior is separated into lanes by heavy cargo nets and the lanes are occupied either by guys in their twenties who have the look of ex-athletes and smack consistent line drives at the pitching machine, or dads coaching their sons.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  entrance caught him off guard: she was as beautiful as people had said, but and languor. She used her more striking than her beauty was that look of hers that seemed so sweet, eyes in a subtle fascinating indeed heavenly, with a hint of sadness in the eyes. The other guests con- way— "she danced with her eyes." The women tinued their conversations, but Auguste could only think of Madame thought that all that Récamier. serpentine undulating of the body, all that Over dinner that evening, he watched her. She did not talk much, and nonchalant rhythmic kept her eyes downward, but once or twice she looked up—directly at the nodding of the head, were prince. After dinner the guests assembled in the gallery, and a harp was sensuous; the men were wafted into a realm of brought in. To the prince's delight, Madame Récamier began to play, 187 188 • The Art of Seduction unearthly bliss. Juliette was singing a love song. And now, suddenly, she changed: there was a roguish an a n g e fatal, and much look in her eye as she glanced at him. The angelic voice, the glances, the more dangerous for looking energy animating her face, sent his mind reeling. He was confused. When like an angel! The music grew fainter. Suddenly, by the same thing happened the next night, the prince decided to extend his a deft trick, Juliette's stay at the château. chestnut hair was loosened In the days that followed, the prince and Madame Récamier took walks and fell in clouds around her. A little out of breath, together, rowed out on the lake, and attended dances, where he finally held she disappeared into her her in his arms. They would talk late into the night. But nothing grew clear dimly lit boudoir. And to him: she would seem so spiritual, so noble, and then there would be there the crowd followed her and beheld her reclining a touch of the hand, a sudden flirtatious remark. After two weeks at the on her daybed in a loose château, the most eligible bachelor in Europe forgot all his libertine habits tea-gown, looking and proposed marriage to Madame Récamier. He would convert to Catholi-fashionably pale, like cism, her religion, and she would divorce her much older husband. (She Gérard's Psyche, while her maids cooled her brow with had told him her marriage had never been consummated and so the toilet water. Catholic church could annul it.) She would then come to live with him in — M A R G A R E T TROUNCER, Prussia. Madame promised to do as he wished. The prince hurried off to MADAME RÉCAMIER Prussia to seek the approval of his family, and Madame returned to Paris to secure the required annulment. Auguste flooded her with love letters, and waited. Time passed; he felt he was going mad. Then, finally, a letter: The idea that two distinct elements are combined in she had changed her mind.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Betty Ann turned off the water at the sink, dried her hands, and drifted back to the table, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Laverne set the dirty dishes she had gathered on the counter.Brother Terrell looked at me, Pam, and Randall. “You kids go on and play now. We need to talk.”“But Daddy . . .”Betty Ann cut Randall off. “You heard your daddy, Randall. Now get dressed and go outside. All of you.”As the four of us left the kitchen, I heard Brother Terrell say, “Jesus stood in my room last night.”We shivered in a miserable little huddle on the tiny patch of a front porch. The gray mud of our yard oozed into the lighter brown mud of the dirt road that ran past our house and four other unpainted houses, and dead-ended at a dark, soupy field. Pam looked around. “What in the world are we gonna do?” It was cold and everything was still wet from last night’s rain. There was no dry place to sit or play.Randall sighed, and his swollen belly strained at the fabric of his thin plaid cotton shirt. “Well, if there’s nothing else to do, I guess we could play husbands and wives again.” His tone was regretful, as if he had exhausted all other possibilities.Pam allowed herself one comment. “You are a nasty boy.” She pointed across the street to the last house on the road. “I saw some kids there the other day. We could ask them to play.”Randall shook his head no. “Them’s worldly kids.”There were many reasons to avoid the unsaved. First of all, they were dangerous. Their picture-show-watching, ball-playing, honkytonking ways might tempt us from the straight and narrow. Second of all, they made us uncomfortable. Everything about outsiders—their clothes, speech, habits—seemed to belittle us, and that put us on the defensive. Mama mimicked the speech of the store clerks and bank tellers we encountered: “Oh mah. What dahling children. So smaht.” There was only one way to be in the world, one right way anyhow, and that was the way we were. Even local churchgoers with their smooth ways were suspect. They might be saved, but they were lukewarm at best, unwilling to make the required sacrifices. It was just a matter of time before God spewed them out of his mouth. These prejudices, spoken and unspoken, gave me, Pam, Randall, and Gary license to treat outsiders however we wanted, though I’m not sure the grown-ups would have seen it that way. If some local kid raised an eyebrow at the goings-on under the tent, we stalked and harassed them for the rest of the revival. Their brains would be splattered on the highway for making fun of God’s anointing. The devil would deep-fry them in a vat of boiling oil. Sores would cover their bodies and they would burn forever.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  her motive— whether she the time made her seem somewhat masculine in spirit. These contrary had acted from enmity or qualities gave her complexity, and complexity gave her power. love—h e wavered in To capture and hold attention, you need to show attributes that go perplexity. He wavered in his thoughts now here, against your physical appearance, creating depth and mystery. If you have a now there. At one moment sweet face and an innocent air, let out hints of something dark, even he was off in one direction, vaguely cruel in your character. It is not advertised in your words, but in then suddenly in another, till he had so ensnared your manner. The actor Errol Flynn had a boyishly angelic face and a slight himself in the toils of his air of sadness. Beneath this outward appearance, however, women could own desire that he was sense an underlying cruelty, a criminal streak, an exciting kind of danger-powerless to escape . . . • ousness. This play of contrary qualities attracted obsessive interest. The His entanglement had placed him in a quandary, female equivalent is the type epitomized by Marilyn Monroe; she had for he did not know the face and voice of a little girl, but something sexual and naughty em-whether she wished him anated powerfully from her as well. Madame Récamier did it all with her well or ill; he could not make out whether she eyes—the gaze of an angel, suddenly interrupted by something sensual and loved or hated him. No flirtatious. hope or despair did he Playing with gender roles is a kind of intriguing paradox that has a long consider which did not forbid him either to advance history in seduction. The greatest Don Juans have had a touch of prettiness or retreat— hope and and femininity, and the most attractive courtesans have had a masculine despair led him to and fro streak. The strategy, though, is only powerful when the underquality is in unresolved dissension. merely hinted at; if the mix is too obvious or striking it will seem bizarre or Hope spoke to him of love, despair of hatred. Because even threatening. The great seventeenth-century French courtesan Ninon of this discord he could de l'Enclos was decidedly feminine in appearance, yet everyone who met yield his firm belief neither her was struck by a touch of aggressiveness and independence in her—but to hatred nor yet to love. Thus his feelings drifted in just a touch. The late nineteenth-century Italian novelist Gabriele d'An-an unsure haven— hope nunzio was certainly masculine in his approaches, but there was a gentle-bore him on, despair away. ness, a consideration, mixed in, and an interest in feminine finery The He found no constancy in either; they agreed neither combinations can be juggled every which way: Oscar Wilde was quite one way or another. When feminine in appearance and manner, but the underlying suggestion that he despair came and told him

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  A follower knocked one out of her chair during a tent service when he raced up behind her, grabbed her camera, and ran out of the tent with it. She ran after him and into a line of men with folded arms. Yes, they had a seen a man with a camera. No, they wouldn’t tell her which way he had gone.Brother Terrell responded to the media coverage with increasingly grandiose claims. “In the Bible Paul said, ‘Follow me as I follow Christ.’ All this fasting and praying has purified my body, my mind, and spirit.”He leaned toward the audience as he spoke and trembled. He danced in place, and then hopped on one leg across the platform. “I’m pure like Paul. I’m without sin like Jesus. You can follow me all the way to glory, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!”The preachers and supporters who sat on the platform stood and shook their fists in the air, yelling amen. Mama stood with them, clapping her hands, shouting, “Preach it, preach it.” My mind rebelled. How can he say he is without sin? Rowed up at the back of the tent, so that they could be the first ones out and escape unwanted attention, sat three little girls. My sisters lived with my mother, but none of the tent crowd in Bangs knew about their existence. When Mama attended the services in Bangs, she handed them off to a woman she had taken into her confidence in Groesbeck. When my mother moved, the woman and her family moved also. They lived on one of Brother Terrell’s properties close to my mother’s farm, though of course they didn’t know the exact location of the farm. The story, should anyone in Bangs ask, was that these girls were the woman’s grandchildren.“God has sanctified me. My body is a living sacrifice for the gospel. I’ve been washed in the blood. Purified by his word. I’m a Jesus man! Everything I do is holy!”Everyone around me stood and applauded, including my husband, who knew everything I knew. To ponder whether the content of Brother Terrell’s sermon matched the reality of his life was the equivalent of grabbing a spiritual fire extinguisher. My brain said, Wait a minute , and my instincts compelled me to step into the flame of belief and burn, burn, burn.Doubt is a lot like faith; a mustard seed’s worth changes everything. Away from the tent, the questions kept coming. How can Brother Terrell claim to be without sin? Why doesn’t it matter that he is committing adultery and lying? Mama tried to explain.“Perfection in God’s eyes is not the same as our idea of being perfect.”“King David had a man murdered, and the Bible says he was a man after God’s own heart!”No matter what Brother Terrell did, God loved him. We loved him. I, on the other hand, failed the holiness dress code, and that was something neither the Lord nor his people could forgive.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  or her attention. The attraction can be sexual, the lure of celebrity, what- time he came he rose to go ever it takes. At the same time, the Coquette sends contrary signals that away immediately after stimulate contrary responses, plunging the victim into confusion. The dinner, and on that occasion eponymous heroine of Marivaux's eighteenth-century French novel Mari- I was ashamed and let him go. But I returned to the anne is the consummate Coquette. Going to church, she dresses tastefully, attack, and this time I kept but leaves her hair slightly uncombed. In the middle of the service she him in conversation after seems to notice this error and starts to fix it, revealing her bare arm as she dinner far into the night, and then, when he wanted does so; such things were not to be seen in an eighteenth-century church, to be going, I compelled and all male eyes fix on her for that moment. The tension is much more him to stay, on the plea powerful than if she were outside, or were tartily dressed. Remember: ob- that it was too late for him to go. • So he betook vious flirting will reveal your intentions too clearly. Better to be ambiguous himself to rest, using as a and even contradictory, frustrating at the same time that you stimulate. bed the couch on which he The great spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti was an unconscious co- had reclined at dinner, next to mine, and there was quette. Revered by theosophists as their "World Teacher," Krishnamurti was nobody sleeping in the also a dandy. He loved elegant clothing and was devilishly handsome. At the 76 • The Art of Seduction room but ourselves. • . . . I same time, he practiced celibacy, and had a horror of being touched. In swear by all the gods in 1929 he shocked theosophists around the world by proclaiming that he was heaven that for anything that had happened between not a god or even a guru, and did not want any followers. This only height-us when I got up after ened his appeal: women fell in love with him in great numbers, and his ad-sleeping with Socrates, I visers grew even more devoted. Physically and psychologically, Krishnamurti might have been sleeping was sending contrary signals. While preaching a generalized love and accep-with my father or elder brother. • What do you tance, in his personal life he pushed people away His attractiveness and his suppose to have been my obsession with his appearance might have gained him attention but by state of mind after that? themselves would not have made women fall in love with him; his lessons of On the one hand I

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  oned in the same jail, showed him the incontrovertible proof of his sex did figure never fixing herself Bouriscout finally accept it. surely in the imagination. She is the memory of an experience, the point at which a dream is Interpretation. The moment Pei Pu met Bouriscout, he realized he had transformed into reality or found the perfect victim. Bouriscout was lonely, bored, desperate. The way reality into a dream. The he responded to Pei Pu suggested that he was probably also homosexual, or bright colors fade, her name becomes a mere echo— echo perhaps bisexual—at least confused. (Bouriscout in fact had had homo- of an echo, since she has sexual encounters as a boy; guilty about them, he had tried to repress this probably adopted it from side of himself.) Pei Pu had played women's parts before, and was quite some ancient predecessor. The idea of the courtesan good at it; he was slight and effeminate; physically it was not a stretch. But is a garden of delights in who would believe such a story, or at least not be skeptical of it? which the lover walks, The critical component of Pei Pu's seduction, in which he brought the smelling first this flower and then that but never Frenchman's fantasy of adventure to life, was to start slowly and set up an understanding whence idea in his victim s mind. In his perfect French (which, however, was full of comes the fragrance that interesting Chinese expressions), he got Bouriscout used to hearing stories intoxicates him. Why and tales, some true, some not, but all delivered in that dramatic yet believ- should the courtesan not elude analysis? She does able tone. Then he planted the idea of gender impersonation with his not want to be recognized "Story of the Butterfly." By the time he confessed the "truth" of his gen- for what she is, but rather der, Bouriscout was already completely enchanted with him. to be allowed to be potent and effective. She offers the Bouriscout warded off all suspicious thoughts because he wanted to be- truth of herself—o r, rather, lieve Pei Pu's story. From there it was easy Pei Pu faked his periods; it didn't of the passions that become take much money to get hold of a child he could reasonably pass off as directed toward her. And what she gives back is one's their son. More important, he played the fantasy role to the hilt, remaining self and an hour of grace in elusive and mysterious (which was what a Westerner would expect from an her presence. Love revives 300 • The Art of Seduction when you look at her: is Asian woman) while enveloping his past and indeed their whole experience that not enough? She is in titillating bits of history. As Bouriscout later explained, "Pei Pu screwed the generative force of an me in the head. . . . I was having relations and in my thoughts, my dreams, illusion, the birth point of

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Your victims are sufficiently intrigued and their desire for you is growing, but their attachment is weak and at any moment they could decide to turn back. The goal in this phase is to lead your victims so far astray— keeping them emotional and confused, giving them pleasure but making them want more— that retreat is no longer possible. Springing on them a pleasant surprise will make them see you as delightfully unpredictable, but will also keep them off balance (9: Keep them in suspense— what comes next?). The artful use of soft and pleasant words will intoxicate them and stimulate fantasies (10: Use the demonic power of words to sow confusion). Aesthetic touches and pleasant little rituals will titillate their senses, distract their minds (11: Pay attention to detail). Your greatest danger in this phase is the mere hint of routine or familiarity. You need to maintain some mystery, to keep a little distance so that in your absence your victims become obsessed with you (12: Poeticize your presence). They may realize they are falling for you, but they must never suspect how much of this has come from your manipulations. A well-timed display of your weakness, of how emotional you have become under their influence will help cover your tracks (13: Disarm through strategic weakness and vulnerability). To excite your victims and make them highly emotional, you must give them the feeling that they are actually living some of the fantasies you have stirred in their imagination (14: Confuse desire and reality). By giving them only a part of the fantasy, you will keep them coming back for more. Focusing your attention on them so that the rest of the world fades away, even taking them on a trip, will lead them far astray (15: Isolate your victim). There is no turning back. Keep Them in Suspense- What Comes Next? The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. More: you have ceded them power. The only way to lead the seduced along and keep the upper hand is to create suspense, a calculated surprise. People love a mystery, and this is the key to luring them further into your web. Behave in a way that leaves them wondering, What are you up to? Doing something they do not expect from you will give them a delightful sense of spontaneity— they will not be able to foresee what comes next. You are always one step ahead and in control. Give the victim a thrill with a sudden change of direction. The Calculated Surprise In 1753, the twenty-eight-old Giovanni Casanova met a young girl named Caterina with whom he fell in love. Her father knew what kind of man Casanova was, and to prevent some mishap before he could marry her off, he sent her away to a convent on the Venetian island of Murano, where she was to remain for four years.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  desire, the threshold of I was light-years away from what was true." contemplation of bodily Bouriscout thought he was having an exotic adventure, an enduring beauty. fantasy of his. Less consciously, he had an outlet for his repressed homo- — L Y N N E LAWNER, LIVES OF sexuality. Pei Pu embodied his fantasy, giving it flesh, by working first on THE COURTESANS: PORTRAITS OF THE RENAISSANCE his mind. The mind has two currents: it wants to believe in things that are pleasant to believe in, yet it has a self-protective need to be suspicious of people. If you start off too theatrical, trying too hard to create a fantasy, you will feed that suspicious side of the mind, and once fed, the doubts will It was on March 16, the not go away. Instead, you must start slowly, building trust, while perhaps same day the Duke of Gloucester wrote to Sir letting people see a little touch of something strange or exciting about you William, that Goethe to tease their interest. Then you build up your story, like any piece of fic-recorded the first known tion. You have established a foundation of trust—now the fantasies and performance of what were destined to be called dreams you envelop them in are suddenly believable. Emma's Attitudes. Just Remember: people want to believe in the extraordinary; with a little what these were, we shall groundwork, a little mental foreplay, they will fall for your illusion. If any-learn shortly. First, it must be emphasized that the thing, err on the side of reality: use real props (like the child Pei Pu showed Attitudes were a show Bouriscout) and add the fantastical touches in your words, or an occasional for favored eyes only. gesture that gives you a slight unreality. Once you sense that they are • . . . Goethe, disciple of hooked, you can deepen the spell, go further and further into the fantasy. Winckelmann, was at this date thrilled by the human At that point they will have gone so far into their own minds that you will form, as a contemporary no longer have to bother with verisimilitude. writes. Here was the ideal spectator for the classical drama Emma and Sir William had wrought in Wish Fulfillment the long winter evenings. Let us take our seats beside Goethe and settle to watch the show as he describes In 1762, Catherine, wife of Czar Peter III, staged a coup against her ineffectual husband and proclaimed herself empress of Russia. Over the next it. • "Sit William few years Catherine ruled alone, but kept a series of lovers. The Russians Hamilton . . . has now, called these men the vremienchiki, "the men of the moment," and in 1774 after many years of devotion to the arts and the the man of the moment was Gregory Potemkin, a thirty-five-year-old lieu-study of nature, found the tenant, ten years younger than Catherine, and a most unlikely candidate for acme of these delights in

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  What drove women wild was that behind his somewhat cold and disdainful exterior, they could sense that he was actually quite romantic, even spiritual. Byron played this up with his melancholic airs and occasional kind deed. Transfixed and confused, many women thought that they could be the one to lead him back to goodness, to make him a faithful lover. Once a woman entertained such a thought, she was completely under his spell. It is not difficult to create such a seductive effect. Should you be known as eminently rational, say, hint at something irrational. Johannes, the narrator in Kierkegaard's The Seducer's Diary, first treats the young Cordelia with businesslike politeness, as his reputation would lead her to expect. Yet she very soon overhears him making remarks that hint at a wild, poetic streak in his character; and she is excited and intrigued. These principles have applications far beyond sexual seduction. To hold the attention of a broad public, to seduce them into thinking about you, you need to mix your signals. Display too much of one quality—even if it is a noble one, like knowledge or efficiency—and people will feel that you lack humanity. We are all complex and ambiguous, full of contradictory impulses; if you show only one side, even if it is your good side, you will wear on people's nerves. They will suspect you are a hypocrite. Mahatma Gandhi, a saintly figure, openly confessed to feelings of anger and vengefulness. John F. Kennedy, the most seductive American public figure of modern times, was a walking paradox: an East Coast aristocrat with a love of the common man, an obviously masculine man—a war hero—with a vulnerability you could sense underneath, an intellectual who loved popular culture. People were drawn to Kennedy like the steel filings in Wilde's fable. A bright surface may have a decorative charm, but what draws your eye into a painting is a depth of field, an inexpressible ambiguity, a surreal complexity. 194 • The Art of Seduction Symbol: The Theater Curtain. Onstage, the curtain's heavy deep-red folds attract your eye with their hypnotic surface. But what really fascinates and draws you in is what you think might be happening behind the curtain— the light peeking through, the suggestion of a secret, something about to happen. You feel the thrill of a voyeur about to watch a performance. Reversal The complexity you signal to other people will only affect them properly if they have the capacity to enjoy a mystery. Some people like things simple, and lack the patience to pursue a person who confuses them. They prefer to be dazzled and overwhelmed. The great Belle Epoque courtesan known as La Belle Otero would work a complex magic on artists and political figures who fell for her, but in dealing with the more uncomplicated, sensual male she would astound them with spectacle and beauty.