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.

Page 42 of 112 · 20 per page

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as House in Iowa In late October, she visits you in Iowa City and decides to be a Dalek for Halloween. You are confused by this, profoundly, because she scorns the most earnest bits of nerd culture for reasons that are never precisely clear. She’s never seen a single episode of Doctor Who. When you tell her you’re going to be a Weeping Angel (you found the perfect nightgown in a Mennonite thrift store; a heavenly, draping Grecian shift in a barely there baby blue), you have to explain the villain to her. But she wants to be a Dalek, and she wants to make the costume herself; when she gets to town she begins to buy and assemble the pieces. She cuts up cardboard boxes, slices craft-store foam balls in half for the Dalek’s signature texture. She buys gold spray paint. Your basement fills with fumes. The night of Halloween, your girlfriend insists on making an elaborate dinner—tuna steaks lightly seared on each side. Butternut squash risotto. Her costume is not done—the spray paint has only just dried, the foam pieces need to be glued to the torso. When you try to gently move her along, she snaps at you, so you begin to get dressed in your own costume: the nightgown, a pair of painted wings, and white and blue makeup on your face and chest and arms. This last part takes much longer than you anticipate—is it that you underestimated the surface area of human beings in general, or your body in particular? You stand in front of the mirror swirling color onto your face as she slams things and stalks around the house, angry that her costume is not finished. Every so often, you snarl soundlessly into the mirror. She yells questions at you every time she passes the bathroom door. Why did you insist on tuna for dinner? (You didn’t.) Why did you let her be a stupid Dalek? (You don’t answer.) What the fuck are you supposed to be again? (An ancient alien life force that disguises itself as the statue of a weeping angel. They send their victims back in time and feed on the potential energy of the life no longer lived in the present. A terrible undeath.) “A what?” “A statue,” you say. “Just a statue.” 20 On your way to the party, it is an almost perfect night: a little nippy, the air smoky and sharp, the drag and slide of autumn leaves across your path. You show up so late that it’s moved past fashionable and full swing, and the party has entered a scarier, darker place. You walk past a friend who has combined alcohol with something else, and when you say hi to her she looks at you with the blankest, most dead-eyed stare you’ve ever seen. People keep asking who you are. You grin and place your hands in front of your eyes, the Weeping Angel’s signature pose. No one gets it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Sodom Like Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt, 44 but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again. 44 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C961.1, Transformation to pillar of salt for breaking taboo.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When Psyches was left alone (saving that she seemed not to be alone, being stirred by so many furies) she was in a tossing minde like the waves of the sea, and although her wil was obstinate, and resisted to put in execution the counsell of her Sisters, yet she was in doubtfull and divers opinions touching her calamity. Sometime she would, sometime she would not, sometime she is bold, sometime she feareth, sometime shee mistrusteth, somtime she is mooved, somtime she hateth the beast, somtime she loveth her husband: but at length night came, when as she prepared for her wicked intent. Soon after her husband came, and when he had kissed and embraced her he fell asleep. Then Psyches (somwhat feeble in body and mind, yet mooved by cruelty of fate) received boldnes and brought forth the lampe, and tooke the razor, so by her audacity she changed her mind: but when she took the lamp and came to the bed side, she saw the most meeke and sweetest beast of all beasts, even faire Cupid couched fairly, at whose sight the very lampe encreased his light for joy, and the razor turned his edge.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Finally, she set it on its belly and covered it with a spare blanket. And now—surprise—there was a letter from Mike Monsky. What was he thinking, writing a letter to her? She supposed she should be grateful he sent it in care of Frekki and Frekki put it in a plain envelope and forwarded it to her. Still, what if Rusty saw it? What if Irene did? Dear Miri, I’m back in Los Altos and I’ve shown your photo, the one Frekki took of you in front of the Paper Mill Playhouse, to Adela and the boys. All three are anxious to meet you and hope you can visit over the summer. Yours, Dad (Mike Monk) Dad? He had the guts to call himself Dad ? And Adela wasn’t surprised? She didn’t get angry when she found out he had a secret child? Maybe she believed Mike Monk when he told her it was a surprise to him to learn he had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Maybe Adela believed whatever he told her. Or maybe they had a big fight over it. Maybe Adela accused him of being a liar. Liar, liar, pants on fire, the little boys would have sung, circling their father. Why did he have to go and write to her? Why couldn’t he just leave her alone? But was that what she wanted—for him to leave her alone? She didn’t know. She folded the letter into smaller and smaller squares, then shoved it into a sock. It could have been a piece of lint. Toe jam in the bottom of her sock. Rusty would never bother to unroll a pair of socks. As far as Miri knew, Rusty never snooped around in her room. She was pretty sure Rusty trusted her. She was just covering all her bases. —TODAY SHE HAD a morning appointment with Dr. O and Rusty was going with her. “I need a pair of shoes,” Rusty said. “And Dr. Osner said he’d fix my chipped tooth at the end of your appointment. Two birds with one stone.” The shoe store, Kolber Sladkus, was next to Three Brothers Luncheonette on the street level of the Martin Building, where Dr. O had his office. While Rusty was trying on shoes, black suede pumps with three-inch heels and a peep toe, on sale to make room for the spring line, Miri slipped her feet into the fluoroscope machine, where she peered into the viewfinder to see her bones, eerily green inside her shoes. Seeing her bones that way made her think of something from outer space. The boys at school were all walking around like zombies with their arms outstretched, making the girls scream. Winky Herkovitz said a flying saucer was causing the planes to crash. You couldn’t see it. It was hovering above Elizabeth and when it wanted to cause a plane to crash, it did. What was it with the boys in her class?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and Latin, there were no regular male teachers at Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor on the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic lantern pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont, had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to that particular lecturer as a brilliant garçon; but that was all; memory refused to supply me with the name of the chateau-lover. On the day fixed for the execution, I walked through the sleet across the campus to the information desk in Maker Hall, Beardsley College. There I learned that the fellow’s name was Riggs (rather like that of the minister), that he was a bachelor, and that in ten minutes he would issue from the “Museum” where he was having a class. In the passage leading to the auditorium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble. As I waited there, in prostatic discomfort, drunk, sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat pocket, it suddenly occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid. There was not one chance in a million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was hiding my Lolita at his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road. He could not be the villain. It was absolutely preposterous. I was losing my time and my wits. He and she were in California and not here at all. Presently, I noticed a vague commotion behind some white statues; a door—not the one I had been staring at—opened briskly, and amid a bevy of women students a baldish head and two bright brown eyes bobbed, advanced. He was a total stranger to me but insisted we had met at a lawn party at Beardsley School. How was my delightful tennis-playing daughter? He had another class. He would be seeing me. Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved: through an advertisement in one of Lo’s magazines I dared to get in touch with a private detective, an ex-pugilist, and merely to give him some idea of the method adopted by the fiend, I acquainted him with the kind of names and addresses I had collected. He demanded a goodish deposit and for two years—two years, reader!—that imbecile busied himself with checking those nonsense data. I had long severed all monetary relations with him when he turned up one day with the triumphant information that an eighty-year-old Indian by the name of Bill Brown lived near Dolores, Colo.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I sat there for a minute, the room reverberating with my scream, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. The house was still. Then I reached for my bathrobe and slippers and went off in search of Lalah and Chloe. I was determined to get out of Lebanon as soon as possible. Leave the Middle East and never darken its door again. I picked my way down the little hill to the house where they were staying, nearly stumbling over rocks and roots of trees at every step. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness and I could see the rooftops of Karkabi, dominated by the electricity tower. Civilization! In half the barns and pastures of Karkabi, boys were probably fucking sheep or their sisters at this very minute. And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but I just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your mother’s husband—and good grief—that’s Daddy! But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really want. So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you should blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear? I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called Orgy Girls. On the bed were about ten other books with titles like Teenage Incest; Swapping: Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Entered in All Places; A Trip Around the World; and Letters of Lust. Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival. His hips began to move faster [Lalah read in a histrionic voice] as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily…. …Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark. “Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded. “Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Figure what out?” “There are two sides to every story.” “Always?” “Almost always.” Henry took her hand. “Rusty deserves to be happy,” he said, “and so does Arthur. He’s a good man, Miri.” As if she didn’t know. As if she hadn’t dreamed of having a father just like him. “How can a good man leave his wife and children?” “We don’t know about his marriage, Miri. We don’t even know that he is leaving his children.” “Do you mean the children might go with him?” That would change everything, and not for the better, now that Natalie hated her. She was glad Steve would be going away to college. She didn’t want to live in the same house with him. He barely acknowledged her existence. And Fern? Fern was a noodge but Miri wouldn’t mind her that much. They could get a babysitter for her, maybe another Mrs. Barnes. “You’re asking questions only Rusty and Arthur can answer,” Henry said. “I’m sure they’re going to sit down with you and explain everything.” “Oh, no!” “What?” “Tonight. Six-thirty. Pizza from Spirito’s. I forgot.” He checked his watch. “You’re already late. You should call.” “Would you do it for me?” “It would be better if you did it yourself.” She called from a phone booth along the boardwalk, feeding coins into the box as fast as Henry handed them to her. When Rusty answered, Miri said, “It’s me. I forgot.” “We’ll do it tomorrow,” Rusty said. “No excuses.” “Okay. Tomorrow.” She didn’t tell Henry until after they’d stopped at the hotel where the wedding would be, until after he’d shown her the garden where the chuppah would be draped with Grandpa Max’s tallis and a white lace tablecloth brought from the old country by Leah’s grandmother. Everything else would be decorated with peonies, Leah’s favorite flower, in shades ranging from pale blush to deep pink. She didn’t tell him until he asked, “Would you like to bring Mason to the

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  In his frenzy to have a constant audience he even slapped my cheek once or twice to awaken me. Dazed and bleary-eyed, I listened. And listened. And listened. After the fifth night, it was no longer possible to doubt that Brian had no plans for science fiction. He himself was the Second Coming. The recognition was slow to dawn. When it did, I wasn’t actually sure he wasn’t God. But, according to his logic, if he was Jesus, then I was the Holy Ghost. And bleary-eyed as I was, I knew that was crazy. On Friday, Brian’s boss left town for the weekend and delegated him to close an important deal with the makers of an oven-cleaning product called Miracle Foam. Brian was supposed to meet with the Miracle Foam people in the computer center on Saturday, but he never made it there. The Miracle Foam people waited. Then they called me. Then they called me again. Brian did not come. I phoned everyone I could think of and finally just sat at home chewing my nails and knowing something dreadful was going to happen. At five o’clock, Brian called to read me a “poem” he claimed to have written while walking across Central Park Lake. It went: If Miracle Foam is only a bubble, Why does it cause us so damned much trouble? If we don’t act soon the world will be rubble All for the sake of a silly bubble. “How do you like it, honey?” he asked, all naiveté. “Brian—do you realize that the Miracle Foam people have been trying to reach you all day?” “Isn’t it brilliant? It really sums the whole thing up, I think. I’m planning to send it to The New York Times. The only thing is I wonder whether The Times will print a poem with the word ‘damned’ in it. What do you think?” “Brian—do you realize that I’ve been sitting here all day answering calls from Miracle Foam? Where in hell have you been?” “That’s precisely where I’ve been.” “Where?” “In hell. Just as you’re in hell and I’m in hell and we’re all in hell. How can you worry about a mere bubble like Miracle Foam?” “What in God’s name are you going to do about the contract?” “Just that.” “Just what?” “In God’s name, I’m going to forget about it. I’m not going to do anything about it. Why don’t you come downtown and meet me and I’ll show you my poem.” “Where are you?” “In hell.” “OK, I know you’re in hell, but where should I meet you?” “You ought to know. You sent me here.” “Where?” “To hell. Where I am now. Where you are now. You’re pretty slow, baby.” “Brian, please be reasonable—” “I’m perfectly reasonable. You’re the one who cares about a mere bubble. You’re the one who thinks it matters if there are calls from Miracle Foam.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Already we had mounted to the following grave, on that part of the cliff which hangs right over the middle of the fosse. O Wisdom Supreme, what art thou showest in heaven, on earth and in the evil world, and how justly thy Goodness dispenses! I saw the livid stone, on the sides and on the bottom, full of holes, all of one breadth; and each was round. Not less wide they seemed to me, nor larger, than those that are in my beauteous San Giovanni made for stands to the baptizers;2 one of which, not many years ago, I broke to save one that was drowning in it: and be this a seal to undeceive all men. From the mouth of each emerged a sinner’s feet, and legs up to the calf; and the rest remained within. The soles of all were both on fire: wherefore the joints quivered so strongly, that they would have snapped in pieces withes and grass-ropes. As the flaming of things oiled moves only on their outer surface: so was it there, from the heels to the points. “Master! who is that who writhes himself,3 quivering more than all his fellows,” I said, “and sucked by ruddier flame?” And he to me: “If thou wilt have me carry thee down there, by that lower bank, thou shalt learn from him about himself and about his wrongs.” And I: “Whatever pleases thee, to me is grateful: thou art my lord, and knowest that I depart not from thy will; also thou knowest what is not spoken.” Then we came upon the fourth bulwark; we turned and descended, on the left hand, down there into the perforated and narrow bottom. The kind Master did not yet depose me from his side, till he brought me to the cleft of him who so lamented with his legs. “O whoe’er thou be that hast thy upper part beneath, unhappy spirit, planted like a stake!” I began to say; “if thou art able, speak.” I stood, like the friar who is confessing a treacherous assassin that, after being fixed,4 recalls him and thus delays the death; and he cried: “Art thou there already standing, Boniface?5 art thou there already standing? By several years the writ has lied to me. Art thou so quickly sated with that wealth, for which thou didst not fear to seize the comely Lady6 by deceit, and then make havoc of her?” I became like those who stand as if bemocked, not comprehending what is answered to them, and unable to reply. Then Virgil said: “Say to him quickly, ‘I am not he, I am not he whom thou thinkest.’ ” And I replied as was enjoined me. Whereat the spirit quite wrenched his feet; thereafter, sighing and with voice of weeping, he said to me: “Then what askest thou of me?

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Her teenage cousin Grace wasn’t feeling well and young Judy sensed it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill cold keeping her down. As Blume recalls in her book Letters to Judy , she spent the whole car ride home asking about Grace, only to get stonewalled. “You’ll find out when you’re thirteen” was all her father would say. But Judy was persistent and when she brought it up again at home, her father pulled her onto his lap and gave her the “talk”—which in this case was a vague, “confusing” story about eggs and the moon. “There was something about eggs dropping down, something about blood and something about the lunar cycle, leading me to believe that every time the moon was full, every female in the world over the age of thirteen was menstruating,” Blume recalled. Nobody gave her a special picture book to describe the inevitable physical changes that would come with puberty. Her mother wasn’t much help, either. A year later, Judy watched Essie buy a menstrual pad in a public bathroom. When she asked what it was for, the mother-daughter pair had a clipped conversation that ended abruptly with Essie telling her, “Someday, it will happen to you.” Ten-year-old Judy nodded. “But I still didn’t understand exactly what would happen or why.” When she finally did learn more about periods, she became desperate to get hers, especially after her friends started menstruating. In her mind it meant they were leaving her behind. “I wanted my period so badly,” Blume said in Judy Blume’s Story , “that I once put a pin in my finger to draw blood. I smeared it on a pad and wore the pad just to see what it would feel like.” She channeled that yearning when she was writing about Margaret. Unlike The Long Secret , Are You There God? doesn’t spend time expounding on the physical mechanics of periods—there are no mentions of eggs or moons, let alone fallopian tubes. Instead, it treats menarche like a rite of passage so earth-shattering that schoolgirls are compelled to pray, cry, and lie about it. Margaret sees getting her period as an initiation into a new, grown-up world, marked by the trappings of female adulthood: bras, menstrual belts, and sanitary pads. In anticipation of the big event, she and her friend Janie slip into a drugstore to check out the personal care aisle. Perusing the selection, the girls settle on the brand they’d like to eventually use: Teenage Softies. They feel like rebels making the purchase, given that neither kid actually needs them yet. “Today I was feeling brave,” Margaret narrates. “I thought, so what if God’s mad at me? Who cares?” When she gets home, Margaret tries on a pad in the privacy of her closet (early editions of the book have her using a menstrual belt, while subsequent printings are updated to reflect the advent of sticky tape, in a change originally suggested by Blume’s British editor).

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he wasn’t presenting his theories, O’Reilly was confiding in me the complexities of his personal life. He’d left his wife for Nancy, a patient, but the moment his divorce had gone through, his wife had discovered she was dying of cancer. O’Reilly complied with her last wish and remarried her. The patient promptly went mad and was now confined in an institution in Kansas. O’Reilly, to console himself, was throwing himself into his work. He was taking on more and more patients. He saw the last patient at midnight and the first at six in the morning. Sometimes I would have both the last hour and the first and I would get permission from the school to spend the night on the analytic couch. I’d set the alarm for five-thirty. I’d arise and hurry over to O’Reilly’s apartment next door. It was decorated like a ship’s cabin, complete with bunk beds, coiled ropes on the walls, portholes for windows, a captain’s desk and red and green lights to indicate port and starboard. To awaken O’Reilly I’d put on his favorite record, “Nothing Like a Dame,” a song he considered “healthy.” I’d then make a cup of coffee for him and with it hand him his jar of Dexedrines. By six-thirty at the latest he was alert, dressed and ready to return to his office. I associate those morning hours with the smell of his lime cologne. Just as years before, when I was seven, I had presented myself to a minister and had sought for his understanding, in the same way now I was turning to a psychoanalyst for help. I wanted to overcome this thing I was becoming and was in danger soon of being, the homosexual, as though that designation were the mold in which the water was freezing, the first crystals already forming a fragile membrane. The confusion and fear and pain that beset me—initiated by my experience with the hustler, intensified by Mr. Pouchet’s gentle silence and made eerie by my fascination with “The Age of Bronze”—had translated me into a code no one could read, I least of all, a code perhaps designed to defeat even the best cryptographer. Dr. O’Reilly was far too Mosaic to read anything other than the tablets he himself was carrying on which he’d engraved his theory. I subscribed to his theory, I placed myself entirely in his care, because learning his ideas was less frustrating and less perilous than teasing out my own. I had no one and he liked me or at least he said he did. Of course, he needed someone to talk to about his problems, and I was a good listener.

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

  When Monroe County District Attorney Ted Pearson first heard his investigators’ evidence against Walter McMillian, he must have been disappointed. Ralph Myers’s story of the crime was pretty far-fetched; his knack for dramatic embellishment made even the most basic allegations unnecessarily complicated. Here’s Myers’s account of the murder of Ronda Morrison: On the day of the murder, Myers was getting gas when Walter McMillian saw him at the gas station and forced him at gunpoint to get in Walter’s truck and drive to Monroeville. Myers didn’t really know Walter before that day. Once in the truck, Walter told Myers he needed him to drive because Walter’s arm was hurt. Myers protested but had no choice. Walter directed Myers to drive him to Jackson Cleaners in downtown Monroeville and instructed him to wait in the truck while McMillian went inside alone. After waiting a long time, Myers drove down the street to a grocery store to buy cigarettes. He returned ten minutes later. After another long wait, Myers finally saw McMillian emerge from the store and return to the truck. Upon entering the truck, he admitted that he had killed the store clerk. Myers then drove McMillian back to the gas station so that Myers could retrieve his vehicle. Before Myers left, Walter threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone what he had seen or done. In summary, an African American man planning a robbery-murder in the heart of Monroeville in the middle of the day stops at a gas station and randomly selects a white man to become his accomplice by asking him to drive him to and from the crime scene because his arm is injured, even though he had been able to drive himself to the gas station where he encountered Myers and to drive his truck home after returning Myers to the gas station. Law enforcement officers knew that Myers’s story would be very difficult to prove, so they arrested Walter for sodomy, which served to shock the community and further demonize McMillian; it also gave police an opportunity to bring Walter’s truck to the jail for Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, to see. Bill Hooks was a young black man with a reputation as a jailhouse snitch. He had been in the county jail for several days on burglary charges when McMillian was arrested. Hooks was promised release from jail and reward money if he could connect McMillian’s truck to the Morrison murder. Hooks eagerly told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners near the time of the crime and had seen a truck tear away from the cleaners with two men inside. At the jail, Hooks positively identified Walter’s truck as the one he’d seen at the cleaners nearly six months earlier. This second witness gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillian with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison. —

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I VPiccarda has left Dante entangled in two perplexities. Why are the nuns shorn of what had else been the full measure of their glory because they were torn against their will from the cloister? And if the inconstant moon is the abode of such as have left their vows unfulfilled, was Plato right after all in saying that men’s souls come down from the planets connatural with them, and return thereto? This latter speculation might lead to dangerous heresy, and Beatrice hastens to explain that the souls who come to meet Dante in the several spheres all have their permanent abiding place with God and the Angels in the Empyrean. Their meeting places with Dante are but symbolical of their spiritual state. But Plato may have had in mind the divine influences that, through the agency of the planets, act upon men’s dispositions and produce good or ill effects which should be credited to them rather than to the human will. And indeed it was a confused perception of these divine influences that led men into idolatry. The other difficulty is removed by a distinction between what we wish to do and what, under pressure, we consent to do; for if we consent we cannot plead violence in excuse, although we have done what we did not wish to do. More questions are started in Dante’s mind, for only in the all-embracing truth of God can the human mind find that restful possession which its nature promises it. Short of that each newly acquired truth leads on to further questions. Beatrice, who had sighed at Dante’s previous bewildered questions, smiles approval now, for he asks her a question as to vows which has some spiritual import. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] BETWEEN TWO foods, distant and appetizing in like measure, death by starvation would ensue ere a free man put either to his teeth. So would a lamb stand still between two cravings of fierce wolves, in equipoise of dread; so would a dog stand still between two hinds. Wherefore, if I held my peace I blame me not, (thrust in like measure either way by my perplexities) since ’twas necessity, nor yet commend me. I held my peace, but my desire was painted on my face, and my questioning with it, in warmer colours far than if set out by speech. And Beatrice took the part that Daniel took when he lifted Nebuchadnezzar out of the wrath that had made him unjustly cruel,1 and she said: “Yea, but I see how this desire and that so draweth thee, that thy eagerness entangleth its own self, and therefore breathes not forth. Thou arguest: If the right will endureth, by what justice can another’s violence sheer me the measure of desert? And further matter of perplexity is given thee by the semblance of the souls returning to the stars, as Plato’s doctrine hath it.2

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he wasn’t presenting his theories, O’Reilly was confiding in me the complexities of his personal life. He’d left his wife for Nancy, a patient, but the moment his divorce had gone through, his wife had discovered she was dying of cancer. O’Reilly complied with her last wish and remarried her. The patient promptly went mad and was now confined in an institution in Kansas. O’Reilly, to console himself, was throwing himself into his work. He was taking on more and more patients. He saw the last patient at midnight and the first at six in the morning. Sometimes I would have both the last hour and the first and I would get permission from the school to spend the night on the analytic couch. I’d set the alarm for five-thirty. I’d arise and hurry over to O’Reilly’s apartment next door. It was decorated like a ship’s cabin, complete with bunk beds, coiled ropes on the walls, portholes for windows, a captain’s desk and red and green lights to indicate port and starboard. To awaken O’Reilly I’d put on his favorite record, “Nothing Like a Dame,” a song he considered “healthy.” I’d then make a cup of coffee for him and with it hand him his jar of Dexedrines. By six-thirty at the latest he was alert, dressed and ready to return to his office. I associate those morning hours with the smell of his lime cologne. Just as years before, when I was seven, I had presented myself to a minister and had sought for his understanding, in the same way now I was turning to a psychoanalyst for help. I wanted to overcome this thing I was becoming and was in danger soon of being, the homosexual, as though that designation were the mold in which the water was freezing, the first crystals already forming a fragile membrane. The confusion and fear and pain that beset me—initiated by my experience with the hustler, intensified by Mr. Pouchet’s gentle silence and made eerie by my fascination with “The Age of Bronze”—had translated me into a code no one could read, I least of all, a code perhaps designed to defeat even the best cryptographer. Dr. O’Reilly was far too Mosaic to read anything other than the tablets he himself was carrying on which he’d engraved his theory. I subscribed to his theory, I placed myself entirely in his care, because learning his ideas was less frustrating and less perilous than teasing out my own. I had no one and he liked me or at least he said he did. Of course, he needed someone to talk to about his problems, and I was a good listener.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “I’m the only man you’ve ever met you can’t categorize,” he said triumphantly. And then he waited for me to categorize the others. And I obliged. Oh I knew I was making my life into a song-and-dance routine, a production number, a shaggy dog story, a sick joke, a bit. I thought of all the longing, the pain, the letters (sent and unsent), the crying jags, the telephone monologues, the suffering, the rationalizing, the analyzing which had gone into each of these relationships, each of these relationdinghies, each of these relationliners. I knew that the way I described them was a betrayal of their complexity, their humanity, their confusion. Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order. Even those writers who respect the beautiful anarchy of life and try to get it all into their books, wind up making it seem much more ordered than it ever was and do not, finally, tell the truth. Because no writer can ever tell the truth about life, namely that it is much more interesting than any book. And no writer can tell the truth about people—which is that they are much more interesting than any characters. “So stop philosophizing about bloody writing and tell me about your first husband,” Adrian said. “OK. OK.” TWELVEThe Madman Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name… —Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream You have to imagine him: short, dark, heavy brown beard—a combination of Peter Lorre, Alfred Drake, and Humphrey Bogart (as Pia and I would have said), or at times Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar. He liked to talk tough in the manner of the movie heroes of his youth. He was, as he put it, a movie-coholic, and even in college would sometimes go to two or three movies a day, preferably at (what he called) “the Vomit-houses"—those beat-up theaters on 42nd Street where derelicts went to sleep and perverts (Brian’s mother called them “preverts”) went to drool, and there were double or even triple bills of war movies, Westerns, or Roman Forum epics.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “You’re like something out of Last Year at Marienbad,” he said. “Did it happen or didn’t it? Only her analyst knows for sure.” He was convinced that Adrian “only” represented my father, and in that case it was kosher. Only! I was merely, in short, “acting out” an Oedipal situation as well as an “unresolved transference” toward my German analyst, Dr. Happe, not to mention Dr. Kolner, whom I’d just left. Bennett could understand that. As long as it was Oedipus, not love. As long as it was transference, not love. Adrian was worse, in a way. We met on the side stairs under a Gothic arch. He was full of interpretations too. “You keep running back and forth between the two of us,” he said. “I wonder which of us is Mummy and which Daddy?” I had a sudden mad impulse to pack my bags and get away from both of them. Maybe it wasn’t a question of choosing between them but just of escaping both entirely. Released in my own custody. Stop this nonsense of running from one man to the next. Stand on my own two feet for once. Why was that so terrifying? The other options were worse, weren’t they? A lifetime of Freudian interpretations or a lifetime of Laingian interpretations! What a choice! I might as well join forces with a religious fanatic, a Scientology freak, or a doctrinaire Marxist. Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. I didn’t believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one’s self. In laughing even at one’s own need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn’t feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts. (I told some of this to Adrian.) “Life as a fruitcake! You are awfully oral, aren’t you?” Adrian said, more with an air of a statement than question. “So what else is new—you want to make something of it?” And he gave me a wet, sloppy kiss, his tongue one of the plums in the fruitcake. — “How long are you going to go on hurting me this way?” Bennett asked when we got back to the hotel. “I won’t go on taking it forever.” “I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded so lame. “I think we ought to get out of here, get the next plane back for New York. We can’t keep on with this insanity. You’re in a state, bewitched, out of your mind. I want to take you home.” I started to cry. I wanted to go home and I never wanted to go home. “Please, Bennett, please, please, please.” “Please what?” he snapped.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I knew I was in England by the smell. SIXTEEN Seduced & Abandoned The vote, I thought, means nothing to women. We should be armed. —Edna O’Brien P aris again. We arrive coated with the dust of the road. Two migrants out of John Steinbeck, two dusty vaudeville performers out of Colette. Peeing by the side of the road is all very charmingly Rousseauian in theory, but in practice, it leaves your crotch sticky. And one of the disadvantages of being a woman is peeing in your shoes. Or on them. So we arrive in Paris, sticky, dusty, and slightly pissed upon. We are back in love with each other—that second stage of love which consists of nostalgia for the first stage. That second stage of love which comes when you desperately feel you are falling out of love and cannot stand the thought of still another loss. Adrian fondles my knee. “How are you, love?” “Fine, love.” We no longer know how much is real and how much fake. We are one with our performance. I am determined by now to find Bennett and try again if he’ll take me back. But I haven’t the slightest idea where Bennett is. I decide to attempt phoning him. I assume that he’ll have gone back to New York. He hates knocking around Europe almost as much as I do. At the Gare du Nord, I find a telephone and try to place a person-to-person call. But I’ve forgotten every word of French I ever knew and the operator’s English leaves much to be desired. After an absurd dialogue, many mistakes, bleeps and wrong numbers, I am put through to my own home number. The operator asks for “le Docteur Wing,” and far off, as if under the whole Atlantic Ocean, I hear the voice of the girl who has sublet our apartment for the summer. “He’s not here. He’s in Vienna.” “Madame, le Docteur est à Vienne,” the operator echoes. “Ce n’est pas possible!” I yell—but that’s the extent of my French. As the operator begins to argue with me, I become increasingly tongue-tied. Once, years ago, when I traveled here as a college student, I could speak this language. Now I can hardly even speak English. “He must be there!” I shout. Where is he if not at home? And what on earth will I do with my life without him? I quickly put through a call to Bennett’s oldest friend, Bob, who has our car for the summer. Bennett would be sure to contact him first. Surprisingly, Bob is home. “Bob—it’s me—Isadora—I’m in Paris. Is Bennett there?” Bob’s voice comes back faintly. “I thought he was with you.” And then silence. We’ve been cut off. Only it is not quite total silence. Is that the sound of the ocean I’m hearing—or do I imagine it?

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  This done he perswaded me to depart, and sayd that onely shame and reproach done unto the old Caitife did suffice him, So I went away amazed and astonied, towards the Baines, considering with myself and devising of the grace of my companion Pythias. Where when I had well washed and refreshed my body, I returned againe to Milos house, both without money and meat, and so got into my chamber. Then came Fotis immediately unto mee, and said that her master desired me to come to supper. But I not ignorant of Milos abstinence, prayed that I might be pardoned since as I thought best to ease my wearied bones rather with sleepe and quietnesse, than with meat. When Fotis had told this to Milo, he came himselfe and tooke mee by the hand, and while I did modestly excuse my selfe, I will not (quoth he) depart from this place, until such time as you shall goe with me: and to confirm the same, hee bound his words with an oath, whereby he enforced me to follow him, and so he brought me into his chamber, where hee sate him downe upon the bed, and demaunded of mee how his friend Demeas did, his wife, his children, and all his family: and I made answer to him every question, specially hee enquired the causes of my peregrination and travell, which when I had declared, he yet busily demanded of the state of my Countrey, and the chief magistrates there, and principally of our Lievtenant and Viceroy; who when he perceived that I was not only wearied by travell, but also with talke, and that I fell asleep in the midst of my tale, and further that I spake nothing directly or advisedly, he suffered me to depart to my chamber. So scaped I at length from the prating and hungry supper of this rank old man, and being compelled by sleepe and not by meat, and having supped only with talke, I returned into my chamber, and there betooke me to my quiet and long desired rest. THE SECOND BOOKE THE EIGHTH CHAPTER How Apuleius fortuned to meet with his Cousin Byrrhena.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Why did it have to be either-or like that? I simply wanted them both. It was the choosing that was impossible. Adrian drove us back to our hotel. As we were coming down the winding hill from Grinzing, he talked about his children, poetically named Anaïs and Nikolai, who lived with him. They were ten and twelve. The other two, twin girls he didn’t name, lived with their mother in Liverpool. “It’s hard on my kids not having a mother,” he said, “but I’m a pretty good Mum to them myself. I even like cooking. I make a damned good curry.” His pride in being a housewife both charmed and amused me. I was sitting in the front of the Triumph next to Adrian. Bennett was sitting in the small seat in the back. If only he’d just disappear—float out of the open car and vanish into the woods. And of course I was also hating myself for wishing that. Why was it all so complicated? Why couldn’t we just be friendly and open about it. “Excuse me, darling, while I go off and fuck this beautiful stranger.” Why couldn’t it be simple and honest and unserious? Why did you have to risk your whole life for one measly zipless fuck? We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents. — The next night was the formal opening of the Congress, ushered in by a twilight cocktail buffet in the courtyard of the Hofburg—one of Vienna’s eighteenth-century palaces. The inside of the building had been renovated so that the public rooms exuded all the institutional charm of American motel dining rooms, but the courtyard was still back in the mists of the eighteenth century. We arrived at that purple hour—eight o’clock on a late July evening. Long tables stood framing the edges of the courtyard. Waiters moved through the crowd holding aloft champagne glasses (sweet German Sekt , it turned out to be, alas). Even the analysts were glittering in the mauve dusk. Rose Schwamm-Lipkin wore a pink beaded Hong Kong sweater, a red satin skirt, and her dressiest orthopedic sandals. Judy Rose slithered by in a braless body suit of silver lamé. Even Dr. Schrift was wearing a plum velvet dinner jacket and a large azalea-pink satin bow tie. And Dr. Frommer was in tails and a top hat. Bennett and I moved through the crowd looking for someone we knew. We wandered aimlessly until a waiter dispensing champagne gently dipped his tray to us and gave us something to do. I drank fast, hoping to get drunk immediately—no trick at all for me.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Everything Lydia had achieved in her life had come as a result of her prodigious organizational abilities and professionalism. There wasn’t any institution in the country that Lydia couldn’t reorganize and make more efficient, and in a few years, when she was done with Wellington, she knew in her heart of hearts that she would go on to Harvard and from there to anywhere she liked, maybe even the Pentagon. She had the skills, and skills took you places in Lydia’s America. You started out with something as lowly as creating a filing system for a Back Bay drycleaning firm, and you ended with organizing and managing one of the most complex databases in the country for the President himself. Lydia knew how she’d got where she was today, and also where she was going. What she didn’t get was how Claire Malcolm had got where she was today. How was it possible that a woman who lost her own office keys sometimes three times in a week and did not know where the supplies cupboard was after five years at the college could yet hold a title as grandiose as Downing Professor of Comparative Literature and be paid what Lydia knew she was paid because it was Lydia who sent out the pay stubs? And then, on top of it all, have an inappropriate workplace affair. Lydia knew it had something to do with art, but, personally, she didn’t buy it. Academic degrees she understood – Jack’s two Ph.D.s, in Lydia’s mind, made up for the all times he tipped coffee into his own filing cabinet. But poetry? ‘Now, would you have any idea which classroom she’s assigned to, Liddy?’ ‘Jack – give me a minute on that. I got it on the computer  the anatomy lesson somewhere . . . Remember that time she took a class on a bench by the river? She gets some crazy ideas sometimes. Is it an emergency?’ ‘No . . .’ murmured Jack, ‘Not an emergency . . . as such.’ ‘It’s the Chapman block, Jack, Room C. You want that I get a message to her? I can send one of the kids.’ ‘No, no . . . I’ll go and . . .’ said Jack, lost for a minute in pressing the tip of a ballpoint into the soft, giving blackness at the centre of his desk. ‘Jack, I got a kid just come in my office looking like someone killed his dog – you OK, honey? Jack, call me later if you need anything.’ ‘Will do, Liddy.’ Jack eased his blazer off the back of his chair and put it on. His hand was on the doorknob when the phone rang. ‘Jack? Liddy. Claire Malcolm just ran by my office faster than Carl Lewis. She’ll be in front of yours in about three seconds. I’ll send someone over to her class and tell them she’s going to be late.’