Contempt

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 253 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality; his genre, his type of humor—at its best at least—the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his very peculiar t’s, w’s and l’s. Quelquepart Island was one of his favorite residences. He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, “realistic” sentences (“He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.” Etc.). Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as “Old Europe debauching young America,” while another flipper saw in it “Young America debauching old Europe.” Publisher X, whose advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond here, had the naïveté to write me that Part Two was too long. Publisher Y, on the other hand, regretted there were no good people in the book. Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail. No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master’s chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown. I presume there exist readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called “powerful” and “stark” by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva was having an affair with her boss, Ken, a middle-aged man with a wife and child. She was open about her obsession with him, but she tried to hide that they were sexually involved. She once showed me a picture of him in a company brochure—tall, big shoulders, white button-down shirt, blue tie, face so nondescript, so boring, he may as well have been molded out of plastic. Reva had a thing for older men, as did I. Men our age, Reva said, were too corny, too affectionate, too needy. I could understand her disgust, but I’d never met a man like that. All the men I’d ever been with, young as well as old, had been detached and unfriendly. “You’re a cold fish, that’s why,” Reva explained. “Like attracts like.” As a friend, Reva was indeed corny and affectionate and needy, but she was also very secretive and occasionally very patronizing. She couldn’t or simply wouldn’t understand why I wanted to sleep all the time, and she was always rubbing my nose in her moral high ground and telling me to “face the music” about whatever bad habit I’d been stuck on at the time. The summer I started sleeping, Reva admonished me for “squandering my bikini body.” “Smoking kills.” “You should get out more.” “Are you getting enough protein in your diet?” Et cetera. “I’m not a baby, Reva.” “I’m just worried about you. Because I care. Because I love you,” she’d say. Since we’d met junior year, Reva could never soberly admit to any desire that was remotely uncouth. But she wasn’t perfect. “She’s no white lily,” as my mother would have said. I’d known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side. I’d seen the tester stickers on various items in the huge bag of makeup she carried around wherever she went. She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence. She was so obsessed with brand names, conformity, “fitting in.” She made regular trips down to Chinatown for the latest knockoff designer handbags. She’d given me a Dooney & Bourke wallet for Christmas once. She got us matching fake Coach key rings.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Full access,” I said, then went upstairs and took a bath, put on the first set of pajamas, lay down on the mattress in the bedroom, and waited for a knock on the door. • • • “I BROUGHT A CONTRACT for you to sign,” Ping Xi said, standing in the doorway, a handheld digital video camera in his hand. He switched it on and held it at chest level. “In case something goes wrong, or in case you change your mind. Mind if I tape this?” “I’m not going to change my mind.” “I knew you’d say that.” He then encouraged me to burn my birth certificate so he could record the ritual on videotape. His interest in me was like his interest in those dogs. He was an opportunist and a stylist, a producer of entertainment more than an artist. Though, like an artist, he clearly believed that the situation we were in together—he the warden of my hibernation with full permission to use me in my blackout state as his “model”—was a projection of his own genius, as though the universe were orchestrated in such a way as to lead him toward projects that he’d unconsciously predicted for himself years earlier. The illusion of fateful realization. He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it. His audience, of course, would never truly be shocked. People were only delighted at his concepts. He was an art-world hack. But he was successful. He knew how to operate. I noticed that his chin was greasy with something. I looked closer: under the smear of Vaseline was a tattoo of a cluster of big red zits. “I think I’m going to be taking lots of footage,” he said. “Handheld digital with this thing mostly. Comes out grainy. I like it.” “I don’t care. As long as I’m on the drug, I won’t remember.” He promised me that he would lock me up and keep my sleeping prison a secret, that he wouldn’t allow anyone to accompany him into my apartment, not an assistant, not even a cleaning person. If he was going to bring in props or furniture or materials, he’d have to bring them in himself, and above all, each time he went away, no trace of his activities could be left. Not a scrap. When I came to on the third day of each Infermiterol blackout, there was to be no evidence of what had happened since my last awakening. There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart. “I wouldn’t want you to know what I’m up to anyway. It would screw up my work.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But Trevor was six foot three. He was clean and fit and confident. I’d choose him a million times over the hipster nerds I’d see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski. The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked. They would be the ones running museums and magazines, and they’d only hire me if they thought I might fuck them. But when I’d been at parties with them, or out at bars, they’d ignored me. They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look- alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Karkabi, Pierre’s much-vaunted “ancestral village,” is a town so small you could easily pass it without noticing. The town only got electricity in ‘63 and the electricity tower, in fact, dominates the village. (It is also the point of interest which the villagers are most avid to show you.) When we arrived in the main square (where a skinny donkey was pulling a stone around in a circle to grind wheat), everyone practically fell over themselves touching the car, breaking their necks for a look at us, and being generally depressingly obsequious. You could tell Pierre loved this. It was his car, and he probably also wanted everyone to think we were his four wives (though, of course, they knew we weren’t). All this seemed even more depressing when you considered that nearly everyone in town was Pierre’s cousin at least and that they all were illiterate and went barefoot—and what the hell was so difficult about impressing them? Pierre slowed the ridiculous tank of a car to a crawl as we drove past (to let all the rubberneckers get a good look). Then he pulled up in front of the “ancestral home"—a small, whitewashed adobe house with grapes growing on the roof and no windowpanes or screens but only small square windows with wrought-iron grilles over them (and flies zooming freely in and out—but inevitably more in than out). Our arrival sent everyone into a frenzy of activity. Pierre’s mother and aunts began preparing tabuli and humus with a vengeance and Pierre’s father—who is about eighty and drinks Arak all day—went out to shoot birds for supper and nearly shot himself. Meanwhile Pierre’s English Uncle Gavin—a displaced Cockney who married Aunt Françoise back in 1923 (and has been in Karkabi regretting it ever since)—produced a rabbit he’d shot that morning and started cleaning it. Inside the house, there were only about four rooms, with whitewashed walls and crucifixes over all the beds (Pierre’s family are Maronite Catholics) and kissed-over pictures of various saints ascending to heaven on slick magazine paper. There were also numerous tattered magazine photos of the Royal Family of England; and then there was Jesus Himself, wearing a toga, his face barely visible under a hail of kiss-prints.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It may not be a plastic surgeon’s dream, but it’s not a Nasser nose either. If anything, its stubby tip betrays the genetic contribution of some pig-faced Polish thug who raped one of my great-grandmothers during some long-forgotten pogrom in the Pale. My Egyptian’s conversational interests, however, went beyond noses. He looked down at a copy of Time Magazine which had lain open (and unread) on my lap during the storm, pointed to a picture of (then) UN Ambassador Goldberg, and said historically: “He’s Jewish.” That was all he said, but his tone and look implied that that was all he had to say. I looked at him very hard (over my Polish nose), and for two cents I would have said, “Me too,” but nobody offered me two cents. Just then our Italian pilot announced the descent into Beirut Airport. I was still shaking from that little interchange when I spotted a hugely pregnant Randy behind the glass barricade in the airport. I’d expected the worst going through customs, but there was no trouble at all. My brother-in-law, Pierre, seemed to be best friends with all the airport personnel and I was whisked through like a VIP. It was 1965 and things were not as spastic in the Middle East as they became after the Six Day War. As long as you didn’t come via Israel, you could travel in Lebanon as if it were Miami Beach—which, in fact, it somewhat resembles, down to the abundance of yentas. Randy and Pierre drove me from the airport in the hearse-black, air-conditioned Cadillac which they’d shipped over from the States. On the road to Beirut, we passed a refugee camp where people were living in packing boxes and lots of dirty children were walking around half-naked sucking their fingers. Randy immediately made some high-handed comment about what an eyesore it was. “An eyesore? Is that all?” I asked. “Oh, don’t be such a goddamned liberal do-gooder,” she snapped. “Who do you think you are—Eleanor Roosevelt?” “Thanks for the compliment.” “I just get sick and tired of everyone bleeding about the poor Palestinians. Why don’t you worry about us instead?” “I do,” I said. The city of Beirut itself is all right, but not as gorgeous as you’d think, to hear Pierre talk about it. Nearly everything is new. There are hundreds of white cornflakes-box-shaped buildings with marble terraces, and everywhere the streets are being ripped up for new construction. It’s unbearably hot and humid in August and whatever grass there is has turned brown in the sun. The Mediterranean is blue (but not bluer than the Aegean—no matter what Pierre says). From some angles, the city looks a little like Athens—minus the Acropolis.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways. The Armed Forces Radio Network blaring out the football scores and the (inflated) number of Viet Cong killed on the other side of the world. Children screaming. Twenty-five-year-old freckle-faced matrons from Kansas wandering about in housecoats and hair rollers, always awaiting that Cinderella evening for which it will be worthwhile to comb out their curls. It never comes. Instead come the salesmen who stalk the hallways, ringing doorbells, selling everything from mutual funds to picture encyclopedias (in simplified vocabulary) to Oriental rugs. Besides the American strays and British dropouts and Pakistani students selling “on the side,” there is a veritable Bundeswehr of gnomelike Germans, peddling everything from “handpainted” oils of sugared Alps under honeyed sunsets to beer steins which play “God Bless America” to Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks which chime perpetually. And the army people buy and buy and buy. The wives buy to fill up their empty lives, to create an illusion of home in their drab quarters, to spread the grease of American money around. The kids buy helmets and war toys and child-sized fatigues so that they can play their favorite games of VC’s versus Green Berets and prepare for their future. The husbands buy power tools to counteract their own sense of impotence. They all buy clocks as if to symbolize the way the army is ticking away their lives. Someone had started a rumor in Mark Twain Village that German clocks brought fortunes in “the land of the big PX,” so every captain or sergeant or first lieutenant made it his business to bring home at least thirty. They collected on his walls for two years, chiming and cuckooing at odd intervals, driving his wife and children as crazy as the army was driving him. And since the walls in those buildings were paper thin, even noncuckooing tenants (like us) heard a steady barrage of cuckoos all day long. When it wasn’t cuckoos next door, it was someone’s unmusical kid playing the unplayable “Star Spangled Banner” on the Hammond organ (paid for in easy monthly installments—it was the listening to it that was hard) or some chief warrant officer howling across the quadrangle for his kids (twin boys named Wayne and Dwayne—otherwise referred to as his “varmints”). When the cuckooing itself wasn’t infuriating me, the symbolism of the clocks amused me. Everyone in the army was always counting the days and minutes: eight more months before you rotate, three more months before your husband goes to Vietnam, two more years before you’re eligible for promotion, three more months before you can send for your wife and child…. The cuckoos recorded every minute of every hour in that long march toward oblivion.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Maybe this memory triggered the hemorrhage of adrenaline that pushed me to go back inside the gallery. I pulled a few Kleenex from the box on my old desk, flipped the power switch to turn on the lasers, and stood between the stuffed black Lab and the sleeping dachshund. Then I pulled down my pants, squatted, and shat on the floor. I wiped myself and shuffled across the gallery with my pants around my ankles and stuffed the shitty Kleenex into the mouth of that bitchy poodle. That felt like vindication. That was my proper good-bye. I left and caught a cab home and drank the whole bottle of champagne that night and fell asleep on my sofa watching Burglar. Whoopi Goldberg was one reason to stay alive, at least. • • • THE NEXT DAY, I filed for unemployment, which Natasha must have resented. But she never called. I set up a weekly pickup with the Laundromat and automatic payments on all my utilities, bought a wide selection of used VHS tapes from the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop on Second Avenue, and soon I was hitting the pills hard and sleeping all day and all night with two- or three-hour breaks in between. This was good, I thought. I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation. Two I’D BEEN SEEING Dr. Tuttle once a week, but after I left Ducat, I didn’t want to have to make the trek down to Union Square that often. So I told her that I was “freelancing in Chicago” and could only see her in person once a month. She said we could talk over the phone every week, or not, as long as I gave her postdated checks for my copayments in advance. “If your insurance asks, say you were here weekly in person. Just in case.” She never caught on that I was having her call in my refills to my local Rite Aid in Manhattan. She never asked how my work in Chicago was going, or what I was doing there. Dr. Tuttle knew nothing about my hibernation project. I wanted her to think I was a nervous wreck, but fully operative, so she’d prescribe whatever she thought might knock me out the hardest. I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life. I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She went on for a while, mentioned the watercolors, her mother’s faith in God. Then she seemed to space out. “To be honest . . .” she began. “It’s like, you know . . .” She smiled and apologized and covered her face with her hands and sat back down next to me. “Did I look like a complete idiot?” she whispered. I shook my head no and put an arm around her, as awkwardly as such a thing can be done, and sat there until the funeral was over, this strange young woman in the throes of despair, trembling into my armpit. • • • THE RECEPTION AFTERWARD was at Reva’s house. The same middle-aged women were there, the same bald men, only multiplied. Nobody seemed to notice us when we walked in. “I’m starving,” Reva said and went straight to the kitchen. I trudged back down to the basement and fell into a kind of half sleep. I thought about whatever subliminal impulse had put me on the train to Farmingdale. Seeing Reva in full-blown Reva mode both delighted and disgusted me. Her repression, her transparent denial, her futile attempts to tap into the pain with me in the car, it all satisfied me somehow. Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again. I woke up briefly to the sound of the faucet running and Reva retching in the bathroom. It was a rhythmic, violent song—throat grunts punctuated with splats and splashes. When she had finished, she flushed three times, turned off the faucet and went back up the stairs. I lay awake until I thought an appropriate amount of time had passed. I didn’t want Reva to think I’d been listening to her vomit. My blind eye was the one real comfort I felt I could give her. Eventually I got out of bed, got my things together, and went back upstairs to call a taxi to come take me to the train station. Most of the guests had left. The original bald men stood in the sunroom off the kitchen.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I thanked her, complimented her on her gold nail polish, pressed the buttons on the payment pad, and left. There was a reason I preferred the pharmacy at Rite Aid over CVS and Duane Reade. The people who worked at Rite Aid didn’t take my moodiness to heart. I’d sometimes heard them cracking up behind the high shelves of pills, talking about their weekends, gossiping about their friends and coworkers, somebody’s bad breath, somebody’s stupid voice on the phone. I’d come in and bitch at them on a regular basis. I blamed them if a prescription was out of stock, cursed them when the line at the pickup window was more than two customers deep, complained that they hadn’t called my insurance company soon enough, were all morons, all uneducated, cruel, unfeeling thugs. Nothing seemed to provoke them to come back at me with anything more than a grin and an eye roll. They never confronted me about my attitude. “Don’t call me ma’am. It’s condescending,” I’d once said. Clearly the woman with the golden fingernails hadn’t gotten that memo. They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident. I ripped into the paper bags on the walk home, threw away all the printed materials, and sunk the medicine bottles deep into the pockets of my coat. The pills rattled like maracas as I dragged myself back through the snow. I shivered violently in my ski jacket. My face, hit by the wind, felt like it was being slapped. My eyes watered. My hands burned from the cold. From outside the bodega, I saw the Egyptians putting up the Christmas decorations in the window. I went in, ducked under the fluttering red tinsel, got my two coffees, went home and swallowed a few Ambien and went to sleep on the sofa watching Primal Fear. • • • FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, thoughts of Trevor called me out of sleep like rats scrabbling inside the walls. It took all the self-control I had not to call him.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained. “The market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.” Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning. Blood-Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it. Natasha was particularly proud of the “Body of Substance” show because all the artists were under twenty-five, and she’d discovered them herself. She felt this would prove her gift for spotting genius. The only piece I liked in the show was by Aiyla Marwazi, a nineteen-year-old who went to Pratt. It was a huge white carpet from Crate & Barrel stained with bloody footprints and a wide bloody streak. It was supposed to look as though a bleeding body had been dragged across it. Natasha told me that the blood on the carpet was human, but she didn’t put that in the press release. “You can order anything online from China, apparently. Teeth. Bones. Body parts.” The bloody rug was priced at $75,000. Annie Pinker’s Cling Film series consisted of clumps of small objects wrapped in Saran Wrap. There was one of tiny marzipan fruits and rabbit- foot key chains, one of dried flowers and condoms. Rolled-up used thong panty liners and rubber bullets. A Big Mac and fries and cheap plastic rosaries. The artist’s baby teeth, or so she claimed, and Christmas-colored M&M’s. Cheap transgressions going for $25,000 a pop. And then there were the large-scale photographs of mannequins draped in flesh-colored fabric, by Max Welch. He was a total moron. I suspected that he and Natasha were fucking. On a low pedestal in the corner, a small sculpture by the Brahams Brothers—a pair of toy monkeys made using human pubic hair. Each monkey had a little erection poking out of its fur. The penises were made of white titanium and had cameras in them positioned to take crotch shots of the viewer. The images were downloaded to a Web site. A specific password to log in to see the crotch shots cost a hundred dollars. The monkeys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair. • • •

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  That puts me in such an awkward position. And I am getting a raise, so that’s good. Plus, I’ve always wanted to work in the World Trade Center. So it’s not like I can complain exactly. I just want Ken to feel bad.” “Men don’t feel bad the way you want them to,” I told her. “They just get grouchy and depressed when they can’t have what they want. That’s why you got fired. You’re depressing. Consider it a compliment, if you want.” “Transferred, not fired.” Reva set her mug down on the coffee table and lifted her hands up in front of her face. “Look, I’m shaking.” “I don’t see it,” I said. “There’s a tremor. I can feel it.” “Do you want a Xanax?” I asked sarcastically. To my surprise, Reva said yes. I told her to bring me the bottle from the medicine cabinet. She clacked back and forth to the bathroom and handed me the bottle. “There must be twenty prescriptions in there,” she said. “Are you on all of them?” I gave Reva one Xanax. I took two. “I’m just going to lie here with my eyes closed, Reva. You can stay if you want, but I might fall asleep. I’m really tired.” “Yeah, OK,” she said. “But can I keep talking, though?” “Sure.” “Can I have a cigarette?” I waved my hand. I’d never seen Reva so shamelessly unbridled. Even when she drank a lot, she was extremely uptight. I heard her spark the lighter. She coughed for a while. “Maybe it’s for the best,” she said. She sounded calmer now. “Maybe I can move on and meet somebody new. Maybe I’ll go online again. Or maybe there’ll be someone at the downtown office. I kind of like the Twin Towers. It’s peaceful up there. And I think if I start things off on the right foot, with a whole new group of people, they won’t treat me like a slave. Nobody ever listened to me at Ken’s office. We’d have these strategy meetings, and instead of letting me speak, they’d make me take notes like I’m some nineteen-year-old intern. And Ken treated me like shit at work because he didn’t want people to know we’re involved. Were involved. Isn’t it kind of weird that he brought his wife to my mother’s funeral? Who does that? What was that about?” “He’s an idiot, Reva,” I mumbled into my pillow. “Whatever.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  heel. Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else. Natasha, my boss at Ducat, was in her early thirties. She hired me on the spot when I came in for an interview the summer I finished school. I was twenty-two. I barely remember our conversation, but I know I wore a cream silk blouse, tight black jeans, flats—in case I was taller than Natasha, which I was by half an inch—and a huge green glass necklace that thudded against my chest so hard it actually gave me bruises when I ran down the subway stairs. I knew not to wear a dress or look too prim or feminine. That would only elicit patronizing contempt. Natasha wore the same kind of outfit every day—a YSL blazer and tight leather pants, no makeup. She was the kind of mysteriously ethnic woman who would blend in easily in almost any country. She could have been from Istanbul or Paris or Morocco or Moscow or New York or San Juan or even Phnom Penh in a certain light, depending on how she wore her hair. She spoke four languages fluently and had once been married to an Italian aristocrat, a baron or a count, or so I’d heard. The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money,” nothing to inspire more than a trip around the corner to buy an unflattering outfit from Comme des Garçons. Natasha had cast me as the jaded underling, and for the most part, the little effort I put into the job was enough. I was fashion candy. Hip decor. I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avant-garde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question. Evade, evade. Never hand over a price list. Natasha paid me just $22,000 a year. Without my inheritance, I would have been forced to find a job that paid more money. And I would probably have had to live in Brooklyn, with roommates. I was lucky to have my dead parents’ money, I knew, but that was also depressing.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "As I was saying, this slave was brought in and the Queen stroked and teased him shamelessly. She placed him over her lap and proceeded to deliver a naked-handed spanking as she did to you, and I could see his erect penis, and how he tried to keep it away from her leg for fear he would spill his passion and displease her. He was utterly compliant and devoted to her. He had no dignity in his surrender at all, but scampered to obey her every command, his beautiful little face always flushed, his skin pink and white and full of blushes where he'd been punished. I couldn't take my eyes off him. I thought I can never be made to do these things. Never -- I should die first. Yet I watched him, and I watched her punish him and prod him and kiss him. "And when he had pleased her well, how she rewarded him! She had brought in six Princes and Princesses from whom he must choose with whom he would couple. Of course his choices were to please her. He chose the Princes always. "And as she presided over him with the paddle, he would mount one of these who knelt for it obediently enough and, receiving the Queen's blows, he would achieve ecstasy. It was a tantalizing spectacle. His own plump little buttocks being soundly spanked, the red-faced submissive slave on his knees to receive Prince Gerald, and the boy's erect cock going in and out of the undefended anus. Sometimes the Queen spanked the little victim first, gave him a merry chase about the room, a chance to escape his fate if he could fetch a pair of slippers for her in his teeth before she could achieve ten good cracks of the paddle. The victim would scurry to obey. But seldom was he able to find the slippers and bring them to the proper place before the Queen had soundly paddled him. So he had to bed over for Prince Gerald, who was too well endowed for sixteen surely. "Of course I told myself all this was disgusting and beneath me. I should never play such games." He laughed softly, and squeezed Beauty against his chest with his arm, kissed her forehead. "I've played them enough since," he said. "But now and then, too, Prince Gerald did choose a Princess. This angered the Queen, though only slightly. She had the little girl victim perform some hopeless tasks in the hope of escape, the same game with the slippers, or the getting of a hand mirror or the like, all the while driving her mercilessly with the paddle. Then she would be thrown down on her back and taken by the lusty little Prince for the Queen's amusement. Or she might be doubled and hung as in the Hall of Punishments.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother—easily pigeonholed and filed away—a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.) My mother smelled of Joy or Diorissimo, and she didn’t cook much. When I try to distill down to basics what she taught me about life, I am left with this: 1. Above all, never be ordinary. 2. The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! “Ordinary” was the worst insult she could find for anything. I remember her taking me shopping and the look of disdain with which she would freeze the salesladies in Saks when they suggested that some dress or pair of shoes was “very popular—we’ve sold fifty already this week.” That was all she needed to hear. “No,” she would say, “we’re not interested in that. Haven’t you got something a little more unusual?” And then the saleslady would bring out all the weird colors no one else would buy—stuff which would have gone on sale but for my mother. And later she and I would have an enormous fight because I yearned to be ordinary as fiercely as my mother yearned to be unusual. “I can’t stand that hairdo” (she said when I went to the hairdresser with Pia and came back with a pageboy straight out of Seventeen Magazine), “it’s so ordinary.” Not ugly. Not unbecoming. But ordinary. Ordinariness was a plague you had to ward off in every possible way. You warded it off by redecorating frequently. Actually my mother thought that all the interior decorators (as well as clothes designers and accessory designers) in America were organized in an espionage ring to learn her most recent decorating or dressmaking ideas and suddenly popularize them. And it was true that she had an uncanny sense of coming fashions (or did I only imagine this, conned as I was by her charisma?). She did the house in antique gold just before antique gold became the most popular color for drapes and rugs and upholstery. Then she screamed that everyone had “stolen” her ideas. She installed Spanish porcelain tiles in the foyer before it caught on “with all the yentas on Central Park West"—from whose company she carefully excluded herself. She brought white fur rugs home from Greece before they were imported by all the stores. She discovered wrought-iron flowered chandeliers for the bathroom in advance of all the “fairy decorators"—as she contemptuously called them.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what she called her “love-life,” from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can, were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but technically the two sets were congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression. I was considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that the good Harold Haze had had according to Charlotte who thought my mirth improper; but otherwise her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets. Of my Lolita she seldom spoke—more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In one of her tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infant’s soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production (Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Caesarean operation and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps—and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills. Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A Guide to Your Child’s Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters! DEAR MUMMY AND HUMMY, Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She was thankful the Lady never looked at her, and then again she felt abysmal. She was nothing to this woman who was dressed and a Lady and free to do all that she pleased, while Beauty was an abject naked slave who could do nothing but kneel before her. "Ah, but there she is, that wicked Lizetta," said the Lady, and the cheerfulness when out of her face as her lips quivered slightly. There were two little dots of color in her cheeks as she drew near the doubled Princess. "And she has been so spoilt and bad today." "Well, she is being severely punished for it, my Lady," said Lord Gregory. "Thirty-six hours here should greatly improve her disposition." The Lady took several delicate steps forward and peered at Princess Lizetta's exposed sex. And to Beauty's amazement, Princess Lizetta did not try to hide her face but stared into the Lady's eyes imploringly. She gave several imploring groans as clearly supplicating as the earlier moans of the Prince beside her. And as she writhed on her hook, her body rocked slightly forward. "You're a bad girl, you are," whispered the Lady as though reproving a small child. "And you disappointed me. I had prepared the Hunt for the amusement of the Queen and chosen you specially." Princess Lizetta's groans grew more insistent. She seemed now without hope or pride or anger. Her face was knotted and pink, and her gag looked most painful, her huge eyes flashing as they implored the Lady. "Lord Gregory," the Lady said, "you must think of something special." Then to Beauty's horror, the lady reached out delicately and fastidiously and pinched Princess Lizetta's pubic lips hard so that they exuded moisture. Then she pinched the right lip and the left, and the girl winced with pain and misery. Lord Gregory had meantime snapped his fingers for the Lord with the iron clawlike hand, and whispered something Beauty could not hear. "It will strengthen her punishment." And now the Lord appeared with a little pot and a brush and as the Lady stepped back, he took brush and bathed Princess Lizetta's naked organ in a heavy syrup. A few droplets fell to the floor, and the Princess again made known her misery. She sobbed softly and shook her head. "It will attract any flies we have about," Lord Gregory said, "and if we have none it shall produce its inevitable itching as it dries. It is quite uncomfortable." The Lady did not seem satisfied. Her pretty and innocent face was smooth however and she sighed. "I suppose it will do for now, but I wish she were bound with her legs apart to a stake in the garden. Then let the flies and the little insects of the air find her honeyed mouth. She deserves it."

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Lalah (the other middle daughter after me) was four years younger and had married a Negro. But as in Randy’s case, the unconventionality of the choice was misleading. Lalah went to Oberlin where she met Robert Goddard, easily the whitest white Negro in the history of the phrase. My brother-in-law Bob is actually cocoa brown, but his mind is white as a Klan member’s member. I don’t know about his member. How he got to a school like Oberlin rather perplexes me, as it perhaps perplexed him. After college, he went to medical school at Harvard and quickly decided to head where the bread was: orthopedic surgery. He now spends four days a week setting legs and pinning hips (and collecting huge fees from insurance companies). The other three days are spent jumping horses at an exclusive club in the fashionable but integrated Boston suburb where he and Lalah live. And how they live! Surrounded by the most extensive array of electrical gadgets outside of Hammacher-Schlemmer: electronic ice crushers, wine coolers, bedside machines which make synthesized sea noises, automatic egg-decapitators, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, automatic cocktail shakers, lawn mowers which move by remote control, hedge clippers programmed to make topiary designs, whirlpools which whirl the bathwater around, bidets which swirl the toilet water around, lighted shaving mirrors which pop out of the wall, color TV sets concealed behind framed copies of the most banal modern graphics, and a bar which pops out of the wall in the foyer when the front doorbell rings. The doorbell, by the way, plays the first few bars of “When the Saints Come Marching In"—Bob’s one and only concession to negritude. With all these gadgets and horses and three cars (one for each of them, and one for their white South American housekeeper), we all assumed that they hadn’t time even to consider having children—to my parents’ relief, I suppose. Arab grandchildren are one thing, but at least they have straight hair. However we were wrong. Lalah was, in fact, on fertility pills for two years (as she later informed us and all the newspapers), and last year gave birth to quintuplets. The rest (as they say) is history. You may even have seen the Time Magazine article about the “Goddard Quints” in which they were described as “cute, coffee-colored, and quite an armload.” “Wow!” reacted Mother Lalah Justine Goddard (née White), twenty-four, when told she had given birth to quints. And now Lalah and Bob have their hands full with broken bones, gadgets, horses, social climbing, and the quints (who, incidentally, they named the most ordinary names they could think of: Timmy, Susie, Annie, Jennie, and Johnnie). And Dr. Bob is making more money than ever, since it appears that having mulatto quints is the greatest way of building up a medical practice since Vitamin B shots. As for Lalah, she writes me once a year to ask why I don’t stop “farting around with poetry” and “do something meaningful” like have quints.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Trevor probably masturbated to Britney Spears. Or to Janis Joplin. I never understood his duplicity. And Trevor had never wanted to “kneel at the altar.” I could count the number of times he’d gone down on me on one hand. When he’d tried, he had no idea what to do, but seemed overcome with his own generosity and passion, as though delaying getting his dick sucked was so obscene, so reckless, had required so much courage, he’d just blown his own mind. His style of kissing was aggressive, rhythmic, as though he’d studied a manual. His jaw was narrow and angular, his chin a lame afterthought. His skin was evenly toned and well moisturized, smoother than mine even. He barely had to shave. He always smelled like a department store. If I’d met him now, I would have assumed that he was gay. But at least Trevor had the sincere arrogance to back up his bravado. He didn’t cower in the face of his own ambition, like those hipsters. And he knew how to manipulate me—I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it. • • • TREVOR AND I WEREN’T SPEAKING when I went into hibernation. I probably called him at some point under the black veil of Ambien early on, but I don’t know if he ever answered. I could easily imagine him diving into a complicated, fortysomething-year-old’s vagina, dismissing any thought of me the way you’d walk past boxes of mac ’n’ cheese or marshmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids’ stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn’t worth the calories. He said he preferred brunettes. “They give me space to be myself,” he told me. “Blondes are distracting. Think of your beauty as an Achilles’ heel. You’re too much on the surface. I don’t say that offensively. But it’s the truth. It’s hard to look past what you look like.” Since adolescence, I’d vacillated between wanting to look like the spoiled WASP that I was and the bum that I felt I was and should have been if I’d had any courage. I’d shopped at Bergdorf’s and Barneys and high-end vintage boutiques in the East Village. The result was an amazing wardrobe, my main professional asset as a new college graduate. I easily landed the job as a gallery girl at Ducat, one of a dozen “fine art” galleries on West Twenty-first Street. I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere. Trevor was right about my Achilles’