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.

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• 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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. A sprawling Oriental city with new buildings springing up beside ruined-looking old ones. What you remember are Coca-Cola signs next to mosques, Shell stations advertising gas in Arabic, ladies in veils riding in the backseats of curtained Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, droning Arabic music in the background, flies everywhere, and women in miniskirts and teased blond hair promenading down Hamra Street where all the movie marquees advertise American movies and the bookstores are full of Penguins, Livres de Poche, American paperbacks, and the latest porno novels from Copenhagen and California. It seems that East and West have met, but instead of producing some splendid new combination, they’ve both gone to the dogs. The whole family was waiting for me at Randy’s apartment—all except my parents, who were in Japan but were expected any day. Despite her numerous pregnancies, Randy continued to act as if she were the first woman in history to have a uterus. Chloe was moping around waiting for letters from Abel (they had been going steady since she was fourteen). Lalah had dysentery and made sure that everyone heard all the details of every attack—including the color and consistency of the shit. The children were wild from all the visitors and attention and kept galloping around the terraces cursing at the maid in Arabic (which caused her to pack her bags and resign at least once a day). And Pierre—who looks like Kahlil Gibran in his own self-flattering self-portraits—wandered around the vast marble-floored apartment in his silk bathrobe and made lewd jokes about the old Middle Eastern custom by which the man who marries the oldest sister is entitled to all the younger ones too. When he wasn’t regaling us with old Middle Eastern customs, he was reading us translations of his poetry (all Arabs write poetry, it seems) which sounded very vanity press to me: My love is like a sheaf of wheat bursting into flower. Her eyes are topazes in space… “The trouble is,” I said to Pierre over syrupy Arabic coffee, “sheaves of wheat don’t usually burst into flower.” “Poetic license,” he said solemnly.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  LaShonda around the store and touched her when he didn’t need to. He went too far once, putting his arm round her waist and suffering the humiliation of a LaShonda dressing-down (‘Don’t you dare tell me to lower my voice, I swear to God – I’ll scream this place down, I’ll send the roof tiles flying!’) in front of everybody. But Bailey never learned; two days later he was hound-dogging her again. Impersonations of Bailey were the stock-in-trade of the floor staff. LaShonda did one, Levi did one, Jamal did one – the white employees were more hesitant, not wishing to cross the line from impersonation to possible racial slur. In contrast, Levi and LaShonda were unrestrained, emphasizing every grotesquerie, as if his ugliness were a personal affront to their own beauty. ‘ Fuck Bailey,’ insisted Levi. ‘Come on, man, let’s walk out. Come on, Mikey, you’re with me, right?’ Mike chewed the side of his face like the current President. ‘I’m just not really sure what it would achieve. I guess I figure Candy’s right – we’ll just get fired.’ ‘What . . . they’re gonna fire all of us?’ ‘Probably,’ said Mike. ‘You know, man,’ said Tom, pulling hard on his rollie, ‘I don’t want to work Christmas Day either, but maybe we need to think it through a bit more. Just walking out doesn’t really seem viable . . . like, if we all wrote a letter to management and signed it maybe . . .’ ‘ Dear Motherfuckers ,’ said Levi, holding an imaginary pen and screwing his Bailey face into a look of comic concentration. ‘ Thank you for your letter of the twelfth. I really could not give a fuck. Get your asses back to work. Yours sincerely, Mister Bailey .’ They all laughed, but it was harassed, bullied laughter, as if Levi had reached into their throats and pulled it out. Sometimes Levi wondered if his colleagues were scared of him. ‘When you think of how much money this place makes,’ said Tom, unifyingly, drawing approving noises from the rest, ‘and they can’t close for one lousy day? Who even buys CDs on Christmas morning? It’s really twisted.’ ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Levi, and they were all silent for a  the anatomy lesson minute looking out over the deserted back lot, a non-place where nothing happened except lines of trash cans overflowing with discarded polythene packaging and a basketball hoop that no one was allowed to use. A pink-streaked winter sky, with the clarity of heatless sunlight, gave a sting to the bleak prospect of returning to work in the next thirty seconds. The sound of the fire door’s bar being shunted downwards ended this quiet. Tom went to help pull it open, thinking it was tiny Gina, but it was Bailey pushing against him, sending him back three steps.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I kept my eyes closed. Reva went on without any breaks, repeating the story six or seven times, each version highlighting a new aspect of the experience and analyzing it accordingly. I tried to disengage from her words and just listen to the drone of her voice. I had to admit that it was a comfort to have Reva there. She was just as good as a VCR, I thought. The cadence of her speech was as familiar and predictable as the audio from any movie I’d watched a hundred times. That’s why I’d held on to her this long, I thought as I lay there, not listening. Since I’d known her, the drone of what-ifs, the seemingly endless descriptions of her delusional romantic projections had become a kind of lullaby. Reva was a magnet for my angst. She sucked it right out of me. I was a Zen Buddhist monk when she was around. I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts. I was too evolved for all her jibber-jabber. And too cool. Reva could get angry, impassioned, depressed, ecstatic. I wouldn’t. I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank slate. Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen. Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don’t feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die—awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. I could take the train to Coney Island, I thought, walk along the beach in the freezing wind, and swim out into the ocean. Then I’d just float on my back looking up at the stars, go numb, get sleepy, drift, drift. Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands. I opened my eyes. There was a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling, fluttering like a scrap of moth-eaten silk in the draft. I tuned in to Reva for a moment. Her words cleansed the palette of my mind. Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I rang Reva’s buzzer at her building on West Ninety-eighth a few times. Ativan would be nice, I thought. And strangely I was craving lithium, too. And Seroquel. A few hours of drooling and nausea sounded like cleansing torture before hitting the sleep hard—on Ambien, Percocet, one stray Vicodin I’d been sitting on. I was thinking I’d get my pills from Reva’s, go home, and then I could hit the sleep for ten straight hours, get up, have a glass of water, a little snack, then ten straight more. Please! I buzzed again and waited, imagining Reva trudging up the block toward her building with a dozen bags of groceries from D’Agostino’s, shock and shame on her face when she saw me waiting for her, arms laden with brownie mix and ice cream and chips and cake or whatever it was Reva liked to eat and vomit up so much. The nerve of her. The hypocrisy. I paced in circles around her crummy little vestibule, punching at her buzzer violently. I couldn’t wait. I had her spare keys. I let myself in. Going up the stairs, I smelled vinegar. I smelled cleaning detergent. I thought I smelled piss. A mauve-colored cat sat on the second-floor railing like an owl. “Fussing with animals in dreams can have primitive and violent consequences,” Dr. Tuttle had said to me once, petting her fat, snoring tabby. I felt like pushing the cat down the stairwell when I reached the landing. The look in its eye was so smug. I knocked on the door to Reva’s apartment. I heard no voices, just the wind howling. I expected to find Reva in her apartment wearing pink flannel pajamas with cartoon bunnies on them and furry pink slippers, in some weird sugar coma, perhaps, or crying hysterically because she was “at a loss for how to handle reality,” or whatever garbage she was feeling. The silver key opened her apartment door. I walked inside. “Hello?” I could have sworn I smelled puke in the darkness. “Reva, it’s me,” I said. “Your best friend.” I flicked up the light switch by the door, casting the place in a sweltering blush-hued glow. Pink lighting? The place was messy, silent, stuffy, just as I remembered it. “Reva? Are you in here?” A five-pound weight propped open the one window in the living room, but no air was coming through. A ThighMaster hung from the curtain rod, a floral drape bunched and pinned to the side with a Chip Clip. “I came for my shit,” I said to the walls.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Their sons were mostly sullen-faced adolescents in bell bottoms and shoulder-length hair who looked at their parents with a degree of cynicism and scorn which was almost palpable. I remembered myself traveling abroad with my parents as a teenager and always trying to pretend they weren’t with me. I tried to lose them in the Louvre! To avoid them in the Uffizi! To moon alone over a Coke in a Paris café and pretend that those loud people at the next table were not—though clearly they were—my parents. (I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away.) And here I was back in my own past, or in a bad dream or a bad movie: Analyst and Son of Analyst. A planeload of shrinks and my adolescence all around me. Stranded in midair over the Atlantic with 117 analysts many of whom had heard my long, sad story and none of whom remembered it. An ideal beginning for the nightmare the trip was going to become. We were bound for Vienna and the occasion was historic. Centuries ago, wars ago, in 1938, Freud fled his famous consulting room on the Berggasse when the Nazis threatened his family. During the years of the Third Reich any mention of his name was banned in Germany, and analysts were expelled (if they were lucky) or gassed (if they were not). Now, with great ceremony, Vienna was welcoming the analysts back. They were even opening a museum to Freud in his old consulting room. The mayor of Vienna was going to greet them and a reception was to be held in Vienna’s pseudo-Gothic Rathaus. The enticements included free food, free Schnaps, cruises on the Danube, excursions to vineyards, singing, dancing, shenanigans, learned papers and speeches and a tax-deductible trip to Europe. Most of all, there was to be lots of good old Austrian Gemültlichkeit. The people who invented schmaltz (and crematoria) were going to show the analysts how welcome back they were. Welcome back! Welcome back! At least those of you who survived Auschwitz, Belsen, the London Blitz and the co-optation of America. Willkommen! Austrians are nothing if not charming. Holding the Congress in Vienna had been a hotly debated issue for years, and many of the analysts had come only reluctantly. Anti-Semitism was part of the problem, but there was also the possibility that radical students at the University of Vienna would decide to stage demonstrations. Psychoanalysis was out of favor with New Left members for being “too individualistic.” It did nothing, they said, to further “the worldwide struggle toward communism.” I had been asked by a new magazine to observe all the fun and games of the Congress closely and to do a satirical article on it.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘No doubt, no doubt . . . that was always more your mum, though, weren’t it? Always had a book in her hand. Walked into a lamp-post once reading a book in the street,’ said Harold, a story Howard had heard and heard and heard, as he had heard the bit that came next and came now. ‘Spose that’s where you got it from . . . Oh, blimey, look at this big tart. Look at him! I mean, purple and pink? He’s not serious, though, is he?’ ‘Who?’ ‘ Him – whatsisname . . . he’s a bloody fool. Wouldn’t know an antique if it was being shoved up his arse . . . But it was funny yesterday ’cause he was doing the bit where you guess the price the thing’ll go for before it goes – I mean, it’s mostly tat, I wouldn’t give you ten bob for most of it, if I’m honest, and we had better stuff than that just knocking around me mum’s house . . . never gave it a first thought never mind a second, but there you are . . . I’ve forgotten what I was on about now . . . oh, yeah, so it’s usually couples or mother and daughter that he gets on, but yesterday he’s got these two women – like bloody buses, both of ’em huge, hair very short, dressed like blokes of course, like they do, ugly as  on beauty and being wrong sin and looking to buy some military stuff, medals and that, ’cos they were in the bloody army, weren’t they, and they’re holding hands, oh dear . . . I was laughing , oh, dear . . .’ And here Harold chuckled mirthfully. ‘And you could tell he didn’t know what to say . . . I mean, he’s not exactly kosher himself, now is he?’ Harold laughed some more, and then grew serious, noting, possibly, the lack of laughter elsewhere in the room. ‘But then there’s always been that aspect in the army, hasn’t there? I mean, that’s the main place you find them, the women . . . I spose it must suit them more, mentally . . . as it were,’ said Harold, this last being his only verbal pretension. Now, Howard, as it were . . . He’d started using it when Howard came home for the summer after his first year in Oxford. ‘Them?’ asked Howard, putting his HobNob down. ‘You what, son? Look, you’ve broken your biscuit. Should have brought a saucer for crumbs.’ ‘Them. I was just wondering who ‘‘they’’ are.’ ‘Oh, now Howard, don’t get angry about nothing. You’re always so angry!’ ‘No,’ said Howard, in a tone of pedantic insistence, ‘I’m just trying to understand the point of the story you just told me. Are you trying to explain to me that the women were lesbians?’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play—I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow—you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa—curious name—who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing—you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work—drop that gun—with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Bar da Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies—drop that gun—and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow—” Feu.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi congratulated his new friend on his sale. Choo took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘It’s Felix’s money,’ he said, cutting Levi off. ‘Not mine. I worked the cabs – it was the same bullshit.’ ‘We get our cut, man, we get our cut. It’s economics, right?’ Choo laughed bitterly. ‘Originals – eight hundred dollars,’ he said pointing at a store across the street. ‘Fakes – thirty dollars. Cost to produce – five dollars, maybe three. That’s economics. American economics.’ Levi shook his head at the miracle of it. ‘Can you believe these stupid bitches be paying thirty dollars for a three-dollar handbag? That shit’s unbelievable. That’s a hustle.’ And here Choo looked down at Levi’s sneakers. ‘How much did you pay for them?’ ‘A hundred and twenty dollars,’ said Levi proudly and demonstrated the shock reducers built into their soles by bouncing up and down on his heels. ‘Fifteen dollars to make,’ said Choo, blowing horns of smoke  the anatomy lesson from both of his nostrils. ‘No more. Fifteen dollars. You’re the one being hustled, my friend.’ ‘Now, how would you know that? That ain’t true, man. That ain’t true at all.’ ‘I come from the factory where they make your shoes. Where they used to make your shoes. We don’t make anything now,’ said Choo, and then cried ‘PRADA!’, hooking another group of women, an expanding group, which kept growing, as if he’d thrown a trawler’s net over the sidewalk. Come from a factory? How can you come from a factory? But there was no time for further inquiry; now, on Levi’s side, a group of Goth girls. They were black-haired and white and skinny, linked to each other by strange metal chains – the kind of girls who haunt the Harvard T-stop on a Friday night with a bottle of vodka tucked in their huge pants. They wanted horror movies, and Levi had them. He did some brisk business, and for the next hour or so the two salesmen did not talk to each other much, unless one needed change from the other’s fanny pack. Levi, who never could bear bad vibes, still felt the need to make this guy like him, like most guys liked him. At last there came a lull in trade. Levi took his opportunity. ‘What’s your deal, man? Don’t take this strange, but . . . you don’t seem like the type of guy who would be doing this kind of thing. You know?’ ‘How about this?’ said Choo quietly, again alarming Levi with his easy use of American idioms, albeit dipped in that exotic accent. ‘You leave me alone and I do my very best to leave you alone. You sell your movies. I sell these handbags. How would that be?’ ‘That’s cool,’ said Levi quietly.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Student precaution, ah guess. Suicide proof.’ ‘Basically, I’m concerned that I’m being unfairly prevented from taking this class due to circumstances beyond my control,’ said Zora firmly, to which Dean French could offer no more than the merest preamble to a murmur, ‘namely, the fact of my father’s relationship with Professor Malcolm.’ Jack French clutched the sides of his chair and leaned back into it. This was not the way things went in his office. In a semicircle on the wall behind him portraits of great men hung, men who were careful with their words, who weighed them cautiously and considered their consequences, men whom Jack French admired  On Beauty and had learned from: Joseph Addison, Bertrand Russell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Carlyle and Henry Watson Fowler, the author of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage , on whom French had written a colossal, almost painfully detailed biography. But nothing in French’s armoury of baroque sentences seemed sufficient for dealing with a girl who used language like an automatic weapon. ‘Zora, If I understand you correctly . . .’ began Jack, moving donnishly forward across the desk to speak – not quickly enough. ‘Dean French, I just don’t see why my opportunity for advance-ment in the creative fields should be stymied’ – French raised his eyebrows at ‘stymied’ – ‘by a vendetta that a professor appears to have against me for reasons that are outside the proper context of academic assessment.’ She paused. She sat very straight in her chair. ‘I think it’s inappropriate,’ she said. They had been skirting around this for ten minutes. Now the word had been used. ‘Inappropriate,’ repeated French. All he could do at this point was to aim for damage limitation. The word had been used. ‘You are referring,’ he said, hopelessly, ‘to the relationship to which you referred, which was, indeed, inappropriate. But what I do not as yet see is how the relationship to which you referred – ’ ‘No, you misunderstand me. What happened between Professor Malcolm and my father doesn’t interest me,’ Zora cut in. ‘What interests me is my academic career in this institution.’ ‘Well, naturally, that would be uppermost in all of – ’ ‘And as for the situation between Professor Malcolm and my father . . .’ Jack wished very much she would stop using that violent phrase. It was drilling into his brain: Professor Malcolm and my father, Professor Malcolm and my father . The very thing that was not to be spoken of this fall semester, in order to protect both the participants and the families of the participants, was now being batted around his office like a pigskin filled with blood . . . ‘as the situation is no longer a situation and has not been for some time, I don’t see why Professor Malcolm should be allowed to continue to discriminate against me in this blatantly personal fashion.’  the anatomy lesson

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  By his example, Nabokov reminded younger American writers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in The Magic Christian (1960) lampoons the myth of American masculinity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multimillionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in imitating life. A famous athlete of the twenties was well-known as an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real name, though he does call him “Ned Litam”—a simple anagram of “Ma Tilden”—which turns out to be one of the actual pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote stories and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality” is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have invented it, and by taking advantage of this fact in Lolita he has, along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the inevitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities—if not the contents—of the American comic novel. Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot” but rather because to Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady—the culture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality. In short, she is the essence of American poshlust, to use the “one pitiless [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in Gogol, is able to express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term.” Poshlust: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard” (p. 63). More precisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (p. 70).24 It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of the Grangerford household in Huckleberry Finn (earlier American poshlust), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean) world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s long view of America is not an altogether genial one.

• 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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  He looked at me as if I were crazy, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “Go after her? Why?” (He burned rubber around a corner, taking another wrong turn.) “Because you loved her.” “I never used that word.” “But if you felt that way, why didn’t you go?” “My work is like keeping chickens,” he said. “ Someone’s got to be there to shovel the shit and spread the corn.” “Bullshit,” I said. “Doctors always use their work as an excuse for not being human. I know that routine.” “Not bullshit, ducks, chickenshit.” “Not very funny,” I said, laughing. After May Pei there was a whole UN Assembly of girls from Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal. There was an African girl from Botswana and a couple of French psychoanalysts, and a French actress who’d “spent time in a bin.” “A what?” “A bin—you know, a madhouse. In a mental hospital, I mean.” Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics. “I knew you wanted something from me,” I said. “Right. It’s your index finger I want to use and your ever so opposable thumb.” “Up yours.” We cursed at each other constantly like ten year olds. Our only way of expressing affection. Adrian’s past history of women practically qualified him for membership in my family. Never fuck a kinswoman seemed to be his motto. His present girlfriend (now watching his kids, I learned) was the closest thing to a native bird he’d had: a Jewish girl from Dublin. “Molly Bloom?” I asked. “Who?” “You don’t know who Molly Bloom is???” I was incredulous. All those educated English syllables and he hasn’t even read Joyce. (I’ve skipped long sections of Ulysses too, but I go around telling people it’s my favorite book. Likewise Tristram Shandy. ) “I’m illit-trate,” he said, pronouncing the last two syllables as if they rhymed. He was very pleased with himself. Another dumb doctor, I thought. Like most Americans, I naively assumed that an English accent meant education. Oh well, literary men often do turn out to be such bastards. Or else creeps. But I was disappointed. Like when my analyst had never heard of Sylvia Plath. There I was talking for days about her suicide and how I wanted to write great poetry and put my head in the oven. All the while he was probably thinking of frozen coffee cake. Believe it or not, Adrian’s girlfriend was Esther Bloom—not Molly Bloom. She was dark and buxom, and suffered, he said, “from all the Jewish worries. Very sensual and neurotic.” A sort of Jewish princess from Dublin. “And your wife—what was she like?”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was their hypocrisy I abhorred. At least if they’d come out openly and said: We loved Hitler , one might have weighed their humanity with their honesty and perhaps forgiven them. In the three years I lived in Germany I only met one man who admitted that. He was a former Nazi and he became my friend. Horst Hummel ran a printing business out of a tiny office in the old town. His desk was piled high with books, papers, and all kinds of junk, and he was always on the telephone or always shouting directions to the three cowering Assistenten who worked for him. He was about five feet tall, very paunchy, and wore thick amber-tinted glasses which accentuated the rings under his eyes. After meeting him for the first time, Bennett always referred to him as the Gnome. For the most part, Herr Hummel (as I called him in the beginning) spoke English well, but he made occasional howlers which compromised all his previous fluency. One day when I told him that I had to go home and make dinner for Bennett, he said: “If your Mann is hungry, then you must go home and cook him.” Hummel printed everything from menus to advertising flyers to The Heidelberg Officers’ Wives’ Club Newsletter —a glossy four-page tabloid studded with typographical errors, doggerel about the plight of an army wife, and pictures of army matrons decked out in flowered hats, orchid corsages, and rhinestone-glinting harlequin glasses. They were always accepting awards from each other for various public services. For his own amusement, Hummel also printed a weekly pamphlet called Heidelberg Alt und Neu. It consisted mostly of advertising for restaurants and hotels, train schedules, movie programs, and the like. But occasionally Hummel (who had once been a war correspondent at the battle of Anzio) wrote an editorial on some community issue, and from time to time he interviewed some town personality or visitor for fun. After a year of hunting Nazis in Heidelberg (and taking a strange series of odd jobs, all of which only increased my depression) I ran into Hummel who asked me to be his “American editor” and help him get more English-speaking readers for Heidelberg Alt und Neu. The idea was to lure them with a column on some tourist attraction and then sell them his advertisers’ products: Rosenthal china, Hummel (no relation to him) figurines, household gadgets, local wines and beers. I was to write a weekly column paid at the rate of 25 Deutsche Marks (or $7) and Hummel would provide photographs and translate the text into German on a facing page. I could write about anything that interested me. Anything at all. Of course I took the job. At first I wrote about “safe” subjects—ruined castles, wine festivals, historic restaurants, odds and ends of Heidelberg history and apocrypha. I used the column to teach myself about things. I used it as a means of snooping into places I wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  That’s it, right there,’ he said, employing his hands a little more than was natural to him because they seemed to expect it. ‘My point is we got to protest, with action. ’Cos right now, as it stands, anybody who’s working part time who refuses to work Christmas is looking at losing their job. And that’s bullshit – in my opinion.’ ‘But what does that mean . . . protest with action?’ asked Mike. He was jittery, moving a lot when he spoke. Levi wondered what it would be like to be such a small, pink, funny-looking, nervy guy. As he wondered this, he must have been frowning at Mike, for the little guy grew more agitated, putting his hands in and out of his pockets. ‘Like a . . . you know, like a sit-in,’ suggested Tom. He had a packet of German Drum tobacco in one hand and a cigarette paper in the other and was trying to roll. He angled his bear-like torso into a doorway, protecting his nascent project from the wind. Levi  the anatomy lesson – although he passionately disapproved of tobacco – helped him out by standing in front of him, a human shield. ‘Sit-in?’ Tom began describing a sit-in, but Levi, once he saw where he was going with it, cut him off. ‘Yo, I am not sitting on the floor. I don’t do floor.’ ‘You don’t have to, you know . . . sitting is not obligatory. We could walk out. Outside the building.’ ‘Er . . . if we walk out they’ll just tell us to keep on walking to the welfare office,’ said Candy, digging half a Marlboro from her pocket and lighting it off Tom’s match. ‘Bailey’ll make sure of that.’ ‘ You ain’t walking your ass out nowhere ,’ said Levi, cruelly impersonating Bailey’s clumsy, jerking rooster head and that half-crouched standing position, which made him look like a four-legged animal only just reared upright, ‘ Your ass ain’t going out of this store unless it’s whupped out of this store, ’cos it sure as hell ain’t walking out of this store, not now, not no how .’ Levi’s audience laughed ruefully – the impersonation was too accurate. Bailey was in his late forties; unavoidably a tragic figure to the teenagers working under him. They considered such employment for a man over the age of twenty-six to be a humiliating symbol of human limitation. They also knew that Bailey had worked in Tower Records for ten years before this – this heaped tragedy upon tragedy. And then Bailey was painfully overburdened with peculiarities, one of which alone would have sufficed to make him a figure of fun. His overactive thyroid made his eyes start from his head. His jowls gathered like turkey wattle. His uneven Afro often had a foreign object in it – pieces of unidentifiable fluff and, once, a matchstick.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Moreover, the sexual scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the number of participants (in a Sade play they call the gardener in), and therefore the end of the book must be more replete with lewd lore than the first chapters. Certain techniques in the beginning of Lolita (Humbert’s Journal, for example) misled some of my first readers into assuming that this was going to be a lewd book. They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why not all the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it pornographic or not did not interest me. Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106. 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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. After Randy’s Arab and Lalah’s Negro and my first husband’s conviction that he was Jesus Christ, my parents were actually quite relieved when I married Bennett. They had nothing whatsoever against his race, but they greatly resented his religion: psychoanalysis. They suffered from the erroneous impression that Bennett could read their minds. Actually, when he looked most penetrating, ominous, and inscrutable, he was usually thinking about changing the oil in the car, having chicken noodle soup for lunch, or taking a crap. But I could never convince them of that. They insisted on thinking that he was looking deep into their souls and seeing all the ugly secrets which they themselves wanted to forget.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. A sprawling Oriental city with new buildings springing up beside ruined-looking old ones. What you remember are Coca-Cola signs next to mosques, Shell stations advertising gas in Arabic, ladies in veils riding in the backseats of curtained Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, droning Arabic music in the background, flies everywhere, and women in miniskirts and teased blond hair promenading down Hamra Street where all the movie marquees advertise American movies and the bookstores are full of Penguins, Livres de Poche, American paperbacks, and the latest porno novels from Copenhagen and California. It seems that East and West have met, but instead of producing some splendid new combination, they’ve both gone to the dogs. The whole family was waiting for me at Randy’s apartment—all except my parents, who were in Japan but were expected any day. Despite her numerous pregnancies, Randy continued to act as if she were the first woman in history to have a uterus. Chloe was moping around waiting for letters from Abel (they had been going steady since she was fourteen). Lalah had dysentery and made sure that everyone heard all the details of every attack—including the color and consistency of the shit. The children were wild from all the visitors and attention and kept galloping around the terraces cursing at the maid in Arabic (which caused her to pack her bags and resign at least once a day). And Pierre—who looks like Kahlil Gibran in his own self-flattering self-portraits—wandered around the vast marble-floored apartment in his silk bathrobe and made lewd jokes about the old Middle Eastern custom by which the man who marries the oldest sister is entitled to all the younger ones too. When he wasn’t regaling us with old Middle Eastern customs, he was reading us translations of his poetry (all Arabs write poetry, it seems) which sounded very vanity press to me: My love is like a sheaf of wheat bursting into flower. Her eyes are topazes in space… “The trouble is,” I said to Pierre over syrupy Arabic coffee, “sheaves of wheat don’t usually burst into flower.” “Poetic license,” he said solemnly.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘You live in this house, you have to help out with family stuff,’ said Kiki, getting down to fundamentals in order to defend a decision whose unfairness she had already privately registered. ‘That’s the deal. You don’t pay any rent here.’ Zora brought her hands together in penitent prayer. ‘That’s so gracious, thank you. Thank you for letting me stay in my childhood home.’ ‘Zoor, don’t start messing with me this morning – I mean it, don’t even – ’ Without anyone noting it, Howard had entered the room. He was fully dressed, even shoed. His hair was wet and combed backwards. It was maybe the first time in a week that Howard and Kiki had stood in the same room like this, albeit ten feet apart, and now with full eye-contact, like two formal, unrelated, full-length portraits turned so as to face each other. While Howard asked the  the anatomy lesson kids to leave the room, Kiki took her time, looking. She saw differently now; that was one of the side-effects. Whether the new way of seeing was the truth, she couldn’t say. But it was certainly stark, revelatory. She saw every fold and tremble of his fading prettiness. She found she could muster contempt for even his most neutral physical characteristics. The thin, papery, Caucasian nostril holes. The doughy ears sprouting hairs that he was careful to remove and yet whose ghostly existence she continued to catalogue. The only things that threatened to disturb her resolve were the sheer temporal layers of Howard as they presented themselves before her: Howard at twenty-two, at thirty, at forty-five and fifty-one; the difficulty of keeping all these other Howards out of her consciousness; the importance of not being sidetracked, of responding only to this most recent Howard, the -year-old Howard. The liar, the heart-breaker, the emotional fraud. She did not flinch. ‘What is it, Howard?’ Howard had just finished ushering his resistant children out of the room. They were alone. He turned round quickly, his face a very nothing. He was at a loss as to what to do with his hands and feet, where to stand, what to rest upon. ‘There’s no ‘‘it’’,’ he said softly, and pulled his cardigan around himself. ‘Particularly. I don’t know what that question means. It? I mean . . . obviously, there’s everything.’ Kiki, feeling the power of her position, re-established her folded arms. ‘Right. That’s very poetic. I guess I’m just not feeling too poetic right now. Is there something you wanted to say to me?’ Howard looked to the floor and shook his head, disappointed, like a scientist getting no data from an elaborately set-up experiment. ‘I see,’ he said finally and made as if to return to his study, but then turned back at the door. ‘Umm . . . Is there a time when we could talk, properly? Like human beings. Who know each other.’ For her part, Kiki had been waiting for a hook. That would do.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  From here he could keep an eye on both ends of the street and the mouth of the station. A few minutes later he looked up and saw the man he assumed he was waiting for, rounding the corner of the next street. To Howard’s eye, which fancied itself attuned to these things, he looked African. He had that ochre highlight in his skin, most visible where the skin was in tension with bone – at the cheekbones and across the forehead. He wore leather gloves, a long grey topcoat and a dark blue cashmere scarf tied smartly. His glasses were thin-rimmed and gold. His shoes were an item of interest:  kipps and belsey very grubby trainers of the flat, cheap kind Howard felt sure Levi would never wear. As he came closer to the station, he slowed down and began to cast his eyes around the small gathering of people waiting for other people. Howard had thought himself as instantly recognizable as this Michael Kipps, but it was he who had to come forward and hold his hand out. ‘Michael – Howard. Hi. Thanks for coming to get me, I wasn’t – ’ ‘Find it OK?’ Michael cut in with extreme shortness, nodding at the station. Howard, who didn’t understand the point of this question, grinned stupidly back at him. Michael was quite a bit taller than Howard, which Howard was unused to and disliked. He was broad too; not that freshman muscle that Howard saw in his classes, the kind that begins at the top of the neck and makes young men trapezoid, no, this was more elegant than that. A birthright. He’s one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is ‘noble’. Howard didn’t much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers. ‘This way, then,’ said Michael, and took a step forward, but Howard caught him by the shoulder. ‘Just going to get these – new passport,’ he said, as the photos were delivered to the chute, where an artificial breeze began to blow on them. Howard reached for his pictures, but now Michael’s hand stopped him. ‘Wait – let them dry – they smudge otherwise.’ Howard straightened up, and they both stood still where they were, watching the photos twitch. Although perfectly content with silence, Howard suddenly heard himself saying ‘Soooo . . .’ for a long time, with no clear idea of what was to follow ‘so’. Michael turned to him, his face sourly expectant. ‘So,’ said Howard again, ‘what is it you do, Mike, Michael?’ ‘I’m a risk analyst for an equities firm.’ Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.  On Beauty ‘Oh, I see . . . that’s very . . .