Contentment

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 This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  kitchen boy in a spellbound castle, a nut in one hand, a tool in the other, until the sound of approaching footsteps woke me up and plunged me, blinking and confused, back into time. The utility room lay just inside the front door. Utility room was Dwight’s name for it; in other houses it was called the mud room. Everyone had to step around me and the horse chestnuts when leaving or entering the house, and on their way to the bathroom. Skipper nodded soberly each time he passed. Norma gave me sympathetic looks, and sometimes stopped for a moment to make insincere offers of help. Both of them let Dwight know they thought he was overdoing it. He told them to mind their own business. I kept hoping they’d really go to bat for me, but they had other things on their minds. Skipper was customizing his car. Norma was in love with Bobby Crow, an Indian boy from Marblemount who drove up almost every night to see her. Dwight disapproved of Bobby, but Norma slipped out of the house at will, and when Dwight bestirred himself to question her she fed him fat lies that he swallowed without a murmur. I knew where she and Bobby went; they went to the village dump, a petting zoo said to be frequented by a one-handed killer who had escaped from the state asylum at Sedro Woolley. Norma told me that one night she heard a noise outside the car and made Bobby lay rubber out of there. When they got back to the house they found a bloody hook hanging on the door handle. This was a true story that Norma made me promise never to tell anyone, ever. And there were bears at the dump, rooting in garbage and rearing up now and then with cans stuck on their noses. As I worked my way through the horse chestnuts I took them up to the attic. This was a dank space where Pearl’s old dolls were strewn, their eyes kindling under the glare of the flashlight, among broken appliances and stacks of Collier’s and the washtub where the beaver lay curing in brine. Skipper and Norma got used to seeing me with the nuts, because it was about the only way they ever saw me; their bus left for Concrete before I woke up in the morning and brought them back just in time for the evening meal. They came to accept the sight as normal. Pearl never got used to it. She passed my station twenty times a night on some pretext or other, lingering nearby until, in spite of myself, I raised my head and saw her looking down at me with hard bright eyes and a little smile. Sometimes Dwight came back to check on my progress. He tried to cheer me on with visions of everyone sitting together, a year or two down the line, eating these very nuts. So I nodded away the nights over boxes of horse chestnuts, while my hands

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Here’s O,” Sir Stephen said. “You know what has to be done with her. When will she be ready?” Anne-Marie glanced at O. “You mean you haven’t told her? All right, I’ll begin immediately. You should probably allow ten days after it’s over. I imagine you’ll want to put the rings and monogram on yourself? Come back in two weeks. The whole business should be finished two weeks after that.” O started to ask a question. “Just a minute, O,” Anne-Marie said, “go into the front bedroom over there, get undressed but keep your sandals on, and come back.” The room, a large white bedroom with heavy purple Jouy print drapes, was empty. O put her bag, her gloves, and her clothes on a small chair near a closet door. There was no mirror. She went back outside and, dazzled by the bright sunlight, walked slowly back over to the shade of the beech tree. Sir Stephen was still standing in front of Anne-Marie, the dog at his feet. Anne-Marie’s black hair, streaked with gray, shone as though she had used some kind of cream on it, her blue eyes seemed black. She was dressed in white, with a patent-leather belt around her waist, and she was wearing patent-leather sandals which revealed the bright red nail polish on the toenails of her bare feet, the same color polish she was wearing on her fingernails. “O,” she said, “kneel down in front of Sir Stephen.” O obliged, her arms crossed behind her back, the tips of her breasts quivering. The dog tensed, as though he were about to spring at her. “Down, Turk,” Anne-Marie ordered. Then: “Do you consent, O, to bear the rings and the monogram with which Sir Stephen desires you to be marked, without knowing how they will be placed upon you?” “I do,” O said. “All right then, I’m going to walk Sir Stephen to his car. Stay here.” As Anne-Marie got up from her chaise longue, Sir Stephen bent down and took O’s breasts in his hands. He kissed her on the mouth and murmured: “Are you mine, O, are you really mine?” then turned and left her, to follow Anne-Marie. The gate banged shut, Anne-Marie was coming back. O, her legs folded beneath her, was sitting on her heels and had her arms on her knees, like an Egyptian statue.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “I was just going to start,” she answered, “but I got up late, took a bath, and it was noon before I was ready.” “Are you dressed?” “No, I have on my nightgown and my dressing gown.” “Put the phone down, take off your robe and your nightgown.” O obeyed, so startled that the phone slipped from the bed where she had placed it down onto the white rug, and she thought she had been cut off. No, she had not been cut off. “Are you naked?” René went on. “Yes,” she said. “But where are you calling from?” He ignored her question, merely adding: “Did you keep your ring on?” She had kept her ring on. Then he told her to remain as she was until he came home and to prepare, thus undressed, the suitcase of clothing she was to get rid of. Then he hung up. It was past one o’clock, and the weather was lovely. A small pool of sunlight fell on the rug, lighting the white nightgown and the corduroy dressing gown, pale green like the shells of fresh almonds, which O had let slip to the floor when she had taken them off. She picked them up and went to take them into the bathroom, to hang them up in a closet. On her way, she suddenly saw her reflection in one of the mirrors fastened to a door and which, together with another mirror covering part of the wall and a third on another door, formed a large three-faced mirror: all she was wearing was a pair of leather mules the same green as her dressing gown—and only slightly darker than the mules she wore at Roissy—and her ring. She was no longer wearing either a collar or leather bracelets, and she was alone, her own sole spectator. And yet never had she felt herself more totally committed to a will which was not her own, more totally a slave, and more content to be so.

• From Story of O (1954)

  After she had laid out her clothes on her bed, and at the foot of the bed her black suede shoes with raised soles and spiked heels, nothing seemed stranger to O than to see herself, solitary and free in her bathroom, meticulously making herself up and perfuming herself, after she had taken her bath, as she had done at Roissy. The cosmetics she owned were not the same as those used at Roissy. In the drawer of her dressing table she found some face rouge—she never used any—which she utilized to emphasize the halo of her breasts. It was a rouge which was scarcely visible when first applied, but which darkened later. At first she thought she had put on too much and tried to take a little off with alcohol—it was very hard to remove—and started all over: a dark peony pink flowered at the tips of her breasts. Vainly she tried to make up the lips which the fleece of her loins concealed, but the rouge left no mark. Finally, among the tubes of lipstick she had in the same drawer, she found one of those kissproof lipsticks which she did not like to use because they were too dry and too hard to remove. There, it worked. She fixed her hair and freshened her face, then finally put on the perfume. René had given her, in an atomizer which released a heavy spray, a perfume whose name she didn’t know, which had the odor of dry wood and marshy plants, a pungent, slightly savage odor. On her skin the spray melted, on the fur of the armpits and belly it ran and formed tiny droplets. At Roissy O had learned to take her time: she perfumed herself three times, each time allowing the perfume to dry. First she put on her stockings, and high heels, then the petticoat and skirt, then the jacket. She put on her gloves and took her bag. In her bag were her compact, her lipstick, a comb, her key, and ten francs. Wearing her gloves, she took her fur coat from the closet and glanced at the time at the head of her bed: quarter to eight. She sat down diagonally on the edge of the bed and, her eyes riveted to the alarm clock, waited without moving for the bell to ring. When she heard it at last and rose to leave, she noticed in the mirror above her dressing table, before turning out the light, her bold, gentle, docile expression.

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

  But we were lucky. We made it home, pushed the car down the drive, went to bed and caught ourselves a few hours sleep before Mr. Bolger had one of the girls come down to fetch us for breakfast. Mr. Bolger was in good humor. He had reason to be. The morning was fresh, Chuck was still free and single, and in another couple of weeks I would be on my way to California. While we feasted on ham and grits and eggs, Mr. Bolger spread a map on the table and marked our route to Seattle. Without actually saying so, he gave us to understand that this trip was a new chance to prove ourselves. We were to drive directly to Seattle and directly home. No sidetrips. No hitchhikers. No drinking. Mr. Bolger tried to be stem as he gave us our marching orders, but it was clear that he enjoyed sending us off on what he considered to be a business of some pith and moment, which it was, if not exactly in the way he imagined.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was fond of Henry, but even he was but charmingly whimsical when it came to any matter that deserved serious attention. He was the son of a French mother and of an Italian-Jewish father; himself a British subject because his father came originally from Malta, he belonged nowhere. There was too great a diversity about him and he felt no urge to solve any particular problem. When his parents began to quarrel and finally separated, it left him free to lead an utterly airy life, without roots of any kind. I tried several times to convert him, in turn, to each one of my successive views; but politics left him cold and he slithered between my fingers, so to speak, and answered my arguments with talk about his guitar, about painting, about summer camps. In the Italian high school where he studied, Fascism discouraged, in those years, all serious thought and was producing a whole generation of lightheaded boys who actually knew nothing thoroughly, only a smattering of mathematics, of doctored history, and a lot of poetry, music, drama, and drawing. So I ended up by accepting Henry just as he was, enjoying in his presence, as if by a clear spring of water, a kind of repose that did me good. It helped me relax and I would then allow him to dream away as I listened to him grow enthusiastic about imaginary projects: miraculous fishing expeditions off the shores of Southern Tunisia, with millions to be made there, or the building of a monstrous theater in the ruins of the ancient one in Carthage. Then he would vanish for a couple of weeks and, when he reappeared to meet me at the gates of our high school, all absent-minded and with his hair ruffled, he would already have forgotten his theater project in favor of a fabulous voyage to the South Sea Isles. I was fond of Henry because life, in his company, seemed less drearily serious, and I have often wished it were indeed less serious!

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I’ll start with number two. True communication requires knowing what you want—or what works—which can be the trickiest part. I find Emily Nagoski’s Come as You Are Workbook: A Practical Guide to the Science of Sex to be an extremely helpful tool for gaining a greater understanding of your relationship to desire, pleasure, and arousal (three very different things, by the way). For people with vulvas, Laurie Mintz’s Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters—and How to Get It is a useful resource as well. Exploring your body outside of partnered contexts is typically where the discoveries happen, when there’s no one else to please or perform for. That’s part of the reason why developing a masturbation practice is so rewarding; in what other context would you feel comfortable enough to insert a vibrating butt plug for the first time? In front of an audience? Maybe you’re into that kind of thing. But maybe not. If you find you love the butt plug—which I think you will—you can then relay this information to partners. And this principle transcends butt plugs. Other insights you might only learn alone could be, “I can only come when fingers circle around my clit counterclockwise,” or “I think it would be hot if you pretended to be the mailman,” or “I’d prefer if you stopped pretending to be the mailman, I don’t understand the scene.” As for Rebecca’s first concern—that communicating during sex ruins the mood—she corrected herself a few hours after we spoke, sending me a video she’d filmed of her laptop screen: Samantha from Sex and the City is naked and sitting on a naked man. She gently instructs him how to stimulate her clit, interspersed with breathy sounds of pleasure and physical reinforcement. “Now put your index finger on my clit … Good … little less pressure … Ooohkay now two fingers.” She grabs his head and kisses him on the lips. “A little higher … A little bit more to the left…” “Well, Samantha makes communicating during sex look sexy,” Rebecca texted. Rebecca’s reluctance to communicate multiple times during sex came from a fear it would disrupt the flow and be too much trouble. In this brief clip, Samantha communicated six instructions, and the scene was still hot, sexy, flowy. So what should we be talking about during sex? Well, all the things Samantha said, things like “faster,” “slower,” “harder,” “counterclockwise,” “just like that,” but also things like “I’m tired,” “Do you like that?” “I have to pee.” Once we’ve done the work to figure out the kind of touch we love, we owe it to ourselves to bring that to partnered sex, and to seek out sexual situations—casual or otherwise—where we feel safe enough to communicate.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Generally, we reached the old gateway long before school-time. We enjoyed the freedom of chatting together before being locked up for three hours within those mouse-grey walls. Besides, we met there all the quick-getaway hucksters who offered us all sorts of cheap dainties. They had learned, from long experience, to classify schools according to the purchasing power of the pupils. We certainly came last but one on their list, only just ahead of the other school of the Alliance that was situated in the heart of the ghetto and where the midday meal and even the clothes of the pupils were distributed free. That is why all these little tradesmen used to bring us whatever they had failed to sell at the gates of the other schools. In October, for instance, the small green apples that had fallen too soon from the tree and had been dipped in a sugar solution with red coloring. We licked the taffy crust until we reached the actual fruit, ate the fruit too, but pulled hideous faces as we did it, with our teeth on edge and our eyes grown dim. I had discovered that if one bit the taffy apple without first licking it the bitterness of the fruit was reduced by the sugar. But then I ate it all so fast that the pleasure was over before I had really experienced it. In spring, the fruit that was sold to us was already full of sunlight: yellow arbutus berries, the less expensive ones still greenish, big as marbles and all kernel, sharp to the taste and giving us belly-aches; the better fruit was of a fine golden yellow or bright red and tasted and smelled exquisitely sweet. Under the pressure of necessity, some of us had even learned to like the cheaper arbutus berries and to claim that they preferred them to the riper ones. To my great surprise, they chose those that were most green and most acid. But I never reached that stage, though some of my schoolmates may actually have been fortunate enough to like the green berries. Toward the same time of year, we were also offered the jujube fruits, small wild berries that were shiny as beads of brown marble or all wrinkled like the cheeks of an old woman, and much more attractive to look at than good to eat. Later, there were also oranges and dates, especially the big yellow dates that have an astringent effect on the mouth, leaving it all dry and resistant to any liquid.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One day, for instance, I had boarded the streetcar that passed by the high school. As it made no better time than I did on foot, I practically never took it, except when, as this morning, it happened to be raining. Each new passenger who boarded the car arrived among us wet and covered with mud, hurriedly slamming the sliding door behind him. The car itself, all warm from its human load and saturated with the steam of our breath, was acquiring an odd kind of intimacy as the passengers felt drawn together by a common feeling of well-being that contrasted with the storm beating against the windows. A mysterious sense of communion was thus born among us. All the races of our city were represented there. Sicilian workers in patched blue overalls, with their tools at their feet, were arguing noisily; a French housewife, conscious of her own dignity, was on her way to the market; in front of me a Mohammedan sat with his son, a tiny little boy wearing a miniature fez and with his hands all stained with henna; to my left, a Djerban grocer from the South, off to restock his store, with his basket between his legs and a pencil over his ear. The rain was sweeping against the panes of the car, opaque with steam, and the drops of water fell against them like the blows of a whip. The Djerban, under the influence of the warmth and the calm of the car, became restless. He smiled at the little boy, whose eyes twinkled as he turned to look at his father. The latter, flattered by this attention and grateful, reassured the child and smiled at the Djerban. “How old are you?” the grocer asked the boy. “Two and a half years old,” the father replied. “Did the cat gobble it up?” the grocer asked the child. “No,” the father answered. “He isn’t circumcised yet, but some day soon...” “Ah, ah!” The grocer had indeed found a theme which was rich in conversational possibilities with the child. “Will you sell me your tiny little animal?” “No!” the child replied with horror. Quite obviously, the boy knew this whole routine and had already heard the same proposition before. I too, knew it all, and had myself played the game some years ago, attacked by other aggressors and feeling the same emotions of shame, curiosity, and complicity. The child’s eyes sparkled with the pleasure of his awareness of his own growing virility, and with the shock of his revolt against such an unwarranted attack. He looked toward his father, but the latter only smiled: this was an accepted game. All our neighbors in the car took a friendly interest in the scene which was traditional and earned their approval. In this warm and human car, protected as we were against nature’s aggressiveness, we were like one happy family. “I offer you ten francs for it,” the Djerban proposed. “No!” the child protested.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  During all this period, Henry was an admirable example of calm, of smiling serenity. He had no ties that he felt he needed to break, and he saw and acted directly, without suffering. Although I was too agitated to listen to him properly, he reduced my scruples by teasing me. Do others have scruples about us? He had turned a part of his room into a workshop where he manufactured toys. He invented new toys and he carved and painted wood with great skill and taste; it was the only useful thing he had learned in his Italian school, he said. The merchants of the city had long been short of goods and they paid him whatever he asked. This source of income allowed him to break with his father for longer periods and his independence made him happy. I used to stretch out on his couch and watch him at work. As his paintbrush moved over a panel of plywood, he would talk away about his latest daydream, with great precision and carefully collected details. In his generosity, he included me in his plans. This time, he had found he had an uncle who was a planter in Argentina, a new country full of possibilities. Europe was ruined and would need everything. We would go to Argentina and carry on his uncle’s flourishing business, even extend it and plant more and more to supply Europe. Soon we would be powerful and perhaps famous in Argentina, where cultured and educated men must be relatively scarce. Henry was a practical dreamer and quoted figures as well as the promises of his uncle who had answered his questions through his daughter. He even showed me some letters! I did not take him seriously, any more than when he had planned a fishing business on the desert coasts of the South. Did the uncle really exist? But I liked Henry’s daydreams. They were a relief for me from the insoluble problems that entangled me. With a single stroke of his brush, an eye appeared; another, and there was the bear’s snout too. Henry would then stop and judge the whole. “How d’you like it?” he would ask. I emerged from my silence. “And what about the war, Henry?” He was in the middle of his dream and could not free himself so easily from it. He thought I was alluding to the dangers of the sea voyage. “The Germans are finished in the Mediterranean.” “That’s not what I mean. Can we really stay out of this war?” He exploded.

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

  In my work with patients I stress that intimacy isn’t monolithic; nor is it always consistent. It is intermittent, meant to wax and wane even in the best relationships. The family therapist Kaethe Weingarten steers us away from looking at intimacy as a static feature of a relationship; she sees it instead as a quality of interaction that takes place in isolated moments and that exists both within and without long-term commitment. There’s the synchronization of dance partners, the sudden identification between strangers on a plane, the solidarity of witnesses to a catastrophe, the mutual recognition of survivors—of breast cancer, alcoholism, terrorism, divorce. There’s the intimacy between professionals and those they serve—doctor and patient, therapist and client, stripper and regular. While we expect to experience these discrete moments of recognition in ongoing relationships, they are not necessarily bound to any overarching narrative. They can be circumstantial, spontaneous, and without follow-up. Informed by Weingarten’s ideas, I no longer look at relationships as being either intimate or not. Instead, I track each couple’s ability to engage in a series of intimate bids tendered over time. Sometimes the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mom’s chicken soup all carry the promise of connection. Golde in Fiddler on the Roof reminds us that even ordinary daily activities will, over time, weave themselves into a rich tapestry of connection. Eddie and Noriko, masters of nonverbal communication, can teach us all a lesson in alternative ways to express our love. When we value only what is disclosed through words, we do ourselves a disservice. At a time when we could use just about any way to connect, we need to honor and recognize the many ways we can reach out and touch someone . Notes 1: From Adventure to Captivity The original primordial fire: Octavio Paz. 1995. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism . San Diego, Calif.: Harvest, p. x. Hence the division between the romantics and the realists: Ethel Spector Person. 1988. Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion . New York: Penguin. Stephen Mitchell: Stephen A. Mitchell. 2002. Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time . New York: Norton. Anthony Giddens describes: Anthony Giddens. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins: At a workshop in Fiji, 2005. As Stephen Mitchell points out: Can Love Last?, p. 44. In the words of Proust: Marcel Proust, from http://www.quotation spage.com/quote/31288.xhtml. Mark Epstein explains: Mark Epstein. 2005. Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life . New York: Gotham, p. 45. 2: More Intimacy, Less Sex Love and lust: Jack Morin. 1995. The Erotic Mind . New York: HarperCollins, p. 200. Ethel Specter Person writes: Ethel Spector Person. 1988.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After breakfast, my father used to slip into his oldest jacket, his work jacket, then his only overcoat, which he carefully folded inside out when he reached his shop, and took his two heavy Arab keys, each of them weighing a full pound. Before leaving the house, he piously kissed the mezuzah on our door, which contained the name of God in a small glass tube, and then he departed, leaving us in peace, and with his own mind at rest. Once my father had gone to the store and my mother had settled down to her work in our kitchen, we children took possession of the alley. Narrow as it was, it seemed huge to me. Closed at one end by the wall of the cemetery, the other opened onto the narrow rue Tarfoune, useless and deserted. This double bottleneck that led into the heart of the noisy and crowded Arab neighborhood followed two sudden turns so that it seemed to be defending a hollow of silence. And we defended it, too, against the few children who ever dared venture there, until the day when a howling gang of rough and nasty boys picked this out-of-the-way place in which to play their forbidden games. We were insulted, pushed around, even beaten; and our dead end, no longer safe for us, ceased to play so important a part in our imagination for it became just another alley in this sordid city. Soon after that, I began to go to school and lost the dead end for good. But before this catastrophe and ever since my birth, my mother’s breast and our one room seemed to extend into a soft and unreal world that submitted patiently to our play like a good-natured old dog.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The street was lazy and relaxed like a young girl’s rose-colored vision of dawn. We had long given up going to the synagogue on Saturdays and visited our suppliers instead, but Saturday was still a holy day. We felt pure and clean and had the assurance of the well-dressed who enjoy leisure. Besides, we usually met the faithful on their way back from Temple, walking daintily in the soft sunshine, holding with the tips of their fingers their book and the little bag that contained their taleth. Fat and happy, their faces quite unresponsive, they went along unhurriedly, as sure of the absolute harmony of the universe as they were of finding their home full of flowers perfuming the air, with a white cloth on the heavily laden table. Toward eleven o’clock there would appear, at the end of our walk and impressing my gaze with their great pomp, the huge stores of Bodineau. They dominated this whole part of town, both by their location and their proportions and by their wealth of window space and nickel fixtures. One reached the main entrance up a flight of rather high steps on either side of which a large showcase, each as big as our room, triumphantly reflected the sunlight on the town. The showcase on the right was the home of a fabulous beast that shared the enchantment of Sabbath: a whole horse, all harnessed with brand-new leather that was studded with gold, its eyes blazing, its reddish and white-haired chest borne proudly aloft. I admired it each time for a long while, though without coming too close to it and always clutching my father’s hand. Later, I was surprised to learn that there are people who dislike the odor of tanner’s bark; for me, it remains one of my basic experiences of smell. Beneath our big family bed we always had a store of skins of all kinds, and during the long summer siestas I often slept in our shop on improvised beds of leather that imposed their character on my dreams. I can reconstruct the whole world and find my way about it like a fox, guiding myself by the warm and masculine scent of the leathers from France, by the tart, heavy and greasy odor of white skins, the stink of stables that clings to fresh skins as they rot, the almond bitterness of blackened calfskins.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  But here she was, up at eight, dressed, her little backpack on her back. “Where are you going?” She brushed her sandy hair. “Are you kidding? I’m not going to spend my day listening to Reverend Creephead talk about the Blood of the Lamb.” She put her brush down and rushed out of the room. “Sayonara.” I heard the screen door slam. I took the hint from Carolee and pretended I was sick. Starr looked at me hard, and said, “Next week, missy.” She wore a short white skirt and a peach blouse and four-inch spike heels. I could smell a big waft of Obsession. “No excuses.” It was only when I heard Starr’s Torino heave itself onto the road that I dared dress and come out, make myself some breakfast. It was nice being alone, the boys hiding somewhere down in the wash, the distant whine of dirt bikes. I was just eating when Starr’s hippie boyfriend came out of the bedroom, barefoot in jeans, pulled a T-shirt over his head. His chest was lean and hairy, sandy threaded with gray, his shaggy hair out of its usual ponytail. He staggered down the hall. I could hear the sound of his piss, the water coming on. Splashing, flushing. He came into the main room and found a cigarette in a pack on the table, lit it. The hand that held the cigarette was missing one finger and the fingertip of the next. He smiled when he saw me looking at it. “You ever see a carpenter get a table in a restaurant? Table for three, please.” He held up his damaged hand. At least he wasn’t sensitive about it. I kind of liked him, though it embarrassed me that he was the one causing the “Christ almighties” through the wall. He was a plain man, lean-faced, sad-eyed, long graying hair. We were supposed to call him Uncle Ray. He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a beer. Shhhhht, it sighed when he popped the top. “You’re missing the Jesus show.” He didn’t drink his beer so much as pour it down his throat. “So are you,” I said. “I’d rather be shot,” he said. “Here’s my theory. If there’s a God, he’s so fucked up he doesn’t deserve to be prayed to.” He belched loudly and smiled. I’d never thought much about God. We had the Twilight of the Gods, we had the world tree. We had Olympus and its scandals, Ariadne and Bacchus, the rape of Danaë. I knew about Shiva and Parvati and Kali, and Pele the volcano goddess, but my mother had banned the least mention of Christ. She wouldn’t even come to the Christmas pageant at school. She made me beg a ride off some other kid. The nearest I’d come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I walked toward the light, past businesses and little houses advertising child care, two-story fourplexes with wooden stairs and banana trees and corn growing in the yard, the Dolly Madison bakery. An electronics shop. A movie prop outlet, Cadillac Jack’s, a Conestoga wagon in its fenced lot. Salazar Mazda repair shop on the corner, where Fletcher Drive crossed the river. From the bridge, the view opened to the river, warmed in the last light like a gift, streaming between bruised gray clouds. The river ran under the road, heading for Long Beach. I rested my arms on the damp concrete railing and looked north toward the hills and the park. The water flowed through its big concrete embankments, the bottom covered with decades of silt and boulders and trees. It was returning to its wild state despite the massive sloped shore, a secret river. A tall white bird fished among the rocks, standing on one leg like in a Japanese woodcut. Fifty views of the L.A. River. A horn honked and a man shouted “Give me a piece of that” out of a car window. But it didn’t matter, nobody could stop on the bridge anyway. I wondered if Claire was here, if she could see me. I wished she could see this crane, the river bottom. It was beautiful and I didn’t deserve it, but I couldn’t help lifting my face to the last golden light. THE NEXT DAY Rena woke us before dawn. I was dreaming I was drowning, a shipwreck in the North Atlantic, it was just as well to wake up. The room was still dark, and freezing cold. “Workers of the world, arise,” Rena said, banishing our dreams with the smoke of her black cigarette. “You got nothing to lose but Visa Card, Happy Meal, Kotex with Wings.” She turned on the light. Yvonne groaned in the other bed, picked up a shoe and threw it half heartedly at Rena. “Fuckin’ Thursday.” We dressed with our backs to each other. Yvonne’s heavy breasts and lush thighs were startling in their beauty. I saw Matisse in her lines, I saw Renoir. She was only my age, but by comparison I had the body of a child. “Gonna report that puta to the INS. Kick her ass back to Russia.” She pawed through the piles of clothes, pulled out a turtleneck, sniffed it, threw it back. I stumbled down the hall to wash my face, brush my teeth. When I came out, she was already in the kitchen, pouring coffee into a battered Thermos, stuffing handfuls of saltines in a bag. In the cold darkness, clouds of white vapor escaped from the tailpipe of the Ford panel van, ghostly in its whitewash, which didn’t entirely conceal the gray bondo underneath. In the big captain’s chair, Rena Grushenka smoked a black Sobranie with a gold tip and sipped coffee from a Winchell’s slotted cup. Rolling Stones played on the tape deck.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One evening, as it was getting dark, Kalla and I were busy, without being unduly hurried, putting the four chairs with which we had been playing at trains back where they belonged. We were tired of traveling around the world, with my sister as the only tourist while I alone drove the engine. Besides, the tiled floor of the yard was cold and our legs were frozen. So we then played at being bakers: we were kneading our painless legs, laughing at their being so strangely numb and threatening to put them in the oven to bake. My mother came out of the dark room and, as the light outside still allowed her to see a bit, set about checking the wick of her lamp. The twilight comes late in our country, but night then falls suddenly, and Mother, as always, was in a hurry. Two discreet knocks were heard, barely touching the wood of the street door. So as to avoid giving me any excuse to go out, I was forbidden ever to open the door. Kalla was more obedient than I and was therefore allowed to open it, which humiliated me, but gave her no particular pleasure. Her large dark eyes and her shoulders apologized to me as she went to open the door. It was Fraji, the son of Choulam: puny, with his scared, wide-open eyes like those of a bat, his sickly hair that grew in greasy tufts on a scalp like a barren moor. “Is your mother at home,” he asked Kalla. Dancing shadows suddenly appeared on the walls that seemed to stare as Fraji’s dark double arose at his feet, crawled from the ground up to the door, and then spread huge across the ceiling. My mother was on her way, holding the lamp at arm’s length before her. She saw the visitor: “Oh, yes, I know what you want. Wait a moment.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Memory tends perhaps to exaggerate the length of this happy period when I was an innocent in a world that I still believed to be innocent. I belonged to my family and to our alley, I lived according to the laws of this world and joyfully accepted its sanctions. Once, because I had cursed the Name of God, I was severely whipped with a belt on the soles of my feet. For three days I was unable to walk, but I felt that my punishment was just and had even saved me from worse when I learned about the danger I had faced: in Hell, I would have had my eyelids torn off and would have been forced to stare without blinking at the midday sun. The mere thought of this otherworldly punishment made me imagine the sufferings so vividly that tears came to my eyes to protect them from so much light. But my easy happiness could not last very long, this life ruled by respect that was also confidence and by fears of punishments that were felt to be just. Very soon, some serious hints began to upset the established order, in spite of the uninterrupted presence of my parents and of the community. I was not born in the ghetto. Our alley was at the frontier of the Jewish quarter of Tunis, but this was enough to satisfy my father’s pride. In the cool twilight of summer days the heat often drove us out of our rooms, and we made ourselves comfortable in chairs leaned against the wall and cushioned with pillows. The men wore their long white underpants, the women their housecoats of printed cotton, and the blind alley took on the air of a common living-room. My father was a better talker than Barouch, so that everybody listened to him. He liked to contrast the dreamy silence of our alley, cool from having recently been watered, with the offensive stink of the ghetto alleys. He would describe the foul fluids of the gutters as they filled the air with the fetid stink of the butcher-shops, the greasy and sickly odor of dishwater from the houses, and the acrid vapors of chlorinated water from the laundries. He spoke of the mountains of garbage where the sunlight hatched swarms of green and black flies, and of the roaches that emerged from them, so well fed that they could scarcely crawl along on their thin legs. In a tone of condescension he deplored the common lavatory that several families must share. We might well have but one room, but we were only two families to share our kitchen and our toilet. Besides, we had the privilege of running water and were not obliged to fetch it, at the risk of freezing our fingers till they were blue, from the fountain in the street.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We lived at the bottom of the Impasse Tarfoune, in a little room where I was born one year after my sister Kalla. With the Barouch family we shared the ground floor of a shapeless old building, a sort of two-room apartment. The kitchen, half of it roofed over and the rest an open courtyard, was a long vertical passage toward the light. But before reaching this square of pure blue sky, it received, from a multitude of windows, all the smoke, the smells, and the gossip of our neighbors. At night, each locked himself up in his room; but in the morning, life was always communal, running along the tunnel of a kitchen, mingling the waters from the kitchen sinks, the smells of coffee, and the voices still muffled with sleep. We took turns with the Barouch family to go into the kitchen to the only washbasin with its single faucet. We came there fully dressed so as not to catch cold while crossing the little yard, and we had to be content with spreading a lather of soap over our faces as far as our ears while taking care not to wet the collars of our shirts. But it was forbidden for us, whether for reasons of self-esteem, hygiene, or religious belief, to sit down to a meal without first washing our faces. In our alley, the goatherd would announce his impatience with long blows on his horn. My mother would remove the two iron bars that protected our front door against thieves and pogroms. I never dared follow her as she pushed through the compact herd of goats that stared at her without blinking their insolent and surprised eyes. The Maltese goatherd wore a thick red flannel sash around his loins, and he would squat down against the wall, on his patched boots. He would take the brown earthenware pot and grab a goat at random to draw from her the sudden spurts of foaming milk. Angry infants, always numerous in our part of town, cried sourly. The street, seeming to awaken with regret, grumbled from all its open windows, shaking itself free from the sluggishness of a light mist that slowly settled on the damp paving stones. The sun was still benevolent. My mother came back through the herd, pushing aside with her hand the goats that were too obstinate to move and holding her pot of milk safe above any unforeseen or capricious movements of the animals. We then breakfasted in our room that was still full of the odors of sleep, seated at our round table that was our sole heritage from my grandfather, between the walls washed with blue lime and the bed still warm beneath a mound of red and green blankets.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn’t know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked. Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother’s totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox. There was a swan in it, a white wooden swan with long black nares, like the swan on Claire’s frosted shower doors. I sat on the swan and made tinkle for Annie. There were white tile squares on the floor, that I played making shapes out of as I sat there, flowers and houses. They were perfect six-sided hexagonals and they all fit together. Also a yellow kitchen linoleum with a paint-spatter design, red and black, and laundry baskets. That laundry feeling, the smell of dryer. Yellow sunlight through a roll-down blind. My finger through the round pull. But who was Annie? A friend? A babysitter? And why had she potty-trained me instead of my mother? I wanted to know what was behind the swan and the yellow linoleum. There were other children there, I remembered that, watching them going to school. And a box full of crayons. Did we live with her, or had she left me there? And Klaus, the silhouette that was my father. We are larger than biography. Where did that leave me? I wanted to know how they met, fell in love, why they split up. Their time together was a battleground full of white stones, grass grown over the trenches, a war I lost everything in and had no way to know what happened. I wanted to know about our traveling years, why we could never go home. I lay back on the sloped embankment and looked up. It was the best place to look at the sky. The concrete banks blocked out its fuzzy flat edges, where you saw the smog and the haze, and you just got the good part, the center, a perfect bowl of infinite blue. I let myself fall upward into that ultramarine. Not a pale, arctic morning like my mother’s eyes, this blue was tender, warm, merciful, without white, pure chroma, a Raphael sky. When you didn’t see the horizon, you could almost believe it was a bowl. The roundness of it hypnotized me. I heard someone’s steps coming toward me. It was Yvonne. Her heavy tread, long hair like a sheet of water. I lay back down. She sat next to me. “Lie down, look at this great sky.” She lay down next to me, her hands folded across her stomach the way she did when she was pregnant, though the baby was gone.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, After death men’s souls cannot find rest save by the merit of faith, because “he that cometh to God must believe” (Heb. 11:6). Now the first example of faith was given to men in the person of Abraham, who was the first to sever himself from the body of unbelievers, and to receive a special sign of faith: for which reason “the place of rest given to men after death is called Abraham’s bosom,” as Augustine declares (Gen. ad lit. xii). But the souls of the saints have not at all times had the same rest after death; because, since Christ’s coming they have had complete rest through enjoying the vision of God, whereas before Christ’s coming they had rest through being exempt from punishment, but their desire was not set at rest by their attaining their end. Consequently the state of the saints before Christ’s coming may be considered both as regards the rest it afforded, and thus it is called Abraham’s bosom, and as regards its lack of rest, and thus it is called the limbo of hell. Accordingly, before Christ’s coming the limbo of hell and Abraham’s bosom were one place accidentally and not essentially: and consequently, nothing prevents Abraham’s bosom from being after Christ’s coming, and from being altogether distinct from limbo, since things that are one accidentally may be parted from one another. Reply to Objection 1: The state of the holy Fathers as regards what was good in it was called Abraham’s bosom, but as regards its deficiencies it was called hell. Accordingly, neither is Abraham’s bosom taken in an unfavorable sense nor hell in a favorable sense, although in a way they are one. Reply to Objection 2: The place of rest of the holy Fathers was called Abraham’s bosom before as well as after Christ’s coming, but in different ways. For since before Christ’s coming the saints’ rest had a lack of rest attached to it, it was called both hell and Abraham’s bosom, wherefore God was not seen there. But since after the coming of Christ the saints’ rest is complete through their seeing God, this rest is called Abraham’s bosom, but not hell by any means. It is to this bosom of Abraham that the Church prays for the faithful to be brought. Hence the Reply to the Third Objection is evident: and the same meaning applies to a gloss on Lk. 16:22, “It came to pass that the beggar died,” etc., which says: “Abraham’s bosom is the rest of the blessed poor, whose is the kingdom of heaven.”